This is my 39th Good Friday. I have known about Jesus and his death for 29 of those 39 years. As I was thinking about Jesus today and the story of Good Friday I found myself going to the end of the story, the part where he is not dead anymore. I tried to stay away from it, but it kept coming back. Then today, at 2:55 in the afternoon it hit me.
I was reading my bible as I have been these past few days leading up to the crucifixion. I got to the part where it talks about Jesus crying out to God in the 9th hour. When the Bible talks about the 9th hour it means 3pm. So, I looked at my phone and saw that it was 5 minutes to 3. It was then that it hit me. “This is real, this really happened. I don’t understand it, sometimes I don’t think about it, but it really happened. 2000 years ago a good man, who did nothing wrong was taken, beaten, humiliated, tortured and hung on a tree till he died in front of hundreds, maybe thousands of cheering and approving people.
Not only was Jesus a good man, Jesus was God. This is the greatest injustice of our time. An innocent man and the creator of the world had His life taken from him for no good cause. The thing about it though was that He let them kill Him. He didn’t fight back, He didn’t argue, He just followed his Fathers will for His life and forgave his murderers. WHAT?
This weekend, specifically tomorrow if you are a follower of Jesus I encourage you to grieve. Grieve the death of an innocent man. Grieve the death of the one who came to save you. Grieve the death of God. And while you are grieving Jesus grieve the reason that He came to die. He came to die not only for our sin, but the sin of the whole world. He died for the young girl who is being trafficked into sex slavery as I write. He died for the sin of those in Sudan and Darfur who are kidnapping little kids, training them to fight for their army and watching them murder their own families to show their allegiance. He died for those who are dying every 18 seconds from water and food related disease.
Spend tomorrow grieving and praying for the lost, the hurting and the broken. And then on Sunday let’s celebrate that all is not lost. Celebrate that Jesus is alive and that He does see the hurting and oppressed of our world, and He has called you and I to be apart of bringing the hope of life and Jesus to them.
