Why Good Friday?
Apr 10th, 2009 by ljkim
Long before God ever spoke to Noah or Abram, people were making sacrifices to their gods. So when God started to regulate it by saying “Here’s the way you make a real sacrifice” it wasn’t a new invention, but a variation on a pre-existing cultural theme. Something precious had to die in order for the world to be set right. No sickly animals could be offered; the sacrifice had to be “perfect” without blemish.
Now it can be hard to look at these kinds of Ancient practices and see anything good in them, but maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if were still doing these things. If you had to set your car on fire the next time you told a lie, you’d think long and hard about lying, or coveting, or lust or greed… We’d take our inner lives a little more seriously if it started cutting into our retirement accounts: You just can’t afford to be a bastard in this economy! In Ancient Israel God taught that everyone had to atone for sin, even the “good” people. So on Passover one would have to kill a lamb and eat it, and the blood of the lamb symbolized what would save you.
“O how silly, how can the blood of a lamb save a person?” someone says. Okay, but the point of all that was to ingrain the concept of a right-sacrifice, a valuable sacrifice… In other words, it was training. So that when God came to offer His sacrifice we would understand. God taught sacrifice not so that we could sacrifice for Him, but so that He could make one final and perfect sacrifice for us. Jesus lives the perfect life of holiness and selflessness, railing against religiosity and self-righteousness as well as overt injustice and disease and pain and death, then He dies a shameful death on the Cross to make a trade. A sacrifice is a trade. Our sins are imparted to the sacrificial lamb, and the purity of the sacrifice is imputed to us. And right there is the heart of it all – the meaning of life, the message of God: He’s offering you a trade. Everything you are, for everything He is.
Now you can’t make a trade based on an emotion, you have to calculate what He’s worth, what you’re worth – you have to make sure it’s not a scam… That’s what we’re here for. Come and do the math. Ask questions. There’s a part in Isaiah where God says “Come let us reason together…” !! “Though your sins be like scarlett, they shall be white as snow.”
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