The Day Love Went All The Way
READ
Isaiah wrote today’s words seven hundred years before the crucifixion. He saw something — a suffering servant, a figure absorbing what others deserved, a wound that became a way to wholeness. When it actually happened, the people watching had no category for it. Even now, it is not easy to look at directly.
Take a moment to read Isaiah 53:4-6:
"Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
REFLECT
Good Friday asks something of us that our culture is not particularly good at: it asks us to sit with something that cannot be fixed, resolved, or skipped past.
The cross is not a symbol to be admired from a safe distance. It is a specific, brutal, historical event — a man executed in the cruelest way the Roman Empire had devised, in public, on a hill, while people watched. The people who loved Him most stood at the foot of that cross and had nothing to do but witness it. No way to help. No way to stop it. Just the terrible, unmoving reality of what was happening.
Isaiah's language is worth sitting with slowly. He took up our pain. Bore our suffering. Was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. The verbs are active — Jesus didn't passively receive this. He chose it. He walked toward Jerusalem knowing what waited there. He went to Gethsemane and prayed through His anguish and then stood up and walked toward the soldiers anyway.
This week has been about confession — the honest acknowledgment of what is true about us before God. And here, on the hardest day of the week, is the deepest truth of all: the weight of everything we've confessed, everything we've hidden, everything we've named and everything we haven't — He carried it. Not because it was easy or because He didn't feel it, but because it was the only way through.
"By his wounds we are healed" is one of the most counterintuitive sentences in Scripture. The wound becomes the healing. The breaking becomes the restoration. The death becomes the door.
Don't rush past today toward Sunday. Let Good Friday be what it is. Grieve it. Receive it. And let the weight of what He chose to carry on your behalf sink in before you get to the empty tomb.
RESPOND
Take a moment to process what God might be leading you to do in light of what you read.
Is there something you've been carrying — guilt, shame, grief, a wound — that Good Friday is specifically inviting you to lay down at the cross today?
"We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way." Where have you most clearly gone your own way recently? What does it mean that He carried even that?
What does it mean to you personally that the punishment that brought you peace was on Him? Try to put it in your own words — not the theological answer, but what it actually means for you today.
REST
Take a moment to rest in God’s presence and consider one thing you can take away from your time reading, then close your devotional experience by praying:
Jesus, I don't want to rush past today. I want to stand here at the foot of the cross long enough to actually feel the weight of what You carried — and to recognize that it was mine. Thank You for choosing this. Thank You that the wound became the healing. I receive what You paid for. Amen.