What’s So Good About Good Friday?

Good Friday invites us to pause and reconsider the dominant narratives we’ve inherited about the cross. Did Jesus die as the object of God’s wrath — or as the Victorious One who forever conquered sin and death? 

This episode reexamines the popular Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) theory, which frames salvation as a legal transaction where Jesus absorbs our punishment and pays the penalty for our sin. In contrast, the much older Christus Victor view tells a very different story — the story of a heavenly rescue mission where the Trinity conspires together to heal our soul sickness and set us free from sin and death. 

Here’s what we unpack: 

• Penal substitution didn’t emerge until the 1500s with John Calvin’s legal framework 
• The early church saw sin as a sickness of the soul to be healed, rather than a crime to be punished 
• Jesus wasn’t punished by God; he willingly entered our suffering in order to overcome it 
• His cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was a quote from Psalm 22 and not a cry of abandonment 
• The Trinity was never broken apart, but God was always in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself 
• Jesus didn’t “pay for” our sins; he forgave them 
• Jesus didn’t die to change God’s mind about us, but to change our minds about God 
• The cross reveals love, not wrath — a rescue, not a retribution 

Buckle up because this episode is PACKED and might challenge some long-held beliefs and assumptions! 

If this episode brought clarity or challenged something that never quite sat right in your spirit, share it with someone who might need that same freedom. And I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway! Just text me using the link in the show notes.

Chapters

• 0:00 Happy Good Friday!
• 0:44 Jesus Was Not God's Wrath Sponge
• 4:29 Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory
• 8:31 Christus Victor: The Early Church View
• 16:49 “Paid For” Sins vs. Forgave Sins
• 23:17 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
• 29:27 Closing Prayer

Transcript

Michele: 0:00

It's Good Friday, April 18, and this is Today's Kus Word. It's Friday, baby, and you know what that means Time to drop another Friday freedom bomb. I'm Michele Kus, your spiritual growth coach, and this is your weekly Kus Word to launch you into your weekend with some truth, some grace and some holy fire. Let's get into it. Happy Good Friday. Hey, I got a text message from Toronto Said Hi, Michele, Friday was my birthday. Ps. I love the Kus word. Hey, happy belated birthday my Toronto friend. So here's Today's Kus Word. You ready for this?

Michele: 0:59

Jesus was not God's wrath sponge. Let me give you that one more time. Jesus was not God's wrath sponge. All right, that's it. That's the Kus word for today. So you might be wondering what are you talking about, girl?

Michele: 1:08

So today is Good Friday. It is the day that we remember Jesus being beaten, being nailed to a cross, bleeding out, suffering and dying. And I've been to a lot of Good Friday services over the years and I have to be honest, they're usually pretty heavy, pretty somber. Sometimes they are downright morbid. Can you relate? So this begs the question what is so good about Good Friday anyway? Great question. For a lot of folks, it comes down to a heaping dose of guilt. You might have heard it framed something like this that should have been me up there. I deserve what Jesus got. Jesus took my beating, my punishment, in my place so God wouldn't destroy me. God, the Father, had to pour out his holy wrath on someone, and Jesus volunteered his tribute. Jesus absorbed it all so I wouldn't have to. Do these messages sound familiar?

Michele: 2:16

Well, if they do sound familiar, you are certainly not alone. That right there is the story that most of us were handed about this day, that Jesus saved you from an angry, wrath-filled God, that God had to pour out his wrath on someone to pay the penalty for sins, and so Jesus, standing in your place, decided to take that wrath and absorb it into himself so that you could go free. Does that sound familiar at all? If it does, you're in good company. Most of us, at least in the Western evangelical world, have heard some variation of that message, and I am here today to challenge that message. So most of us are not even taught in church that there's another way to look at the cross.

