Have you ever had high hopes for something, and just before it was, in your thinking, about to unfold, it just disappeared?

How would you feel if you had just watched the most significant person you had ever known be unjustly put to death in the cruelest of ways?

Just imagine for a moment that the one person you have admired more than any other person who has ever lived and with whom you have spent the last three years of your life doing pretty much everything together is killed in a whirlwind of drama. The one person all your hopes and dreams were built on was taken away from you in a moment, and your highest hopes disappeared like a fog once the sun arose.

It doesn’t sound like a Good Friday, does it?  Yet that is what we as believers celebrate every Friday before Easter, or as I like to call it, Resurrection Day comes.

If we follow the Biblical narrative, Jesus had already entered triumphantly into Jerusalem not too long before and later celebrated Passover with His disciples. Afterward, He needed to pray and went to Gethsemene to do so with three of His disciples. That is where Jesus determined to go through with what He knew was God’s will for Him. Then, the temple soldiers arrived and took Him away to be tried.

After a mock trial and being slapped and spit on, He was handed over to Pontius Pilot for trial, where His people turned against Him in favor of a thief and murderer.  With shouts of crucify Him, Jesus was betrayed by His won race and handed over for crucifixion.

His disciples were scattered; one had denied Him at His first trial just as Jesus said He would, and there was only one who hung around to see Him die on the cross.  On that cross, Jesus cried out, “Father, why have You forsaken me?” as the sin of the world came upon Him there.

This is the scene of what we call Good Friday.  But we see it in retrospect.  The men and women who had followed Jesus up to that point did not possess such a luxury.  They were faced with dire circumstances, having watched the one who raised the dead, healed the sick, made the lame to walk and the blind to see be killed by the hands of men, so it seemed.  Where was their faith?  Jesus had spoken to them to prepare them for this.

Those first ones in faith received and proved the text that promises,

2 Timothy 2:13 If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.

Jesus remained faithful to those men and women. Three days later, He appeared to them and began the process of restoring them and their hope. You might be in what you perceive as the greatest struggle of your life right now. Your latest and best hope is shattered by the reality of circumstances like those first followers experienced. But is all hope lost? Could you be about to experience something amazing happen?

Good Friday screams at us, if we will, but listen—hope is never lost when it is placed on Jesus!  Good Friday teaches us to wait on the Lord, and He will renew our strength.  This story of hope lost and then recovered is why it is called Good Friday by the generations who now know based on retrospect.

I sincerely hope you have a Good Friday today and always!