There’s my son.  It’s Good Friday, and so this morning I have been thinking about GoodFriday sort of things—the cross, Jesus, God giving up his Son, the fulfillment and end of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament that Hebrews speaks of—those things.  As I continued on that line of thinking, I began to realize the craziness of the cross, and the significance hit home in a way that it never has in my whole life:

Look at my son.  Do you know what I would never do?  Give him up.  For anything.  Ever.  EVER!

EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER EVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVEREVER !

Our minds can’t imagine this kind of sacrifice.  As an ok father, I have enough love for my son that the loss would cause me unimaginable pain, and I could never love you enough to loose him for you.  And yet God, a perfect father, did this.  Could you imagine how much that must have hurt. The Brian McLarens of the world who just dismiss the majesty of this act as “cosmic child abuse” miss that.  They miss, and don’t understand, the perfection of God, the Trinity, His love and Justice, the infinite ugliness of sin, and that Jesus, as God, was willingly taking on his own wrath.  God felt both pains: the loss of a son and the bearing of all human sin. My Lord and my God, we can not even begin to fathom the depth and richness of your love seen in the cross.

This is the centerpiece of our faith, the centerpiece of the Bible, and the centerpiece of time and eternity—that God became nothing, so that he could give us everything, by giving us himself.  The cross is offensive, foolish weakness, but to those who are being saved by it, it is life and power (1Cor. 1:18).  Happy Good Friday.