Holy Week-Good Friday-Love made a way

If you knew you had only hours left on this earth before you would die the most unjust, horrific death, what would you do in those hours?

Defend yourself against those who have unjustly accused you and intend to do you fatal harm?

Try to escape and run for your life?

Make a bargain with the devil to live no matter what?

Drink a potion to numb the impending pain and agony?

We’re human, we might do any of those or anything else, except what Jesus did.

Jesus did none of those things. 

In fact His last hours were spent in constant pain and agony up until the end.

This day, Good Friday, is considered the darkest day, for good reason.

Jesus experienced all that is the worst of being human. Why? Why did that happen?

He could have taken the easy way out. He was God after all. 

But that was not the plan of the Father.  

God knew we needed a Savior who could understand our every pain, our every betrayal, and our worst nightmares come true. 

The hardest work imaginable!

He knew we needed a Savior who could have saved himself but chose to save us instead. Sacrificial love in the greatest sense, became the culmination of Jesus’ work on earth.  

And because He was still holy as he was still human, He felt every sin that had ever been committed in history up to that point and to the point beyond…of future time, for all of us, and all to come. That burden was an unbearable one, and yet He bore it for us. 

If there were ever an act that said “YOU MATTER”, Good Friday was that for us.  In all our trials, in all our sorrows, even in all our ugliness, we matter to Him. We matter to God! Love came down to be sacrificial love for us! It is hard to get our minds around that kind of selflessness. But it is for us…that amazing gift is for us.

And He did that for us because He knew we would need him to understand our frailties, our wayward paths, our sins, our very humanness. We needed a God who could be “with us”…and be Emmanuel for us. 

We needed Him to “know” and still to love us.

Isn’t that what we all crave…To have someone in our lives who knows the very essence of us, good and bad, and STILL believe in us, still understand, still care, still love ALL of us?

On that darkest of days, down that dark road, and up on that dark cross, Jesus gave it all for us, every single one of us, no exceptions, we are all offered that kind of love.

He came to fulfill the law…to make the Law of Love the most important commandment of all.

For when it was done, when all the betrayals were committed by friends and foes, when all the atrocities were committed against Him, when he saved the soul of the man on the cross beside him even when He was dying Himself, when all the insults had been hurled against Him, when the words, “It is finished” were spoken (John 19: 30) …at that very moment, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom”. (Mark 15: 38)

The earth shook!

“The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open…” (Matthew 27: 51-52). And the law was finally fulfilled as the Law of Love.

It was indeed, the darkest day…but God left us even in that day, a ray of hope, the promise that we no longer needed an intercessory for us with Him. We now had a straight line to our Savior, to our God. 

“Love has made a way. Hope is never lost. There’s power in the Cross.” from Power in the Cross by Derek Johnson

There’s more of course, so much more.

And that’s why we wait now…we watch and wait for the rest of the story. 

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