Good Friday- Propitiation

This is Good Friday of Holy Week.  On Holy Monday we looked at the bad news that makes the Good News great, on Holy Tuesday we thought about being made in God’s image and not making Jesus in ours, on Spy Wednesday we looked at the dangers of disordered love and on Maundy Thursday we looked at a prayer of courageous surrender.  Today let’s take a good look at Good Friday.

I recently heard a pastor say that Good Friday is about how God loved us so much.  God loved us so much that He died on the cross so He could relate to all of our human suffering, even death on an awful cross.  He said that Good Friday tells us that no matter what suffering we’re going through that God is with us in it and understands it. 

Much of what this pastor said is true.  We do have a high priest who can relate with all of our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15).  Good Friday is a loud proclamation that God loves us so much.  But I disagree that this is the core of what Good Friday is about.

Jesus didn’t die to relate to us, He died to replace us.

Propitiation has become a dirty word for some Christian circles but this is what Good Friday is about at its core.  Good Friday does indeed announce that God loves us so much, but it also proclaims that we needed someone to die for us.  The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), so we needed someone to take what we earned.  Before Christ we were by nature objects of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), so we needed someone to die to satisfy the just wrath of God.  In Adam all men die, but in Christ men live (1 Corinthians 15:20-22).  Adam’s life started the death-making curse of sin; Jesus’s death started the life-making power of grace. 

Propitiation is not a four-letter word.

Propitiation is what we needed.  Without the cross we aren’t in danger of having a God that couldn’t relate to us, no without the cross we are in danger of being crushed as an enemy of Almighty God.  Christ replaced us.  It was the Father’s will to crush His Son (Isaiah 53:10) and not Matthew Thomas Ray.

This Good Friday the love of God will be magnified before us because the wrath of God was satisfied by the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  Good Friday is at its core about justice and grace intersecting in the shape of a cross.

We needed Jesus to die for us.  Worship Him with awe, wonder, sorrow and thankfulness for replacing us today.