Surrey Hills Presbyterian Church Good Friday Sermon:
"Grave"
Contemporary Presbyterian Good Friday sermons rarely deny the Cross outright. Indeed, most explicitly affirm that Christ died for sinners, bore punishment, and rose again. This Good Friday sermon from Surrey Hills Presbyterian Church preached by Rev. Oli Blythe is no exception. Isaiah 53 is read reverently, substitutionary language is retained, and the congregation is repeatedly reminded that Jesus suffered “for us.”
Yet this is precisely what makes its theological problems more difficult to detect. The issue in many of the Good Friday sermons examined throughout the “New Birth in Exile” series is not the formal denial of atonement, but evidence of the gradual weakening of the doctrinal world that once made the atonement terrifyingly necessary. The Cross remains verbally central while the doctrines that explain why mankind must be born again steadily recede into the background. This sermon reveals that decline with unusual clarity because the reduction occurs simultaneously at three interconnected levels: hermeneutics, homiletics, and theological architecture.
The first problem emerges at the level of hermeneutics. The sermon collapses prophetic fulfillment into immediate direct identification, flattening the redemptive-historical movement through which Isaiah’s Servant prophecy reaches its full meaning in Christ. Isaiah 53 is treated almost as a direct descriptive narration of Jesus’ crucifixion rather than as prophetic revelation unfolding through covenant history, sacrificial theology, representative headship, and divine judgement.
Certainly, the New Testament repeatedly identifies Isaiah’s Servant with Christ (Acts 8:32–35; Matt. 8:16–17; Luke 22:37; John 12:37–41; 1 Pet. 2:22–25; Rom. 10:16). But the sermon moves so quickly from Isaiah’s words to Jesus himself that the entire covenantal architecture surrounding the prophecy largely lost.
The wider context of Isaiah itself is thus largely absent from the sermon. Isaiah 53 addresses God’s chosen people and emerges within the prophetic atmosphere of covenant judgement, exile, guilt, and promised restoration. The Suffering Servant appears not merely to comfort emotionally burdened individuals, but with a promise to bear the covenant curse resting upon the rebellious people under divine judgement. Yet much of this redemptive-historical horizon disappears in the sermon’s more immediate psychological and relational framing of the Cross.
What is lost in this flattening is immense. To give some perspective, Isaiah 53 does not emerge in isolation. It stands within canonical concerns:
· Adamic ruin,
· Israel’s failure,
· covenant curse,
· exile,
· sacrificial blood,
· priestly mediation,
· and the prophetic anticipation of divine judgement falling upon a representative substitute.
Once these dimensions recede, the Cross naturally becomes more emotional and relational than covenantal and judicial. Christ risks becoming merely the loving sufferer rather than the covenant-bearing Servant crushed beneath divine wrath in the place of condemned sinners. The entire federal and forensic structure of redemption weakens. The hearer no longer sees Christ as the climactic fulfillment of redemptive history but primarily as the object of prophetic prediction and personal devotion.
This weakened hermeneutic then directly shapes the sermon’s homiletics. The controlling emotional framework appears almost immediately:“Have you ever been loved by someone who should have rejected you?”
That question is used several times in the sermon and is not unreasonable in itself. But it arrives before the congregation has been brought beneath the holiness of God and the terror of divine wrath that necessitated Calvary. Before the sermon’s text of Isaiah 53 is allowed to expose the sinner judicially, the congregation has already been positioned psychologically within categories of emotional acceptance, relational longing, and therapeutic reconciliation.
This is not merely a stylistic issue. It reveals a broader shift in modern evangelical homiletics. Increasingly, sermons begin not with God’s holiness or the theological gravity of the text itself, but with the listener’s immediately recognisable emotional experience. The hearer must first “connect.” Psychological recognisability becomes the gateway into a sermon. This Good Friday sermon follows that trajectory consistently.
The illustrations themselves reveal the pattern. The opening relational question frames acceptance and rejection, while the farm misdemeanour illustration reinforces the sermon’s emotionally recognisable treatment of guilt and forgiveness. The Elton John illustration reinforces the sermon’s therapeutic and emotionally recognisable entry point into human need and longing. The Sherlock Holmes illustration creates the atmosphere of hidden guilt. The backpack illustration creates burden imagery. The crucifixion nail imagery carries the emotional weight of physical suffering and sacrifice. The Maximilian Kolbe story carries substitution emotionally. The Richmond AFL analogy carries vindication. None of these illustrations are necessarily inappropriate in themselves. The deeper issue is that the illustrations increasingly carry the burden of conviction, emotional pressure, and theological accessibility while comparatively little detailed exegetical time is spent unfolding:“it pleased the Lord to crush him,”“guilt offering,”“justify many,”“bear their iniquities,”or the covenantal and judicial structure of Isaiah 53 itself.
