Good Friday

https://odb.org/MY/2023/04/07/drops-of-red

Today is Good Friday, and as believers, we celebrate this day in remembrance of Jesus’s crucifixion and death on the cross of Calvary. The death that enabled our sins to be forgiven by God once and for all to break the sting of sin, which is death itself. Because of the cross, though we may die, we will live (John 11:25). Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Thus, Jesus is the basis for our eternal life. He is the one and only begotten son that was sent by God because He so loved the world that we may have life eternal in John 3:16.

But just before Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot, arrested and led to be judged and later punished to death with crucifixion, He spent his last night praying at the Mount of Olives. This was right after the last Passover meal He had with His disciples (which originated our Christian tradition of the breaking of the bread). At Mount Olives, Jesus prayed and asked that the cup be passed from Him, but if that is the Father’s will, then may His will be done. An angel came down to strengthen Him, and as He prayed so intensely at those moments, His sweat was like blood.

This account of Jesus’s last moments before being arrested is recorded in Luke 22:39-44, which highlights that while Jesus is God, He is fully human. While He is one with God in the Holy Trinity, He is nevertheless distinct as Jesus Christ the Son of God. His pain and suffering on the way to the Cross and at the Cross are the most extreme of human suffering. At the spiritual level, those were the moments that the Father turned His face away because of the sin of mankind that Jesus was carrying, and that was the most painful moment ever experienced by Christ before. He the Son of Man became the Lamb of God for our sake that we may have communion with the Father again, something we couldn’t have since the day Adam and Eve sinned against God.

As we celebrate Good Friday today and Easter this Sunday or some call Resurrection Sunday, let’s remember that Jesus died for our sins as a man. He had to die as a man as an unblemished sacrifice for our sins. He who was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin woman was born a man but without sin and was thus the only human possible to die for our sins. The only human born a human and yet unblemished by the sin of Adam as He was from God and conceived by God by the Holy Spirit. God incarnate, the Immanuel, as God had lived among mankind, the creator among His creation. Eden will be recreated again at the end of age, as we see in Revelation 22, and that is only possible because Jesus died for the sins of mankind 2,000 years ago!