Text: Matthew 27:31-52
...The life changing reality of our text today is that because Jesus was crucified, we now have access to God by faith alone, and we are called to carry our cross. And we will look at three things today: 1) The Brutality of the Cross, 2) the Humiliation of the Cross, and 3) the Necessity of the Cross. So lets look at our first point today:
I. The Brutality of the Cross
A. Flogging: was so brutal that very often people would in fact die from it. One commentary states: “Scourging was a cruel and barbaric punishment…The whip or scourge itself was an inhumane instrument consisting of a handle with several leather thongs attached, which were weighted on the ends with jagged pieces of bone, metal, and rock. Frequently, the agony of the scourging resulted in death. Victims lost eyes and teeth, were occasionally disemboweled and were almost always horribly disfigured."
B. Crucifixion: the victim was stripped naked and then laid on the cross. Large 7-inch spikes were driven through the hands (in the wrist area) and heels of feet. And the way a person died on the cross was through asphyxiation. Cicero, a Roman historian, described the horror of crucifixion as: “the most cruel and hideous of tortures.” and "the very mention of the cross (should) be far removed not only from a Roman citizen’s body, but from his mind, his eyes, his ears."
D. Here's the picture: Jesus, the spotless, perfect, lamb of God, is brutally whipped and has the flesh torn off of His body. Christ was so disfigured from the beating that He took, that the prophet Isaiah, foreseeing what would happen to Christ, says that the Messiah would be "so disfigured he seemed hardly human, and from His appearance, one would scarcely know he was a man." And then He is paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, and taken outside of the city gates, and laid down on a piece of wood, where spikes driven through His hands and feet, and where He would spend the next 7 hours or so in incredible agony and torment.
Why did God choose this method to redeem His people? I think we can see at least three reasons as to why God might have chosen this method over others.
You see, when we look at the cross, we see something of:
1. God's holiness: when we look at the horror of the crucifixion, we get as sense of just what God thinks about sin. God hates sin so much that He would have it crucified.
2. The Love of God: when we look at the cross, we see the depth of the love of God and the extent He was willing to go in order to save us. God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son! So, when we consider the cross, we see both God's holiness and His love.
3. The cross also shows us the horror of sin itself! ...Man was created in the image of God, but when sin entered the equation, that image became marred. Man as he is today in his fallen condition is so disfigured from his original state, that he is barely recognizable in terms of what He was really created to be. And that is part of what our redemption in Christ is all about. In Christ we are renewed, and in a real sense we have our true humanity restored to us, as we are being conformed more and more to the image of Christ, the one who showed us what a human being was supposed to look like.
II. The Humiliation of the Cross
A. Crucifixion was a powerful symbol of humiliation and shame that was reserved for the worst and lowest. Jews viewed it as a sign of being accursed by God.
B. Mockery: The mocking of Jesus actually begins when Jesus is arrested and is taunted and mocked by both the Jewish and Romans authorities. Our text presents us with the constant mockery of Christ:
In v. 34 - wine to drink, mixed with gall. This drink was not meant to comfort Jesus. The fact that the wine was mixed with gall, which is a bitter herb, meant that the wine would have been undrinkable.
v. 36 THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS – Jesus was unjustly charged by the Romans with the false charge of insurrection. And this sign that is placed above Jesus' head on the cross, is meant to mock both Jesus and the Jews. It's as if the Romans were saying to the Jews: there's your king. Of course this king was doing precisely what He had come to do: He had come not to begin an insurrection against the oppressive tyranny of the human government that the Jews found themselves under; but to overthrow the oppressive spiritual forces and rulers and cosmic powers over this present darkness, and to deliver us from the tyranny and slavery of sin and death.
vv. 38 - 45 - everyone, those who passed by, religious leaders, and even the robbers who were crucified with Jesus, mocked Jesus.
...Jesus' humiliation didn't begin here. We need to understand what theologians refer to as the two estates of Christ. By this they mean that there two patterns that marked Jesus' life and ministry that are seen in Scripture. The first characteristic is what we refer to simply as humiliation, which begins with His incarnation and spans His entire earhtly life. The second is what we refer to as exaltation, which begins with Jesus' resurrection.
The apostle Paul describes Jesus' state of humiliation this way in Phil 3:5-7: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."
Think of it: The eternal Son of God, who dwelled in a state of perfect blessedness with the Father and the Spirit from all eternity, and who created all things, voluntary stoops down out of the glory of Heaven into this sin ravaged and fallen world. And He takes on all of the limitations of human flesh, and enters into the fullness of human experience, all without sin:
He who gives food to the sparrow, knows what it's like to experience hunger.
He who created the springs of water that quenches our thirst, knows what it's like to thirst.
He who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, knows what it's like to own nothing except the clothes on His back.
He who dwelled in the splendor of Heaven, knows what it's like to dwell in poverty and not have a place to lay His head.
He who lays down His life for His friends, knows what it's like to be abandoned by all of His friends.
He who is Faithful, knows what it's like to be betrayed with a kiss.
He who is the Truth, knows what it's like to have someone bear false testimony against Him.
He who is our Advocate, knows what it's like to have people shout "crucify Him, crucify Him!"