Older Reformed experiential preaching operated very differently. The Puritans certainly addressed the experience of the hearer, but they began with God’s holiness, man’s corruption, divine wrath, covenant guilt, and the searching authority of Scripture itself. Experience arose from theological reality, not the reverse. Modern preaching often reverses the order. Emotional recognisability becomes the interpretive gateway into the sermon. As a result, biblical doctrines increasingly become translated into therapeutic categories modern hearers can psychologically identify with. Sin, instead of rebellion against God, becomes shame, condemnation becomes insecurity, wrath becomes disappointment, and regeneration becomes emotional responsiveness to Jesus.
The result of these hermeneutical and homiletical instincts become visible in the sermon’s theological architecture. Here the deepest concerns of this Easter Series finally emerge.
The sermon unquestionably contains genuine strengths. It is warm, pastorally earnest, emotionally accessible, and more substitutionary than much contemporary Easter preaching. The preacher openly states that Christ bore punishment in the place of sinners and repeatedly returns to Isaiah 53’s language of piercing, crushing, suffering, and substitution. The sermon clearly wants listeners not merely to understand the Cross intellectually but to feel the wonder of undeserved mercy.
Yet the sermon’s theological architecture proves deeply unstable precisely where a Good Friday sermon should place its greatest doctrinal weight: the doctrine of sin and the necessity of regeneration. The controlling emotional structure established at the beginning governs the entire sermon thereafter. Love dominates experientially while wrath remains comparatively abstract and muted. The congregation repeatedly hears that Jesus loves them, suffered for them, and welcomes them. Yet the Father’s holy opposition to sin scarcely emerges with apostolic force.
Indeed, one of the most striking features of the sermon is the near absence of both the Father and the Holy Spirit from its experiential atmosphere.
Salvation increasingly functions as:Jesus lovingly rescues burdened sinnersrather than:the Father publicly vindicates His righteousness through the crushing of His Son while the Spirit raises dead sinners into resurrection life.
Once salvation is framed primarily through categories of relational acceptance and emotional trust, the Reformed doctrine of election quietly begins receding into the background. The decisive issue no longer appears to be God sovereignly raising spiritually dead sinners from the Adamic curse, but sinners choosing whether they will accept Christ’s loving offer. Grace remains verbally present, yet its function subtly changes. Regeneration no longer appears as the sovereign miracle producing faith, but increasingly as the emotional outcome of responding positively to Jesus’ love. The sermon does not formally deny Reformed theology, yet its anthropological and experiential structure steadily relocates the centre of salvation from divine resurrection to human response and actions.
This imbalance becomes especially visible in the sermon’s mentioning of the resurrection. The preacher speaks of Jesus being “vindicated to save you” after earlier describing the resurrection as “God’s tick of approval.” Yet biblically, the Cross and resurrection are not fundamentally about God emotionally vindicating Jesus’ loving sacrifice. Romans 3 presents Calvary as the Father’s public vindication of His own righteousness:“to demonstrate His righteousness.” The resurrection declares that divine justice has been satisfied, death conquered, wrath exhausted, and the holy God proven righteous while justifying sinners. That world scarcely appears in the sermon.
This weakening of divine holiness flows directly into the sermon’s doctrine of sin itself. The preacher states:“sin isn't just doing bad things, it's rejecting Jesus, his rule, his voice, his right to lead our lives.”
That language sounds serious and is stronger than outright therapeutic moralism. The preacher even uses the word “rebellion.” Yet the formulation remains profoundly inadequate as a biblical doctrine of sin. Especially so in a Good Friday sermon. Sin is not merely rejecting Jesus’ leadership. Scripture presents sin as inherited corruption, hostility toward God, spiritual death, bondage to evil, suppression of truth, hatred of holiness, and condemnation in Adam. The sermon repeatedly portrays mankind as burdened, ashamed, flawed, hiding guilt, and going astray, yet scarcely presents humanity as spiritually dead and under wrath by nature.
These omissions are devastating because they quietly remove the necessity of the new birth. And without the rebirth, salvation does not exist, John 3:5 “Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
If sin is primarily rejecting Christ’s rule, then salvation naturally becomes accepting His rule. In classic Reformed terminology, this is Arminianism. If mankind’s problem is mainly relational refusal, then the solution becomes emotional trust and forgiveness. But Scripture presents mankind’s condition far more radically:
· dead in trespasses and sins,
· hostile to God,
· incapable of submission,
· children of wrath,
· and corrupt from birth in Adam.
This sermon never truly reaches that depth. Humanity is treated as guilty and burdened rather than ruined and spiritually dead. The congregation is never fully brought to see that the problem is not merely what sinners do, but what sinners are.
This explains why the recurring evangelical formula throughout the sermon becomes so revealing:“Jesus died so that anyone who trusts in Him will be saved.”
In one sense, this is gloriously true. But within the sermon’s weakened anthropology, the statement bypasses condemnation in Adam, inherited corruption, inability, and the absolute necessity of imputed righteousness. Faith begins sounding less like the empty-handed dependence of spiritually bankrupt sinners and more like a sincere human response to Christ’s love.
