My "Bad" Good Friday
Apr
2
Written by:
4/2/2010 11:36 AM
When I first started blogging, I promised myself I wouldn’t necessarily stick to what is traditionally considered the Christian holiday messages. Not that I don’t appreciate the holidays and what they cause us to remember, but to me the grace, mercy, love, and good things of God should be remembered year round. So, for me to bring up Good Friday on Good Friday is not something I would do unless I was led by God to do it. I tried to develop other ideas I had, but I kept hitting dead ends. So, I guess I better stop fighting against it and just flow with it :-).
However, this will not resemble any traditional Good Friday message, because this is a story of one particular Good Friday I had as a child. When I was a child, my best friend was a girl my age that lived next door to me. One particular Good Friday, we went to her Grandma’s house on the other side of town and we had numerous bad things happen to us that day. I don’t remember all of the particular instances that led us to this conclusion, but we termed that Good Friday the “bad” Good Friday. Upon graduation from high school, we went our separate ways. I got married and joined the Army and moved across the country. Through the miracles of modern technology (Facebook in particular) we touched base again 20 years later. The first time we chatted and we were recollecting memories, that is one particular memory we both remembered: our “bad” Good Friday. It is this story that brings me to this verse from what is considered the love chapter:
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” ~ 1 Corinthians 13:11
I don’t pretend to fully understand what Jesus did for us on the Cross that day on Calvary 2,000 years ago. However, if I even remotely grasped what Good Friday was about on that day we christened the “bad” Good Friday, I would have thought anything we went through wasn’t anything vaguely resembling bad. Here is a short list of some of the things Jesus went through on His “Good” Friday:
· one of his trusted disciples sold Him out for thirty pieces of silver
· the rest of His 11 disciples either left His side or denied that they knew Him (although John finally came back when He was on the Cross)
· He was put on trial and convicted for crimes He did not commit
· as part of finally giving in to the demands of Jewish authorities, Pontius Pilate reluctantly gave into scourging Him to the maximum extent of the Jewish law: beating Him 39 times with a whip which had up to 12 different leather extensions on it, each extension having bone or metal fragments in the ends to ensure flesh was ripped during the process. Jesus, to the amazement of many, survived this, because many did not even survive this scourging process.
· He was mocked by placing a purple robe on Him, a crown of thorns was placed upon His head, and blindfolded and punched, while people mockingly told Him to prophesy who it was that hit Him. During all of this process, He did not accuse anyone or speak badly about any of His accusers.
· Pilate, realizing Jesus was innocent was torn between releasing Jesus and following the angry crowd, so he came up with a plan. Pilate found one of the most vile, heinous criminals that he had in custody and offered to free either this criminal (Barabbas) or Jesus; even though Barabbas had committed many crimes against the Jews, the Jews still chose to free Barabbas.
· After His flesh was tore beyond recognition, He was made to carry an approximately 200 pound cross beam more than 300 yards, in which he got some temporary relief from Simon of Cyrene.
· He was hung on the cross and crucified. To this day, crucifixion is still considered to be one of the cruelest ways to ever put people to death and back then was reserved only for the most heinous criminals.
Wow, that’s depressing, huh? Like I said, I literally just touched the tip of the iceberg on what Jesus went through on the day that we call Good Friday. If anyone deserves to complain or call that a “bad” Good Friday it would be Jesus Christ, God in the flesh. The reason that it is a good Friday though, is because Jesus realized His mission and realized that in order for the Father’s will to be accomplished, He was the only one worthy to become the final sacrifice for all sins of everyone who would accept Him. Take time to thank Jesus Christ for His ultimate sacrifice today!
1 comment(s) so far...
Re: My "Bad" Good Friday
Perhaps another bullet needs to be added to the list?
He became a curse for us, and bore our sins, drinking the 'cup of wrath' that WE deserve for our sin, so that Christ would actually 'purchase' for God, with his blood, people from every tongue and tribe and nation..
Now thats GOOD!
By Dan on
4/17/2010 9:28 AM
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