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Good Friday Sermon

Sermon ~ “The Tomb Speaks of Death”

Mark 14:32-36, 15:34

 

For the body of Jesus, Good Friday ends in a tomb.  The lips of the tomb, the mouth through which the cold body of Jesus was passed, speaks to us.  The tomb has two messages.  One is of death, the other is of life beyond death.  The message of life beyond death is not a fable, a fabrication, a pie-in-the sky hope, a grasping for straws.  It is real; more concrete than the air we breath or the floor under our feet.  Yet life beyond death is the Easter message spoken by the empty tomb, and tonight we are carrying the crucified body of Jesus  through Good Friday.

 

On Good Friday the tomb speaks of death.  It tells us that we are to die with Jesus.  The death of Jesus began before His betrayal by Judas, before His arrest, before He stood before Pontius Pilate, before the whipping, the beating, the nails

hammered into His hands and feet.  The death of Jesus began in the Mount of

Olives.  We see Jesus beginning to die when He prays, “Father, if You are willing, take this cup from me, yet not my will, but Yours be done.”

 

Why did Jesus have to die?  Why has one of our own members, Fae, been suffering set back after set back for over a year with a disease that not even the Mecca of Medicine, the Mayo clinic, can figure out?  Why does Art, son of a former pastor, seem to pass from one trial into another?  Harold, why did Iantha go through all of her testing?  I could have a very long listed if I included everyone at Immanuel who struggles with the question of why does suffering come to the Saints of God.

 

If God is all powerful, and if God is all good, then why doesn’t He stop the suffering!  Why doesn’t He intervene and save us the pain, the humiliation, the fear for tomorrow?  Why doesn’t an all powerful and all loving God devise another way for our

salvation other than the torturous death for Jesus?  “Father, if you are willing,” prays the Lord Himself, “take this cup from me.”

 

Why the cup?  Why the suffering for Christ and the Saints?  Why?  Why?  Why?

 

It’s right when we say that God is all loving.   It is also right when we say that God is all powerful.  Yet we like to stop with these two traits of our sovereign God.  We want to  neglect the third important characteristic within God’s nature.  Clothed in sin, we would put aside the fact that God is also all holy.  He has no evil within Himself; none whatsoever.

 

And let’s be clear on something else.   When we say that God is all power we mean

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