Good Friday 2013

Anything I could hope to say, we've sung over and over again. The scripture readings, the songs have prepared us well. Let's let's pray before we hear from God's word again. Our father in heaven, we are treading into depths that we don't understand. Lord, we stare. into the cross as as the profound mystery that's at the center of the universe or that you, a holy and righteous God, love sinners. We pray tonight, Lord, that as we consider these truths that we've been singing, that we've been hearing already, or that you would keep us from the errors of the Jews and the Greeks, from a stumbling block of God become man dying. from the folly of a crucified man being a king. Or may we see in the cross the power of God unto salvation. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. What I hope for us to do is just to continue to meditate on these truths or as we think about Good Friday and help us to understand what Jesus has done for us, maybe for the first time, maybe in a new way and a new depth or just to stir us up in reminder and worship God because of what he has done for us in the cross of Jesus Christ. We're going to be looking at Matthew 27, not all of it. I hope you'll have a chance at some point this weekend or maybe you've already had a chance to read through the passion narratives of the Gospels. They are rich. We'll be in Matthew 27. And I'll start in verse 15. Now, at the feast, the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted, and they had been a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. So when they had gathered, Pilate said to them, whom do you want me to release for you, Barabbas or Jesus, who is called Christ? For he knew that it was out of envy they delivered him up. Besides, while he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream. Now, the chief priest and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor again said to them, Which of the two do you want me to release for you? And they said, Barabbas. Pilate said to them, then what shall I do with Jesus, who is called Christ? They all said, let him be crucified. And he said, why, what evil has he done? But they shouted all the more. Let him be crucified. So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, I am innocent of this man's blood. See to it yourselves. And all the people answered his blood be on us and our children. Then he released for them Barabbas and having scourged Jesus. Delivered him to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor's headquarters and they gathered the whole battalion before him and they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him and twisting together a crown of thorns. They put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand and kneeling before him. They mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews. And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him. As they went out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name. They compelled this man to carry his cross. And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means place of a skull, they offered him wine to drink mixed with gall. But when he tasted it, he would not drink it. And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. Then over his head, they put the charge against him, which read. This is Jesus, the king of the Jews. Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left, and those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself. If you were the son of God, come down from the cross. So also the chief priest with the scribes and elders mocked him, saying he saved others, he cannot save himself. He is the king of Israel. Let him come down now from the cross and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God deliver him now if he desires him, for he said, I am the son of God. And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way. Now, from the 6th hour, there was darkness over all the land until the 9th hour and about the 9th hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Ali, Ali, let me say that is my God. My God, why have you forsaken me? Some of the bystanders hearing it said this man is calling Elijah and one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. But the other said, wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him. And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, The curtain of the temple was torn into from top to bottom and the earth shook and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened and many of the bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection. They went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who are with him keeping watch over Jesus saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, truly, this was the son of God. As we think about this passage, I want us to consider four things, four aspects of what we see unfolding here. The first is divine suffering. Divine suffering, it's obvious if we read through the narrative that what's taking place is tremendous suffering that starts with his Jesus's anticipation of what's happening in the Garden of Gethsemane. And it goes on to all the fulfillment of those events, the mocking, the beating, the crucifixion. Jesus is suffering is real and it's intense. Sometimes I think it's easy to miss that what we see here is an execution. This is a legal process. He's been tried as a criminal. He's been convicted as a criminal and he now faces the death sentence. And what