Death of Jesus (Jesus is the Gospel #2)
Thank you for taking time on this Good Friday to come and remember the cross. That is the entire purpose of tonight — to remember that Jesus went to a cross, that His back was beaten, that a crown of thorns was pressed onto His head, that nails pierced His wrists and feet, and that He bled out for us.
Tonight is not a celebration; we get to do that in a couple of days. Nor is it simple duty. Tonight is about remembering — through song, through the teaching of the word, through prayer, through Scripture. The idea is that you would come and bow before the cross, remembering that it was for your sin that Jesus died. Tonight is for repentance, confession, thanksgiving, and worship.
He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. — Isaiah 53:5–6 (ESV)
The Missing Leg of the Stool
He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. — 1 Peter 2:22–24 (ESV)
Those words may sound familiar. Partly because Peter is drawing images and phrases straight out of Isaiah 53 — including that final line we just heard.
Last Sunday we asked what the gospel actually is. Ask most people and they will say it is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Which makes sense — here we are on Good Friday remembering His death, and in two days we will celebrate His resurrection. Every year the church reminds people of those two enormously important things.
But I suggested that is incomplete. It is like a three-legged stool with only two legs. The missing one is the life of Jesus.
Peter puts it plainly: He committed no sin. Jesus is the only human ever to have lived entirely without sin — and that is precisely what allowed Him to pay the penalty for sin. Had He sinned, He would have gone to the cross and paid for His own, because the penalty for sin is death. Having no sin of His own, He could go to that cross and have the payment transferred to those of us who do.
What Actually Sets His Death Apart
Some people assume it is simply the fact that Jesus died that distinguishes Him. But think about it — dying only proves He was human. All humans die. Your great-great-grandmother, whom you never met, died. People die every day; we hear about it in the news. Your closest friend either has or will. You will one day breathe your last. Despite the very best efforts of science, the mortality rate remains stubbornly at 100%.
So was it the cross? I understand why you would say so. We do not open a news app and routinely see crucifixions; it would be extraordinary today. But in Jesus’ day it was not extraordinary at all.
The Romans did not invent crucifixion — the Assyrians did — but the Romans perfected it. They understood exactly how to use it to consolidate their own power and strip everyone else of theirs. They would nail people to wood, sometimes bind them with rope, sometimes to a beam and sometimes to trees. Before raising them, they stripped them of their clothing to humiliate them utterly — the victim, their family, their village, their tribe. And then they placed them along busy roads, so everyone entering or leaving the city had a standing visual reminder of Rome’s power and of what happened if you stepped out of line.
We have no reliable count of how many died this way, but across roughly five centuries of Roman rule the estimates run into the hundreds of thousands. Which means Jesus was one of perhaps two or three hundred thousand. Not even the crucifixion sets Him apart.
What makes His death significant is that sinless life. Because He lived it, He did not deserve the cross — and by going anyway, He could take what would have been the payment for His own sin and transfer it to us.
The Argument Going Around
Last week a familiar debate broke out online, as it seems to every year around Holy Week. It has become quite fashionable for Christians to attack a particular understanding of salvation: penal substitutionary atonement.
And this is not atheists objecting — they would dismiss it anyway. This is Christians. Pastors. Theologians. Saying it is ridiculous, or wrong, or even immoral.
Let me break the phrase down. Penal relates to penalty, punishment, paying something painful. Substitutionary means Jesus stood in as a substitute — it should have been us on that cross, and He was put in our place. Atonement means to make amends. Put together: amends were made with God, we were made right and forgiven, because He paid the penalty in our place.
What are the objections? First, that it portrays God as cruel — how can you call Him loving if He sends His own Son to be tortured and killed? The events of the cross are horrific, and no loving God would do that. Second, that it is not justice — an innocent person dying for the guilty is the opposite of justice; the guilty should be punished. Third, that if Jesus died in our place it nullifies His command to take up your cross and follow Him, since He has already done it for you.
I saw one pastor post a screenshot of a text exchange where he was asked, with Holy Week approaching, for his case against it. He gave seven reasons. Reason seven was “it’s stupid” — so really he had six. And underneath, comment after comment: thank you, I always knew something was wrong with that, such a dangerous doctrine, so glad you addressed this heresy.
And yet when I read Peter, he does not appear to have a problem with it at all. He himself — Jesus — bore our sins: there is the substitution; it should have been our sins we paid for, and He bore them. In his body: there is the penal element, the painful penalty. That we might die to sin and live to righteousness: there is the atonement.
So I Checked the Translations
Then a thought hit me a couple of days ago: what if it is my translation? I usually teach from the ESV, and I know its translators likely carry a bent toward this understanding. Perhaps, working from the Greek, they nudged it to fit their systematic theology.
