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The Revd Giles Fraser is a past Canon at St Paul’s Cathedral and former Rector at the south London church of St Mary, Newington. He also writes for UnHerd and is author of Chosen.
He will soon be taking up a new post as Vicar of St Anne’s in Kew, West London.
Fortunately, Fraser was able to stay at St Mary’s for Easter, the Church’s greatest feast, celebrating Christ’s resurrection from the dead:
The object hanging over the altar is a pyx. It contains a consecrated host, representing the Body of Christ, as remembered from the Last Supper in the sacrament of Holy Communion:
The congregation bought a very special bottle of wine for him to consecrate at his last Communion service there. How fitting that the winemaker’s surname is Le Moine — Monk:
These were members of St Mary’s on Easter 2019:
St Mary’s held a farewell party for him on Easter Day, April 17, 2022:
Then it was off to St Anne’s in Kew Green. How wonderful to have a cricket pitch next door:
Fraser has met the vicar of St Luke’s, also in Kew:
One wonders if they discussed Brexit:
In lighter matters, St Anne’s new vicar is planning on learning the piano. He received many supportive comments to this tweet:
Note the sheet music: ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, one of the grandest of hymns.
Fraser posted his thoughts about changing parishes for UnHerd: ‘Have I abandoned my flock?’
It is a deeply moving account of faith, a church family and the challenges that ministry presents.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
He describes his final Easter at St Mary, Newington, damaged by the Germans in the Second World War:
When I celebrate Mass here for the final time, I need to remind myself that I am not abandoning people, because it’s not all about me. The only real job of a priest is to point beyond him or herself to that God who, I believe, is the only true ground of lasting hope. In a funny way, I suspect my departure has helped focus that for some of the congregation …
On Easter Sunday, as dawn breaks over South London, I will light a fire in the crumbling remains of my old church, substantially redesigned by the Luftwaffe, yet unbowed. I will take that fire into church and the first of the day’s baptisms will begin. Clouds of incense will pick up the light now streaming in through the window. The fire will be shared as everyone’s candles are lit. I will cry. Hugs will be shared. The victory over death will be proclaimed.
Later, we will feast on Jollof rice, which is a kind of sacrament of community round these parts. That seems a perfect way to say goodbye. We will always be family.
That morning, Fraser baptised two adults and two children. Easter Sunday is the traditional day for group baptisms.
He had this to say about the sacrament, which involves sprinkling of water, symbolic of full immersion:
… like learning to swim, faith also involves the prospect of drowning. Baptism isn’t a little bit of genteel water sprinkling. The imagery is one of death and rebirth. It’s a simulated drowning. The old person is destroyed; the new one rises from the waters. Like Neo being unplugged from the Matrix and being reborn into a new reality. Evangelicals are not wrong when they speak of being born again. You can’t fully plan for what that involves. At some level, you just have to take the plunge.
He discussed moving out, discarding old belongings, comparing it to a type of death, rather apposite for Holy Week, the culmination of which is Good Friday:
I have been the priest at St Mary, Newington for ten years. This Sunday, I am moving on. A new parish awaits. The skip is full of stuff I remember buying with much excitement, but now looks like pointless trash; the salvation promised by advertising and the shopping centre is so short-lived. And now the removal vans have been — and trashed more of our apparently precious belongings — there are further trips to the local tip, which is rather poignantly located next to the crematorium.
This is where things come when they have stopped working: our fridges and our bodies. The tip and the crem are Good Friday places. This is the wasteland, the valley of the shadow of death. Perhaps one day we should gather here, rather than in a lovely church, to experience the full existential desolation of the crucifixion. Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion, was itself a rubbish dump. A place of human landfill. This is where our dreams come to die.
I have never been especially threatened by atheism. For one thing, atheism is good for business: it helps maintain the tension. Indifference is the real enemy. But also because atheism is assigned a pivotal place in the Christian narrative. The period between 3pm on Friday and dawn on Sunday symbolises my own atheistic imaginings. When He is murdered by the Romans, all the expectation and excitement of Jesus-following is shown up as a terrible, embarrassing mistake. We were conned. He wasn’t the new King after all. Might is right. Oh, I get atheism all right. It’s an essential part of the cycle of Holy Week.
Then he discusses the Resurrection:
A wander around Kew Gardens, right next to my new church, reveals the natural world coming back to glorious life after the dead of winter. It’s a wholly natural expression of deep Christian instinct: that there is life beyond death. That even death cannot keep life down.
The resurrection of Jesus is not magic. Not “a conjuring trick with bones”, as the great Bishop David Jenkins once put it.
By the way, Jenkins’s full quote was ‘Well, it’s certainly much more than just a conjuring trick with bones’.
Fraser continues:
It’s an acknowledgement that a life rooted in the eternal will not remain under the heel of perpetual nothingness. Agreed, this is not an empirical statement. I have stepped outside what can be demonstrated naturally. The God I describe is beyond time and space, the author of all things, not one thing among others.
“Blah,” go the atheists. But upon this “blah” I hang my whole life. The God who is there in the person of Jesus is the same one in whom everything moves and has their being. It’s not that physical death doesn’t happen. It’s just that it doesn’t mean what nihilists believe it means. Hope exists because God exists.
He expressed his concerns about leaving his congregation at St Mary, Newington, and remembered his arrival ten years ago. He left St Paul’s under a cloud, having run into trouble after hosting Occupy London on the Cathedral grounds:
As I leave my old parish, I feel a terrible sense of abandoning my people. It was hard to start with. Ten years ago, I was parachuted in by the Bishop who took pity on me after my resignation from St Paul’s Cathedral. Like all parishes, they wanted St Francis of Assisi with an MBA. What they got was a broken spirit, in hiding from the world. And to start with, many of them didn’t much care for what they got.
I don’t blame them really. I was a mess. Some of them left the church. But slowly we rebuilt and we bonded. Now they are my family, the water of baptism being thicker than the blood of biological relatedness. We have been through everything together: bereavements, deep disappointments, some of the happiest parties you can ever imagine, then the emotional desolation of lockdown. During my ten years here, some of the post-war estates have been demolished and new more expensive and private developments have taken their place. As gentrification spread, our congregation has become much younger and whiter …
Our new church intake looks very different. Apart from being younger and whiter, they were not raised in the faith. There were fewer infant baptisms for this generation. Here, faith is a choice not an inheritance. “I wish my parents had done this for me,” said one of the new baptismal candidates. I understand this. Becoming a Christian is much harder to do as an act of choice, more fraught with anxiety.
The generation raised under the aegis of liberalism have to bear the weight of their own choices. This is problematic because to be in a church is to be a part of a family. The idea that you choose your family, choose to be baptised, seems to introduce a strange contractual aspect to this relationship, like taking out a mobile phone contract. I wonder if those “wanting more” in baptism preparation are, on some level, asking me for the small print. Is that how they see the Bible, I wonder? I hope I have helped to disabuse them of this idea.
He says that he doesn’t have all the answers to people’s problems, however, the church is where we bring the problems we cannot solve:
I don’t have answers to many of the problems that people bring into this church. I can’t solve the deep poverty that many experience, nor the broken relationships, nor the desperate sense that the world is not responsive to everyone’s deepest needs. I am there to carry them, and they carry me. The church is where you can bring all the stuff that is impossible to solve. And there are advantages to this — it means that we are not frightened of all the stuff that cannot be remedied. We can carry failure. And we can only do this because, as I said before, hope exists because God exists.
I wish Giles Fraser well in Kew, with his ministry — and his piano lessons. I have a feeling he will really enjoy his new assignment and new pastime.
In 2017, John MacArthur preached a sermon on Galatians 4:19-20 called ‘The Primary Importance of Sanctification’.
In addition to preaching well on the text, he also gave a discourse on why today’s churches are so, well, awful, for lack of a better word.
The excerpt follows, emphases mine:
We talk a lot about the economy in America and the economy growing. You do understand, don’t you, that the economy in America grows on massive self-interest, not on altruism, not on wanting to help others; it grows on massive self-interest. The church has bought into that as a way to appeal to those people who live for their own fulfillment. Churches then look and sound and feel like the world, and they advertise God as if He was a product that would satisfy your heart’s desires. Carefully they avoid anything that condemns people, anything that convicts them, certainly anything that terrifies them, like the judgment of hell. They avoid anything that expects people to deny themselves, take up a cross, pursue with passion what is holy, pure, and good. And, again, even in churches where there’s a strong emphasis on justification, and maybe a now and then emphasis on glorification, there is a strict avoidance of sanctification. This plays out all the time.
The church is supposed to look like Christ in the world. And rarely does a day go by that there isn’t some blatant, gross sin and immorality attributed to someone in the media across the country, if not across the world, who is anything but Christlike. Faithful churches are always led by godly shepherds who lead their people away from the world, away from themselves to God, away from the fulfillment of their own desires, their own longings, to seek those things which are above, not things on the earth. The church is in a sad state.
Now, how did we get to this point? I don’t want to belabor this, but this is a little bit of helpful history. Churches for centuries were theological, theological, and biblical. The Bible was the centerpiece, and the theology that the Bible taught established the convictions, and churches were God-centered.
It was even demonstrated architecturally. You go back a few generations, and when churches were built they were built to manifest a kind of transcendent perspective. They were tall, they were high; they wanted to demonstrate something that was above the earth. Some of you have visited those kinds of places where you look up, perhaps in some cases a hundred feet or more, and you see paintings and stained glass and things like that.
There was a sense in which when you went to church you were encountering God, and transcendence was important. It was God-centered, it was Christ-centered. And they trusted in the Holy Spirit for the growth of the church. I’ll say that again. They trusted in the Holy Spirit for the growth of the church.
Churches opposed worldliness. They opposed sin categorically ... But even Protestant churches, even gospel-preaching churches had a sense of transcendence. There was a dignity about them. The music had a dignity. The way people conducted themselves had a dignity. The leadership carried themselves in a dignified fashion. One commentator I read this week said, “Modern pastors look like they buy their wardrobes at Forever 21.” There was a loftiness. There was an ascendency. You came to hear from heaven. You came for an encounter with God.
New churches are not theological, they’re not biblical; they are psychological, sociological. They have given up transcendence – a heavenly experience, for imminence – an earthly experience, to make it as much like what is familiar in the world as possible; to not make you think that you’ve stepped into any kind of different category, either in the style, the fashion, or anything else; make it as worldly, as flat as possible. It is man-centered. And though the names of Jesus and God are used, Jesus and God are like imaginary friends who give you what you want. Churches today trust in their growth techniques, not the Holy Spirit. They trust that by sucking in the world and redefining worship as a mindless musical stimulation while the people think only about their own desires, that somehow this is how you grow a church.
You can collect a crowd that way, but only the Holy Spirit can build a church. Vague spirituality has replaced sound doctrine. True holiness is not an issue, because that would be way too confrontive. You can’t talk to people about self-denial, of giving up everything they long for, everything they think satisfies them, giving it all up in total self-denial for the sake of God; can’t do that. This culture today has drunk too deeply of the wine of self-fulfillment for too long. They are drunk on it.
Attendance in a church and loyalty to a church is never related, it seems, to the love of the truth or the love of Christ, but always to the love of self: “I like what they do, it’s my style; makes me feel good about me.” You might say, “How did we get here?” We got here because ideas have consequence.
Sigmund Freud died in 1939. He was the father of psychoanalysis. His system was a system that rejected God. His system was a system that said man is the ultimate. And so he said, there is in every human being, what he called, the id. And the id is the real you, the authentic you. It’s basically the complex out of which comes all your desires. And if you want to be who you are you’ve got to let your desires go. If you want to be an authentic person, you need to be you. Whatever you is, whatever the complex of your heart’s desires are, you have to be able to fulfill them to be a healthy, authentic person. In other words, unleash your sinfulness.
Obviously, the most eager people to buy into that were young people, because young people haven’t learned lessons in life about how living like that destroys you. So they’re the fertile ground to sow those seeds. The most liberated sinners are the youngest, because they lack the restraints that come from the lessons of life, and so youth become the symbol of authenticity. Youthful, irresponsible desire is elevated to a noble level, and the perpetual adolescent is the most authentic person.
We see it in our culture. The heroes of this culture are so profoundly sinful and so proud about it, that it would be hard to track the record of their iniquitous behavior. But they’re real; they’re the real people. The church is a restrainer. The church is bondage. The church is full of hypocrites, people who dress up like we do because they’re phonies and they are not authentic.
Over the years since Freud, this youthful authenticity movement has taken over the culture. Dramatically it made strides in the 1960s when, for the first time, the selfish, self-indulgent, immoral young person, hedonistic young person became the cultural hero: the hippies – sex, drugs, rock and roll. This is played out in songs like “I’ve Got To Be Me,” “I Did It My Way.” “And so if a church doesn’t let me be me, I reject it.”
This has reached severe proportions. An illustration: same-sex marriage. Homosexual people don’t care about marriage – just mark it – they don’t care about marriage, they just care about doing what they want to do. They don’t care about marriage.
Why do they want same-sex marriage? They want it established by law for one reason: so that they can put those who are against that sin out of business. That’s all they want; LGBTQ lobbying constantly for acceptance in the culture. It isn’t that they want some kind of political acceptance, they want to make criminals out of the people who spell that out as sin. They want to criminalize Christianity. That’s the only reason any of this is happening. They’re free to do what they want, and they do it. But what bothers them is those who denounce that behavior as sin; they want to make us criminals. So we’re in a tough spot.
The culture, mostly young people, is against us. In the ‘60s after the hippie movement, when immorality just broke loose, there were some kids who supposedly came to Christ; they became the Jesus people. They came to Southern California down to Orange County. There was a guy named Lonnie Frisbee who was leading that movement, who was secretly a homosexual and died of AIDS.
But Lonnie Frisbee had decided they needed to take their kids, that were meeting on the beach and baptizing in the Pacific Ocean, to church. So they went to Calvary Chapel in Orange County where Chuck Smith was pastor. Then it was a four square church, traditional church. And they all showed up on a few Sundays barefoot, long hair, irreverent, casual, with their own kind of music; and the leaders of the church said, “We’ve got to hold onto the young people. If we don’t give them what they want they’ll leave.”