compounds that, what compounds the suffering there, is that it's unjust suffering, right? He's been convicted wrongly. Most of us know from various times in our lives what it's like to suffer for our own foolishness, the bad decisions we make, consequences of our decisions, and sometimes we get to suffer Unjustly, sometimes the CEO of our company makes a decision that we had nothing to do with, and yet we face the consequences. Sometimes a player on our team violates a rule and we all have to run laps even though we didn't do anything. That's kind of unjust suffering, but there's a worse kind when there's a conviction, there's crime involved and there's punishment. Jesus suffers as a completely innocent man. In fact, the only innocent man, no accusation of any kind could be raised against him. It's almost comical to see the Jews trying to come up with a cause to accuse him before the high priest. See, Jesus is there crucified with criminals on the left side and the right side, Barabbas, who was freed instead of him, but he wasn't trying to lead a rebellion against Rome. He wasn't a political rebel. He was. His kingdom was of another world, as he says, he had committed no crimes and certainly not any capital offenses. And yet he was condemned. And Jesus was condemned, as I said, as the only innocent man who's ever walked the face of the earth. He cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's an amazing cry, isn't it? We think about the story of the Bible throughout the Bible, we see over and over again. People not being faithful to God and yet him continuing to bear with them, continuing to forgive them. We have this overarching promise that comes from the covenant, I will be your God and you will be my people. If you obey me, I will bless you. If you obey me, I will go with you and continue. We continue to see through the Bible people not obeying God, not being faithful to the covenant and yet him being faithful to them. And yet when we get to the cross. We get to Jesus' sufferings. His obedience is perfect. He doesn't waver for a second. He obeys perfectly. And yet He is the one who is forsaken by God. Jesus upholds His end of the bargain, and God doesn't. There's something else that takes place here in the cross that we see that's even more profound. We see it a couple of times coming out in the words that are mocking Jesus. He's the son of God. Jesus is the son of God. He has an eternal relationship with God, the father that existed from before the foundation of the world. It's a relationship like no other relationship. They existed together in perfect harmony and perfect love and unity and fellowship. And from all eternity past, that fellowship was uninterrupted. It was unbroken. It was perfectly harmonious. There's no human relationship we can even point to that comes close to that. No marriage, no family has ever even touched the kind of unity that existed in the father and the son. And yet here we see that relationship is completely broken. Most of us know what it's like at some point in life to lose love. Whether it's it's puppy love that we see in early on in life or whether it's it's death of a loved ones. Most all of us lose love at some point. And we know how painful and how real that is. So we can see here that the sufferings of Jesus, because of the nature of his relationship with the father, are infinite. The one who had a perfect relationship with God, the father, is abandoned here at the moment of his greatest need. Because of that, the greatest relationship the world has ever known, the greatest love that has ever been was broken. The father abandoned his son. And that's why when we see Jesus's cry, he's not crying out about the physical pain of his hands or his feet or his head, he's not crying out about the psychological torture of being mocked, he's not Crying out about being abandoned by his friends, but it's being utterly forsaken by his father. It's divine suffering. Second, we see a divine script. Jesus cries out. He's not merely crying out in pain of his broken love with his father. What he's doing is quoting scripture. He's quoting Psalm 22, and that's profoundly significant for interpreting what's happening here on Calvary. David, in Psalm 22, describes the kind of suffering that if you look back at his life, it doesn't really make sense. There's no events that correspond to his hands and feet being pierced all around him, mocking him, wagging their heads. But if you read Psalm 22, You can read it as a script for what's happening in Matthew 27. It follows exactly. And so what Jesus is doing by quoting the psalm is proclaiming that he is the fulfillment. He is the prophesied Messiah of the Old Testament. He's assuming the role that David was was looking forward to. And that means a lot in this context, doesn't it? It means that Jesus understands what's happening here, that it was God's sovereign plan that brought about every Every action, every person, every everything that's led up the history to the moment of the crucifixion. And it shows that Jesus is embracing that he's he understands that his role is this suffering servant that we read about in Isaiah. And he's still doing it. He's still continuing to obey, even though he knows God's not going to rescue him. There's going to be no deliverance. There's no help coming. He is going to be utterly abandoned. And yet he's going on and doing it. In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus's last words were it is