Why is it "Good" Friday?

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I sometimes hear people ask, Why is the day on which Christians commemorate the death of Jesus called "Good" Friday? What could possibly be "good" about the brutal death of an innocent man? Certainly Jesus' death was brutal. Crucifixion was a barbaric form of punishment, and in Jesus' case it came after He had been flogged to within an inch of His life and had a crown of vicious thorns rammed onto His head, digging deeply into His flesh. It was also a humiliating death. The victim was publicly proclaimed as the worst kind of criminal, and whilst our modern depictions show Him with a loincloth, the reality allowed no such modesty. Those crucified were hung naked before the world. So what could possibly be good about it? Simply this: Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, chose willingly to bear this in our place. The Bible tells us that every one of us has sinned, failing to live up to God's standards. Our own experience confirms this: even the best person among us cannot honestly claim to have lived a perfect life. God had declared that "the soul that sins shall die." (Ezek 18:4, 20) That doesn't just mean physical death, but spiritual death - eternal separation from God, otherwise known as hell. Because God is righteous and just, He had to uphold that sentence. But because He is love, He devised a way that He could forgive sin and make heaven available to us. The only way He could do that was to pay the penalty Himself. So God the Son became man in the person of Jesus Christ, and went to the cross bearing our sins, even though He himself had never sinned. The night before, when He prayed in the garden "Father, if it be possible, take this cup from Me," He was not just talking about the physical death, as horrible as that would be, but the spiritual trauma of having all the sin of mankind placed upon Him, and of the moment of separation when He would cry out, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" Today is Good Friday because today we celebrate the fact that God loved us so much that He willingly went through all that for us, and as a result if we repent (admit our sin and turn back to Him) and believe in Him, surrendering our lives to Him as our Lord and Savior, we can be forgiven our sin and brought into a new and exciting relationship with Him which will last not just for this life, but for all eternity.