That was already being discussed a lot of places, because the hippie movement caught fire across America – the movement of rebellion against authority, responsibility, duty, expectation; rebellion against right, honor; it caught fire. So the church feared, “We’re going to lose these people if we don’t acquiesce.” So for the first time when the Jesus people came to church, first time I can find in church history, the church began to redefine its own identity and worship based upon the wishes of a rebellious subculture. That definition started then and spread; started in California, spread clear across the country.
Prior to the ‘60s, nobody expected a church service to be rock concert. Nobody expected a church service to be entertainment. Nobody expected worship to be physical stimulation, emotional feelings without engaging your mind. Nobody expected church to be a manipulation of people’s desires to fulfill their own self-styled identity. A church was a church, and it was a place where there was thoughtful, prayerful, biblical, sober-minded hearing from the Word of God, leading to conviction and edification and elevation. It was a heavenly encounter.
But to this modern generation of young people – serious, sober, thoughtful, scriptural preaching about God, and confrontation of sin, and a call to holiness, and a call to separate from the world and from iniquity is far too absolute and far too offensive. People who want to feel good about themselves the way they are don’t want that, so the church caved in. The church caved in and gave them what they want. And now pastors continue to accommodate those same people – irresponsible, lazy, undisciplined rebels who want what they want – and the church, instead of confronting it, conforms to it. No preaching on sanctification, no preaching on holiness can be done in those environments; they’d empty the place.
This is the situation today. Strong preaching on holiness against worldliness, confronting the desires of the hearts of the “me” generation as sin from which they need to repent is a far cry from the trend.
How true.
I put this post together on Easter Day. What was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon about? The Resurrection? No. Justin Welby preached about the ungodliness of processing economic migrants crossing the English Channel from France to the UK — overwhelmingly single, young men without papers — in Rwanda. That is the Conservative government’s plan which is scheduled to start in several weeks’ time. It is an attempt to reduce the number of migrant crossings which went up from several hundred per annum a few years ago to 28,000+ in 2021.
In a further note on the Church of England, which illustrates what MacArthur is rightly condemning, a 30-something ordinand, GB News commentator Calvin Robinson, is unable to be formally ordained yet because he follows the Bible and is not conforming to the world. The C of E doesn’t like biblical preaching. The C of E is one of the worldliest denominations around. However, many of us stick around because we love the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and, where we can find it, the liturgy of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. We ignore everything and everyone else.
The channel’s article on Robinson’s struggle appeared on Holy Saturday:
When asked what reason the Church gave to him as to why they cancelled his curacy, Calvin added: “They said it would be too turbulent for me to be an ordained minister and have a public profile.
“The official line will be that there [are]n’t enough curacies in London but that is nonsense as I have had several offers for title posts, but even then the Church says no.
“It’s not about there not being enough space, it’s purely politics.”
In response to Calvin’s comments, the Diocese of London told GB News: “In the Diocese of London, we have a limited number of curacies available each year that are considered on a case-by-case basis.
“We work with and support Ordinands throughout the discernment process to establish the right path for each person.
“In this instance, it was felt that there was no suitable option available that London could offer.
“Calvin continues to be a candidate sponsored for ordination. We continue to be willing to work with him to discern the right way forward, and we keep him in our prayers.”
Last year, Calvin Robinson presented an hour-long programme, The Meaning of Christmas.
This year, he presented a similar programme on Easter, featuring classic hymns, a biblical viewpoint and interviews with clergy and laity discussing the meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection as well as what it was like living in our Lord’s era under Roman rule:
I, too, will keep Calvin in my prayers for his future. He was a teacher for several years, and he would make a good priest. He’d be an ideal Archbishop of Canterbury.
One can only live in hope for the future.
One of John MacArthur’s sermons that I used for my Holy Saturday exegesis on the Epistle is ‘Breaking Sin’s Grip’ from 1992.
It might seem as if 1992 were a long time ago, but his sermon is as fresh today 30 years on as it was then.
In it, he asks, ‘Whatever happened to sin?’
Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
… it struck me that the present political scene is talking a lot about values. Have you noticed that? Everybody wants to talk about family values, moral values, traditional values, and it strikes me as a rather a fruitless discussion since no one is willing to talk about sin. And as long as you will not define sin then you cannot define morality; and so all the talk about values amounts to little more than some sentimentality.
In fact, I’ve been so concerned about this that I have a three-book contract with Word Publishers and I said to them, I said, “This third book that I’m going to write which hasn’t yet been done, I would like to write on the subject of sin,” thinking that I would immediately get told that that would never work. I was amazed when they responded by saying, “We think that’s great.” So I’m prepared in the next few months to dig into the subject of whatever happened to sin.
And it’s kind of a curious thing to me because it’s, if anything is true of our society, true that we don’t want to even acknowledge sin. We continue down a path of improperly diagnosing man’s behavior and therefore not having any clue about how to cure it.
Several years ago Dr. Karl Menninger, of the famous Menninger Clinic, which is a psychiatric clinic and he’s a world-famous psychiatrist, wrote a book and the title of the book was just that, Whatever Happened To Sin? Here was a renowned psychiatrist basically saying, “I operate a psychiatric clinic and if I’m going to help people with their problems, I have got to tell them about sin.” He tried to make people face the reality of sin as the curse that creates the problems of life. The book was somewhat widely read but also widely rejected.
Frankly, sin isn’t as nearly as marketable as other things. Today in our culture I think it would be fair to say that sin isn’t even an acceptable word. You don’t hear anybody talk about sin, certainly not a politician, rarely a preacher in some cases. Not only is it an unacceptable word, it is an unacceptable cause for the troubles of man. With all this talk about values and no talk about sin, the definition of values is hopelessly vague.
Certainly sin is not an acceptable diagnosis of man’s problems. We look at the world and what do we see? We see evil everywhere but it’s not defined as evil. We see sin everywhere but it’s not defined as sin. It’s not an acceptable word. It’s not an acceptable cause. It’s not an acceptable diagnosis of man’s nature.
In fact, things that we used to willingly say were sin we don’t want to call sin anymore. There was a column in the August 29 Dallas Morning News written by columnist Anne Melvin. She wrote this column about sin interestingly enough. This is what it says, part of it: “Most sins have gained respectability through politics or profitability. They’re mostly all legalized, advertised, organized, supervised and taxed. We’ve got liquor by the drink, and young girls dress like hookers just to be in fashion at their homecoming dance. We’ve got your basic graphic sex on cable TV and an entertainment market from wind-up toys to electronic state-of-the-art based solely on violence. So, hey, is it fair to name all these little diversions sins?”
She goes on, “Sin, go figure out how you can make a fortune for Time Warner with a recording about killing cops, how you can refuse to let school children say grace for lunch and then teach them how to use a condom before recess. Clearly we are foundering here, a society preoccupied with values yet hopelessly vague on sin,” end quote.
It isn’t just the politicians and it isn’t just the profit takers who want to market sin and sell it. The politicians don’t want to talk about sin because they don’t want to alienate any sinning votes. The entrepreneurs and the materialists don’t want to talk about sin because they can sell it. The government doesn’t want to talk about sin because they can tax it. But what is really most amazing, I guess, of all is that even the people helpers, the counselors, the psychologists, the psychiatrists, they don’t want to talk about sin either. And again I remind you, they don’t want to talk about sin because they don’t want to deal with the sin in their own lives, and secondly, because sin doesn’t sell very well. Sickness sells a lot better. Addiction is a much nicer word than iniquity.
I read a book yesterday, the title of it is, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. It’s a short book, I read it in the morning and then I thought about it in the afternoon. It’s written by a lady by the name of Wendy Kaminer and it’s a secular book. And in this secular book she confronts as a critic the new anthropology, the new theology, the new psychology. That new stuff that is called abuse psychology, or codependency, all of that kind of stuff that basically is saying, “You’re really a wonderful person and everybody keeps abusing you and what’s happening outside of you is the problem because everything inside of you is so wonderful.”
She talks about the fact that this new anthropology, this new sociology, psychology, theology and she even lists…well she lists secular sociologists, secular psychiatrists, Christian psychologists into one big bag as all affirming basically the same thing. She writes this in evaluating the movement and articulating what they believe. This isn’t her view but this is what she says they are espousing, “No matter how bad you’ve been in the narcissistic 1970s and the inquisitive 1980s, no matter how many drugs you’ve ingested, or sex acts you’ve performed, or how much corruption you’ve enjoyed, you’re still essentially innocent. The divine child inside you is always untouched by the worst of your sins.”
And then she further says these new definers of man’s nature say, quote: “Because no one is inhabited by evil or unhealthy urges because inside every addict” that’s the new word for sinner “is a holy child yearning to be free.” And then she goes on assessing what they say, “They say inner children are always good, innocent and pure, like the most sentimentalized Dickens characters, which means that people are essentially good and evil is merely a mask, a dysfunction.” She says, “The therapeutic view of evil as sickness not sin is strong in codependency theory.” that’s that new kind of theory. “Shaming children, for example, is considered a primary form of abuse.”
In other words, what she’s saying, if I can digress, is that if you make your child feel any shame about anything, any guilt about anything, that is a form of child abuse. That will wind up, you can be sure, in the courts, and it already has as child abuse.
She goes on, “Both guilt and shame are not useful, they say.” And then she adds, “Someone should remind these people that there is a name for people who lack guilt and shame. They’re called sociopaths.” She’s right.
But here is a secular writer looking at the face of the people-helping industry and saying these people are saying that innately inside in the deepest heart of man, he is innocent, pure, holy and good. Boy, it’s amazing how all these people who are that way on the inside can be so rotten on the outside.
The point is this. You basically have a culture that denies the reality of sin. And as we said in our discussions about homosexuality, if you misdiagnose the problem then you’re not going to be able to offer the proper cure. So what happens is, if you alleviate people of the responsibility for dealing with the sin in their lives, you have, in effect, made them unredeemable. You have damned them.
That’s the kind of culture we live in, not just minimizing sin but eliminating it. And then coming up with the unbelievable idea that man is some kind of good, holy, pure thing inside, longing to be free from these terrible dysfunctions that have occurred on his outside because of the way he’s been abused by others, usually his parents.
Now we’re victims, to some extent, of that kind of thing in our culture. We have as wicked, as wretched, as sinful, and as vile a culture as could be imagined. And at the same time we have a massive campaign to remove the word “sin” from our vocabulary. You talk about putting people in an unredeemable position. They aren’t even going to understand that they are responsible for their own offense against God. They’re not even going to be in a position to seek a deliverer from their iniquity, thus they are unredeemable. I can’t imagine that Satan could have devised any more effective plan than to move a culture toward the most wretched, vile kind of life, and at the same time sell it wholesale the philosophy that no such thing as sin exists innately in the human heart. Talk about damning a culture, damning a world, that’s how to do it.
Now the fallout to this…the fallout to this we feel in the church, and the church tends to minimize the reality of sin, even in its own life even among Christians. We tend to be desensitized, don’t we, to the iniquity around us, and if we are desensitized, let me tell you this, to the iniquity around us we will be desensitized to the iniquity in us. If I am not outraged by the sin I see outside, then I will be less likely to be outraged by the sin I see inside. People always decry the Victorian era, periods of history where even the society itself has had a highly developed sense of sin. But those kinds of societies at least articulated a morality that held the church accountable. Now society holds the church accountable for nothing because society has no morality, no definition of sin, therefore the church can behave itself in just about any way it wants. In fact, I imagine today that because of the way the church has behaved itself in our culture, it would be very hard for anybody in the church to do anything that would shock the world.
So the fallout of this kind of sinless definition of man and the overexposure that even Christians have to iniquity and to sin through the media, desensitizes us to our own sin. And I’ll tell you what that can do. Because we don’t really see the sinfulness of sin, because we don’t really see how sinful we are, it is possible to think of ourselves as more holy than we really are. If you go back, for example, and read in the writings of godly men in…in the past, you very often find them bemoaning and bemoaning and bemoaning their own sin. And you read about their lives and they seem so holy and so pure and so devoted to Christ and yet so overwrought with sin. Sin was highly defined in ancient times, even in the society in many cases. And it held even the people who were Christians up to a high standard. Nobody was letting them off the hook in the culture. Nobody was blaming their parents for the way they acted, nobody was blaming some codependency or some addiction. Everybody was dealing in the culture with sin as sin, at least to some degree. And consequently people were confined to those definitions, saw them for what they really are and I think in some ways the sort of general human goodness in the culture, the sort of pervasive morality helped control the thinking even of Christians. Now we don’t have that benefit. We can just about call ourselves Christians and live any way we want to live. And if we sort of exceed the average, we tend to think of ourselves as holy.
J.I. Packer, who is a well-known theologian and a skilled thinker, writes this, “Christians often imagine themselves to be strong, healthy and holy. But the way to health is to recognize that we are weak and sick and sinful.”
The point is, don’t let the society give you the standard. I mean, if you’re a little better than the society you’re in, that doesn’t make you very good because they don’t have any definition of sin.
Packer goes on to say, “The first truth is that we are all invalids in God’s hospital,” all of us Christians. He’s talking about believers. “In moral and spiritual terms we are sick and damaged, diseased and deformed, scarred and sore, lame and lopsided to a far, far greater extent than we realize. We need,” he writes “to realize that the spiritual health we testify to is only partial and relative, a matter of being less sinful and less incapacitated than we were before.” And then here’s a great statement: “Our spiritual life is a fragile convalescence. It is a fragile convalescence easily disrupted and we are prone to damaging delusions about it.” Profound.
I grieve because the way our culture goes does affect the church. And because we’re two notches above the way they live we assume that we are holy. We are engaged in a fragile convalescence from the near fatal disease of unregenerate life. Therefore we need to deal with sin and we need to deal with it strongly in our lives. And we cannot allow the world’s standard to become ours. The politicians can talk all they want about values, family values, traditional values, but when they talk about that they do not mean what you and I understand as biblical Christianity. We’ve got to deal with it on biblical terms.
At that point in the sermon, MacArthur begins preaching on 1 Peter 4:1-8, on turning from sin to doing God’s will.
He discusses our Lord’s death on the Cross, taking our sins onto His body, which believers remembered on Good Friday last week:
… sin was thrown upon Him in its fullness as He bore our sins. In fact, the Bible says He was made sin on the cross and there the heavy weight of sin was placed upon Him. He suffered, as it were, in the flesh and He suffered from the attacks of sin. Sin attacked Him in temptation, obviously from outside since He was impeccable, sinless and could not sin on the inside because He was holy God. Sin attacked Him through the persecutions. Sin, of course, then was even poured upon Him in its fullness by God the Father as He became the substitute.
