Friday, April 18, 2014

Understanding Good Friday Better

I'm about to say something that will sound strange coming from a Christian:  a lot of times, I kind of forget about Jesus.

I have a strong sense of God the Father:  when I marvel at the mysteries of creation, see acts of compassion and love, and ask for direction in my life, it's God the Father that I'm thinking of.  The Holy Spirit also resonates with me in a very real way:  I am aware of His presence in those spiritual nudges and whispers of conscience and discernment, and in my prayer life.  

But Jesus?  I sing about Him and read about Him and claim to love Him--and in theory, I do, or I want to--but a lot of times I wonder if I know Jesus at all.  For starters, I don't really understand a lot of the things that He says in the Bible.  The old wineskins and new wineskins (see Mark 2) parable is beyond me.  And why did He sometimes tell people not to speak a word about Him, whereas other times He instructed people to tell everyone of what they had seen?  This is just a small sampling of the things I don't get about Jesus.

And then, there's the big things that I don't get about Jesus:  like... what did it really mean for Him to die for my sins?  I realize that that is a quadrazillion-dollar type question.  But it's so fundamental to our faith.  Why do I struggle with it so much?

The cool thing is that this year, I've been studying the Gospels verrry, very slowly.  Generally, I gravitate towards the Old Testament -- specifically, the first five books of the Bible, which are very powerful to me.  But in an effort to address this Jesus gap in my spiritual life, I decided to camp out in the Gospels for the year.  In other words, I decided to read about Jesus.  Slowly.  Over and over.  All year long.  

It's been good.  Between the Sunday sermons and Blackhawk sermons and the reading and what must be God's work in increasing my understanding, I'm actually starting to put some pieces together.  

One of the most critical aha! moments from this year came when I read Matthew 9 and finally understood what it meant.  There, Jesus heals a paralytic man, but before He does any healing, He tells the man that his sins are forgiven.  The Pharisees who are standing around accuse Him of blaspheming, and Jesus replies with something that I had never understood before:  "Which is easier: to say 'your sins are forgiven,' or 'get up and walk'?"  I think I must have just raced past this story a thousand times before in my life, because all of a sudden it clicked for me sometime this winter... of course it is easier to say to someone that his sins are forgiven, because who can really prove that except God?   Jesus knew that that was true, so He proved His authority over sin by doing the harder thing--telling the paralytic man to get up and walk--which required Him to actually perform a miracle.  And if Jesus could prove His authority over the harder thing, that should help the people believe that He was also capable of forgiving sin.

So simple!  (Not really.  At least not to me, for 30+ years.)  Every time I think about that passage, I'm spiritually tickled a little bit because it makes so much sense. But I didn't get it for such a long time.  

One other thing has been very powerful for me over the last few weeks.  In our Blackhawk series, we went over Isaiah 53 a few weeks ago and suddenly the passage made so much more sense.  The passage is about Jesus (that I knew), and it's written from the point of view of Israel at some point in the future, when they acknowledge Jesus as Lord (that part I did not know, and makes everything connect).  In connection with the exposition of that passage, which in itself was incredibly illuminating, the pastor presented a very effective and moving illustration of what it meant for Jesus to die for our sins...for my sins.  

It goes like this:  Imagine what would happen if each of our sins was recorded in writing.  How big would the volume be? More like...how many volumes would there be, and how thick would each be?  Let's assume we're all saints and in the course of our lifetime, we each produce sins that amount to one, inch-thick book (in which our sins are recorded in very tiny print).  Of course, we know that in reality, the magnitude and volume of our sins far exceeds that which is assumed in this hypothetical, but let's take a very liberal approach with ourselves for a moment.  It is supposed to be the case that each of us carries the weight of our own sins; we are each to bear our own punishment for our sins.  But God did not choose to do it that way.  No, He instead chose to impose the penalty for our sins on one person, Jesus Christ.

To illustrate, the pastor brought his young (12-year-old?) daughter to the stage, and gave her an inch-thick book to hold.  That represented her bearing the weight of her own sin.  So far, so okay.  But then, to illustrate what Jesus did in bearing the weight of multiple people's sins, the pastor started piling on additional inch-thick books for her to hold.  He added ten books to account for all the people in the front pew.  He then added eight or ten additional books to cover people in the second pew.  By this point, the books reached past the girl's chin and she began to totter under the weight of the books.  There were still a few hundred people in the congregation to "cover," though...and if the girl did what Jesus did, she would have been drowning under the weight of all those books.  They would crush her.

Jesus was crushed.  Not just under the weight of one church's sins...but...one church, times a community, times a city, times a nation, times all the nations, times a generation, times all generations -- past, present, and future.

I cannot even begin to fathom how big that sin must have been.  And there were mine, stacked right along with everyone else's.  That's what Jesus carried to the cross.  That's why He died there.  That's what He wiped clean there.

*crickets*

Uhhhhhhh.....

Yeah, I think I understand Jesus a little better now.  And that has made this Good Friday more meaningful.  Thank You for the cross, thank You for going to the cross. Thanks for making a way to give me life, Jesus.







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