Blessed are You, O’LORD our G_d, King of the universe, Creator of all things that You would be willing to leave the heavens, to leave Your Glory behind, to leave the ‘safety’ of Your courts – in order to pay the penalty of a broken covenant.

Blessed are You, O’LORD our G_d, King of the universe, Creator of all things that You willingly and knowingly signed both sides of a contract that You knew we would fail to uphold.

Today is Good Friday – not sure that it got that title until after Sunday – but then again hindsight is 20/20. Soren Kierkegaard once wrote about Good Friday that it isn’t so amazing that G_d in the flesh (Jesus) was able to rise from the dead – rather the amazing part was that we were able to kill G_d! What a fascinating thought…I’m not so sure that we killed G_d as much as He laid down His life for us.

I want to ponder that for a moment…I think we believe that G_d laid down His life on that Friday afternoon…but I’d argue that He laid down His life much earlier in Genesis 15:

¹²Now when the sun was going down,a deep sleep fell upon Abram…

¹⁷It came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces.

G_d made a covenant with Abraham to be a blessing to the world, to have many descendants – many nations come from Him…but Abraham would have to sign a Covenant of agreement to do this – G_d had Abraham lay out a blood-path that typically both parties (one on each side of the contract/covenant) would have to walk through to sign – signifying that if either did not live up to their obligation of the covenant that they would become like the animals along the bloodpath – death! Abraham never signed…but G_d signed twice (see verse 17 above) – G_d passed through the bloodpath once for His side and once for ours.

Jesus’ death on the cross was (at least in part) a result of our failure to uphold our side of the covenant that He signed on our behalf.

My prayer today is that we might uphold the covenant and be a blessing to all the people we come into contact with – so that the children of the kingdom can be like the numbers of the stars in the heavens.

So that Today can truly be Good Friday!