In every case remember this, will you, sin made Christ suffer. He battled it through temptation. He suffered the indignities and the persecution and the blasphemy and the hatred and the hostility and the violence of evil men and women. And He suffered until it crushed out His life when He bore sin on the cross.
So look back. If you’re going to entertain sin in your life, says Peter, look back. He’s reminding persecuted believers here, by the way, who are undergoing some heavy, heavy persecution. And under that kind of duress it is not unreasonable to assume that some of them may have begun to defect, maybe not wanting to take the heat, some small compromises. And he reminds them that Christ, the very One he has just described in verses 18 to 22 of chapter 3, who gave His life for them, who when reviled reviled not again, who when He was being evil spoken of never retaliated, and who paid for their sins, that same Christ suffered extremely beyond anything they will ever know and never sinned and never fell to sin, and never stopped trusting the Father, and never yielded up His confidence, and never gave away His hope, and never defected. And He becomes your pattern.
Sin did everything it could to destroy Christ. It was ineffective and He was triumphant. But He endured it all and it was all painful. Even temptation must have been some kind of an offense to His holy nature. Certainly blasphemy was and mockery and all the rest, and to say nothing of sin bearing. He suffered. He suffered and naver…never gave in. He suffered and never sinned. And he says, does Peter, you have to arm yourself with the same purpose and you know that the one who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin. The one who goes all the way to death is relieved from sin.
Well what is that point? The point is this, if you’re faithful like Christ was even to the place where they take your life, as bad as it sounds it’s really good because when you die you cease from what? From sin. That’s the arm… That’s how you arm your mind. You say, “I will be holy and I will be pure like my Lord, He is the author and the finisher of faith. He is the model and the example and He suffered all the way to blood. And if I go that far in my suffering, if I stand for Christ and holiness and righteousness and it cost me my life, the reward is no more sin, for death means sin has ceased.”
When Christ died on the cross He was relieved from sin. Never again would He be tempted. Never again would He be persecuted. Never again would anybody spit in His face. Never again would they mock Him to His face. He was exalted to the right hand of the Father. Never again would He bear in His own body our sins. Sin was gone forever from any personal contact with Christ.
And so it is with us. He says, look, if you’re going to deal with sin you’ve got to have the same kind of purpose, the same kind of…the word in the Greek means idea, thought, concept, the same perspective is probably the best way to say it, that Christ had. I will endure to the very end, even if I die in the process I will then be freed from sin for good. That’s the resoluteness of purpose that you see exemplified in Christ. The One who was made sin, the One who came into the world in the likeness of sinful flesh, Paul says in Romans 8:3, gives us the pattern. If we’re going to live no longer in the flesh, following the lusts of men, we have to have that kind of perspective.
And then there’s a second thought here at the end of verse 2 that strikes me. If we are going to have this same perspective, and if we’re going to see what sin did to Christ and therefore its horror and its heinousness and realize that like He we are to endure without compromise to the very end because even that means only reward and bliss, beyond that if we’re going to live the rest of the time in the flesh we have to recognize not only how sin affected Christ, but how it affects God, how it affects God.
Look back in the past. He says you are to live no longer in the lust of men but for the will of God. You’ve got to realize that every time you’ve committed a sin in your past, you’ve defied God’s will, you’ve disobeyed God’s will, you’ve rejected God’s will. In a sense, you’ve usurped the throne. You’ve pushed God aside and said I will take command of my life; I will do whatever I want to do. You’re not in charge, I’m in charge. It is the ultimate act of blasphemy, really, because it questions God’s authority, it questions God’s sovereignty. Follow this, it questions God’s wisdom. It questions God’s goodness because sin says I’m in charge, I’ll do it if I want, I’ll make this thing work out into my life, I’ll do it because it will bring me pleasure, it will bring me satisfaction. And all of that says, “God, You don’t really love me or You wouldn’t withhold this thing from me cause it’s going to be so good. God, You’re not really wise or You’d really see how this thing can work in my life some way and produce some benefit. You’re not really in charge because You can’t stop me from doing this.”
You see all of that is inherent in sinning. When I sin I say, “God, move over, I’m in charge.” I say, “God, You’re not as wise as You think You are because if You were You’d let me do this and understand it will all work out. And thirdly, You’re not as good and gracious and kind as You ought to be because if You were You’d let me have what I so desperately want.”
You see, all of that attacks the character and the purpose of God and I become then a rebel. Look back at your sin and understand what it was. It was an attack on the will of God, an attack on the authority of God, the sovereignty of God, the purpose of God. It is flat, outright, overt disobedience to God. And how can you, as we read this morning, say you love Him and not obey Him? See sin for what it is. Back in Psalm 51 David said, “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.” All sin is against God. It attacks Him first and foremost. That’s why the point of confession is to God. You may affect others with your sin but the primary point of confession is always to God. You may need to seek forgiveness from others because you have sinned against them. The primary point of confession is still God. He is the One most holy, He is the One most offended.
If I’m going to deal with sin in my life, then, I’ve got to look back and see what it did to Christ, how it pursued Him all through His life and brought Him only pain, only sadness, even tears, ultimately death. That’s what sin is like, it wants to kill Christ. It wants to kill the purest who ever lived. You need to remember that. That’s what it wants to do and that’s what it wants to do to you, kill what is pure, what is Christ-like.
And, secondly, you need to remember, too, that sin is a violation of the will of God. And every time you have sinned in the past you have, as it were, usurped the role that God has as the authority and the leader. Jeremiah, the prophet, wrote a couple of times the words where God said, “I have spoken to you again and again yet you haven’t listened to Me.” How it must grieve the heart of God that His children are so rebellious. Every time we sin it is outright rebellion, and what a long track record of rebellion. It isn’t helpful to go back into the past and regurgitate all your specific sins. God has forgotten them. He’s buried them in the depths of the deepest sea. They’re removed as far as the east is from the west. He remembers them no more. But it is good to remind yourself that every time you ever sinned you absolutely, rebelliously struck a blow against the will of God.
And there’s a third thing that I think comes out in this text and that is very vivid in verses 3 to 5. You must remember what sin has done to lost humanity. You must remember what sin has done to lost humanity. Or to put it more personally, remember what sin was doing in your life before you became a Christian.
What a powerful meditation for Easter Week.
Let us remember the power of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection as we move forward in the Easter season. More loving acts have never been done for sinful mankind.
Therefore, let us show God and His Son Jesus Christ the reverence and devotion they so rightly and richly deserve from us.
Let us turn away from sin and lead a new life, following in their Commandments.
The painting above is by the Renaissance artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, father and son. Lucas Cranach the Younger finished the painting in 1555. It is the centre altar painting in Sts Peter and Paul (Lutheran) Church in Weimar, Germany. Read more about it:
My Good Friday post from 2017 has several entries about the significance of the Crucifixion, Christ’s ultimate sacrifice for mankind which erased our debt of sin in the New Covenant.
Readings for Good Friday can be found here.
The exegesis for the Gospel reading is here.
The Epistle, the first of two choices from the Book of Hebrews, is as follows (emphases mine):
Hebrews 10:16-25
10:16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds,”
10:17 he also adds, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
10:18 Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.
10:19 Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus,
10:20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh),
10:21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
10:22 let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
10:23 Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.
10:24 And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds,
10:25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
To better understand this passage it is helpful to read my exegesis, thanks to Matthew Henry and John MacArthur, on the Epistle for Monday of Holy Week: Hebrews 9:11-15, in which Christ is represented as the ultimate and true tabernacle, replacing that of the Old Testament and Old Covenant with the New Testament and the New Covenant.
Christ rent the veil of the Holy of Holies, permitting all of us to approach God, which, heretofore, even the high priests could not do for more than a second once a year.
The author of Hebrews cites Jeremiah 31 in today’s reading:
31 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to[d] them,[e]”
declares the Lord.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
The audience for the Book of Hebrews were Jews who had become Christians and Jews who were intellectually interested by Jesus. The first group was prone to giving up the faith — apostasy — because Christianity is such a departure from Mosaic law and Jewish tradition. The second were to be encouraged to become Christians.
Hebrews is an apologetic for Christianity for the Jewish mindset. However, I gained a much deeper understanding of the faith by reading and writing about it for my Forbidden Bible Verses series. The first entry for Hebrews 10 is below:
Hebrews 10:1-3 – Christ’s blood sacrifice one and sufficient, Jesus, God, sin, forgiveness
The author cites Jeremiah 33 in verse 26, in which God says that He will make a New Covenant with His people, putting His laws into their hearts and writing them on their minds.
This was a stumbling block for the Jews of Hebrews, so the author reminds them that the New Covenant was always part of God’s plan.
John MacArthur says:
… the sacrifice of Christ is effective because it fulfills the promised new covenant. God said, “I’m going to bring a new covenant.” And when Jesus died, He sealed the new covenant. Remember, the covenants in the Old Testament were always sealed in blood, weren’t they? Jesus died and sealed the new covenant …
And Jeremiah 31 is a prophecy of the new covenant, you see, and it says to the Jew, “God always intended a new covenant, so what are you so uptight about? Because it’s arrived. What are you accusing us of heresy for? What are you accusing of some new revelation for? This is the same thing Jeremiah told you was coming. Read your own testament.”
God told Jeremiah (Jeremiah 31:34) that He would no longer remember His people’s sins and lawless deeds (verse 17).
Matthew Henry says that this:
will alone show the riches of divine grace, and the sufficiency of Christ’s satisfaction, that it needs not be repeated …
The author of Hebrews explains that, as these sins are and will be forgiven, no further offering for sin needs to be made (verse 18).
MacArthur elaborates on this verse and the dilemma of these Jews on hearing it:
… Jeremiah said it would happen, but Jeremiah didn’t say it on his own. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Now, do you see what the writer is doing to these Jewish readers? He’s putting them on the horns of an unbelievable dilemma. He’s saying this – he’s placing these readers in a position where they will accept their beloved prophet Jeremiah, and they will accept what the Holy Spirit said through him, and if they do that, they’ll have to accept Christ and the new covenant. If they reject Christ and the new covenant, they also reject Jeremiah and the Holy Spirit.
Now, that’s a tough spot to be in because they loved Jeremiah and they believed in the Holy Spirit. And what He’s saying to them is, “You don’t need the old because the new is come, and God even promised that it would come.”
In verse 18, he wraps it up. What a terrific statement. “Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.” It’s done. It’s forgiven. Don’t go back to the temple and make more sacrifices. It’s over. Complete forgiveness. You just need to lean on the one sacrifice of Jesus. You say, “You mean to tell me that I can be saved tonight, without any works, by just leaning on the one perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ?” That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. Exactly.
The sacrifice of Christ is effective, then, forever because it fulfills God’s will. It replaces the old system. It sanctifies the believer. It removes sin. It destroys the enemy. It has eternal security built into it. And, lastly, it fulfills the promise for a new covenant. It’s so perfect, you can’t add anything to it. All you need to do is believe. You say, “Does God want me to do that?” Yes, He does.
John Donne preached much the same in his sermon ‘Christ’s Legacy’ based on John 14:20, about which I wrote earlier this week. The Holy Spirit will equip us for what we need to do in matters of faith. We need not know how the holy mysteries work, just that they are worthy of our belief. Christ is in us and we are in Him.
Returning to Hebrews and this promise of the New Covenant, this means, therefore, that we can enter the sanctuary with confidence (verse 19) because the blood of Jesus opened a new and living way for us to go beyond the veil of the Holy of Holies (verse 20).
MacArthur indicates the importance of the word ‘therefore’ in that verse:
… you’ll notice that 19 begins, “Having therefore,” and the therefores are always there for a good reason. They always point backwards. “On the basis of what I’ve said for 10 chapters and 18 verses, you must respond.” If you know the gospel of Jesus Christ, you either then take a positive response and boldly, verse 19, “enter into the holiest,” or you take a negative response, verse 26, you sin willfully after you knew the truth, and you fall away, and judgment comes about. Only two responses.
After the Crucifixion, the veil to the Holy of Holies in the temple was rent in two.
Henry describes this historic and theological event for us:
The veil in the tabernacle and temple signified the body of Christ; when he died, the veil of the temple was rent in sunder, and this was at the time of the evening sacrifice, and gave the people a surprising view into the holy of holies, which they never had before. Our way to heaven is by a crucified Saviour; his death is to us the way of life. To those who believe this he will be precious.
The rest of the verses in this reading give us a practical application of what we are to do in our Christian journey.
Henry says the following about the change in tone. He, like many others of his era, believed that Paul wrote Hebrews, although subsequent scholars do not:
And now we have gone through the doctrinal part of the epistle, in which we have met with many things dark and difficult to be understood, which we must impute to the weakness and dulness of our own minds. The apostle now proceeds to apply this great doctrine, so as to influence their affections, and direct their practice, setting before them the dignities and duties of the gospel state.
MacArthur says of this transition and the preceding verses:
… it’s an appeal for men to come to Christ is what it is, on the basis of doctrine. You see, no biblical appeal is ever really made apart from a solid foundation in doctrine. That’s true all the way through Scripture. All solid appeals are based on doctrine. And so ten chapters of basic doctrine about the identity of Christ and finally he says, “Now here’s the opportunity for you to respond.” And the first, then, is a positive response, and would to God that this would be the response that all men would have, that you tonight who don’t know Christ would have even tonight.
The positive response is salvation. Now, salvation is made up of three features, and these are common in our understanding throughout the Scripture: faith, hope, and what’s the third? Love. Faith, hope, love. Now, if you’ll notice the text, first of all is faith. “Let us draw near,” verse [22] … Verse 23, “Let us hold fast.” And then there’s love, verse 24, “Let us consider one another.”
Three statements beginning with “Let us,” one having to do with faith, one having to do with hope and one having to do with love. And they really kind of separate into three features the experience of salvation. Salvation is drawing near, holding fast and loving each other. That’s the fullness of salvation. Somebody who draws near and falls away, that’s not salvation. Somebody who draws near, sticks around a while but doesn’t love his brother falls under the qualifications of 1 John, in which it says, “If any man say he love God and love not his brother” – he’s what? – “he’s a liar.”
