Why Good Friday Is Called "Good"?

Dear friends:

Happy late Easter!

Good Friday probably should be called Worst Friday, right? Jesus the sinless righteous Man was crucified for all human sins on the cross. He was wrongly accused as " the King of Jews", guilty of sedition in a Roman court, Was He a king without even one single soldier?( Indeed He is our King, our Lord but not in the political and secular sense.) Jesus was accused as blasphemous against God in a Jewish court before the high priest because He claims that He is the Son of God. According to Jewish laws, if that claim is not true, then He deserves to be stoned to death. But the Jewish leaders were not allowed to put someone to death, only the Romans had the right. So they brought Jesus to Roman court. The Roman governor Pilate couldn't find Him guilty at all, yet he yielded to the Jewish mob's request to crucify Jesus at the end. All these schemes and other twisted accusations are the culminations of all kind of evils. How then could it be called " Good" Friday? Well, although Jesus' crucifixion is the worst injustice case in human history, yet it has accomplished God's salvation for mankind. Furthermore, the resurrection of Jesus has changed the perspectives of this worst injustice case. Jesus has risen from the death and lives forever!
In a word, Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath for us, so if we accept Jesus' offer of Salvation then we don't need to drink the cup of God's wrath ourselves, thus it is called Good Friday. 
( i.e. the day itself and its crime is horrible, yet we are talking about the accomplished salvation for mankind it brought about; that is surely good.)

However, have you ever wondered what kind of "cup" Jesus had prayed earnestly for God the Father to remove from Him in His last prayers at Gethsemane just before He was arrested illegally ? Jesus knew He would rise from death after 3 days in tomb, so it was not the death and physical pains He feared the most to face. Then what is He really struggled to face? He is totally holy yet was going to be contaminated by human sins, to really be under God's wrath for all human sins and to suffer the unprecedented separation from God the Father which is unbearable no matter how temporary that separation was.

...Key passages in the Bible connect God’s wrath with the imagery of a cup. Jeremiah 25:15 tells us, “Thus the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: ‘Take from my hand this cup of the wine of wrath, and make all the nations to whom I send you drink it.’” Then Isaiah 51:17 says, “O Jerusalem, you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of his wrath, who have drunk to the dregs the bowl, the cup of staggering.” In Revelation 14, an angel speaks, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger” (verses 9–10).

Jesus confirms this connection in Gethsemane when he prayed, the cross looming just ahead, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).

The disciples will drink a cup, too — a cup of suffering (Matthew 20:23). But Jesus’s cup of suffering is different from theirs because Jesus’s suffering is under God’s anger. Jesus drinks the cup of God’s wrath, a cup that has accumulated the fury of God against sins of all types. Heinous crimes, adultery, careless words, dishonoring thoughts, lies — all of it will be punished by God. (None of us is sinless according to God's absolutely holy standard: the cardinal sin could be "Denying our Creator God to be our Father in Heaven", don't you realize that?)

This is the cup Jesus drinks willingly on the cross for us. That shows us how deep His love for us.

Come and Drink This Cup

There, at Golgotha, our Savior drained God’s cup of burning anger down to the dregs. God poured out his wrath, full strength, undiluted, onto His Son. Paul summarizes the meaning of this great event, “For our sake He ( God the Father) made Him( Jesus, God the Son) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God”
(2 Corinthians 5:21).

Jesus drank the cup of God’s wrath for us so that he could extend the cup of God’s fellowship to us, that is a cup of Salvation offered in Jesus. It might include suffering, but not wrath. We don’t get wrath anymore — now we get God. We get the sweet, satisfying reality of his eternal fellowship in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit.

This is the cup we drink now and forever. This is the cup that we offer to those who don’t know Him yet, imploring them in God’s mercy, Come, drink this cup with us because Jesus drank that cup for us.

( click the link below to read more)

The Cup Consumed for Us | Desiring God

Furthermore,
...God's wrath is not anger out of control. An angry God bothers some so much that they take ever tack possible to remove the obvious meaning of the text. One scholar argued that Paul did not mean to indicate a personal reaction on God's part but the reaction of a "moral universe." All such attempts seem grounded in the idea that anger is inherently wrong and sinful, and so a lot of anger (a fairly common definition of wrath) would really be wrong and sinful. The Bible teaches otherwise. "Be angry, and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your wrath" (Ephesians 4:26). Anger is not always irrational. Jesus was angered at hard hearts (Mk. 3:5; Jn. 2:15-16). What feeling should such callousness as the Pharisees exhibited evoked in our Lord? To see sin ruining lives, both now and in eternity, and not be angry at the devil and foolish people who allow themselves to be taken by him is unthinkable. Righteousness loves light, and hates darkness (John 3:20). Thus, every expression of darkness must be met with righteous indignation or anger.

However, there is an enormous amount of difference in human anger and divine wrath. In a time when child abuse is widely reported it is important that our  Heavenly Father not be portrayed as some sort of raging tyrant, mindlessly and wildly hurting His children. This portrait of God is painted when people decide God's wrath is like man's wrath. "God gets angry like we get angry," our humans mind can think, "only His anger is bigger and more powerful." In reality, most human anger is not righteous anger, and so James affirm: "So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:19-20). We get angry because our egos have been slighted, and because we did not get our way. Further, human anger usually expresses itself in ways that are hurtful to others around us. God's anger in no way resembles our (sinful) anger. God is not angry because He has some gigantic ego that we have failed to gratify. His righteous anger is directed at evil people who refuse to be what He made them to be and thus hurt themselves. He is angry at the senselessness of men and women who send themselves to hell because they will not heed His word. Additionally, as we shall see, Paul develops the critical point that even the expression of God's wrath is not designed to hurt sinful man but bring him to his senses that he will return to his maker and be saved.

( click the link below for the whole article)

"The Cup our Savior Drank" (Matthew 26:42) -