Why is it called Good Friday
It seems interesting that we refer to the day Christ died as ‘Good Friday’. Considering the events of the day, tragic or awful seems more appropriate. However, we ultimately know what God was up to that day. Though the events seemed very ‘BAD’, God was using everything that happened for ‘GOOD’.
WHAT’S SO GOOD about Good Friday?
The day that Jesus died?
Jesus had the power to heal, bring people back from the dead, resist the temptation of the devil; he could have brought an army of angels down from heaven to save him from the cross. He didn’t.
Filled with an insatiable LOVE for each and every person on the planet, his children on this earth, he chose to reunite them with his father in heaven.
The freewill given to us by God meant that sin had crept into the world. From Adam and Eve and their encounter with the devil (the serpent) onwards we had become a sinful people.
The one thing that separates us from God is our sin. God cannot physically be around it, he can’t stand sin. But he loved us so much that something had to be done. He sent his son to intervene.
In Old Testament times – before Jesus came into the world – Jews would sacrifice animals to God to be forgiven for their sin. They would take an animal, say a sheep and pray over it. Before God, they would confess their sins transferring them to the animal and then kill it and put it on an altar as an offering to God. This is why Jesus is known later as the Lamb of God.
The first ever sacrifice recorded in the Bible was that of Cain and Abel.
Good Friday gets its name because of the purely good thing that Jesus did for us. He lived a sinless life teaching and preaching to those around him about how to live, healing people and explaining to them about God. But we rejected the teaching and called for him to be crucified because Jesus said he was the Son of God.
In the eyes of the Jewish leaders this was blasphemy, a serious crime against God. Except Jesus is God’s son – they refused to believe that. Jesus went willingly to the cross to die, he went through every human emotion, he was scared but God strengthened him.
He became the sacrifice; he took the sin of the world, past, present and future and died for it allowing us today to have a relationship with God.
He gave us the freedom to have a personal relationship with God and the privilege to ask for forgiveness from him without the need for death.
So what’s so good about Good Friday?
Jesus – bridging the gap that sin had left between us and God.
Source: Life through God’s sunglasses