And so salvation could be kind of dissected into faith, hope, and love. Faith in God, holding fast to our hope, and loving each other, that indicates a true believer. And so he’s talking about a real response. “Come on,” he says, “draw near, hold fast and love each other.” And what he’s really saying, pushed into one statement, is: “Take a positive response to the gospel.”
MacArthur describes the Holy of Holies and the significance it has even today for orthodox Jews:
You remember that in the Old Testament, as we’ve been studying, there was a tabernacle or a temple, and inside of the totality of this outer courtyard there was what was called the holy places, the holy place, and inside, separated by a veil, was the Holy of Holies. And in the Holy of Holies, God dwelt. And no man could enter into that place except the high priest once a year to offer atonement for the sins of the nation Israel. But now he is saying, “You all can enter into God’s presence. The veil has been torn down, and you can all enter in, and you can enter in boldly.”
So we have this new entrance, you see, into the holiest by the blood of Jesus. And, of course, this is a fantastic statement to a Jew because to a Jew, entering into the holiest is absolutely forbidden. And if a Jew ever tried to do that under the old economy, he would’ve been instantly consumed in the flames of the fire of almighty wrath. And no Jew would ever conceive of going into the Holy of Holies.
In fact, it’s interesting. If you go to Jerusalem, you’ll find out that there’s a certain area of the temple ground where it is forbidden to Jews to ever walk there because it may be the area where the Holy of Holies once stood, and no Jew would ever put his foot on the Holy of Holies. Therefore, there are big signs outside the gates of the temple that say Orthodox Jews have been forbidden by the rabbi to enter into this place lest they step on the Holy of Holies.
They have a fear, still today, the Orthodox Jews, of ever going into the presence of God. But because of the new covenant, he says we can have boldness. We don’t even go in sheepishly, saying, “God, I’m coming, don’t step on me,” see. We can enter in boldly. It’s a fantastic concept for the Jewish mind to understand. Now, when he uses the term “brethren,” just a point of information, when he uses the term “brethren” here as on other occasions in the book of Hebrews and also in the book of Romans, he’s talking to Jewish brethren, not Christians.
“Having, therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus,” I think, has primary reference to the Jews, to the brotherhood of Jews as it is so used elsewhere in Hebrews and, as I said, in Romans. On the basis of all that you’ve learned, therefore, on the basis of everything I’ve said in chapter 7, 8, 9, and 10 about the openness, about the fact that Jesus made the perfect sacrifice, that Jesus provided access, that Jesus provided entrance, on the fact of all of that, you have boldness to go on in and meet God person-to-person. The blood of Jesus has opened the way.
You see, in the Old Testament there was a lot of blood being shed, but none of it ever opened up the veil, did it? All of the blood of all of the animals never did it. It couldn’t open the way. It couldn’t do it.
MacArthur says that the Parable of the Prodigal Son has to do with God’s forgiveness and treating us as if we were made new again, just as the prodigal’s father treated him:
… the prodigal who went away came to himself, realizing he’s having – he’d spent all of his means, and he wound up in a pigpen, slopping pigs. “And he said to himself, ‘I will arise and go to my father.’” You say, “Well, that’s real good. Who wouldn’t in your situation?” But that isn’t how God sees it. God takes a man when he comes, whatever his reason.
“And he arose and he went.” And you find him – when he gets back, and you find him in his father’s house. You don’t find him outside the door. You don’t find him peeking through the portholes or the windows or whatever. He’s in the house. Sovereign grace has given him boldness to enter the house. Why not? He confessed his sin. He received the kiss of reconciliation. The father put on him the best robe, gave him a ring for his finger. He was fitted to enter the father’s house, and that’s where you find him, not outside looking in. Boldness.
And so in the passage of the prodigal, we are told the prodigal had been, in a sense, perfected. He had been made fit to enter the father’s house. And so it is in the experience of one who comes to God. Jesus Christ puts the right robe on, the right ring on his finger, and gives him the right things so that he may enter the Father’s house and not be in the wrong place. He can go in boldly. And, of course, those in Judaism were afraid. This whole concept was so revolutionary to them. There was no way they were going to understand it in the first – the first time it was indicated. That’s why it’s been repeated so many times in the book of Hebrews.
Therefore, the perfect sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is the new way (verse 20) of coming to the Lord God.
MacArthur explains the word ‘new’ in the original Greek manuscript:
The word “new” is a very rare word in the New Testament. It is not the typical word for “new,” neos, kainos, none of those words. It is this word: prospheton. You know what it means? Freshly slaughtered. That’s the literal meaning. What it says is we have boldness to enter into the holiness by the blood of Jesus by a freshly slaughtered and living way. How vivid. How vivid. Who was it that was freshly slaughtered that opened the way? Jesus Christ, a freshly slain road to God. All the old sacrifices didn’t make it.
The old road was a dead road. It wasn’t a new and living way. It was an old, dead one. There wasn’t any life there. The old way was only an index finger pointing to the new road – in Christ. And I love the fact that it’s been at least 30 years since Jesus died when this was written, but it’s still fresh. It’s still a freshly slaughtered way. Isn’t that terrific? You know, under the old economy, you had to sacrifice an animal all the time, every day, every day, every day, every day, and every year through the Yom Kippur ceremony, all the time, over and over and over and over. Jesus Christ was slain once, and His slaying is fresh, and still just as fresh today, 2,000 years later, as it was the day it happened.
His sacrifice is effectual for all of time and thus it is spoken of as fresh. It’s ever fresh because He’s really the Lamb slain from before the foundations of the world. His sacrifice is always fresh. And for the man who comes to Jesus Christ tonight, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is fresh. Because the Bible says through the Apostle Paul that the moment you’re saved, you die with Christ. “You are crucified with Christ, nevertheless you live.” And so in a very real sense, Christ’s crucifixion is just as fresh as the moment that you experience Him. It’s a fresh way. Not only that, it’s a living way.
Oh, that’s exciting. And that talks about resurrection. How can you have a slain and a living sacrifice? It never worked in the Old Testament. You had a dead one, and that was it. None of those animals bounced back to come alive again. None of those pieces joined back together. But here, it’s a living way. Jesus isn’t even a dead sacrifice. He’s alive. He’s risen. And he’s seated at the right hand of the Father, making intercession for us. And so it’s a living way because the sacrifice is alive.
The author of Hebrews says that, in Christ, we have a great high priest presiding over the house of God, the Church (verse 21).
MacArthur explains the significance of our great high priest, who could do what the priests of the Old Covenant could never accomplish:
… when the high priest in Israel went into the Holy of Holies on that one day, he just brushed the veil aside and went in. When Christ died, He didn’t brush the veil aside. He split it from top to bottom, and left it wide open …
The term “high priest” here is really translated “great priest.” And it is used, perhaps, in ancient Hebrew to speak of the high priest but it is accurately the great priest. And He, the great priest, is there in God’s presence mediating for us. You see? And the term “the house of God” has to do with all believers. All believers. Peter uses it thusly in 1 Peter 4:17 and Paul in Ephesians 2:21 and 22. All believers are seen, then, in a sense, as the house of God, the habitation of God. And so Jesus Christ opened the way, a new and living way, but He didn’t only open it, He took us in there with Him …
Jesus Christ not only pointed out the access to God, but He took me by the arm and ushered me into His presence, and He sits there with me. In Revelation chapter 3, it says that I sit on the throne with Jesus, who sits on the Father’s throne. It’s a beautiful thought. And so He’s the great priest in the presence of God, living to intercede for me. His life is there, and He is there. And Romans 5:10 says if His death could do so much to save me, oh, what His life must be doing in the presence of God to keep me, as He’s there, securing my place in the presence of God.
I’m anchored there by His presence, because I’m inseparably and eternally connected to Him. Do you see? He that is joined to the Lord is what? One spirit. And the Lord is in there, in the throne of God, seated at the right hand of God, in His presence. And if He’s there, I’m there with Him, because we’re one.
The author of Hebrews then goes into what we must do to remain believers.
We must approach our Lord with a true heart, a full assurance of faith, our hearts cleansed — as if by the sacrificial cleansing room of the tabernacle — sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water (verse 23).
MacArthur elaborates on the meaning of this verse:
… “Let us draw near honestly” – now watch this – “in full assurance of” – what? – “faith.” In full assurance of faith. He must come to God in faith. Not works, not self-righteousness. Faith. And not doubting, but believing God. “He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that” – what? – “diligently seek Him.” You must believe to come to God, and that’s really all God asks, is that you believe. Believing is so important …
… “Come with full assurance of faith, having our hearts” – and here’s what happens when we come – “our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.” When you come to God through Jesus Christ, something begins to happen.
Now, you remember that this is, of course, a picture of the Old Testament ritual. The priest would wash himself. The holy things were cleansed. And everything was sprinkled with the blood of the sacrifice. And all through all of this sprinkling of blood and everything, the priest was constantly bathing and cleansing himself in the laver, which was the basin of clear water. But it was all external, you see. You see, it was the body and everything else sprinkled. And it was the body washed with water. It never got inside. Only Jesus can really cleanse a man’s heart. His is no external purification, but by His Spirit He cleanses the inmost thoughts and desires of a man.
Now, notice the statement “having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience.” This is a beautiful picture of deliverance. The same kind of deliverance in chapter 9, verse 14, where it says, “He purges our conscience.” Conscience condemns. Conscience brings guilt. And the guilt can never be removed until the sin is removed. And when Jesus died, His blood removed our sins, and thus our conscience becomes free from guilt.
When Jesus’ blood is shed and we believe, our sins are forgiven. And when the burden of a guilt-ridden conscience is removed, we’ve been cleansed from an evil conscience. The precious blood of Jesus Christ removes the evil conscience, that condemning, guilty feeling, and we don’t condemn ourselves anymore.
Now, that has to do with God’s side. You see, when you’re saved, sin is forgiven. Sin is forgiven. You’re sprinkled, as it were. Like on the Passover, the blood was sprinkled and the angel of death passed by. You’re sprinkled and cleaned. That’s satisfaction toward God, or expiation, if you want a theological word. It’s the cleansing that applies toward God. In other words, sin is removed.
But, secondly, there is something that has to do with you. Our bodies are washed with pure water. And here we have simply the idea that there is a cleansing that goes on within us by the Spirit of God. First of all, blood is sprinkled to satisfy God. Then you and I are cleansed on the inside by water.
Now, some people say that’s baptism, but it can’t be baptism. That’s not the point there. In John chapter 3, verse 5, it talks about being washed by the water and the Spirit, or being born again by the water and the Spirit, and the water there is really the water of the Word that cleanses us.
In Titus chapter 3, verse 5, “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us by the washing of regeneration.” And there you have a spiritual metaphor, the washing of regeneration. In Ephesians chapter 5, you have a similar statement in verse 26, or at least one that can apply, “that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word.” You see, this is talking about a spiritual cleansing. So you have two things when you’re saved. Number one, God is satisfied, and two, you’re changed. You see?
We must hold fast to the hope we confessed without wavering (verse 23). That means refusing apostasy.
Henry explains:
Here observe, (1.) The duty itself–to hold fast the profession of our faith, to embrace all the truths and ways of the gospel, to get fast hold of them, and to keep that hold against all temptation and opposition. Our spiritual enemies will do what they can to wrest our faith, and hope, and holiness, and comfort, out of our hands, but we must hold fast our religion as our best treasure. (2.) The manner in which we must do this–without wavering, without doubting, without disputing, without dallying with temptation to apostasy. Having once settled these great things between God and our souls, we must be stedfast and immovable. Those who begin to waver in matters of Christian faith and practice are in danger of falling away. (3.) The motive or reason enforcing this duty: He is faithful that hath promised. God has made great and precious promises to believers, and he is a faithful God, true to his word; there is no falseness nor fickleness with him, and there should be none with us. His faithfulness should excite and encourage us to be faithful, and we must depend more upon his promises to us than upon our promises to him, and we must plead with him the promise of grace sufficient.
We are asked to provoke each other to love and good deeds (verse 24), i.e. the fruits of faith.
MacArthur explains the word ‘provoke’ in Greek:
You need each other. You need to love each other. You need to kind of irritate” – the word “provoke” literally is “irritate,” it’s a negative word. “Irritate each other into good works.” Paroxusmos. Stimulate good works and stimulate love. These are the things that go together in the Christian experience, love and good works.
We can compare that to the grit that irritates an oyster into producing a magnificent pearl. Out of something irritating comes a thing of true beauty.
Finally, we are to continue in fellowship, not only occasionally, as some do, but encouraging each other to come together in worship, all the more as the Day approaches (verse 25).
For those Jews, it was the coming of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. This passage was written in AD 62. The temple was destroyed eight years later.
For us, this means the day we die as well as the Day of Judgement, whenever it comes. We must be prepared at all times, and worship helps us to do that.
Henry says:
There was a day approaching, a terrible day to the Jewish nation, when their city should be destroyed, and the body of the people rejected of God for rejecting Christ. This would be a day of dispersion and temptation to the chosen remnant. Now the apostle puts them upon observing what signs there were of the approach of such a terrible day, and upon being the more constant in meeting together and exhorting one another, that they might be the better prepared for such a day. There is a trying day coming on us all, the day of our death, and we should observe all the signs of its approaching, and improve them to greater watchfulness and diligence in duty.
The ensuing verses have to do with apostasy but end on an encouraging note of faith, endurance and compassion:
Hebrews 10:26-31 – God, Jesus, apostasy the worst sin, eternal judgement
Hebrews 10:32-39 – faith, endurance, compassion
I hope that this exposition helps give deeper meaning to our Lord’s deep and humiliating sacrifice on Good Friday, sufficient for the sins of the whole world, past and present.
Only through it could we be reconciled to God.
May we be forever grateful.
Readings for Good Friday, along with links to several of my previous posts about this day, can be found here.
This is the full Gospel reading (emphases in bold mine):
John 18:1-19:42
18:1 After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.
18:2 Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples.
18:3 So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.
18:4 Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?”
18:5 They answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus replied, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.
18:6 When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they stepped back and fell to the ground.
18:7 Again he asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.”
18:8 Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.”
18:9 This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.”
18:10 Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus.
18:11 Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”
18:12 So the soldiers, their officer, and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him.
18:13 First they took him to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year.
18:14 Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people.
18:15 Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest,
18:16 but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in.
18:17 The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.”
18:18 Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself.
