Fact check: why is it called Good Friday?

Good Friday is the most wonderful day because today we remember how Jesus sacrificed Himself to pay for all of our sins.

Why is today called Good Friday?

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him might not perish, but have eternal life.”

Technically, the term Good Friday has been around since the 1300s, when the word “good” was associated with the word “God”, such that a similarly derived term, goodbye actually derived from “God be with ye” — thus Good Friday actually meant “God’s Friday” or “Holy Friday”. ..

But why is it still called Good Friday today?

But that doesn’t answer why Christians still call this day Good Friday, when the meaning of the word “Good” has lost all connection with “God” or “Holy;” I think today that contemporary Christians have even more of an appreciation for why this day is a good day, even when it commemorates the most despicable evil deed that was ever done in the history of humanity, which was to crucify the most innocent, pure-hearted, good person who ever lived, Jesus Christ, a man who “went about doing good”, who healed the sick miraculously, forgave the sinners, set free those captive to the demons of mental illness, and restored social outcasts, a man whose closest friends said was himself free from sin (I am sure our closest and best friends know that this is not true of any of us.)

So when a friend recently asked me the question, “Why do Christians call today Good Friday, when it was the day when Jesus was crucified?” this was my reply:

This day is called Good Friday because by Jesus' death on the cross, all our sins are gone, kaput, when he died he took the burden of everything we did wrong, and all our griefs, sorrows, sicknesses, burdens, shame, and took it all away completely by dying instead of us. This is a prophecy written 600 years earlier by the prophet Isaiah, which was kept faithfully intact by the Jewish people, who treasured God’s word that was given to them, both before Jesus’ coming and in the 2000 years since: :

“Who would have believed what we now report?
Who could have seen the Lord's hand in this?

2

It was the will of the Lord that his servant
grow like a plant taking root in dry ground.
He had no dignity or beauty
to make us take notice of him.
There was nothing attractive about him,
nothing that would draw us to him.

3

We despised him and rejected him;
he endured suffering and pain.
No one would even look at him—
we ignored him as if he were nothing.

4

“But he endured the suffering that should have been ours,
the pain that we should have borne.
All the while we thought that his suffering
was punishment sent by God.

5

But because of our sins he was wounded,
beaten because of the evil we did.
We are healed by the punishment he suffered,
made whole by the blows he received.

6

All of us were like sheep that were lost,
each of us going his own way.
But the Lord made the punishment fall on him,
the punishment all of us deserved.

Isaiah 53:1-7 (Good News Translation)

We human beings ought to love God because He is totally good and there's "no shadow of turning" with Him -- but we don't love Him. We love ourselves and feel sorry for ourselves and don't do what God wants, which is to love others and go out of ourselves and love God and pray to Him and put Him first and find out who He is. Being depressed and turned in on oneself is because of our human sinfulness, but the good news is, Jesus died for our sins, instead of us, he died on the cross and took the punishment we deserved, so we don't have to earn favour with God -- it's given as a free gift. So it's called Good Friday.