Michele: 3:13

So this particular view that I just talked about has a name. This is called the penal substitutionary atonement theory. Sometimes it is just simply referred to as penal substitution, or PSA if you want to sound very fancy and theological, but whatever you call it, this is the dominant view in modern Western evangelical Christianity. Here's the nutshell of this view God is holy. People are wretched sinners. Sinful people can't be in the presence of a holy God. Somebody's got to be punished for all that sin. So Jesus steps in and takes all the punishment and absorbs all the wrath on your behalf. And now God, the Father, can look at your sorry face without throwing up. Okay, that last part was my addition, but that is the vibe.

Michele: 4:25

So in this theory, the theory of penal substitutionary atonement, Jesus is punished by God instead of you. This line of thinking believes that Jesus was punished by God on the cross in your place for your sin. This theology depicts an angry, scary, vengeful, wrathful God. In penal substitution, Jesus becomes the wrath sponge who soaks up all the wrath of the angry Father God and stands between you and the Father, literally protecting you from the wrath of the Father. So do you see what I mean when I say Jesus acts as the wrath sponge, soaking up all that divine anger, that divine wrath, in your place? So you didn't have to. So let's just break these words down for a second. Penal refers to punishment, so you can think of like a penal colony, or where we get the word penalty.

Michele: 5:36

And substitution just refers to Jesus acting as your stand-in or acting as your substitute. So when you say it should have been me on that cross, you're saying Jesus stood in as my substitute. And you are probably thinking but this sounds really familiar and biblical. And while this whole story might sound very noble on the surface, the bigger picture that it paints is a picture of a God who is angry and violent and vengeful and a father a father God who needs blood before he can forgive you. If this is the version of Good Friday that you were handed, guess what? You are not alone. That's what I was taught in church too. That's what a lot of us were taught, if not most of us. But there is a better story that most of us haven't even been exposed to, and today we're going to get into it. This theory might sound very biblical to your ears because it's been preached so widely and so confidently for so long that we're not even aware of how terrible it sounds.

Michele: 6:56

But here's the deal. This theory, penal substitution it's not ancient, this is not what the early church believed, this is not what the early church taught, this is not even what the early church fathers believed or preached at all. It's not even close. So penal substitution didn't even show up until the Reformation era in the 1500s, especially through guys like John Calvin. And here's the kicker John Calvin wasn't even a theologian by training, he was a lawyer. Let that sink in for a minute. That's important because Calvin's entire framework for understanding Jesus, salvation and the cross, his entire understanding was shaped by courtrooms, punishment, and legal transactions. So that legal mindset deeply shaped how John Calvin interpreted scripture and theology. So this whole idea that Jesus took the punishment so God the Father wouldn't have to punish you, this whole idea is rooted more in Western legal theory than it is in the message of the early church. It was a brand new concept when John Calvin introduced it and then began to propagate it in the 1500s.

Michele: 8:30

So how did we get here? Well, let's back up for a minute and talk about how the early church actually understood sin, because, this might surprise you, in the earliest centuries of Christianity, sin was not viewed as a crime. Sin was viewed as a kind of soul sickness. It was viewed as a type of disease of the soul that needed healing, not punishment. So Jesus didn't come like some cosmic lawyer to negotiate a plea deal. Jesus came as the Great Physician, the healer of our hearts and minds and spirits.

Michele: 9:22

And the early church believed that salvation was about restoring the image of God within us, the image that sin had damaged but had not destroyed, and the cross. This wasn't about God unleashing his fury. This is about Jesus defeating sin and death and the powers of evil once and for all. That's the view called Christus Victor. It's a Latin phrase that means Christ the victor or Christ the conqueror, the liberator. The goal of salvation wasn't to avoid the wrath of God. It was to become whole again, to become fully alive, to become reunited with God. Salvation was about healing and restoration and union with God, not about crime and punishment.

Michele: 10:20

But centuries later you have thinkers like Augustine to some degree, and later Anselm and John Calvin the view began to shift and sin started to be framed less like a soul sickness and more like a crime, something that violated God's law and it demanded legal punishment. So the cross got entirely reinterpreted. So now Jesus was the one to step in and take the legal penalty to satisfy God's justice. So over time salvation became this whole thing about being forgiven for your guilt. It became about a legal matter and someone's got to be penalized. There has to be a penalty for sin. But the original understanding was that sin was a soul sickness, a disease of the soul that needed to be healed and transformed into something beautiful.