I am not a Greek scholar, so I rely on the wisdom of others. I set the ESV aside, pulled up a parallel Bible, and lined up the major modern translations — genuinely looking to see whether one of them had twisted it, whether I had believed something false and another rendering would set me straight.
Every single one translated it the same way.
That is remarkable. Different reading levels. Different committees. Different theological instincts pulling in different directions. And it was not most of them, or nearly all — it was every one. Christ bore your sin in His body on the tree. He took the penalty. He was your substitute. He atoned for your sin so it would not be held against you and you could come into the presence of God.
And He was not dragged to that cross by a cruel God engaged in some sort of divine child abuse. He went willingly. He knew that if you paid your own penalty you would be eternally separated from God, and because He loves you He came gladly and bore your sins in His body — so that you might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds you are healed.
Why We Call It Good
That is why this is called Good Friday. Make no mistake — it was not good for Jesus. There is nothing good about a cross. It was horrific. It is where we get the word excruciating, which literally means “out of the cross.”
And He did it willingly, knowing exactly what lay ahead, because He loves you. He did not deserve it. I deserved it. You deserved it. He did it for us. That is very, very good.
We do have trouble with that word, though. Ask someone to describe a friend and you will hear, “Oh, she is so good.” It is a very Iowan thing to say, isn’t it. I did it myself last week — someone asked about one of the wrestlers who comes to our weekly Bible study and I said, “He’s a great kid. Good kid. I wish there were a hundred more like him.” And I would say the same about plenty of people in the Riverwood family.
That is culturally accurate. It is not biblically accurate.
This past Wednesday at youth group, Jake was taking us through the New City Catechism, and it led us to Romans 3 — that cheery little passage: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
One of the students spoke up and said, “I don’t like that.” Neither do I. It is not encouraging. Boiled down, it says you are not good.
You might push back that Romans is simply Paul’s opinion. Except he is quoting Psalm 14:1–3, which is repeated almost verbatim in Psalm 53. And read on and he keeps quoting — Isaiah 59, Proverbs 3, Ecclesiastes 7. Paul is not offering an opinion. He is stating spiritual fact. It is why Jesus Himself says in Luke 18:19 that only God is good.
We do not like that message. We want to be good enough. We want to show God we can manage it. We are Iowans. And biblically, we are not.
He Is Not Disgusted by You
Here is the mercy in it: God is not disgusted by your lack of goodness.
Don’t misunderstand — God hates sin, and sin cannot come into His presence. But He is not repulsed by you, or by what you have done, or by what you have thought. When you bow before Him in prayer He does not recoil. When you walk into a church to worship He does not flee the room.
Because when God made you, He made you in His image — an image meant to reflect His character, so that you would be good, something like the way He is good. When sin crashed into the created order it tried to tear that image apart. It distorted it, marred it, blurred it. It could not remove it.
God can still look into the middle of the mess and see His own image there. That is why He is not repelled by you. He is drawn to you, and He comes to you.
And He does not want you left in that condition — because if you stay there, when you die you will pay for your own sin. Which is exactly why Jesus came to be your substitute and take your penalty, so amends could be made, so you could come back into relationship with your Creator, and so that image in you could begin to be restored into the image of Jesus. So that you will love as He loved, live as He lived, and ever so slowly become good the way God is good.
Don’t Jump to Sunday
If this story is unfamiliar to you, you have heard tonight, vividly, that Jesus died on a cross for your sin. And I will spoil the ending: that is not where it stops. There is another chapter. Jesus rises from the dead, and we get to celebrate that on Sunday — the third leg of the stool.
But what happens in a lot of Christian traditions is that we skip ahead to Sunday and skim past Friday. It is like rewatching a film you have seen many times: you do not sit in tension wondering what becomes of the hero, because you already know, so you relax and enjoy it. And we forget what Jesus actually went through. What that Friday was like for the disciples. That the world went dark. That God grieved over our sin.
So tonight, don’t jump to Sunday. I want you to have an extraordinary celebration on Sunday — and I think it will be richer and greater if you first sit in the shadow of the cross.
Because it is here at the cross, looking at the crucified Christ, that we see our brokenness. And it is here at the cross that we see our healing. It is here that we see our sins borne by Him, and here that we see we have been given His righteousness.
So come. Pray. Sing. Confess. Take the communion elements and remember what He did. We will celebrate in a couple of days — but tonight, let us mourn and lament. Our sin was so great we could never have paid for it ourselves, and He took the penalty for us. He bore our sins in His body on that tree, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By His wounds you have been healed.