finished. Reflecting that he knew something was taking place there on the cross and he was doing it. He was completing it. That leads us to third, we see divine judgment. So we see divine suffering, a divine script and divine judgment. When Jesus says it is finished, what is finished is the pouring out of God's wrath against sinners. We see that in a number of things in this passage, just a few here, the darkness, The darkness indicates that reality throughout the Old Testament, the prophets, when they see the coming judgment of God, one of the things they see is darkness. And that's exactly what we see here from the sixth hour to the ninth hour, darkness covers the land, God's judgment is coming down. But if we read the Old Testament, God's judgment, we expect on his enemies, on those who oppress his people, on those who worship idols. But here we see God's wrath descending on Jesus, his son. Jesus is experiencing the curse for those who disobey God, he is abandoned by God, God removes all special grace, all common grace and gives him over to the punishment that sin deserves exclusion, separation, God's absence. Death. And hell. That's what Jesus experiences on the cross, and that's what sinners deserve. God is holy, God is perfect, he's righteous, he is good, and nothing and no one that's unholy can enter into his presence, can have any kind of fellowship with him. Because we as creatures have rebelled against God, we've rejected his rule over us, we deserve to die. But the story of the Bible, we see over and over God providing a way for him to dwell with sinful people. We see, and that's why, as Keith said Sunday, that's why the Bible is such a bloody book. From beginning to end, we see Adam and Eve being covered with animal skins, God making the first sacrifice, the whole sacrificial system we read about in Leviticus, blood being sprinkled everywhere, saying we deserve death for sin, and pointing forward to a greater death. On the cross, we see God's justice. We don't see those sacrifices pointing toward the coming great sacrifice. We see here the great sacrifice. God's judgment, the full fury of his wrath against sin comes down on Jesus. And yet Jesus was sinless. It's clear, again, from the case, nobody could come up with a legitimate accusation against him. He was perfect. He had lived a life of complete obedience to God, fulfilled perfectly all of God's law. And yet God's judgment is coming down on him. It doesn't make sense. We look at the cross. It doesn't make sense why God would let all of this happen to Jesus. It only makes sense if we understand that Jesus was a substitute. Just like the lamb of the sacrificial system we read about in Leviticus or the Passover, Jesus is the lamb who takes away the sin of the world. His blood was being spilled as if it were the blood of God's people for their sins. Jesus was being forsaken by God so that his people could be accepted. As we read through the account of Jesus's crucifixion, we should see ourselves everywhere in this passage. We should hear our voices with the crowd yelling out crucify. We should see ourselves there with the religious leaders accusing Jesus We should see ourselves with a soldier spitting on him, beating him, crucifying him. That's that's how each of us have responded to God by going our own ways, by rejecting his authority over us, by disobeying his laws, by worshiping other things. And we should see ourselves there in Jesus's place on the cross, we should see us there beaten to a pulp, ridiculed, condemned and utterly abandoned by God. That's what we deserve in our sin. That's that's the punishment that should be on us. All of God's holy wrath should be poured out on us. And yet we see it in the gospel coming down on Jesus. It begs the question, why? Why? What's going on here? And that leads us to the fourth thing I want us to see is divine love. Divine love, what we see in the cross is the ultimate expression of God's love. Think about what was Jesus accomplishing by going to the cross? What was he gaining? What was in it for him? He already had a perfect loving relationship with his heavenly father. He already had all the glory of dwelling in heaven and angels. So what did he gain? What did Jesus gain on the cross? He gained us. He gained us. That's why he did it. Unholy, rebellious, sinful people who deserve God's wrath. But before the foundation of the world, God had determined to rescue us from sin. God set his love on us, unworthy sinners though we are, and sent his son into the world to deliver us from his wrath and bring us to himself. Even as I'm speaking that, it's not comprehensible. We can't get our finite minds around it, that God would forsake the love of his son. It's too much for us. It's like going into the middle of the ocean and trying to dive down and just hold your breath and swim all the way to the bottom. It's not possible to plumb the depths. But just listen to scripture over and over again, emphasizing that this is, in fact, the case. For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. But God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him would not perish, but have everlasting life. Friends, don't you see? This was the only way for God to get us. We were helpless. We were dead in our trespasses and sins. But God loved us. God loved us and he sent his son for us and Jesus loved us and he gave his life for us. There's a profound irony when we're reading through the account of the people mocking Jesus, isn't