Good Friday
2
Cor 5:14-21
4/3/26
Paul says in our text, “Even though we once regarded Christ
according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” To regard Christ
according to the flesh is to view him in the ordinary ways of the world. It is
to evaluate him only on the basis of the events of Good Friday that we heard in
the reading of the Passion of Our Lord.
To regard Christ according to the flesh is to see only the Roman
practice of crucifixion. The Romans didn’t invent crucifixion. They took the
practice from others. But Rome took the cross and made it into a means of
institutional terror and control.
Human ingenuity has devised a number of ways by which a person can
be executed. Man has invented stoning, the gallows, burning at the stake, the
guillotine, the firing squad, the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal
injection. But what differentiates crucifixion from so many other methods of
execution is the amount of time that was needed for it to kill a person. These
other ways of execution kill a person within at most ten or fifteen minutes. But
crucifixion took a day, or more often several days.
For the Romans, this was the great thing about crucifixion. It was
a means of prolonged public suffering and humiliation. First the victim was
stripped naked and scourged with a whip studded with pieces of bone or lead.
This agonizing torture shredded the flesh and turned the individual into a
bloody mess. Then the person was nailed or tied to the cross in such a way that
the legs could barely support the body.
As we learn in the Gospels about the crucifixion of Jesus, the
Romans did this in a very public place where many people would see it as they
passed by. The crucified person was put on display, hanging there naked, as he
suffered. Death was usually a process of slow asphyxiation as the person’s
weight pulled down on their chest and it became more and more difficult for a
person to raise himself enough to take a breath. Crucifixion was long, slow,
and terrible as the person was put on display in a humiliating death.
And that was the point. The Romans used crucifixion to terrorize
populations. The bodies of the crucified were normally left on the cross to be
eaten by the birds. All of it was meant to send the message: Do not mess with
us, or we will do this to you. In the face of any kind of organized uprising it
was not uncommon for the Romans to crucify hundreds or even thousands of people
lining the road for miles.
Paul told the Corinthians, “For I decided to know nothing among you
except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” If one regarded Christ according
to the flesh – if a person viewed him according to the ordinary ways of the
world – this was absurd. It was moronic. Jesus was a criminal who had been
executed by crucifixion. He had died in the most humiliating and shameful death
known to the Greco-Roman world. His death was a picture of powerlessness. It was pointless.
Certainly, Paul had once viewed it that way. But he says in our
text, “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.
Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus
no longer.” The apostle tells us that we can’t regard Jesus Christ according to
the flesh. We can’t view him in the ordinary ways of the world.
Instead the apostle reveals that through the crucifixion of Jesus,
God was acting for the sake of the world – for your sake. He says, “All this is
from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the
ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the
world to himself.” Paul says that Christ on the cross was the means by which
God reconciled us to himself.
The language of “reconciliation” invites the idea that there is
some kind of division between two parties – that there is some source of
contention or disagreement. But when
Paul uses this language elsewhere, he is clear that the problem went far beyond
that. He told the Romans, “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God
by the death of his Son.”
The apostle says that we were enemies of God. We know that this is not the way we were
created. Instead God created us in his image for perfect fellowship with him.
But through the disobedience of Adam sin invaded our existence and we lost the
image of God. This sin warped and twisted us into something that is not very
good. We are now people who find sinning to be easy. It is easy to put my wants
and desires ahead of God. It is easy to put my wants and desires ahead of my
family, friends, and neighbors.
Each and every sin is not simply the breaking of some abstract law
code. It is sin committed against God.
AS David said in Psalm 51, “Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in
your words and blameless in your judgment.”
Our sin is the rejection of God the Creator. In our sin we set ourselves against God,
because we are saying that we are going to be god in our own lives. We make
ourselves the enemies of God.
God is the holy God in whose presence sinners who sin cannot
exist. Their sin evokes his wrath and
judgment. Paul told the Ephesians that
as sinful descendants of Adam who are opposed to God we “were by
nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” We were storing
up wrath for ourselves on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment
will be revealed. We were people who
would receive God’s eternal damnation.
God had created us for fellowship with him. But even in the
rebellion of sin as we were enemies of God, he did not cease to love us. Paul
told the Romans, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still
sinners, Christ died for us.” In the
incarnation God sent his Son into the world as he was conceived by the Holy
Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He sent Christ as the means by which he
would reconcile us to himself.
Paul says in our text, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the
message of reconciliation.” We were enemies of God because of our sin. God
acted in Christ to reconcile us to himself by not counting our trespasses
against us.
But how could God do that? God is the just and holy God. We learn
in Scripture that, “He will render to each one according to his works.” To be
justified – to be declared innocent by God – you have to live in righteous
ways. Paul told the Romans, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are
righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.” God
could not be true to his own nature as the just and holy God if he simply
ignored your sin.
And so God judged our sin on Good Friday in Christ. Paul says at
the beginning of our text, “For the love of Christ controls us, because we
have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died.”
Jesus’ death on Good Friday, was the death of the One who is true God and true
man. It was a death on behalf of us all.
It was a death through which the apostle says that we all died.
Jesus Christ had no sin. But he came to be the Servant of the Lord whom
we hear about in our Old Testament reading. Isaiah says, “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.” In our text, Paul expresses this
in even stronger language as he writes: “For our sake he made him to be
sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness
of God.”
God so closely identified Jesus with our sin, that Paul can say the
sinless One was made to be sin. In God’s saving work Jesus became The Sinner in
our place – the One who was counted as sinful because of our sin. And then the
just God did to Jesus what he will do to sinners on the Last Day. He poured out his wrath. Paul told the Romans
that “by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for
sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” Jesus cried out “My God, my God why
have you forsaken me?” as he received God’s judgment in our place.
On Good Friday, the just God justly judged your sin when Christ
died on the cross. Now through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus,
you are justified before God. As Paul told the Romans, he did this, “so that he
might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Paul tells
us in our text, “in Christ God was reconciling the world to
himself, not counting their trespasses against them.”
In yourself you are still a sinner who sins. But through faith in
Christ you have the status before God of being a holy one – a saint. This
status has nothing to do with your actions. Instead it is received as God’s
gift through faith in Christ. Paul told
the Romans, “And to the one who does not work but believes in him who
justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, just as David
also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart
from works: ‘Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins
are covered; blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his
sin.’”
Because we know the Gospel we no longer regard Christ according to
the flesh. We don’t view his death in the ordinary ways of the world. Instead
we know that it was God acting to reconcile us to himself as he justly judged
our sin in Christ.
On Good Friday we focus on what the death of Jesus Christ means for
us. Because of Christ’s death we are not justified before God through faith in
the Lord - we are forgiven. However the Gospel is not only about Christ’s
death, and it’s not only about forgiveness. Tomorrow night we will begin our
focus on why Paul says in our text: For the love of Christ controls us,
because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all
have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live
for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”
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