You can stop thinking that Good Friday is a holy season that comes with the authority of Scripture or even has the accuracy of an annual festival. Picking the Friday before or after Passover is another convenient avoidance of the facts. Since no truth or spiritual value exceeds the passion, and no act of Christ outranks his death it is time to consider good grief gone to ground an established fact.
Good grief assured Abram
God said to Abram, “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years. (Genesis 15:13)
This was in answer to Abram seeking assurance that the land of Canaan was going to be his home and his descendants’.
7. And He said to him, “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.” 8. He said, “O Lord God, how may I know that I will possess it?” (Genesis 15:7-8)
It is not that we need holy days, weeks, months. They are all juvenile toys.
9. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? 10. Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. 11. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain. (Galatians 4:9-11)
Truth gone to ground with Good Friday
Is it not a deadly myth that God saved eight people and all the animals, clean and unclean from the flood, and saved the people from Egypt only to kill all of them except two in the wilderness?
This holiest of moments that we can pin almost to the hour is not subject to sectarian opinion or manipulation.
Who would have thought that the ruler of the age to come would make himself an offering for sin? The princes of this world did not for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 1 Corinthians 2:7-8. The bloody component of divine wisdom is scandalous, necessary and diagnostic.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Isaiah 53:10
His soul an offering for sin
If we do not know what sin is we might have an excuse. With the conscience accusing every one, and the law condemning everyone who looks into it, an offering for sin is the only answer. We know what a sin offering looks like. It is the holy and undefiled Son of God, incarnate and separate from sinners (all humans). Sin, for which Christ suffered himself, is unbelief. This is the universal failure of the human race. There is no one who is exempt from God’s evaluation of humanity.
Comparing missions
I know that tombs were emptied the moment Christ died. In the Bible we find neither rumor nor speculation that the sick and diseased were affected by the Lord’s death. On the cross is where the atonement takes place, not before or after. It is to honour the Son that this timing is precise and public. Christ on the cross is God’s exclusive answer to the human problem, and that problem is not the kind of thing that a doctor, prophet, priest or king can treat. Sin calls for a life – “blood”, not a beating. The idea that the physical abuse our Lord endured is atonement for infirmity (sickness and disease) has no biblical support. To remove disease requires no offering, least of all the offering of God’s Son. The idea that Christ went to Golgotha to change the physical wellbeing of the human race is a mouldy piece of bread.
Trafficking in trademark trash
It is obvious that the mission of the original missionaries did not include forgiveness of sins. Jesus stopped funerals, reversed the corruption of death (in one case after four days). At his death all kinds of ancient dead came back to life.
Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.
Matthew 10:8
- The sick
- The lepers
- The dead
- The demonized (those possessed by evil angels)
- No price tag attached
Instead of believing the message we have turned the report into a set of fables. Isaiah’s question still highly functional. Who is believing the messsge of the evangelist?
Scandalous from the start
When the Hebrews slew a lamb and sprinkled its blood on their doorposts it saved their lives. Noone questioned this use of blood. There were no questions about the use of blood in the tabernacle day after day. However, since a life is given to pay for sin, and the life is in the blood, there was no living link between the sinner and the animal that saved his life. The priest sprinkled or poured the blood but that atoning blood never came into contact with the worshipper. Blood was the last thing an Israelite wanted to handle.
26. Moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl or of beast, in any of your dwellings. 27. Whatsoever soul it be that eateth any manner of blood, even that soul shall be cut off from his people.
Leviticus 7:26-27
Life is Fun, But Not a Joke 