Good Friday 2025

A couple days ago during youth group, one of the high school students asked

“What’s so good about Good Friday?  It seems terrible to me.”  It’s a good question.  What, after all, is so good about it?  A man is betrayed by one of his closest companions.  An innocent man is falsely condemned.  The same crowds that sang his praises days earlier now raise their voices in mockery.  A man without fault is executed with public shame.  God Himself is rejected by the very ones He came to save.  How can such a day be called “good”?

And yet, therein lies the mystery.  The sorrow of Good Friday is real.  It is a tragedy, no doubt.  But paradoxically, it is the very depth of that tragedy which reveals its goodness.  This is the hour when God chooses not to turn away from the ruin we brought upon ourselves, but to walk straight into it.  What Adam spoiled, Christ redeems – not by escaping suffering, but by embracing it.

When Adam and Eve sinned, the world became a place of pain, loss, and death.  God could have wiped the slate clean.  Instead, He chose the harder path: to enter our wounded world, to taste its bitterness, to let it wound Him too.  He has felt betrayal, rejection, agony.  He has suffered.  He has died.  And it is precisely by plunging into this human sorrow that He transforms it.  A tree in Eden was the cause of our fall; a tree on Calvary the means of our salvation.

The Cross does not merely cancel sin – it converts it.  It does not erase the curse but turns it inside out.  By His stripes, we are healed.  By His Blood, our sins are washed away.  Through the doorway of death, He opens the gates of paradise once more.  That is why Good Friday, though cloaked in grief, shines with a deeper light.

It is, to the eyes of the world, a defeat.  But to the eyes of faith, it is the triumph of divine love.  For there is no greater love than this: that God would lay down His life – not in spite of our sins, but because of them.  Good Friday is good because it is the day God looked upon our worst and gave us His best.

This is not sentiment.  It is a truth written in blood.  And if we let it, it will become the truth that shapes our lives.  The Cross is not merely something that happened – it is something that speaks.  In the silence of Calvary, God says what words alone never could: “I love you.”  And that, more than anything, is what makes this Friday good.