The absence of imputation throughout the sermon therefore becomes critical. Isaiah 53 is saturated with judicial transfer:“the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Yet the sermon never deeply explains how our guilt becomes or how Christ’s righteousness becomes ours. Likewise, propitiation is virtually absent. Christ suffers punishment, but the sermon never fully unfolds that the wrath of the Father waiting for His people was exhausted upon the Son beneath covenant judgement. Christ’s suffering remains focused largely upon physical agony, rejection, and emotional sacrifice rather than the dreadful reality of standing beneath holy wrath and covenant curse. In place of fleeing to Christ as condemned sinners, the sermon increasingly calls the hearer simply to respond emotionally to Jesus’ love, accept His forgiveness, and entrust themselves relationally to His sacrificial care.
Consequently, the realities of remaining outside Christ remain strangely weak as well. There is little sustained emphasis upon abiding wrath, eternal judgement, or perishing beneath the justice of God. The congregation is shown what Christ lovingly offers but not fully what upon those still united to Adam.
One of the sermon’s deeper anthropological weaknesses is that it repeatedly speaks of sinners “rejecting Jesus” without ever adequately explaining how fallen humanity stands in hostility toward Christ in the first place. Rejection increasingly sounds like an unfortunate relational decision rather than the manifestation of a corrupt nature already at enmity with God. Yet Scripture presents fallen mankind not merely as reluctant, burdened, or emotionally hesitant, but as spiritually blind, lovers of darkness, hostile toward God, and unwilling to come to the light apart from sovereign grace. The terrifying question therefore scarcely emerges in the sermon at all: what if the sinner does not want Christ? What if mankind’s condition is so ruined in Adam that the problem is not merely failure to accept Jesus, but hatred of the holiness of God itself? Without that deeper anthropology, regeneration naturally recedes from being a sovereign resurrection out of death into little more than an emotional willingness to respond positively to Jesus’ love.
This is no vague observation. To tell sinners they must “love Jesus” demands far deeper theological explanation than the sermon provides. Love Him why? Because He comforts us? Because He forgives us? Because He rescues us from suffering? Scripture presents a far more dreadful reality. Fallen mankind does not merely fail to appreciate Christ’s love. Humanity stands hostile to the holiness of God Himself and unwilling to come to the light apart from sovereign regeneration.
The sermon offers the comfort of acceptance and reassurance without first confronting the sinner with the terrifying holiness of God before which fallen mankind must reckon with. The congregation may leave feeling loved, accepted, and grateful while never truly confronting the horrifying reality that apart from sovereign regeneration they remain dead in Adam and under the wrath of God.
The quotation from Tim Keller near the conclusion crystallises the sermon's entire theological atmosphere:“ more sinful and flawed than we ever dared believe, yet more loved and accepted than we ever dared hope.”
“Flawed” is revealing language. Scripture’s anthropology is far more dreadful than that. Humanity is not merely flawed. Humanity is condemned, corrupt, hostile, spiritually dead, lovers of darkness and unwilling to come to the light. “Flawed” belongs to distinctly un-Christian language which reshapes the biblical doctrine of man into categories modern hearers can emotionally live comfortably with.
And this is precisely the concern driving the “New Birth in Exile” series. These Presbyterian sermons have not abandoned the Cross altogether. The problem is more subtle and therefore more dangerous. The doctrinal ecosystem surrounding the Cross has steadily weakened. Once original sin weakens, wrath weakens. Once wrath weakens, propitiation weakens. Once imputation weakens, regeneration recedes. And once mankind is no longer presented as spiritually dead in Adam, the necessity of the new birth disappears beneath the language of love, acceptance, and reassurance.
Isaiah 53 does not merely present emotionally burdened people needing comfort. It presents condemned rebels whose guilt is so dreadful that the Servant of the Lord must be crushed beneath divine judgement in their place. The Cross therefore does not merely announce that we are deeply loved. It announces that mankind is so ruined beneath sin and wrath that only the death of the Son of God and the miracle of supernatural new birth can reconcile sinners to the holy God.
This Good Friday sermon was warm and sincere, earnest, pastorally accessible, emotionally engaging, and recognisably evangelical throughout. Yet this is precisely what makes the theological reduction so dangerous. The congregation hears of Christ’s love, suffering, sacrifice and invited to accept Christ’s love. Whilst the deeper realities that once made the Cross terrifyingly necessary steadily recede from view. The sermon retains the language of substitution while weakening the doctrines of condemnation, imputation, wrath, regeneration, and sovereign grace that give substitution its full biblical meaning. This type of preaching prompted the series title “The New Birth in Exile”. In that sense, the sermon stands as a revealing example of the broader theological drift now confronting much contemporary Presbyterian preaching.
More articles in this series are at The New Birth In Exile