He who is all-powerful, knows what it's like to be weak. He who is life, knows what it's like to suffer death.
He who is the Blessed one, knows what it's like to be cursed.
So we see that His entire life and ministry here on earth was marked by humiliation, which finds its climax here at the cross, where the One who clothes the lilies of the field, is Himself stripped naked, and is nailed to a tree that He created, by creatures that He had made in His image. The ones who are putting Him to death, are in fact the ones that He is dying for.
In summing up the humiliation of Christ, the Scriptures use one simple word that captures the full scope of what Christ did, and that word is "suffering." And the reason this is so important for us to understand is because our lives are to follow the same basic pattern as that of our Lord. As the Master had His two estates of humiliation and exaltation, so shall we.
But what does this mean for us? Listen again to what the apostle Paul said in Phil 3:5-9: "let this mind be in you which was also in Christ…" You see, we are so quick to get to the part of that passage that talks about what Jesus did that we completely overlook how that passage begins: it begins with a command to us, that this is what is supposed to shape our thinking and our lives. And what did Jesus do? He made himself nothing! He humbled Himself. He took the form of a servant. He died the most humiliating of deaths.
So we see that are called to the same pattern of life which culminates in the death of the cross...Our lives are to be stamped by everything that is represented by the cross: humiliation, self-denial, and death, and that death is where we are dying daily to our ourselves. Dying to our selfishness and pride, dying to our anger, and dying to always have to assert our rights. Dying to retaliation.
But you see, the modern church today, especially in
So what we have then is that much of the church today looks to the same things as the world does to define itself and to measure whether or not it is walking in the power Spirit. In other words, it looks to the exact opposite things that the Lord God has called it to, and then has the audacity to call it "spiritual" and to call it "Spirit filled!"
...But the point is that we see the pattern: when we are brought to saving faith in Christ, we are said to be raised with Christ. And the same power by which Jesus was raised from the dead is now at work in us. But, that power is at work in us to bring us to the cross. It brings us to the pattern of humiliation, where we deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow the Master. It brings us down to the place of humility and weakness, and poverty of spirit, because it there where the power of God is made manifest...
III. The Necessity of the Crucifixion:
A. Look at v. 46: "My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me:" Why does Jesus say these words? Well, what we discover is that Jesus is directly quoting Ps. 22:1, and when we read through that Psalm, which was written about 900 years before Christ was even born, we see many descriptions of what would happen at the cross...
All of this teaches us that the crucifixion of Christ was not a divine afterthought! The crucifixion of the second person of the Trinity was something that was conceived of in the mind of God before time even began. Jesus is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, and as the apostle Peter says Jesus was "…delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God."
And so now we see Jesus, enduring that which was ordained from the foundation of the world, quoting the words that were written with Him in mind 900 years before He was born, as He cries out: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" And with these words we see the ultimate point of despair for Jesus. Jesus, the eternal Son of God became a man so that He could be our substitute and bear our sins. And what is it that our sins deserved? It is the full wrath of God. It is being cut off from the blessedness of His presence to experience the fullness of His wrath for sin...
...And it's not that the Father turned His back while Jesus on the cross. It was that the Father turned to Jesus in the fullness of His wrath against sin, when He took our sin upon Himself, so that what Jesus experienced on the cross was in essence, Hell. He is literally cut off by God. He is actually forsaken, cursed and forced to endure outer darkness, which as we note in our text that darkness had actually fallen over the land even though it was the middle of the day! This is the true horror of the cross! It is the curse. It being forsaken by God. This is agony that Jesus didn't want to experience for even one second, but which those who do not turn to Christ will be forced to endure for eternity.
...So, it was necessary for Jesus to die on the cross in order to bear the curse of God for our sins. But, we also discover that it was necessary in order of us to have access to God.
B. Look at v. 51 Read verse 51: (Heb 9): Here we are told that the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The curtain marked the entrance into the
And at that moment, the curtain to the earthly temple is torn, which speaks to the fact that now we have direct access into the
Conclusion:
We have seen the brutality of the cross, the humiliation of the cross, and the necessity of the cross. And we have discovered that because of His work on the cross, we have access now to God by faith, and our lives are to be patterned after the pattern of Christ's.
We are called to the suffering of Cross bearing, which looks a denial ourselves, and putting sin to death. It looks like forgiveness, and love. The problem though is that frankly, we are too infatuated by the comforts of the world, and far too often we chase the things that the world chases after.
People in the church today want Rolls Royce faith, when they should be asking for cross-bearing faith. People want a faith that gets them want they want, when they should be asking for a faith that sacrifices for the cause of the Gospel.
Let us today look fully and squarely at the cross of Christ. Let us not lose sight of the horror of it, and all that Christ endured to set us free from the power of sin and death. And let us not forget that the cross is not the end of the story. Jesus is risen! And He has been highly exalted, and at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow and every tongue confess.
Let us endeavor this day to live a cross-stamped life, recognizing that the power that raised Christ from the dead is at work in us, not to enable us to run after what the world does, but to enable to die to ourselves, so that the life of Christ might be manifested in us.
Amen.
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