18:19 Then the high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and about his teaching.
18:20 Jesus answered, “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret.
18:21 Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.”
18:22 When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, “Is that how you answer the high priest?”
18:23 Jesus answered, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?”
18:24 Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest.
18:25 Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.”
18:26 One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?”
18:27 Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.
18:28 Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover.
18:29 So Pilate went out to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?”
18:30 They answered, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.”
18:31 Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law.” The Jews replied, “We are not permitted to put anyone to death.”
18:32 (This was to fulfill what Jesus had said when he indicated the kind of death he was to die.)
18:33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”
18:34 Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”
18:35 Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”
18:36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
18:37 Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
18:38 Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him.
18:39 But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?”
18:40 They shouted in reply, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a bandit.
19:1 Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.
19:2 And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe.
19:3 They kept coming up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and striking him on the face.
19:4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.”
19:5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”
19:6 When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.”
19:7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.”
19:8 Now when Pilate heard this, he was more afraid than ever.
19:9 He entered his headquarters again and asked Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer.
19:10 Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”
19:11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
19:12 From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.”
19:13 When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus outside and sat on the judge’s bench at a place called The Stone Pavement, or in Hebrew Gabbatha.
19:14 Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, “Here is your King!”
19:15 They cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but the emperor.”
19:16 Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus;
19:17 and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.
19:18 There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.
19:19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”
19:20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.
19:21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’”
19:22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”
19:23 When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top.
19:24 So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says, “They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”
19:25 And that is what the soldiers did. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
19:26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.”
19:27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
19:28 After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.”
19:29 A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
19:30 When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
19:31 Since it was the day of Preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the sabbath, especially because that sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed.
19:32 Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him.
19:33 But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
19:34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.
19:35 (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.)
19:36 These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, “None of his bones shall be broken.”
19:37 And again another passage of scripture says, “They will look on the one whom they have pierced.”
19:38 After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body.
19:39 Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.
19:40 They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.
19:41 Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.
19:42 And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.
As the Gospel reading is long, I will be focusing only on John 18 this year.
Commentary comes from Matthew Henry and John MacArthur.
John MacArthur explains what John wants us to see in this chapter:
John wants us to see the glory of Christ in His arrest – betrayal and arrest. This is as ugly a scene as we could expect. Judas, the ugliest of all apostates, the traitor of all traitors, the archetypal hypocrite is on display. It is in the middle of the night, everything is dark, and the darkest of it all is the hearts of the people surrounding Jesus and the disciples. But in the midst of this darkness, John shows us our Lord’s glory. We see His divine resolve, we see His divine power, we see His divine love, and we see His divine righteousness. Those four things are going to come through in this passage. The wretchedness, the injustice, the hellishness of Satan’s plot to kill Jesus unfolds.
But it isn’t just Satan’s plot to kill Jesus, as we heard Peter say from Acts 2 – it is God’s predetermined plan. So here, God and Satan come together on the same person for two very different reasons, and God triumphs. Instead of debasing Christ, as the devil intended, He is exalted in these scenes to the highest heaven. His unbounded magnificence explodes on us in all these settings.
After Jesus gave His final messages to the Apostles at the Last Supper, He and they crossed the Kidron valley to a garden, the Garden of Gethsemane (verse 1).
Matthew Henry’s commentary explains the biblical significance of the valley, known in his day as the brook Cedron:
That he went over the brook Cedron. He must go over this to go to the mount of Olives, but the notice taken of it intimates that there was something in it significant and it points, (1.) At David’s prophecy concerning the Messiah (Psalm 110:7), that he shall drink of the brook in the way the brook of suffering in the way to his glory and our salvation, signified by the brook Cedron, the black brook, so called either from the darkness of the valley it ran through or the colour of the water, tainted with the dirt of the city such a brook Christ drank of, when it lay in the way of our redemption, and therefore shall he lift up the head, his own and ours. (2.) At David’s pattern, as a type of the Messiah. In his flight from Absalom, particular notice is taken of his passing over the brook Cedron, and going up by the ascent of mount Olivet, weeping, and all that were with him in tears too, 2 Samuel 15:23,30. The Son of David, being driven out by the rebellious Jews, who would not have him to reign over them (and Judas, like Ahithophel, being in the plot against him), passed over the brook in meanness and humiliation, attended by a company of true mourners. The godly kings of Judah had burnt and destroyed the idols they found at the brook Cedron Asa, 2 Chronicles 15:16 Hezekiah, 2 Chronicles 30:14 Josiah, 2 Kings 23:4,6. Into that brook the abominable things were cast. Christ, being now made sin for us, that he might abolish it and take it away, began his passion by the same brook. Mount Olivet, where Christ began his sufferings, lay on the east side of Jerusalem mount Calvary, where he finished them, on the west for in them he had an eye to such as should come from the east and the west.
The Apostles — Judas included — were well acquainted with the garden, because Jesus often met with them there (verse 2).
Henry has this to say about Christ’s sufferings in a garden and His burial in another, circumstances which he enjoins us to consider when we enjoy our own open spaces:
This circumstance is taken notice of only by this evangelist, that Christ’s sufferings began in a garden. In the garden of Eden sin began there the curse was pronounced, there the Redeemer was promised, and therefore in a garden that promised seed entered the lists with the old serpent. Christ was buried also in a garden. (1.) Let us, when we walk in our gardens, take occasion thence to meditate on Christ’s sufferings in a garden, to which we owe all the pleasure we have in our gardens, for by them the curse upon the ground for man’s sake was removed. (2.) When we are in the midst of our possessions and enjoyments, we must keep up an expectation of troubles, for our gardens of delight are in a vale of tears.
MacArthur explains the meaning of Gethsemane:
The other writers – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – tell us its name. And “Gethsemane” means “oil press.” It is, after all, the Mount of Olives, and olives are pressed to make olive oil. Jesus and His disciples had been there; they’d been there many times. They’d been to that garden many times.
Many of the people in the city of Jerusalem outside the city on the Mount of Olives – they would have little fences around their gardens, or walls around their gardens, and a gate to keep them private – they were private gardens – and I would assume that this garden, because the Lord went there so many times, was always made available to Him.
Matthew Henry arrived at the same conclusion about a private garden whose owner made it available to Jesus and His disciples.
Then a huge group of armed Romans and Jews arrived on the scene, led by Judas (verse 3).
Both our commentators say there were several hundred in this group of men, perhaps up to one thousand, some accompanied by their servants.
MacArthur describes them:
… it’s appropriate to add that it’s a “Roman cohort.” The word is speira in the Greek. A Roman cohort usually consisted of six hundred men. There could be a detachment from a cohort called a maniple, which would have two hundred men. So it could be as many as six hundred men, and add a few hundred of the temple police and a few others. And maybe as the crowd moved through the darkness, they could have collected other people on the way. You could have as many as a thousand people coming into the darkness of that little place.
… they had their full force under full command. This is, of course, a recognition on all their parts of the power of Jesus. They recognized His power. They’d seen it on display in the temple. They knew that He had raised Lazarus from the dead. They knew He was a miracle worker. They were very aware of His power.
Such is the idiocy of unbelief. They send an army to take an unarmed Galilean carpenter and teacher.
Jesus came forward and asked them whom they were looking for (verse 4). When He affirmed that he was Jesus of Nazareth (verse 5), whom they sought, they fell backwards to the ground (verse 6).
Henry notes that the mob coming to arrest Jesus were terrified. The Apostles, who had been asleep, were now awake:
See how he terrified them, and obliged them to retire (John 18:6): They went backward, and, like men thunder-struck, fell to the ground. It should seem, they did not fall forward, as humbling themselves before him, and yielding to him, but backward, as standing it out to the utmost. Thus Christ was declared to be more than a man, even when he was trampled upon as a worm, and no man. This word, I am he, had revived his disciples, and raised them up (Matthew 14:27) but the same word strikes his enemies down.
The same exchange took place again (verse 7).
Jesus reaffirmed His identity and asked that His disciples be left to go unharmed (verse 8). John mentions that this was to fulfil our Lord’s affirmation to His Father that He would not lose anyone God gave him to cherish and protect (verse 9).
MacArthur says that Jesus had made that statement only a short time before:
Back in chapter 17, verse 12 – in the prayer – He said, “Of those whom You have given Me, I lost not one.” So He protects them out of that love that He has for them, in a moment when if they had been taken prisoner they would have been lost.
I want you to think about that. He does not allow the disciples to be arrested and brought to trial and judgment. He protects them from that so that He will fulfill the Scripture that they will not be lost. Hypothetically then, had He allowed them to get arrested, their faith would have been completely overwhelmed. It was hard enough as it was. They scattered, and Peter was a rabid denier of Christ. But our Lord knew that if they were arrested and put through what He was going to be put through, their faith would fail …
Here is a dramatic illustration of the Great High Priest, out of love, protecting His weak sheep. They’re not going to be arrested. He acts in a special, unique way. It’s kind of like 1 Corinthians 10:13. You could take that as a personal promise: “No temptation will ever come to you such as is common to man; and God will make a way of escape that you maybe be able to” – What? – “be able to bear it.”
Not surprisingly, Simon Peter — big and brash at the time — decided to defend Jesus by cutting off the right ear of a slave called Malchus (verse 10).
Henry points out that Peter could have been aiming for Judas and missed:
We must here acknowledge Peter’s good-will he had an honest zeal for his Master, though now misguided. He had lately promised to venture his life for him, and would now make his words good. Probably it exasperated Peter to see Judas at the head of this gang his baseness excited Peter’s boldness, and I wonder that when he did draw his sword he did not aim at the traitor’s head.
Jesus calmly told Peter to put away his weapon, because it was time to ‘drink the cup’ that His Father had given to Him (verse 11).
MacArthur defines the ‘cup’ for us:
The cup of wrath, the cup of fury, the cup of the vengeance of God, “Shall I not drink it?”
Commentary for verses 12-27 can be found here, with more insights from John MacArthur, particularly on the theme of trust.
The Jews led Jesus away from Caiaphas and delivered him to Pilate’s headquarters, which they did not enter because they did not want to defile themselves for Passover (verse 28).
Henry points out their spiritual blindness and hypocrisy:
This they scrupled, but made no scruple of breaking through all the laws of equity to persecute Christ to the death. They strained at a gnat, and swallowed a camel.
Pilate asked what the charges were against Jesus (verse 29).
They assured him that they would not have brought Jesus before him if He were not a criminal (verse 30).
Pilate, knowing that a Jewish crime involved an offence against Judaism, told them to judge Jesus themselves. The Jews countered that their laws did not permit sentencing someone to death (verse 31). They meant ‘under Roman law’.
John says that this scene fulfilled the prophecies of Jesus about His death (verse 32).
Henry elaborates:
Those sayings of Christ in particular were fulfilled which he had spoken concerning his own death. Two sayings of Christ concerning his death were fulfilled, by the Jews declining to judge him according to their law. First, He had said that he should be delivered to the Gentiles, and that they should put him to death Mark x. 33 Luke xviii. 32,33), and hereby that saying was fulfilled. Secondly, He had said that he should be crucified (Matthew 20:19,26:2), lifted up, John 3:14,12:32. Now, if they had judged him by their law, he had been stoned burning, strangling, and beheading, were in some cases used among the Jews, but never crucifying. It was therefore necessary that Christ should be put to death by the Romans, that, being hanged upon a tree, he might be made a curse for us (Galatians 3:13), and his hands and feet might be pierced. As the Roman power had brought him to be born at Bethlehem, so now to die upon a cross, and both according to the scriptures.
Pontius Pilate summoned Jesus and asked Him if He was ‘the King of the Jews’ (verse 33).
Jesus asked Pilate if he asked that question from a notion he had or from what he had heard from others (verse 34). Pilate obfuscated, saying that he himself was not a Jew, yet the Jews handed Jesus — one of their own — over to him. Pilate asked Jesus of what He was guilty (verse 35).
Jesus gave an answer which must have flummoxed them all (verse 36): His Kingdom is not of this world; if it were, He said, His followers would have rushed to His defence.
Today’s radical clergy would do well to remember that neither Jesus nor His disciples took up arms or created unrest against either the Jews or the Romans. They were not social justice warriors.
Pilate asked Jesus if He was a king. Jesus replied that Pilate used that term, not He Himself. He, knowing that He is the King of Kings, went further and said that He came to testify of the truth and that all who believe in the eternal truth listen to His voice (verse 37).
Pilate asked an excellent question — ‘What is the truth?’ — but left before Jesus could answer. Clearly, he did not understand; nor did he wish to understand. Instead, he went back to the Jews and said he could find no evidence of a crime against our Lord (verse 38).
Then Pilate offered to release Jesus, since, at Passover, a Jewish criminal was released and allowed back into freedom (verse 39).
They shouted their disapproval at Pilate’s idea and said they wanted Barabbas, a thief and a radical, released instead (verse 40).
Matthew Henry concludes:
Thus those do who prefer their sins before Christ. Sin is a robber, every base lust is a robber, and yet foolishly chosen rather than Christ, who would truly enrich us.
John 18 ends there, a sad account of the worst in men, particularly those who claim to be religious, awaiting the Messiah, when He was there before their very eyes. Instead, they chose to have him condemned to death.
It is Good Friday 2020 and, incredibly, the doors to most of our churches around the world are locked.
The same holds true for other houses of worship.
It happened easily and quickly.
All it took was a pandemic, media panic and speedy draconian emergency legislation.
—————————————
Now on to Good Friday.
The painting above is by the Renaissance artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, father and son. Lucas Cranach the Younger finished the painting in 1555. It is the centre altar painting in Sts Peter and Paul (Lutheran) Church in Weimar, Germany. Read more about it below:
Here are my past posts, which might be helpful in understanding the Crucifixion:
The greatest reality show ends with a popular vote
Barabbas: an inspiration for liberation theology?
Reflections on the Crucifixion
Good Friday: in whom can we trust? (John 18:12-27)
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the false views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the true views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the comfort
Good Friday: the horror of the Crucifixion (John MacArthur)
Easter: the drama and glory of the Resurrection (John MacArthur, explains Jesus’s relatively short time on the cross)
Biblically focussed clergy, such as John MacArthur, often tell us how much God hates sin.
Yet, most of us, myself included, struggle to understand how much God hates sin.
