The Day Love Won

 

Good Friday.  The day love won.  It's always the day that I don't know what to do with myself.  A huge dichotomy of emotions always courses through my veins on this day.  One moment I am in the throws of grief, hardly able to contain my sorrow for my Lord.  This Creating King walked in flesh and was pierced, beaten, and hung up on dry wood only to be robbed of breath.  All for my sin.

The next moment, I am listening to music and smiling from ear to ear because I know the full redemptive story. I know He is alive and well and interceding on my behalf.  Up from the grave He arose my heart shouts!

Good Friday is always a sacred dance of grief and joy.  The best love stories always are.

I want to tell you about one simple verse and one simple Greek word today.  I hope it finds you where you are.

In Luke 22:22, we see this, "And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined but woe unto that man (Judas) by whom he is betrayed."

Jesus is in the upper room sharing a final Passover meal with his disciples. He has expressed how his body will be given for them and his blood shed for them.  He wants them to know that the old covenant will be stripped away because the new covenant is in his blood.

There must have been a dichotomy of emotions in Christ at that meal.  You know he longed for the cross because of the hope set before him: a beloved people restored to the Father.  You also know his weak human flesh was screaming against the agonizing hours that he knew were ahead.

It's this verse that has made me pause all week.

"And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined..."

Jesus is going to the cross.  It was his whole mission.  Satan didn't win by nailing him to the tree.  It was God and Jesus and me and you who won in that moment.

The Greek word for determined is "horizo" and means exactly what you are thinking because we get our word horizon from this word.  It means to mark off by boundaries, to set limits, to appoint, to determine.

Even when the triune God was marking off the boundaries of creation, setting boundaries of oceans and horizons, the triune God had already determined that the Son would be the sacrificial atonement.  Even before mankind was in place and had fallen, the plan of redemption had already been determined.

The cross didn't catch God off guard.  The cross had been determined all along.

The cross was God's majestic and holy dance of grief and joy.

Determined.

I think of all the sorrow around and I think about how nothing catches God off guard.  I reflect on His sovereignty and am reminded that He determines everything, ultimately bringing joy from grief.

I see your ache and how you swim in the uncertainty of what God has determined and allowed in your life.  He has appointed things that seem almost uncharacteristic for His nature.

Remember these three words: It is Finished.  While you swim in grief, the joy and complete picture has already been accomplished.  There is a future that goes beyond your "Friday." God is smiling when He thinks about it. He is gifting you with faith to wait for it.

"This is God's promise to us. In Christ, the not-rightness of the world is already defeated. Jesus's cry of 'It is Finished' from the cross was true and real. When things aren't all right now, take comfort in the fact that they will be, forever." Tulian Tchividjian