Good Friday 2025

“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”

John Stott

“God’s power is at its greatest not in his destruction of the wicked but in his taking all the wickedness of the earth into himself and giving back love.”

J. N. Oswalt

“So long as sin, death, and the curse remain in us, sin damns us, death kills us, and the curse curses us; but when these things are transferred to Christ, what is ours becomes His and what is His becomes ours. Let us learn, therefore, in every temptation to transfer sin, death, the curse, and all the evils that oppress us from ourselves to Christ, and, on the other hand, to transfer righteousness, life, and blessing from Him to us. For He does in fact bear all our evils, because God the Father, as Isaiah says, ‘has laid the iniquity of us all on Him’. And He willingly took them upon Himself. For He was not guilty; but He did this in order to do the Father’s will, by which we would be sanctified eternally.”

Martin Luther

“These Old Testament stories that illustrate God’s backward ways of engaging us in the world—then and now—are all preambles to the Lord’s ultimate revelation. Genesis to Malachi is one long drumroll that summons the cosmos to stand at attention before the climactic unveiling of the glory of God.
And there it is, in a dying man. Soldiers gamble for his clothing. His closest friends have skulked away. His fiercest enemies spit insults in his face. Even a fellow condemned man mocks him. There is nothing, not one iota, of obvious God stuff going on here. It looks like hell. No one would walk outside Jerusalem to this spot of public execution, stand at the foot of this man’s cross, look up, and say, ‘There is the glory of the Almighty. There is the unveiling of who God is, how God works, how he comes to us.’ The opposite would be said. ‘Looks like the devil’s work. There is the shame of failure.’ “

Chad Bird