One thing I learned from writing about the Book of Hebrews was that God hates sin so much that, from the beginning, He commanded that blood sacrifices be made for it. Under the Old Covenant, God’s chosen people had to sacrifice animals time and time again. Yet, all of those were insufficient.
Then God sent His Son Jesus Christ to Earth for the one, holy and perfect sacrifice for the sins of the whole world: past, present and future. The Crucifixion brought about the New Covenant, a ‘better’ covenant, as the Book of Hebrews tells us.
In Hebrews 9:16-23, the book’s anonymous author, inspired by the Holy Spirit, says that the sacrifices under the Old Covenant were but ‘copies’ of ‘the heavenly’ sacrifice that Jesus made on the Cross (emphases mine):
16 For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. 17 For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. 18 Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. 19 For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, 20 saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that God commanded for you.” 21 And in the same way he sprinkled with the blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. 22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
23 Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.
Hebrews 10 explains the sufficiency of our Lord’s ultimate sacrifice for us, citing Jeremiah 31:33-34:
12 But when Christ[b] had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, 13 waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. 14 For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.
15 And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying,
16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them
after those days, declares the Lord:
I will put my laws on their hearts,
and write them on their minds,”
17 then he adds,
“I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
18 Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.
Therefore, we should be grateful for Christ’s perfect sacrifice for us, which reconciled us with God once and for all.
We can have assurance in our Christian faith, the promise of which is eternal life:
19 Therefore, brothers,[c] since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, 20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
You can read more about Hebrews 10 in my post from 2016:
Epistle for Good Friday Year C — Hebrews 10:16-25
May we remember that our Lord’s ultimate sacrifice for us is the reason that we profess the Christian faith.
He then rose from the dead to bring us to eternal life. We look forward to celebrating the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, even though we will be at home alone, instead of with our friends at church.
Below are readings for Good Friday from the three-year Lectionary.
Emphases mine below.
Before proceeding to the reading, these posts discuss various aspects of our Lord’s horrifying and humiliating death on the Cross:
Barabbas: an inspiration for liberation theology?
Reflections on the Crucifixion
Good Friday: in whom can we trust? (John 18:12-27)
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the false views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the true views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the comfort
Good Friday: the horror of the Crucifixion (John MacArthur)
First reading
This prophecy is about Christ as Messiah and Redeemer. Matthew Henry’s commentary calls it the ‘gospel of the evangelist Isaiah’.
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
52:13 See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.
52:14 Just as there were many who were astonished at him–so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals-
52:15 so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.
53:1 Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
53:2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
53:3 He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.
53:4 Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
53:5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
53:6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
53:7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
53:8 By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.
53:9 They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
53:10 Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the LORD shall prosper.
53:11 Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
53:12 Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
Psalm
David speaks largely of himself in this Psalm, yet perfectly prophesies his descendant, Christ Jesus.
Psalm 22
22:1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
22:2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.
22:3 Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
22:4 In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.
22:5 To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.
22:6 But I am a worm, and not human; scorned by others, and despised by the people.
22:7 All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
22:8 “Commit your cause to the LORD; let him deliver– let him rescue the one in whom he delights!”
22:9 Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
22:10 On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
22:11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.
22:12 Many bulls encircle me, strong bulls of Bashan surround me;
22:13 they open wide their mouths at me, like a ravening and roaring lion.
22:14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;
22:15 my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.
22:16 For dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me. My hands and feet have shriveled;
22:17 I can count all my bones. They stare and gloat over me;
22:18 they divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.
22:19 But you, O LORD, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid!
22:20 Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog!
22:21 Save me from the mouth of the lion! From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.
22:22 I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you:
22:23 You who fear the LORD, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!
22:24 For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.
22:25 From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him.
22:26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the LORD. May your hearts live forever!
22:27 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.
22:28 For dominion belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations.
22:29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him.
22:30 Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord,
22:31 and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.
Epistle — first selection
There is a choice of two Epistles, both of which are from Hebrews. This is the first selection, which speaks of God’s forgiveness of our sins through the one and sufficient sacrifice that Jesus made on the Cross.
Hebrews 10:16-25
10:16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds,”
10:17 he also adds, “I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more.”
10:18 Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.
10:19 Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus,
10:20 by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh),
10:21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
10:22 let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
10:23 Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.
10:24 And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds,
10:25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Epistle — second selection
The second selection from Hebrews focusses on a common theme running through that particular book: Christ as High Priest, the source of our salvation.
Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9
4:14 Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession.
4:15 For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.
4:16 Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
5:7 In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.
5:8 Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered;
5:9 and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him,
Gospel
This passage from John recounts Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter’s denial of Him, His crucifixion and burial. (St Luke’s account was the Gospel reading on Palm Sunday.) John speaks of himself in John 19:26-27 and John 19:35. It is less clear who the other disciple of John 18:15-16 is.
John 18:1-19:42
18:1 After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.
18:2 Now Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, because Jesus often met there with his disciples.
18:3 So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and weapons.
18:4 Then Jesus, knowing all that was to happen to him, came forward and asked them, “Whom are you looking for?”
18:5 They answered, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus replied, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them.
18:6 When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they stepped back and fell to the ground.
18:7 Again he asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” And they said, “Jesus of Nazareth.”
18:8 Jesus answered, “I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.”
18:9 This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken, “I did not lose a single one of those whom you gave me.”
18:10 Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus.
18:11 Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”
18:12 So the soldiers, their officer, and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him.
18:13 First they took him to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year.
18:14 Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it was better to have one person die for the people.
18:15 Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest,
18:16 but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in.
18:17 The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.”
18:18 Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself.
18:19 Then the high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and about his teaching.
18:20 Jesus answered, “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all the Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret.
18:21 Why do you ask me? Ask those who heard what I said to them; they know what I said.”
18:22 When he had said this, one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, “Is that how you answer the high priest?”
18:23 Jesus answered, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?”
18:24 Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest.
18:25 Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.”
18:26 One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?”
18:27 Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.
18:28 Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover.
18:29 So Pilate went out to them and said, “What accusation do you bring against this man?”
18:30 They answered, “If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.”
18:31 Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law.” The Jews replied, “We are not permitted to put anyone to death.”
18:32 (This was to fulfill what Jesus had said when he indicated the kind of death he was to die.)
18:33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”
18:34 Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?”
18:35 Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”
18:36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
18:37 Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
18:38 Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him.
18:39 But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?”
18:40 They shouted in reply, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a bandit.
19:1 Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.
19:2 And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe.
19:3 They kept coming up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and striking him on the face.
19:4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.”
19:5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”
19:6 When the chief priests and the police saw him, they shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him; I find no case against him.”
19:7 The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God.”
19:8 Now when Pilate heard this, he was more afraid than ever.
19:9 He entered his headquarters again and asked Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer.
19:10 Pilate therefore said to him, “Do you refuse to speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”
19:11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
19:12 From then on Pilate tried to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are no friend of the emperor. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against the emperor.”
19:13 When Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus outside and sat on the judge’s bench at a place called The Stone Pavement, or in Hebrew Gabbatha.
19:14 Now it was the day of Preparation for the Passover; and it was about noon. He said to the Jews, “Here is your King!”
19:15 They cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but the emperor.”
19:16 Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus;
19:17 and carrying the cross by himself, he went out to what is called The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.
19:18 There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.
19:19 Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”
19:20 Many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.
19:21 Then the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.'”
19:22 Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”
19:23 When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic; now the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top.
19:24 So they said to one another, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see who will get it.” This was to fulfill what the scripture says, “They divided my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots.”
19:25 And that is what the soldiers did. Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
19:26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.”
19:27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
19:28 After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.”
19:29 A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.
19:30 When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
19:31 Since it was the day of Preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the sabbath, especially because that sabbath was a day of great solemnity. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed.
19:32 Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him.
19:33 But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
19:34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out.
19:35 (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.)
19:36 These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, “None of his bones shall be broken.”
19:37 And again another passage of scripture says, “They will look on the one whom they have pierced.”
19:38 After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body.
19:39 Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds.
19:40 They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews.
19:41 Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.
19:42 And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.
The Gospel reading makes the passage from Isaiah and the Psalm truly resonate. May we also remember the verses from Hebrews and give solemn thanks this Good Friday for our loving High Priest who made the ultimate sacrifice for us.
Good Friday is the most solemn day of the Church year, as we contemplate our Lord’s horrifying, humiliating death on the Cross for our sakes.
The following post explains more about the above painting by the Renaissance artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, father and son. Lucas Cranach the Younger finished the painting in 1555. It is the centre altar painting in St Peter and Paul (Lutheran) Church in Weimar, Germany.
The next three posts are about Martin Luther’s perspective on the Crucifixion:
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the false views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the true views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the comfort
Three contemporary pastors explain aspects of the Crucifixion in this post:
Good Friday: in whom can we trust? (John 18:12-27)
Readers might also find the following of interest:
The greatest reality show ends with a popular vote
Barabbas: an inspiration for liberation theology?
Reflections on the Crucifixion
The next two posts discuss Good Friday and Easter:
Easter: the drama and glory of the Resurrection (John MacArthur, explains Jesus’s relatively short time on the cross)
Holy Week and Easter — the two-part story
I hope all believers are able to devote time in their busy day to prayerfully contemplate Jesus Christ’s suffering and death so that we might enter into eternal life with Him.
Happy Easter! He is risen!
I hope that all of us enjoy this feast day, the most important in the Church year.
I have many past posts on Easter:
Easter: the greatest feast in the Church year
Easter Sunday: Thoughts on this greatest of days
The significance of Easter to the Church (various questions answered)
Psalm 118, Christ’s Passion and Eastertide
Easter poems from an inspired Anglican, the Revd George Herbert
Part I of a Martin Luther Easter sermon: the story of Christ’s Resurrection
Part II of a Martin Luther Easter sermon: the fruits and benefits of Christ’s Resurrection
Holy Week and Easter — the two-part story
The road to Emmaus — a great Easter story
Epistle for Easter in Year C — Acts 10:34-43 (2016)
The Easter story: reflections on Mark 16:1-8 (Dr Gregory Jackson, Lutheran)
Judge Andrew Napolitano on the meaning of Easter (great, especially from a layman)
Easter documentaries — when knowing the Bible helps — part 1
Easter documentaries — when knowing the Bible helps — part 2
Easter, the egg and the hare (one of the fullest accounts about Easter symbolism)
Mary Magdalene and the legend of the egg (Christian — not pagan!)
Many of us have lingering questions about Easter, myself included, and this is probably because we are not that well acquainted with all the Gospel accounts of the time between Jesus’s death and the Resurrection.
Today’s post provides excerpts from two of John MacArthur’s sermons on the subject: ‘The Amazing Burial of Jesus, Part 1’ and ‘The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Part 1’.
Subheads and emphases mine below.
Summary
Anyone knowledgeable about the Christian faith is aware of the significance of the cross, where our sins were borne by the Lord Jesus Christ to free us from the penalty and guilt of sin. Just as significant is the resurrection of Jesus Christ–the single greatest miracle the world will ever know. It demonstrates Christ’s finished work of redemption and reminds us that His power over death will bring us to glory.
Why Jesus died within a few hours
Interestingly, there was discussion on some of my Holy Week posts this year about the rapidity of Jesus’s death on the cross.
Jesus was nailed to the cross at nine in the morning, but most victims lingered much longer on the cross, some for many days. No one took His life from Him; He voluntarily gave it up (John 10:17-18). Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who ordered His execution, was astounded when He heard Christ was dead so soon (Mark 15:44).
Also significant is that the day He died was a Friday, meaning that Sabbath started at sunset that day:
It was imperative that Christ be dead early enough in the day so He could be put in the grave some time on Friday. That day had to be included as one of the three days He would be in the earth (the others being Saturday and Sunday).
John 19:31-33 states that the Jewish leaders were concerned about Jesus and the two criminals remaining on the cross before a Passover Sabbath. They would have to die and be removed beforehand. The quickest way of ensuring death was to have their legs broken:
31 Since it was the day of Preparation, and so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day), the Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. 32 So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him. 33 But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.
MacArthur says:
They derived this particular rule from Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which says, “If a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt surely bury him that day (for he who is hanged is accursed by God), that thy land be not defiled.” Apparently they didn’t always follow that regulation since historians tell us that bodies were often left on crosses for days. But on this Passover they made sure to perform this particular injunction to the limit.
John 19:34:37 says:
34 But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water. 35 He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe. 36 For these things took place that the Scripture might be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken.” 37 And again another Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.”
Why did the soldiers pierce the crucified?
the soldiers would give the victim what Jewish scholar Alfred Edersheim termed the “coup de grace” (lit., “the stroke of mercy”)–the death stroke (The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 2 vols. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953], 2:613). A soldier would ram his spear into the victim’s heart … One proposal is that the pain of his shattered legs would traumatize the victim so that the spear thrust would be somewhat of a relief … The general idea behind the spear thrust and the leg breaking was to cause the victim to die immediately.
Onee prophecy fulfilled, mentioned in John 19:36, is in Psalm 34:20:
He keeps all his bones;
not one of them is broken.
Another prophecy fulfilled, regarding the piercing in John 19:37, is in Zechariah 12:10:
10 “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.
There were other prophecies fulfilled that day:
Verse 34 tells us that blood and water came out of Christ’s pierced side–a sign of death. That’s a fulfillment of a prophecy from Psalm 69–a psalm that contains prophecies of the crucifixion scene, such as verse 21: “They gave me also gaul for my food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” Verse 20 says, “Reproach hath broken my heart.” Under the intense weight of all the sins of everyone who ever lived or will live, it is not inconceivable that a human heart could rupture. Thus another prophecy was fulfilled.
The importance of Jesus’s burial
The burial of Jesus as told in Matthew 27:57-66 is:
a marvelous account of God’s intervention into every detail in the life of Christ. We see God’s testimony unfold through Joseph of Arimathea (vv. 57-60), the two Marys (v. 61), and the chief priests and Pharisees (vv. 62-66). They play important roles in the burial of Jesus, validating the truthfulness of Christ’s claim to be the Son of God.
Joseph of Arimathea — prophecies fulfilled
Joseph of Arimathea’s actions played a significant role in fulfilling two prophecies regarding Jesus:
57 When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus. 58 He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. 59 And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud 60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away.