Michele: 11:29

So what do we get with penal substitution? We get a picture of God as an angry judge demanding justice, ready to smash someone. And Jesus, he jumps in front of that wrath train and takes the hit for you, which sounds very dramatic, that's for sure, but it's not exactly biblical and honestly it's kind of messed up. I mean, penal substitutionary atonement paints a God who is violent and vengeful and emotionally unstable. It creates a father that you don't feel safe with and for anyone who has had a history of abuse or a distant father, this theology doubles down on that wound.

Michele: 12:22

So in this version of quote-unquote salvation, Jesus doesn't reveal the heart of the Father. Jesus protects you from the Father. Jesus becomes your shield from the Father, standing between you and a God who supposedly loves you but also cannot bear to look at you unless someone takes a bloody beating first. That, my friends, is not love. That is a hostage situation. So here's why this whole theory just falls apart. It separates the Father and the Son like they're playing some cosmic game of good cop, bad cop. It messes with the Trinity, as if the Father and the Son aren't of one heart and mind. It puts forth the idea of there being some kind of hierarchy within the Trinity, which is absolutely not scriptural. It assumes that justice is about punishment rather than healing and restoration. And it creates a fear-based faith where Jesus doesn't show us the Father. He saves us from the Father. I'm not sure if you've ever thought about it this way.

Michele: 13:53

And this penal substitution message? Of course it's not called that right, it's just called the gospel, it's just called the message of the cross, as if that's the only way to view it, is this way. But this message is called penal substitutionary atonement or penal substitution. And this message is preached in churches all over the world on Good Friday. As a matter of fact, some of you are going to a Good Friday service tonight and very possibly will hear some version of this penal substitution message. In fact, this message is not just reserved for Good Friday.

Michele: 14:41

We hear messages that involve penal substitution on Sunday mornings, many Sunday mornings in church, in Bible studies. I did a year-long Bible study last year with a group of ladies called The Bible Recap, with Tara-Leigh Cobble. No shade to Tara-Leigh Cobble. I do realize she's doing the best she can with the knowledge that she has, but I probably heard penal substitution language in her Bible study during the course of the year at least a dozen times or more and every time I heard it it made my skin crawl. So we do the best we can with the knowledge that we have right, and I'm so grateful that there is a Bible Recap out there getting people into the Word and getting people excited to read through the Bible in a year. I'm excited about that. But let's do a little more digging, a little more research and make sure our messaging and our studies are giving people the right information or at least another way to look at things.

Michele: 15:53

So, speaking of another way to look at things, the early church didn't believe anything remotely like penal substitution, not for the first thousand plus years of the church, from the time of Jesus until the time of John Calvin, basically, this whole penal substitution framework simply was not the way that Christians understood the cross. They believed something way more beautiful and way more powerful. Nobody thought that Jesus, you know, paid God off or absorbed God's wrath or anything like that. This idea that Jesus paid for our sins makes it sound like God's some kind of cosmic debt collector and Jesus is throwing down his blood payment. Jesus didn't say I pay you. He said I forgive you. So Jesus didn't pay for our sins.

Michele: 16:53

Let's pause on that for a second, because we hear that language a lot in church as well that Jesus paid for our sins. Jesus didn't pay for our sins. Jesus forgave our sins. And you can think of the difference like this: If you walk into a restaurant, you have a delicious meal and at the end of the meal you get your check and you realize you cannot pay that restaurant bill, two things can happen. Someone else can come along and pay for your bill, or they can just come over and tear up the restaurant check. So Jesus didn't pay your restaurant bill, he tore up the check. That's what it means. When he forgave your sins, he tore up the check completely. He didn't pay it, he tore it up.

Michele: 17:46

So we've been taught this theory in church over and over. It sounds so normal, it sounds so gospel. But it's just one theory, and penal substitution, it's not even a very old one and I'm not mad at the people who repeat it. It's probably the only thing that they've ever heard. It's probably the only thing they were taught in Bible school or seminary or whatever. But today we are going to peel back the layers on a much older, much more ancient, and much more beautiful truth.

