Easter is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus! But where there is resurrection, there must first be death. Good Friday is the harsh reminder that sin has a cost and the price of redemption is greater than our effort or repentance, it would cost Jesus His very life. Friday is good because the cross of Christ is the divine declaration that no price is too great for our redemption and no sin is too great for His forgiveness. The Father gave His Son for you!
In the darkest hour of all human history, something unfathomable happened, Jesus would do more than bear our sins on the cross, He would become sin. While this cannot be fully comprehended, one thing is for sure…we do ourselves a devastating disservice to presume that God abandoned Jesus at this moment. The prophetic fulfillment of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”, was not a proclamation of what God did, but what Jesus, in His humanity felt. Later, in that same Psalm, it states, “He has not hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.” God is not in the habit of abandoning people because of sin. He didn’t with Adam; He didn’t with Jesus; and He didn’t with you. The nature of the Savior is to rescue, not forsake. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. The cross is the Father’s love on display through the Son and if you want to know what God the Father is like, look at Jesus! Even and maybe especially in the darkest hour, the Father’s love shone through to show you that nothing, absolutely nothing can stop His love for you.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.