MacArthur tells us:
The entire chapter of Isaiah 53 is devoted to the death of Christ. It says He was despised and rejected, truly a man of sorrows (v. 3). He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows (v. 4). He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities (v. 5). He was taken from prison into judgment (v. 8). Verse 9 says, “His grave was assigned to be with wicked men, yet [He was] with a rich man in his death” (NASB). That unusual prophecy would be difficult to understand apart from the scenario of Christ’s burial. He was supposed to have been buried with criminals, but instead was buried in a rich man’s tomb.
Then, there were Jesus’s words regarding Jonah (Matthew 12:40):
Jesus said, “Just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (NASB). Jesus predicted that there would be three days between His death and resurrection–that He would be in the earth for three days.
Therefore:
God used Joseph of Arimathea to fulfill those prophecies, and thus provide testimony to the deity of Christ.
MacArthur says:
I don’t know what caused Joseph of Arimathea to publicly manifest himself as a follower of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it was the earthquake, the darkness, the graves opening, and the veil of the Temple ripping from top to bottom (Matt. 27:45, 51-54). Perhaps it was simply his love for Jesus and the agony he felt watching Him endure pain and suffering on the cross. One thing we can be sure of: God worked on his heart to bring to pass the fulfillment of prophecy.
The three days
How can we be sure there were three days between His burial and Resurrection? This is a recurring question, one which is sometimes hotly debated.
Some people have difficulty reconciling what Jesus said in Matthew 12:40 about the length of His stay in the grave: “As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Does that mean Jesus had to be in the earth three full days and nights? No. Many commentators take that view and back the crucifixion to Thursday, so the three days and nights are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, with His rising on Sunday. The obvious problem with that view is that we are left with a fourth- day resurrection. Yet all the passages in Scripture dealing with this issue indicate He was to rise on the third day. That eliminates the need for interpreting Matthew 12:40 as referring to three 24-hour periods. The phrase “three days and three nights” was simply an idiom of the Jewish people referring to a three-day period.
For example, if you were to say, “I’m going to San Diego for three days,” does that mean you’ll be there for three 24-hour periods? Not necessarily. It could mean you’ll be there for a few hours one day, all day the next day, and a few hours the third day. That is how Scripture refers to Christ’s burial.
In Luke 24:21 the disciples traveling the road to Emmaus were bemoaning the death of Christ, saying, “We hoped that it had been he who should have redeemed Israel; and, besides all this, today [Sunday] is the third day since these things were done.” They understood that the Lord’s prophecy of His resurrection wasn’t going to take place after three 24-hour periods, but on the third day, which from Friday would be Sunday. After all, Jesus said He would “be killed, and be raised again the third day” (Matt. 16:21). Matthew 17:23 repeats, “They shall kill him, and the third day he shall be raised again.” The chronological, historical references to the death of Christ indicate a third-day resurrection, not one following three 24-hour periods. When Jesus referred to three days and three nights, we can conclude He was referring to a part of three 24-hour periods. Rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah (who lived around A.D. 100) said, “A day and night are an Onah [a portion of time] and the portion of an Onah is as the whole of it“ (Jerusalem Talmud, Shabbath ix.3; cf. Babylonian Talmud Pesahim 4a).
The two Marys
Matthew 27:61 says:
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.
MacArthur tells us:
Mary Magdalene came from Magdala, a village on the west coast of the Sea of Galilee. The other Mary was the mother of James and Joseph (v. 56). John 19:25 calls her the wife of Clopas, or Alphaeus. (Matthew 10:3 refers to James as the son of Alphaeus to differentiate him from James the son of Zebedee.) She was one of the ladies who followed Him from Galilee to attend to His physical needs by providing food and sustenance. Other ladies had been present during the crucifixion and burial, but they apparently left with Joseph and Nicodemus (v. 60). Only these two women remained.
These two ladies also went to Jesus’s tomb on the third day (Matthew 28:1):
Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.
They went to the tomb because they loved Jesus that much, but also, MacArthur says:
perhaps hoping against hope that what He said might come to pass.
The earthquake — the third day
The two Marys approached the tomb at dawn of the third day, when an earthquake took place and an angel appeared, whose appearance was ‘like lightning’ (Matthew 28:2-7). The words ‘and behold’ are a call to pay close attention:
2 And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. 4 And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he[a] lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” 8 So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.
MacArthur breaks this down for us:
Now this is the second earthquake in three days. There was an earthquake when Christ died, you remember, that split the rocks wide open and opened graves and dead people came alive among the saints. So this is the second earthquake. And God again is moving and God is demonstrating in a physiological way His activity. It’s not new for God. You can look to the past. For example, back in Exodus 19:18 at the giving of the law, 1 Kings chapter 19 verse 11, God came in an earthquake. You can look into the future and you read about it in Joel 2:10 that the time of the coming of the Lord there will be an earthquake. Revelation 6, Revelation 8, Revelation 11 describe that kind of thing. Jesus Himself even referred to it in the great Olivet Discourse, Matthew 24:7, about the earthquake that’s going to be coming or earthquakes attendant with His return. So when God begins to move in the world, the world shakes.
And here these women are approaching…they haven’t yet come to the garden. Instantly there is an earthquake. The epicenter of the earthquake is at the tomb. And the seismic radiation waves rumble through the ground beyond the grave and no doubt rock the land on which the women walk. They feel the earthquake not knowing what has happened.
Now what caused the earthquake? I suppose most people have just sort of concluded, “Well, the resurrection of Christ,” but that’s not the right answer. The resurrection didn’t cause the earthquake. Matthew tells us what caused the earthquake. “There was a great earthquake for or because an angel of the Lord descended from heaven.” When this angel hit the garden it created seismic waves. The word for “earthquake” is the root word seismos from which we get seismograph. And when the angel hit the land it sent out an earthquake. And these women not even knowing what was going on felt the movement of the earth, no doubt, as they approached the tomb. But the earthquake was not caused by the resurrection of Christ, it was caused by the arrival of an angel to open the tomb. Nothing, by the way, says that he let Jesus out of the tomb. That is a fallacy.
Have you ever seen a picture of an angel and a stone rolled back and Jesus coming out? That isn’t right. I mean, Jesus did not have the power to raise Himself from the dead and then wait in there until somebody moved the stone so He could get out. No one actually saw the resurrection. The women experienced the seismic ramifications of that event of the angel coming and the phenomena around the resurrection. The resurrection occurred in an invisible way, no one was in there to see it. Christ came out of that grave.
Put it this way very simply. The angel did not move the stone to let the Lord out. The angel moved the stone to let the women in so they could see that He was already gone.
You say, “Well, how could He get out of there?” Well the same way John 20:26 says the disciples were meeting on the eighth day and Jesus was in their midst, the door being shut. The same way He came through the wall into the upper room is the same way He went out of the rock of the grave which we shouldn’t imagine as any problem for one in His glorified form. So no one saw the resurrection. The angel came not to let the Lord out but to let the women in and to let the apostles in and to let us in and to let the whole world in to see that He wasn’t there.
Faith on display
The faith of the Marys was stronger than that of the disciples.
MacArthur says:
God honored their faith by allowing them to give testimony to what they saw. However feeble their faith may have been, it certainly was stronger than that of the disciples.
Remember, too, that the men were reluctant to believe the women:
The truth is that the disciples were reluctant to believe what the women said (Luke 24:6-12). Thomas was reluctant to believe when he heard from the other disciples who had seen their risen Lord (John 20:24-25). So God gave us first-hand witnesses to spread the word of the resurrection. Through eyewitness testimony and fulfilled prophecy in the burial of Christ, God was at work vindicating Jesus Christ as His Son.
What they saw
The Gospel accounts differ slightly in who went to the tomb and on the number of angels or men there.
Matthew 28 says only the two Marys went and that there was one angel. Only Matthew mentions the earthquake.
Mark 16 says that Salome (not Herod’s stepdaughter, by the way) accompanied the Marys. Mark says there was a ‘young man’ dressed in a white robe sitting inside the tomb.
Luke 24 names the two Marys, says there were two men present in dazzling apparel and records that Peter went to the tomb later.
John 20 records that only Mary Magdalene went and that Peter and an unnamed disciple went to the tomb after she met them. John himself was ‘the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved’. John mentions two angels later (verse 12) who appeared to Mary Magdalene after Peter and John left the tomb.
Regardless, MacArthur looks at Matthew’s and John’s accounts and describes what they saw.
In Matthew 28:
… there were the linen wrappings undisturbed the way they had been wrapped around His body. And the head napkin in a separate place. There was no turmoil, no big hurry to unwrap Him and throw everything on the floor and get out of there. It was just the way it had been when His body was in it only He was gone.
And then the angel came after He left to move the stone so the world could come in and see that He was gone and sat there as the heavenly witness to what had happened. What a scene.
I can’t imagine for a moment what that must have been like.
In John 20:
I believe this is the proper point to harmonize John’s special interest in Mary Magdalene. Mary was to the women what Peter was to the Apostles. She was impetuous. What happens here is fascinating. The women come into the garden and I think this is the best place to insert this, although we can’t be dogmatic, it seems to me to fit so perfectly here. When Mary comes in all she sees with her rather myopic viewpoint is this whole and the stone is gone. And she doesn’t take note of this angel. And seeing that the stone is moved and the grave is empty is enough for her.
John tells us her reaction. Let’s look at John chapter 20. “The first day of the week comes Mary,” and then he notes, “[She] started out when it was yet dark unto the sepulcher and sees the stone taken away from the sepulcher.” Now apparently that’s all she saw. She missed the angel. She saw just that the stone was removed. And then verse 2, “Then…without a delay…she ran.” She took off. “And she went right to the two most prominent apostles, she went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved,” which is John’s term used to describe himself and the fact that it’s to Peter and to the other disciple probably indicates they were in two different homes during this Passover time. We can’t be certain. But anyway, she ran to Peter and John to tell them.
And what did she tell them? “They have taken away the Lord out of the grave and we know not where they’ve laid Him.” They’ve taken Him…they? I don’t know who they are. She didn’t know who they are…somebody. “Peter therefore went forth and so did John and they came to the grave.” Verse 4 says they ran and John outran Peter and arrived first.
MacArthur returns to Matthew 28 to tie these two accounts together:
So as we come to the women then in the confrontation with the angel, Mary Magdalene is apparently gone. She’s bolted to tell Peter and John that the body had been stolen. The other ladies stayed and they have the wonderful experience of an encounter with an angel.
As I mentioned earlier, John 20 records that, after Peter and John returned home from the tomb, Mary Magdalene stayed behind. Not only did she see two angels, but, even better, she also saw Jesus. What an indescribable moment that must have been:
11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic,[b] “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18 Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”—and that he had said these things to her.
MacArthur describes the angel in Matthew 28:
The angel is described for us in verse 3. “His countenance…or his face…was like lightning.” Now that’s a pretty graphic description, isn’t it? Like lightning flashing, brilliant, blazing. This, no doubt, to transmit the effulgence or the essence, the deity, the brilliance of the character of God. This is the glow of God. This is the Shekinah somehow transmitted from God to that angel, as it was on one occasion from God to Moses and shown on his face, do you remember that in the book of Exodus? This angel, this one representative of God, this messenger from God possessed the very character of deity. And it emanated from his glowing face. Also it says his raiment or garment was white as snow and this is emblematic of purity, holiness, of virtue.
So here is a holy angel…the holy angel sent from God bearing the very imprimatur of the character of God, an angel representative of deity, a created being who represents the uncreated cause of all beings, God Himself, this holy angel. This to distinguish him from some man, this to distinguish him from some demon, this to identify him as the agent of God, this beautiful, glorious, glowing, pure, holy being sitting on the stone as living witness to the risen Christ…God’s own assigned witness.
The angel’s presence frightened the guards in the extreme (Matthew 28:4):
And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men.
MacArthur explains:
They went into temporary coma. They were knocked literally unconscious out of terror. Fear will do that. Fear will cause people to be paralyzed to the point where they go unconscious and that’s precisely what happened. They were knocked cold out of fear. They were victims of divine power. They had seen something they had never seen or thought of or ever been able to comprehend and they were not now able to comprehend it.
The women were afraid, too, but because they loved Jesus, they listened to the angel.
‘He has risen’
Matthew 28:6 states that the angel said:
He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he[a] lay.
Luke 24:6-7:
6 He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”
Mark 16:6:
And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him.
MacArthur’s version of the Bible has ‘He was raised’. This indicates:
that He was raised by the power of the Father. Over and over again it says that in Scripture…Romans 6:4, Galatians 1:1, 1 Peter 1:3, a couple of those I mentioned to you. He was raised by the power of the Father. It also says, doesn’t it, in John 10:18, “I have power to lay My life down and I have power to…what?…take it up again.” So He was raised not only by the Father but He was raised by His own power. And then in Romans 8:11 it says He was raised by the power of the Spirit. “It is the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead.” So the whole trinity is involved in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the angel gives this incredible announcement, “He’s not here He was raised.” The point is He’s alive.
And then I love this, “He was raised,” it says, “as He said.” Isn’t that great? I mean, He just jolts them with the memory that this is exactly what He said He would do on the third day, just like He said. And by the way, Luke 24:8 says, “And they remembered His words.” So, that’s what He meant…so that’s what He was saying.
What a day of drama and glory!
Truly, Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
Being there for the Lord
It amazes students of the Bible that the Apostles, who spent three years day in and day out with Jesus, were not the first to arrive at the tomb on the third day.
It was the women who were there. And they were blessed by the presence of an angel or angels. Mary Magdalene was further blessed by the presence of Jesus.
MacArthur says we can draw a lasting lesson from being faithful to and present for the Lord:
You know what that says to me? I don’t want to extrapolate too much on this but it’s nice if you’re there when the Lord does wonderful things. There’s a great spiritual truth in that somewhere and that is that the closer you stay to the Lord and what He’s doing, the more you’re going to enjoy what He’s doing. I don’t know about you but I’d rather be there and experience it than hear it from somebody else, wouldn’t you? I praise God for people who are there. I mean they’re there when the Lord is working. They’re there when His people gather together. They’re there when His Word is taught. They’re there when it’s time to come to your knees before Him. They’re there when it’s time to call on His power in ministry. And they’re the ones that experience first hand the moving of the power of God. No, they saw it because they were there.
I trust that you will be the kind of person like those women. What you may lack in faith you make up for in devotion, what you may lack in understanding you make up for in loyalty. And God will confirm your weakness and turn it into strength because you’re faithful enough and loyal enough to be where He is and where He’s moving and where He’s working.