Michele: 18:21

So if the cross is not about an angry God needing a blood payment to appease his wrath, then what is the cross about? Well, the cross is about victory. Let me introduce you to the OG understanding of the cross, something that the early church called Christus Victor, which is a Latin phrase that means Christ the Victor.

Michele: 18:49

So the early church believed that sin was not a legal problem. It was a sickness, a soul sickness, an infection that warped our hearts, that broke our communion with God and held us captive to fear, death, and the powers of evil. So Jesus didn't come to make God less mad at us. He came to make us whole again. He entered into our pain, our sin, our death, and he defeated it all from the inside. He overthrew the powers of darkness, he unmasked the lies. He showed us what God is really like. This is the good news of Good Friday. God was not punishing Jesus. God was in Jesus reconciling the world to himself. You can read it right in 2 Corinthians 5, verse 19, For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them, and he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. The cross isn't the moment that Jesus saves us from God. It's the moment that Jesus reveals to us the heart of God. It's a love that would go to hell and back to heal us from our sin sickness.

Michele: 20:26

So this view says that Jesus didn't die because God needed to beat someone up. He died to defeat the powers of darkness that enslaved us. Sin, death, the devil, all of it. This was not a legal transaction. This was a rescue mission. That's why the cross is good. It's not because someone got punished. It's because death was completely defeated, sin was defeated.

Michele: 20:57

Love had the final word. That is Christus Victor, and I'm happy to say that many theologians and many pastors are actually re-embracing a much older, much more beautiful view of the atonement, one that is rooted in relationship and not law, one that is rooted in love and not wrath, one that is rooted in restoration, not fear. That is the ancient understanding of Christus Victor. Jesus was not punished instead of us. He willingly laid down his life for us, and he did this to break the power of sin and death and to set us free from the power of those things forever. So this wasn't God the Father punishing the Son. The cross was a divine act of forgiveness, of breaking the stranglehold of sin and death over humanity once and for all time. This was the Trinity united choosing together to rescue and restore humanity. It's the Trinity united choosing together to heal a broken humanity and restore her to her original design. This is the view I personally hold.

Michele: 22:31

I don't believe penal substitutionary atonement theory. I don't believe in a God who needed someone to punish. I believe in a God who came to heal, to reconcile and to restore and to make all things new. I believe that's the heart of our Father. Jesus confronted the powers that had hijacked humanity and he utterly defeated them. Colossians, chapter 2, verse 15, says it loud and clear: He disarmed the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them triumphing over them by the cross. That's why it's called Good Friday.

Michele: 23:17

And I want to talk for just a second about one thing that Jesus said on the cross that is very often not taught correctly, and that is this section. You can find it in Matthew 27: 46, where Jesus cries out from the cross on Good Friday my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Many people say see, even Jesus thought that God had turned his back on him. See, see, God abandoned Jesus on the cross. But hold on, Jesus wasn't abandoned on the cross. This is a common teaching that Jesus was being punished, he was separated from the Father, he was abandoned by the Father. But hold up, hold up. That line is not a cry of despair, it is a quote.

Michele: 24:11

Jesus, when he says my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Is quoting the first line of Psalm 22. If you don't believe me, pause this podcast and go look up Psalm 22. Let me know what you read there. This is a deeply prophetic Psalm that paints a vivid picture of a righteous sufferer who is mocked, who is pierced, who is surrounded by enemies. Does that sound like a familiar scene? So in Jewish tradition, when you quote the first line of a psalm, it's like saying the whole psalm. So if I were to say, here she comes, just a-walking down the street singing, you would immediately think do a diddy diddy, dum diddy, doo, like your brain just moves on with the song, right? That's exactly what Jesus was doing. So by quoting the first line of Psalm 22, he is triggering in their hearts and minds the whole rest of the psalm.

