Why do we call this Good Friday? We can ask the same question of why when we consider the opening sentence of Bruce Shelley’s book on church history: “Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of its God.” Surely, the crucifixion of God’s only begotten Son was darkest day in all history. Indeed, how could the humiliation and death of the Author ever be called good?

To answer that question, let us consider Exodus 17:1-6, an Old Testament passage that gives a marvelous picture of what Jesus did upon the cross.

By chapter 17 of Exodus, the people of Israel have already been led out of Egypt with all of God’s signs and wonders. Yahweh even parted the sea for their exodus from the house of slavery and used those very waters to drown Pharaoh and his chariots. The LORD then began to lead them through the wilderness, where He would test and instruct His people. In chapter 15, He led them to bitter waters, and though they grumbled, the LORD made the water sweet. In chapter 16, the people began to complain about not having food, and God rained manna down from heaven to be their food throughout their time in the wilderness.

Yet even after those miracles of provision, chapter 17 finds Israel failing the same test a third time.

All the congregation of the people of Israel moved on from the wilderness of Sin by stages, according to the commandment of the LORD, and camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. Therefore the people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the LORD?”

Gone is the grumbling and complaining that Israel previously had done; they were now quarreling with Moses. At the very least, they are now openly protesting against Moses’ leadership and authority, and at worst, as the Septuagint interprets, they were reviling and verbally abusing Moses.

And because Moses was simply leading as Yahweh’s servant, Moses rightly called the people to consider that their quarrel against him was really a way of putting God on trial. They were placing the Judge of all the earth in the interrogation seat by rejecting and abusing His servant. But the people did not consider Moses’ warning; instead, we read in verse 3:

But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”

Like Adam and Eve in the garden, Israel’s rebellion is fundamentally rooted in their disbelief in the goodness of God. Our first parents received an entire world of blessing, yet still believed that God was withholding goodness and glory from them by forbidding the fruit of one, single tree. Likewise, Israel had beheld with their own eyes the destruction that Yahweh brought upon Egypt, and they carried with them the treasures of Egypt that were freely given to them as they left on the night of the Passover. They had drunk from bitter waters that God had made sweet, and they were still eating daily from the bread of angels. Yet here instead of crying to God in prayer for water, they readily believed that God’s plan all along was kill them of thirst in the wilderness.

Of course, we have no moral high ground over the Israelites. We are often just as quick to doubt and disbelieve the goodness of God whenever we encounter difficulties. The Lord brings us out of our comfort zone, and we grumble and complain. He allows us to suffer, and we begin to doubt that He even cares for us at all. Rather than quietly submitting to the tests that God brings upon us, we are all too quick to put Him to the test, placing Him on trial and demanding that He account for Himself.

But Moses does in verse 4 what all of Israel should have done:

So Moses cried to the LORD, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me.”

With the people ready to stone Moses, Yahweh answers the prophet, saying:

Pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go.

The gathering of some of Israel’s elders and the command to take the staff is a display that God was calling a trial into order, and the description of the staff as with which you struck the Nile has an ominous ring to it. In 15:26, God warned that He would put the plagues that He worked in Egypt upon Israel if they failed to keep His commandments. And in 16:3, Israel explicitly wished that God had struck them dead while they were still back in Egypt. The sight of Moses carrying the staff and walking with the elders before the people should have left the Israelites in fear of which plague God was about to inflict upon them. But God does not strike His rebellious people:

Behold, I will stand before you there on the rock at Horeb, and you shall strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.

Rather than bringing God’s righteous judgment upon the people of Israel by striking them with the staff of God, Yahweh Himself stood upon the rock and commanded Moses to strike the rock. The striking of the rock with the staff, just as the Nile was struck, is an indication that Moses was indeed dealing God’s judgment, just as he had done in Egypt.

In 1 Corinthians 10:4, the Apostle Paul tells us, “For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.” Whatever the presence of Christ looked like, He stood before Moses upon the rock at Horeb and was stricken by Moses’ staff.

Of course, this was Jesus foreshadowing the wrath of God that He would ultimately be struck with upon the cross. In their wickedness, Israel placed God on trial, yet God in His mercy let the execution be passed onto Him. Israel deserved to receive just as many plagues from God through Moses’ staff as the Egyptians did. They were only spared because God Himself receive their judgment. And we are no less sinful than either the Israelites or the Egyptians and deserve to be afflicted with Yahweh’s divine judgment just as much as they did. We are only spared because Jesus took God’s righteous judgment upon Himself. That is the wonder of what we read in Isaiah 53:4-6:

            Surely he has borne our griefs
                        and carried our sorrows;
            yet we esteemed him stricken,
                        smitten by God, and afflicted.
            But he was pierced for our transgressions;
                        he was crushed for our iniquities;
            upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
                        and with his wounds we are healed.
            All we like sheep have gone astray;
                        we have turned—every one—to his own way;
            and the LORD has laid on him
                        the iniquity of us all.

That is the why we call our remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion Good Friday. Through the death of Christ, God worked a good for us that is unfathomable. The striking of the rock brought forth water for all of Israel, but the striking of Christ upon the cross has brought us peace with God. Indeed, Jesus Himself is the living water that washes away all of our sins, but our sins are washed away because Jesus was drowned in the flood of God’s wrath in our place. Isaac Watts rightly wrote that upon the cross “sorrow and love flow mingled down.” No sorrow has or ever will be greater than the Lord of Glory dying a such a shameful death, and no love has or ever will be greater than our Lord has shown in dying such a death for you and for me.

The Table set before us is a visible and tangible reminder of the crucifixion. In crushing the bread with our teeth, we are to be reminded how Christ was crushed under the judgment of God, not for His own sin but for yours and mine. In drinking of the cup, we are to remember that Christ drank the cup of God’s righteous indignation against sin down the very last drop, so that there is no one sin that remains unatoned for whoever casts his faith upon Christ. Indeed, just as water came forth from the stricken rock to quench the thirst of the Israelites in the wilderness, this cup that we drink is meant to remind us that Christ the water that quenches the very deepest of our thirst. At this table, we look upon the Rock of Ages who was cleft to be the double cure for our sin: to save from wrath and wash us pure.

Let us, therefore, use this time of approaching the Table to consider our own response to the cross. If we are dull in viewing the cross with the mingling of sorrow and love that it deserves, let us make the following prayer our own:

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.