I confess that I struggle a bit with attending church on Good Friday. In my experience, we come into church with long faces because we remember that this was the day on which our Lord suffered and died, and then return, two days later, full of smiles because – surprise, suprise! – he’s not dead, but alive!
It’s not a great idea to separate Good Friday from Easter Sunday in this way, as though Friday is ‘bad’ and Sunday is ‘good’? …
A summary of chapter 35 of The Fountain of Life, by John Flavel.
“When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished. And he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.” John 19:30
It is finished. This was uttered as a triumphant shout when our Lord Jesus Christ saw the glorious issue of all his sufferings now at hand.
It is but one word in the original; but in that one word is contained the sum of all joy; the very spirit of all divine consolation.…
A summary of ch. 26 of John Flavel’s The Fountain of Life.
“Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, you have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” Acts 2:23
In this text, we have an account of
1. The nature of the death Christ died, which is here described more generally, as a violent death, You have slain him: and more particularly, as a most ignominious, cursed, dishonorable death; you have crucified him.…
‘With God all things are possible’ (Matthew 19:26). ‘Nothing is impossible with God’ (Luke 1:37)
So why doesn’t God simply forgive sinners, without need of any atonement? Why can’t he just let bygones be bygones?
After all, he can do anything, can’t he?
Well, setting aside the obviously absurd (God cannot create a two-sided triangle), we note with Puritan Thomas Brooks that there are three things that God cannot do:- he cannot die; he cannot lie; and he cannot deny himself.…
This is one of the questions posed and answered by Richard Bewes in his little book The Top 100 Questions.
Put slightly differently, the question is: What does it mean to say that Jesus Christ died ‘for’ me?
The most fundamental answer to this question, says Bewes, lies in the idea of ‘penal substitution’. Christ was the only person qualified to take upon himself the penalty of separation from God (Romans 6:23), and he himself declared that he had come to give his life in the place of many (Mark 10:45).…
“The criterion of what is Christian and what is not is the cross of Jesus Christ, the crucial enigma which distinguishes the peculiarly Christian way of looking at human existence and experience from all other viewpoints” (p. 18).
For the Christian, “the cross alone is our theology.”—Luther (p. 26)
“The Christian tradition, following in the paths indicated by Paul, has identified the cross, interpreted in the light of the resurrection, as the final, decisive and normative locus of the revelation of God” (p.…
Given the reticence and reserve with which the NT dwells on the physical aspects of Christ’s sufferings, it is certainly possible for Christians themselves to dwell too much on them.
F.F. Bruce comments on this subject in his fascinating book, Answers To Questions (p249f).
He contrasts this, by Charles Wesley…
1. O Love divine, what has thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!
The Father’s coeternal Son
bore all my sins upon the tree.…
Text: John 12:1-11 (also Mark 14:1-11)
Who do you identify with? Mary? Martha? Judas?
Where? When? Who?
Mary approaches Jesus with a jar of expensive perfume.
She anoints not only his head (kingship) & body…
…but also his feet and wipes them with her hair – scandalous!
(Mary anticipates the servant-heartedness that will be taught in the foot-washing incident, Jn 13)
(Do we, like Mary, look for opportunities to express our gratitude to Jesus? …
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Matthew 27:46)
Here is a summary of Ch. 33 of John Flavel’s great work, The Fountain of Life.
Here, says Flavel, ‘are words that might rend the hardest heart.’
The manner of the complaint
Note what our Lord complains of. ‘It is not of the cruel tortures he felt in his body, nor of the scoffs and reproaches of his name; he mentions not a word of these, they were all swallowed up in the sufferings within, as the river is swallowed up in the sea, or the lesser flame in the greater.’…
I’ve been going through Tom Wright’s important new book The Day the Revolution Began: Rethinking the Meaning of Jesus’ Crucifixion (SPCK, 2016) with a fine tooth-comb. Here I offer a synopsis of what I think Wright is saying.
