Why Good Friday Is the Best of All Days

The death of Christ on the cross is arguably the greatest event in human history, for one simple reason: It is the greatest demonstration of God’s love for us, as also of Christ’s love for us.

As Paul declared, “God demonstrates his own love for us (in this, namely,) that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The Gospel of John makes the same point in the justly famous 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son [in context: to be lifted up on the cross], in order that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Similarly, in 1 John 4:9-10: “By this God’s love was manifested among [or: to] us, (namely) that God has sent his only son into the world … a means of making amends [or: an atoning sacrifice] for our sins.”

It is no great matter for God to create, destroy, and recreate the cosmos. All of that can be accomplished by God in the blink of an eye. Yet Jesus’s death on the cross cost both God and Jesus the greatest sacrifice, God in offering his only Son, Jesus in willingly offering himself, as the ultimate act that makes amends or restitution for the sins (or: sin) of the world.

The anguish of God was amply displayed by the three hours of darkness preceding Jesus’s expiration and by the tearing of the Temple veil. Previously, the High Priest tore his robes at the alleged blasphemy of Jesus’s disclosure that he was the Messiah, God’s Son, and the apocalyptic Son of Man who would come on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead.

God in effect tears his own robe at beholding the torturous crucifixion of his Son. At the same time, he makes a way for the whole world to have access to him through Jesus, Gentile as well as Jew.

If God “did not spare his own Son but handed him over [to death to make amends] for us all, how will he not also, together with him, grace us with all things?” (Romans 8:32). If God demonstrated his love to the inestimable degree of giving his Son, and did so while we were yet enemies and ungodly sinners, how much more will God lavish on us salvation in the age to come now that we have been adopted into his family (Romans 5:6-10)?

Other reasons why Good Friday is the best of all days:

1. The Magnification of Christ

It is the cross that showed Jesus’s complete obedience to God as a Son to his Father and functioned as the means by which Jesus became the indispensable medium of Life for the world, thereby “lifting Jesus up” (John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32-34), exalting him in and through the cross and not only after his resurrection. It is for this reason that Jesus is portrayed as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29, 36), even in the throne room of God according to the Book of Revelation (chapters 5-7 and passim).

2. Definitive Proof of Our Need for Grace

It is the cross of Jesus that establishes that I am a sinner in need of God’s abundant grace, a sinner who cannot fulfill sufficiently the righteous requirement of the Law. For if it were otherwise, Christ would have died for nothing (Galatians 2:21).

3. The Basis for Our Justification, Reconciliation, and Victory Over Evil Powers

It is the cross of Christ, and specifically the atoning character of his death — its amends-making, restitution-offering, redemptive character — that makes possible our justification (God’s declaration that we are set right; Romans 3:24-25; 5:9), our reconciliation (God’s putting aside our sin that created enmity between us and God; Romans 5:10; 2 Corinthians 5:19, 21), and our victory over the evil powers (God’s erasing the certificate of indebtedness created by our trespasses that left us enslaved to these powers; Colossians 2:14-15).

4. The Act That Ratified the New Covenant

Only the cross ratifies and inaugurates the new covenant, according to Jesus himself at his Last Supper (Mark 14:24; Matthew 26:28; Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25). This explains why Jesus instructed his church to remember regularly this, and only this, one event in history (1 Corinthians 11:24-26). This is so because only at the cross are amends made for human sin. From this flows the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit, the twofold foundation of the new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

It is the cross of Christ that purifies the temple of our body so that the Spirit of God and Christ may dwell in us (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). The cross is not an isolated event but rather heralds the end of the dominion of old age for those who are in Christ.

5. The Paradigm for Our Crucified Life

It is the cross of Christ that signals that those in Christ must die in relation to the sin-controlled condition of old Adamic humanity (Romans 6:1-14). The purpose of this death-to-self is that we might no longer live for ourselves but rather for the one who handed himself over to death on our behalf, Christ living in and through us as we no longer live (Galatians 2:19-20; 2 Corinthians 5:15).

It is by the cross of Christ that we die with Christ by putting aside the sinful desires of the flesh, emptying ourselves, and serving others in grace. In so doing, we follow the example of the One who lowered himself from the highest station, being in the form of God, to the absolute bottom, even death on the cross, so that the world might be saved, considering others more important than ourselves.

6. Proof That the World’s Values Are Not Ours

It is by the cross of Christ that we are crucified to the world and the world to us, renouncing the prevailing values of a world in rebellion against God’s will (Galatians 6:14). The cross of Christ is the fullest demonstration that the values of the world and the values of God are at odds (the world crucifying the Messiah provides the ultimate proof).

The cross is also the supreme demonstration by God that even the “foolishness” and “weakness” of God are wiser and stronger than anything the world can produce, for even by this foolish and weak event God can save all who believe (1 Corinthians 1:18-25).

7. Moves Our Hearts

Most of all, it is the cross of Christ that warms my cold heart and infuses me with gratitude for the One who gave all that I might live. Seeing the nails in his hands and wound in his heart, knowing how greatly he suffered on our behalf, should drive us to our knees in eternal praise of the one who gave all that we might live.

All glory to the Lamb of God on this Good Friday, the best of all days, even though to the worldly eye of his first followers (our reaction would have been no different), it initially appeared to be the worst.

READ MORE from Robert Gagnon:

Our Two Main Parties Are Non-Christian but Only One Is Demonic

Vance Admirably Explains Christian Faith — But He Left Something Out

No, Rick Warren, Jesus Crucified Between Two ‘Bandits’ Doesn’t Mean He’s in the Middle

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