_{Good Friday – April 10, 2009}

_{Father, Forgive Us for the Sake of Your Son!}

Isaiah 53:4-6 – Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

“About the sixth hour . . . darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining” (Luke 23:44,45). The sixth hour would have been noon; the ninth was then 3:00 p.m. In the middle of the day the sun stopped shining. Some want to write it off as nothing more than a particularly thick storm in the sky, or perhaps a cloud of sand in the upper atmosphere. But they are wrong. What happened was nature itself gone awry, and the darkness was only the start of it. Earthquakes are not uncommon in that area of the world, but the one that shook the earth that day was of such a violent nature that it split the rocks. That such an upheaval of the earth might open many of the sepulchers in the area is not unexpected, but that their occupants should come back to life and go into the city? It seemed the universe itself was turning upside down.

And our text tells us the reason why: because the events of that day were completely opposite from the way they should be. An innocent man was suffering a death reserved for the worst of criminals. A holy and blameless man was being charged with the sins, transgressions, and iniquities of every human being. The very Son of God was being forsaken by God the Father for crimes he had never committed. But what could we expect from this particular day and this particular crucifixion, which began with the most out-of-place words of them all - a man pleading to heaven for pardon for his murderers? The whole day was in disarray.

And thank God that it was! For out of that disarray and disorder came the rock-solid foundation for our faith. Out of it came the grounds upon which our hope of salvation is built. Out of it came the answer to the prayer that we have concentrated on during the last six weeks:

Father, Forgive Us for the Sake of Your Son!

“We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” It would be highly flattering to our souls to imagine that our sins and the troubles they cause are not of our making. We might try, as did our first parents in Eden, to pass ourselves off as the poor and innocent victims of tempters. Or we might, like so many people today, try to believe that we are for the most part blameless victims of unavoidable circumstances. There have been those who have blamed God for their troubles, contending that we have received a punishment far greater than any crime we may have done. And there are those who write up a whole fairy-tale for themselves in which nothing but mere chance has placed into their lives the problems they must deal with.

But we are sheep who love to wander and have no one to blame but ourselves. God has set a path before us, clearly marked out on the pages of Scripture, and has commanded us that this is the way in which we are to walk throughout our lives. But so often we decide that we can find something better, and so frequently, we find ways to go in any direction other than that of the Ten Commandments.

We have spent this Lenten season cataloguing our sins according to the wrongs done to Christ on that Thursday and Friday. We Christians know that our lives have been filled with sins against our Creator and Lord. Like his frightened disciples in Gethsemane, we have fled from him when staying would have taken more trust than we cared to give him. Like the proud rulers of the Jewish Sanhedrin, we have protested at the authority of his commandments. Like the mob in Pilate’s courtyard, we have been annoyed when he hasn’t given us everything we feel he owes us, and like the Roman governor himself, we have been afraid at times to stand up for his truth. The mockery of the soldiers can be heard when we have tried to deny, or at least to soften, Christ’s claim upon us. And we have often wept the fruitless tears of the daughters of Jerusalem, when what was called for were honest tears of repentance for our own wrongdoings.

We aren’t innocent victims of the hardships that a sinful human race brought into this world. Not one of us was forced to sin; we chose it for ourselves. And we cannot argue that since we were born in sin, we had no choice but to sin. That seems to sound so biblical, and yet it is nothing more than an excuse we use when we are caught. Let us not try to get “theological” about this; we sin because we want to commit the sin.

And thus we chose for ourselves the punishments pictured in Isaiah’s words of this text. We should be carrying our own infirmities and sorrows; we should be stricken, smitten, and afflicted. The Bible itself tells us that this is our well-deserved sentence, because “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

That is how things were supposed to be. But on that disordered and confused Friday when the sun quit shining at noon, God made things turn out different for us. Oh, the wages of sin were paid—but not by the sinners. God’s Son made the full payment for us all.

Nature was in upheaval on that day because an upheaval was taking place before the judgment seat of God. The innocent one was suffering for the sins of the guilty. The Creator was dying for the sins of his creatures. The Son of God was shedding his blood for the transgressions we committed against his own Father.

The object of the punishments is supposed to be the sinner. This is clear, not only from our common sense but even in the pages of the Bible. In Ezekiel the prophet’s day, the exiled people of Israel accused God of making the children suffer in exile for the sins of their disobedient fathers back in the old days. God answered them back in no uncertain terms that no one was dying for any sins but his own: “The soul who sins is the one who will die” (Ezekiel 18:4).

But what we have is someone else who suffers for our guilt. It is not the souls who sinned but the one who never sinned that dies. And now think again of the catalogue of woes that Isaiah speaks of here: infirmity, sorrow, piercing, wounds. How difficult these would be to bear for those who truly deserved them! Imagine the pains of cancer or arthritis. Think of how often sinners—even we ourselves—groan and sweat under the troubles we have in this world.

How much more must these bring agony to the soul of him who alone never wandered and never went astray! It was a burden so great that he begged to be relieved of it in the final moments in Gethsemane. It was an agony so deep that in the midst of the darkness at midday, although he had always known the answer full well, he cried out to God the Father, “Why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

But it was his desire and will that we should have peace and be healed by means of the turmoil and hurt he suffered there. It was only in this way that our sins could be paid for and our guilt could be covered. In suffering our own punishment, we would have been lost forever. In suffering for us, he was able to save us from what we deserved. We would have been lost to eternal death and torment. But he promised, “Because I live, you also will live” (John 14:19).

Thus, as the Bible says, something unheard of became possible. Full and complete justice was served, and every sin against the commandments received its full and horrible penalty. But, at the same time, the love and mercy of the Father was shown to sinners, and all who believe in Jesus as Savior do not perish but are given the gift of everlasting life. God could be just and enforce his law to its last terrible measure but, at the same time, be merciful and take away all our guilt.

“Father, forgive them!” was Christ’s plea. It was only in this way that Christ Jesus could win for us the answer to that prayer that we could never merit. He bought the answer at the price of his life’s blood. That we should go astray was sadly, all too predictable. That the Son of God should make full payment for our sins—is all so amazing.

And so when God’s only Son, the Son he loves, the Son in whom he is well pleased, offered up his life for our sins and prayed, “Father, forgive them!”—and when we echo that cry, praying for God’s mercy for the sake of the innocent sufferings and death of Christ, his Son and our Lord—how can the Almighty refuse? How could Isaiah have written any other words than those at the end of our text, the words that shook the world, and the words that opened heaven to us all? “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Amen.