there? Everything that they say is true. He is the son of God. He is the king of the Jews. He is saving other people. And that's precisely why he doesn't come down for the cross from the cross. It's not that the nails are holding him on there. It's his love that's holding him on there. He is choosing to stay there, to endure God's wrath for sinners like you and me. Jesus knew what he was going to go through, he knew at the incarnation what he was going to go through, and yet he did it because he loved us. I wonder what you think about that tonight. What do you think about Jesus's claim to be the king? What do you think about This so-called king being crucified. If you're here tonight, maybe you're not a Christian. First of all, we're glad you're here. Thank you for coming and being with us. I wonder if you think or ever think about your standing before God. What what we're thinking about, what we're talking about, what we're singing about is the gospel, is the good news that there is forgiveness of sins, that all of us stand condemned. under God's wrath for our sin, for our rebellion against him. And yet God has determined to rescue us through sending his son. God offers sinners an amazing exchange, and that's what's taking place here, where God puts all of our sin on Christ and punishes him and gives us all of Christ's obedience and righteousness and honors us. It's an amazing it's an amazing exchange, and it's available to all who repent of their sins and put their faith in Christ. So if you're if that's new to you, I would love to talk to you more about that. Please stick around after the service. But just consider the gospel statement here. For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Most of us here tonight are Christians. And I think it's easy for us to come to a service like this and think of it almost like it's a funeral, like we have an annual funeral for Jesus. And I think when we do that, when we do just that, we miss the entire point of Good Friday. Yes, we should remember our sin, I'm certainly not saying that we should tread lightly, this is holy ground we're talking about at the foot of the cross. We understand that it took nothing less than God's divine son to rescue us from our rebellion, we remember that we weren't redeemed with Perishable things like silver and gold, as Peter says, but the precious blood of Christ. And that's a sobering thought. But I don't want us to go through the night and lose sight of the fact that God loved us enough to do all this. He loved us enough to send his son. If we really understood God's love for us in Christ, we would not sin at all. We wouldn't. We would stop searching for love and acceptance and approval and people. and in stuff and in the world around us. We would live in satisfaction and freedom that comes from knowing that we have the love of the God of the universe. The God who made us for himself and then saved us for himself, the only one who can really satisfy us, we wouldn't look elsewhere. We wouldn't seek for the validation that comes from relationships or jobs or accomplishments. We would set all that aside. We take the focus off of ourselves and we would rest in God's love for us and Jesus. We would love him in response to his love for us and we would serve others. We would give our lives to Jesus because he has given his life for us. But Good Friday also means we should never doubt God's love. We should always stand in wonder and in awe, but in assurance. We should be confident that if there's anything us that looks to the cross and sees God's love in it, that that didn't come from us. That's spirit born. If there is the slightest love of love for God in our hearts, it's because he must have put it there. Good Friday tells us that no matter what we're going through, we can be confident that God is with us. Jesus was forsaken by God so that we never would be. The temple veil was torn from top to bottom. We're not excluded from God's presence anymore. He is with us in Christ. And we can live in the assurance that God is working in us and through us with the absolute certainty that our future is sure, because Jesus's work, as he said, is finished. And I don't want to steal from Keith's Thunder Sunday morning, but Jesus is not on the cross and he's not in the tomb. He's raised. He is raised, he is alive and his resurrection confirms that everything he taught, everything he did is validated. Is true. So I want us to conclude tonight just by reading one more passage of scripture coming from Romans chapter eight. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all. How will he not also with him graciously give us all things who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies who is to condemn Christ. Jesus is the one who died more than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us, who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ. So tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword As it is written, for your sake, we are being killed all the day long. We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, for I'm sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen. Let's pray. Father, as we continue our worship this weekend. We pray that we would be mindful of the cross. That on it, we would see our guilt. And on it, we would see your love for guilty sinners. Help us to celebrate your love for us, Lord, and remember its great cost, and we pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.