What's so Good about Good Friday?

Today is what we call good Friday. The main reason it's good is because of the Person and work of Jesus the Christ. Good Friday is the day when Christ willingly went to the Cross on Calvary to be crucified. Although he was found guilty, the verdict came from an illegal mock trial and was unarguably innocent from any wrong doing - His entire life was guiltless and within full obedience of God the Father.

However, we are not innocent but guilty of disobeying the Law and stand before a holy, just God with the punishment for that guilt being death (Romans 6:23). Nonetheless, on a Friday some 2000 plus years ago, Christ became our substitute and took our deserved punishment upon Himself and shed His blood and died (Hebrews 9:22). The doctrine that I'm talking about is that of the penal substitution. Now, what we mean by “penal substitution” is simply that Jesus stood as a substitute for his people, taking the penalty that was due to those who actually deserved it - that's you and me! Jesus took our deserved hell and the full wrath of God for us, He (Jesus) was standing in our place.

What I have been talking about is what we might often here as the atonement, but I believe more accurately it should be expressed as the penal substitution atonement. Jesus explained his own death this way and that His life was to be given for a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45). Paul’s declaration that Jesus the sinless one “became sin for us” (2 Cor. 5:21). When we speak of Jesus as our substitute, therefore, we are speaking in a deeply biblical way about what Jesus accomplished for us at Calvary.

D. L. Moody stated, "I must die or get somebody to die for me. If the Bible doesn’t teach that, it doesn’t teach anything. And that is where the atonement of Jesus Christ comes in." Atonement has often defined as "At-one-ment" or simply making up for a deficiency and thereby restoring a broken relationship, specifically here that broken relationship is between us and a Holy God. Jesus was the Atonement that bridged that gap with His death on the Cross (Hebrews2:17). John Owen stated, "There is no death of sin without the death of Christ.

Sin requires the death of the one who sinned. If that is not understood, then the necessity of Christ’s death will never be understood. The peril we are in until we receive Christ will never be understood, either, and we will never have sufficient gratitude to God for our salvation. We must understand the link between sin, death, and atonement. We must understand from the moment of conception, we are all contaminated with sin (Psalm 51:5). It is not that we are incapable of doing good. It is that we are incapable of not doing bad.

Jesus, however, did not sin. Therefore He did not deserve to die. But He came to earth and died anyway. Because He did not deserve to die, God was willing for Jesus’ death to count for ours. If we would, by faith, believe in and receive Jesus as our Savior, God would allow His death to count for ours and give us His life. In this way we could escape the penalty for sin. Wow! That's why we call this new the gospel - the good news.

There is a little chorus written by Ellis Jay Crum which says, “He paid a debt He did not owe, I owed a debt I could not pay.” It summarizes quite simply the link between sin, death, and atonement: all sin, so all die. Jesus, however, died in our place. He provided atonement for our sins. That is, He made up our deficiency, which we would be unable to make up ourselves. Jesus was both God and man, and because He was both, His death was sufficient for our atonement. If He were not man, he could not have died in our place (substitution). If He were not God, it would not have mattered, because His death would not have been sufficient to cover our sin - because it had to be a perfect sacrifice, which only God himself is perfect. He, Jesus being perfect (God in the flesh) died in our place and provided atonement for our sin. That is what is so good about Good Friday!