Good Friday

Substitution means to take someone’s place. Atonement means an action of reparation or compensation.

Christ died in our place and with it bearing the weight of the sin of this world.

The human conceptuality of divine things can often be inadequate. The action of Christ atoning for our sins is a difficult thing to comprehend but this is the most pure form of grace that Christ has showed to us. Jesus was blameless and sentenced to death while being without sin. The Lamb of God.

It is hard to understand why he wouldn’t resist being crucified. Humans by nature have survival instincts and when threatened or in danger attempt to defend themselves. Why would Christ not defend himself verbally in court and stay silent? Why would Jesus not defend himself physically in the Garden of Gethsemane and not fight back?

The answer is because Jesus had to fulfill his purpose on Earth, which was to die. Not just in any way, but specifically by form of crucifixion. Symbolically he was ordered by the masses to die instead of the treacherous murderer Barbaras. After taking on unspeakable amounts of physical abuse to his body, he then carried his own cross as much as he physically could to Golgotha. Every detail occurring during Jesus’s crucifixion was intentional, predetermined, and willed by God.

Anyone reading the story of the Crucifixion for the first time must be full of anger and would deem this as a great injustice. We might see this through our worldly, feeble, wretched, sin-stained human minds, but there was always a divine purpose. Even the disciples felt this during his arrest and death on the cross. Things sometimes occur that might seem unfair or unjust but God always knows the purpose in everything that happens. Jesus had known why he was sent to Earth. There is nothing that God had not known was going to happen. It all happened for a purpose and it all occurred exactly the way God willed it.

May we always seek to better understand God’s Word and also God’s will and to understand the purpose of his death just as much as the significance of His resurrection.

Additional Reading
Romans 3:23

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”

2 Corinthians 5:21

“For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

1 Peter 2:24

“Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness - by whose stripes you were healed.”

Isaiah 53:5

“But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.”