Upon hearing this, the man raised up from his bed, and cried out, “Do not call that man worthless for whom Christ died!” If the crucifixion and resurrection are ever to truly take hold in our life and become more than historical events, we must appreciate this point.

We spend a huge chunk of our lives pursuing acceptance and approval from various sources : our parents, our spouses, our children, our friends, our bosses. We wrestle with self-esteem and self-worth. We spend our lives seeking to establish our significance, and the nature of the quest is that we can’t quite do it alone.

It is rare that we fully confess how desperately we crave this affirmation and approval; we don’t want others to glimpse our need. But God sees it, and knows its origin and its solution. The “God-shaped vacuum,” as Augustine observed, is part of the manufacturing process – “For you have made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

Our worth in God’s eyes is rooted in the fact that Jesus Christ was willing to die for each one of us – that He came specifically to fill the God-shaped vacuum in your heart and mine.

For Good Friday and Easter to change us, we must allow our quest for significance to lead us to Calvary and a personal encounter with Christ. For it is only at the foot of the cross that we can truly comprehend the depth of God’s love and acceptance.  It is only then that we can look at the mirror each morning, and see the one for whom Christ died.

On Good Friday, we must comprehend that the cross is more than a fashion statement. Take a moment to consider what the cross meant in Jesus’ day.

Capital punishment is a hot topic these days. How do we attempt to deter violence? The death penalty has been around for ages, and the Roman Empire in the time of Tiberius took it mighty seriously. There wasn’t a hot debate about lethal injection or other humane methods of putting one to death. The Romans wanted executions to be excruciatingly painful and as public as possible. Thus, the Roman practice of death by crucifixion.

We often turn away from the horror of the cross. Sometimes we want to take encouragement from the fact that Christ died for us, but skip over the messy details. We shouldn’t. This brief account, based upon the gospels of Matthew and John, provides a sense of Jesus’ ordeal.

During the trial before Caiaphas, the priests “spit in his face and struck him with their fists.” Then, “they bound him” and sent him to Pilate, who had him flogged; the usual procedure was to tie the criminal’s hands to a pillar, strip their upper body and deliver up to 40 blows with a three-pronged whip. Then “the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head,” after which “they took (a) staff and struck him on the head, again and again.” Weakened from the beatings he had received, Jesus was unable to carry his cross the whole distance to Calvary, as was customary, so an onlooker named Simon of Cyrene was pressed into duty by the soldiers. Christ was then affixed to the cross by having large nails driven through his wrists and into the wood. In crucifixions, death came by suffocation as the weight of the victim made breathing progressively more difficult as they lost strength. It took six hours for Jesus to die.

The solemnity of the cross is increasingly lost upon today’s society. Perhaps the fuss over “The Passion of the Christ” will help reconnect with it. As Christians, we must never lose sight of the true meaning of the crucifixion. It reminds us that the grace that we stand in didn’t come cheap. Jesus Christ paid a huge price for our salvation. All it will cost us is our pride and self-will. Sometimes it seems to us that this is too great a price, which only indicates how far removed we are from the details of Christ’s sacrifice.

The extraordinary power of the cross is that no matter where we’ve been or how far we’ve wandered, we can stand in God’s presence – just as we are. It serves as the bridge between a broken people and a Holy God. Take a moment this Good Friday and ask yourself which side of the breach you’re on. Believing on the power of Christ’s death and resurrection, cross that bridge into eternal life and peace with God.

Today’s church sometimes doesn’t know what to do with Satan. He’s still there in the Bible, but was written out of sermons in most main-line Protestant churches years ago. To be sure, belief in Satan as a literal, spiritual being has caused a whole heap of problems over the years, among them the abusive treatment of mental illness and cruel scare tactics brought to bear upon impressionable youth.

The church’s track record with the devil has led many people of faith to discard this as a credible belief. In this view, which is also applied to the virgin birth, the validity of a doctrine is judged according to how well or poorly mankind has handled it.

In recent years, polls indicate that Satan has made something of a comeback. The notion of an exclusively benevolent spiritual realm has become problematic in a world filled with indiscriminate violence and terror. Even people of deep faith have trouble reconciling the events of 9-11 or the suffering of the victims of the anthrax mailer (which hit close to home here in Central new Jersey) .

When we read about these kind of horrific events, we are acutely aware of the dark side of human nature. Yet we resist the idea that the struggle between darkness and light may not be confined to inside our heads – that it is an external struggle as well as an internal one.

This, of course, is what the Bible says. The account of Christ’s temptation in the desert is one of many references to Satan as a very real force working to deceive us and turn us away from the light of God’s love. These verses sometimes get edited, of course. Consider the Lord’s Prayer. The original text in Matthew doesn’t say “deliver us from evil,” generically stated. What Jesus said was “deliver us from the evil one.”

In a Christian experience in which love is the central theme, it’s not easy to make the case for a literal Satan. But as we encounter these passages in the Bible, it’s important that we be mindful of our inclination to dismiss the devil as an archaic belief. After all, if Satan is real, that’s probably exactly how he’d want it.