By Douglas V. Gibbs
Christians call the day an innocent man was brutally executed Good Friday. And if you don’t know the whole story, that sounds… strange. Even offensive. But once you see the full picture, the name makes sense.
This week is Holy Week on the Christian calendar. It starts with Palm Sunday; the day Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a young donkey while crowds shouted, “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Now, to us today, that might sound like a parade. But to the people of that time, it was a flashing neon sign. Hundreds of years earlier, the prophet Zechariah had said Israel’s true King would arrive exactly that way, “riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
And that was just one prophecy Jesus fulfilled. Born of a virgin. Born in Bethlehem. Called out of Egypt. Descended from King David. Healing the blind (blind since birth which means He “created” sight attesting His Divinity), the deaf, the lame. The signs were everywhere.
So some of the people believed the Messiah had finally come, and they thought they knew what He was coming to do: overthrow Rome. King Herod feared Him. Crowds tried to make Him king by force. Peter even drew a sword when the guards came to arrest Jesus. Everyone expected a political revolution.
But Rome wasn’t Israel’s biggest problem. And it isn’t ours either. The real problem is sin: the thing that separates every one of us from God. Scripture says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and “the wages of sin is death.” In other words, even the best of us can’t earn our way back to God.
But God had a plan; a plan He hinted at all the way back in the Passover. When Israel was about to leave Egypt, every family sacrificed a spotless lamb and put its blood on the doorframe. When God saw the blood, judgment passed over that home.
So when John the Baptist pointed at Jesus and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” he wasn’t being poetic. He was telling the world exactly who Jesus was and what He came to do.
Jesus, fully God and fully man, lived the perfect life we couldn’t live. And on Good Friday, He took the penalty we deserved. Not just the physical agony of crucifixion, but the spiritual weight of being forsaken by the Father. He bore the judgment meant for us.
But the story doesn’t end there. Easter morning, the stone rolled away. Jesus rose from the dead, just as He said He would. He declared, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies.”
That’s why Good Friday is good. Because the death of Jesus opened the door to life, real life, eternal life, for anyone who believes that Jesus is Lord and that He raised from the dead.
That offer still stands today.
So as we move toward Easter Sunday, remember: this isn’t just a story about something that happened. It’s a story about something offered to you, right now.
Happy Easter.