Michele: 25:13

And how does the psalm end? For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one. He has not hidden his face from him, but has listened to his cry for help. Let that sink in. Jesus was never abandoned. The Trinity was never, not for a second, broken apart. This is one of the greatest heresies of modern Christianity that the Trinity was somehow broken apart.

Michele: 25:50

Jesus wasn't expressing his hopelessness. He was calling us to look deeper. Even in his agony on the cross, in that moment, he was saying to us look, God is here, God sees, God hears, he is with me. He was pointing us to this truth that even in his suffering, God was near him. He was not turning away in disgust. He was leaning in with love. He was redeeming all of the suffering from the inside out.

Michele: 26:30

And if you have ever felt forsaken in your darkest moments, if you have had lonely nights, anxious thoughts, huge regrets, you need to know God did not turn away from you. You may have felt abandoned, but like Jesus on the cross, quoting Psalm 22, the truth underneath all that pain is this: he has not hidden his face from you. You are seen, you are heard, you are held. God is not the angry judge that some of us have been taught to fear. He is the ever-present, ever-loving Father who enters into your suffering and transforms it from the inside out. You are not a problem that needs to be punished, just a soul that needs healing.

Michele: 27:31

If you only have one takeaway from today's episode, let it be this: the cross was never about Jesus saving you from God. It was always about Jesus revealing God. It was love in action, God with us even in the darkest hour, and that is what makes Good Friday good. Jesus didn't die to change God's mind about you. He died to change our minds about God and to destroy everything that stood in the way of our healing. The cross was not a punishment, it was a rescue mission, it was an invasion of love into the darkest parts of our reality, and Jesus walked right into it for the joy set before him, which was you, because he knew where he was headed, he knew Sunday was coming. Okay.

Michele: 28:42

So I know that this is probably new for many of you, and some of you probably didn't even realize there was another way to view the cross. So I offer you this little tidbit from Bible school because I don't want you to just swallow everything that you're hearing without thinking carefully about it. Does this line up with who we know God, our Father, to be? Jesus himself said if you've seen me, you've seen the Father, and I don't know about you, but I, in the scripture, have never seen a Jesus who is punishing or wrathful. So feel free to research all of this out for yourself and, of course, as always, you are powerful to disagree.

Michele: 29:28

Let me pray. Jesus, thank you for showing us the heart of the Father, not a heart full of wrath, but a heart that overflows with mercy, compassion and relentless love. Thank you that you didn't come to shield us from God, but you came to reveal him to us, to heal us and to rescue us from sin and death and from every lie that's kept us in fear. For every listener today who has carried shame or who's been afraid of God or who's wondered if they are too far gone or if God has abandoned them, would you break every lie right now and replace it with the truth that they are deeply loved, fully forgiven, and they are not just tolerated but celebrated and forever invited into union with you. Make this truth go deep, from head to heart, from information to transformation. Let it be like a balm on every wound in their soul. We forgive the Church for misrepresenting the heart of the Father in this penal substitution teaching. And we thank you, Jesus, for your victory. We thank you for the cross. We thank you for Good Friday that really is good. In Jesus' mighty name, amen.

Michele: 30:56

Friends, as we come into Easter this weekend, let's remember that the cross was about forgiveness and not punishment, that we are in union with the Trinity, and the good news is God is always for you, he's never against you. He is celebrating you, not merely tolerating you. He is one with you, not distant from you. He is the Good Father and, as my friend says, not the Godfather. So happy Good Friday and, of course, happy Easter. And that is what I got for you today.

Michele: 31:36

If this episode challenged you or maybe brought some clarity to a topic that you felt like never quite sat right in your spirit, would you share it with a friend? Maybe that friend needs that same freedom? And, of course, you can always send me a text message. There's a link down in the show notes that says Text Michele. Just tap that link on your phone, send me a text message and let me know what you think of this episode. It's a long one. I'd love if you text me your biggest takeaway from this episode and I'll share those on the next one. Thanks so much for joining me today and I will see you again next Friday for another Kus Word. Until then, have a great week and a wonderful, blessed Resurrection Sunday. He is risen!