Amen.
Once again, happy Easter, everyone. I hope we have a beautiful day, rain or shine, as we reflect on the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ our Lord.
The painting above is by the Renaissance artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, father and son. Lucas Cranach the Younger finished the painting in 1555. It is the centre altar painting in Sts Peter and Paul (Lutheran) Church in Weimar, Germany. Read more about it:
I have a variety of posts on Good Friday. The following three concern Martin Luther’s view of the Crucifixion:
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the false views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the true views
Martin Luther’s ‘How to Contemplate Christ’s Sufferings’: the comfort
The next set of posts present a number of perspectives on the Crucifixion:
Reflections on the Crucifixion
Good Friday: in whom can we trust? (John 18:12-27)
Holy Week and Easter — the two-part story
The greatest reality show ends with a popular vote
Barabbas: an inspiration for liberation theology?
John MacArthur’s sermon on Matthew 27 — ‘The Wickedness of the Crucifixion, Part 2’ — is one of the most comprehensive expositories on the events that we contemplate on Good Friday.
Excerpts and a summary follow. Subheads and emphases are mine.
Society at that time
MacArthur cites a theologian, David Thomas, who described the social atmosphere of Jesus’s time as pure evil:
So, as we go through the passage in Matthew that describes the crucifixion, we see just unrelenting evil. David Thomas wrote, “For thousands of years wickedness had been growing. It had wrought deeds of impiety and crime that had rung the ages with agony and often roused the justice of the universe to roll her fiery thunderbolts of retribution through the world. But now it had grown to full maturity. It stands around the cross in such gigantic proportions as had never been seen before. It works an enormity before which the mightiest of its past exploits dwindle into insignificance and pale into dimness. Wickedness crucifies the Lord of life and glory,” end quote.
The Gospels record Jesus speaking of wickedness not only of the religious leaders but that generation as a whole. The disciples also experienced wickedness in their ministries.
Politically, the Jews looked for their Messiah to deliver them from the Romans and to make their land and their people into a mighty kingdom. As my aforementioned post on Barabbas explains, a small group of radical Jews banded together as the Zealots with the objective of throwing off the Roman yoke through violence and theft.
How people saw Jesus
The people directly involved with Jesus’s condemnation, scourging, mocking and death did not know who He was, even when they thought they did.
The crowd yelling for Barabbas to be freed thought that Jesus could not be their Messiah because he was not fighting the Romans.
MacArthur divides these people into four groups:
Let’s call them the ignorant wicked, the knowing wicked, the fickle wicked and the religious wicked. And I want to suggest to you that every person in the world who does not come to faith in Jesus Christ, every Christ‑rejecting person fits into these groups. They are constant. They were there at the cross. They’re around today. And everybody fits somewhere in these four groups.
The soldiers — the ignorant wicked
We saw that the callous soldiers basically were Roman Legionnaires stationed in Caesarea, no doubt, with Pilate. They didn’t really have first‑hand information about Jesus. They were not very well apprised of who He was. They may have had a very limited smattering of information. They basically are ignorant. To them Jesus is another criminal and a somewhat deranged one at that. There seems to be no legitimate criminal act that He has done. He seems to be more a maniac who thinks Himself to be a king but by who any … by any definition they know of a king is not a king at all. They no doubt think Him to be somewhat deficient intellectually and mentally and through all the tortures that they bring upon. Him, He never says a word which probably confirms their suspicion.
Pontius Pilate — the ignorant wicked
He has already stated on several occasions that Jesus is innocent. He has given the findings of the court when he said, “I find no fault in this man.” He really doesn’t want to execute a man he knows to be innocent. His wife has warned him against that and his own conscience has done the same. But he is being blackmailed into a corner by the Jews and he thinks maybe he can satiate their thirst for blood by showing Jesus to be such a foolish, foolish looking person that they will understand Him to be little threat to Rome or to Israel. And so he brings Jesus out and says, “Behold the man.” And the scream the more for His blood and say if you don’t kill Him we’ll report you to Caesar. And trapped for the fear of the loss of his position, he indicates that Jesus is to be crucified. And so it is determined.
The two robbers — the knowing wicked
They knew something of the claims of Jesus. They knew something about it as is evidenced by the future record of what they say. We find that in verse 44. “The lesti, the robbers also who were crucified with Him,” and the Authorized says, “cast the same in His teeth.” Actually, what the text says is “heaped insults at Him.” They heaped the same insults at Him. The same insults they were hearing from the Jewish leaders who were saying, “If You’re the king of Israel, come down. You say You trust in God, let God deliver You. You said You were the Son of God,” so forth. So they knew some of the claims of Jesus.
They were familiar because they were a part of the Jewish society with perhaps the work of Jesus Christ, may have been familiar with His person, may on occasion have heard Him in a crowd. We don’t know that. But obviously they knew something about Him, something more than the Roman legionnaires would have known who had nothing to do with life in that part of the world …
… these crass materialistic bandits, for them life revolves around possessions, materialism, loot. They have not thought about righteousness, truth, justice, honor, godliness. They have no concern for morality. They have no concern for Messiahs and kingdoms; they’re just out for the loot.
However, Luke recorded that one of the thieves did believe at the eleventh hour and that he rebuked the other (Luke 23:39-43):
39 One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him,[d] saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” 43 And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
The crowd — the fickle wicked
The people who joyously acclaimed Jesus on Palm Sunday were the same who wanted Him to die. They preferred Barabbas.
It was bad enough that they sentenced Jesus to death by shouting for the release of Barabbas (Luke 23:13-25), but, as He agonised on the cross, they walked by to taunt Him (Matthew 27:39-40).
They had a place for Jesus, they wanted His miracles, they wanted His signs and wonders, they listened to His teaching. The crowd was fascinated by Jesus, to some extent. And they knew full well who He claimed to be and they knew there was a demonstration of the veracity of those claims …
Jesus didn’t fulfill their expectation. In fact, when Jesus rode in, they thought He would attack the Romans. He came back into town and attacked the Jews by wiping out the temple buying and selling. And that was not in His favor. They thought He ought to attack Rome, not them. And now how could this be the Messiah? All week long and He’s done nothing. He’s been here all week and now look at Him, He’s hanging on a cross, put there by the Romans. He is a victim. This is not our Messiah …
Because they assumed the Messiah would come in a military triumph over Rome and all the other nations. It all was coming to pieces and they had forgotten their hallelujahs and hosannas and now in their disappointment over Jesus’ failure to give them what they wanted when they wanted it, they had turned against Him and were blaspheming His name. So fickle.
The Jewish leaders — the religious wicked
The wors[t] group is yet to come in verses 41 to 43, the religious wicked. They are illustrated to us by the canting, and that word basically means insincere and hypocritical, the canting leaders, insincere, hypocritical, the lowest level of blasphemers, religious hypocrites who parade their pi[e]ty, who want to appear to represent God and know the truth and be pure and godly and virtuous and represent the Word of God. And the truth of it is they’re filled with hate and vilification toward the very Christ of God Himself.
In verse 41 we meet them. It wasn’t just a fickle crowd, likewise also the chief priests. All those various orders of priests that operated within the temple ministries were mocking Him along with the scribes who were the authorities on the law and the elders who were suppose to be the revered and renowned men of maturity and wisdom in the land. They constitute the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of Israel.
So, all of these leaders who are supposedly the religious elite, who suppose … are supposed to know everything there is to know about the truth of God and the Word of God and the mind of God and the heart of God, who pretend to love God and revere His Word and hold up His name. They come along and what did they say? And notice, please, that the crowd talked to Jesus, the leaders don’t talk to Christ. They hate Him. He is so despised by them they will not talk to Him, they only talk about Him. So they talk to each other about Him.
Verse 42, “He saved others.” And they mean by that His healing ministry, His deliverance from demons. “He did it for others, Himself He cannot save.” They never denied ever in the New Testament the miracles of Jesus, never. It was impossible to do that. There, is never an indication that the religious leaders of Israel denied His miracles. They said they were by Satan done, by Satan accomplished, but they never denied them. They said He does what He does by the power of Beelzebub, but they never denied them.
And now, to see Jesus hanging on the cross unable to come down, will affirm in their minds that indeed He did have power but it was Satan’s power. So when we put Him on the cross, we can be sure He’ll stay there because God is on our side. Look, the fact that He is there shows that His power is not as great as ours. His is Satan’s, ours is God. God’s with us.
They’re mocking His power. If He is the king of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross and we’ll believe Him, if He has such sovereignty and such authority and such power, let us see it now. They put in the word “now,” right now. They were forever and always asking for a sign. The truth of the matter is even if He had come down from the cross, they wouldn’t have believed, their hearts were so evil.
The horror of Jesus’s suffering
MacArthur describes in detail how horrifically Jesus suffered that day for our sins — the sins of the whole world, believers and unbelievers alike.
One thing is made abundantly clear throughout the pages of Holy Scripture and that is that man is wicked, that he is sinful. And given over to his own devices unrestrained will perpetrate crimes beyond imagination. Now the wickedness of man is no more clearly seen, nor does it reach a higher apex than it does in the execution of Jesus Christ. The crucifixion of the Savior is the greatest expression of human evil in history, the epitome of demonstration of the depth and comprehensiveness of the sinfulness of human nature …
Yes, the crucifixion was the greatest act of love on the part of God and that seems to be John’s focus and even more the emphasis of Mark and Luke, but it was also the greatest expression of human evil which seems to be Matthew’s particular interest under the direction of the Spirit as he writes …
… wickedness is not content just to execute Jesus Christ. It must torment Him also in the process. It must taunt Him in the process. It must heap on Him all imaginable evil. It cannot just kill Him, it must slap Him and punch Him and stab Him and spit on Him and defame Him and blaspheme Him and keep that up all the time He is dying. Inconceivable. But such is the cruelty of the human heart when fully exposed.
… according to Isaiah 53:4, He carried our griefs and He carried and bore our sorrows and in addition to that His own sorrow in being alienated and separated from His Father. So He not only suffered more than any man has suffered, but He suffered more than all men together have ever suffered.
During His earthly life, Jesus suffered for us temporally through poverty and self-denial. He also suffered spiritually by temptation from Satan. As if those were not bad enough, He suffered continual rejection by His own people. On the day He was crucified, He also suffered His father’s wrath because of mankind’s wickedness:
God then had to pour out all of heaven’s fury against all of earth’s sin and it all came on Jesus Christ. So He suffered the unmitigated wrath of God.
The scourging
MacArthur described how the aforementioned soldiers scourged Jesus:
… they’ve tied His wrists to a post, His feet suspended from the ground, His body taut and they have taken leather thongs attached to a piece of wood and in the end of the leather thongs are bits of stone and bone and metal and they have lashed Him until His flesh is ripped off and His internal organs are laid bare and exposed and blood rushes from out of His body.
If you have seen Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, you saw exactly that. (MacArthur had not written from Gibson’s perspective, because he wrote his sermon in 1985. The film came out in 2004.) I was quite disgusted with every other Christian I know in the offline world, none of whom liked the film because it was too gory and violent: ‘It never would have happened like that!’ NO! It did happen like that — for our sake!
The mocking
They have then clothed Him again. They brought Him back into Pilate’s hall and they start a little game under the watchful supervision of Pilate. And that little game is to make Jesus to appear as a king. And you’ll notice what happens in verse 28. They stripped Him. They took off His own robe which had been placed over His open wounds and they put on Him a scarlet robe, that’s the heavy outer robe Rome…worn by a Roman soldier. No doubt causing excruciating pain to those open wounds, a mock royal robe. And then they braided a crown of thorns and put it around His head. Put a reed in His right hand representative of a crown and a scepter. They bowed their knees before Him and mocked Him saying, “Hail, king of the Jews.” And as they rose from the ground they spit in His face. Then they took the reed out of His hand in a mocking gesture of snatching away His pitiful sovereignty and smashed Him in the head with His own scepter. In John 19:3 it says they kept on punching Him. He is a fool. He is a clown. He’s a buffoon. He is an object of mockery. This one who claims to be a king, what a farce, what a joke, how ridiculous. And the soldiers with joy and glee trained in the art of killing and maiming people enjoy to the very fullest their leisure expression on Jesus Christ at His expense.
By the way, this is the second time He has been punched and spit on. The Jewish leaders did it back in chapter 26 verses 67 and 68. There they spit on Him because He claimed to be a prophet. Here they spit on Him because He claimed to be a king. Little did they know the King that He was and long will they know it in hell in eternity. Little did they know that indeed He was a King and indeed He will wear a robe and a blood‑spattered robe at that. In Revelation chapter 19 and verse 13 it shows Jesus Christ coming in Second Coming glory out of heaven and He is indeed wearing a robe of royalty and it is a robe spotted with blood but it is not, at that time, His own blood but rather the blood of His enemies. And indeed some day He will wear a royal crown. It will be far different from this crown, not a stephanos, not a crown made of some earthly thing but a diadema, a diadem, a royal regal crown. Yes, Revelation 19:12 says He will wear many crowns for He will not only have His own but He will wear the crown that once belonged to every other sovereign in the world for He alone will be King.
And some day He will wield a scepter and it will be no reed, it will be according to Revelation 19:15, a rod of iron with which He will bring instant judgment on the unbelieving world …
The blows from the reed which was heavy enough to cause a painful blow to the head are added and more bumps and bruises appear. His body is dripping with blood, oozing from His pores. A lack of sleep, the anguish of sin has contorted and twisted His face so that He is hardly recognizable as human, let alone as Jesus of Nazareth. And He is thought to be nothing more than a fool.
The way of the cross
They put back on His own garment. And they lead Him away to crucify Him. As they leave the city in verse 32, they conscript a man by the name of Cyrus … of Simon who is from Cyrene. And this man, as we saw last time, is to carry the cross of Christ. They then, verse 33, come to a place called Golgotha, meaning skull place named for the shape of the hill. They give Him vinegar to drink, actually wine, oinos in the better texts. They give Him wine to drink and mingled with bitter herbs. That’s a general term. Mark tells us the bitter herbs were in fact myrrh. And myrrh would act like a sedative. This was provided by Jerusalem women. There was an association of women who provided this for people who were to be crucified as an expression of the fulfillment of Proverbs 31 where it says that strong drink is for those who face death. These women did it out of kindness. The soldiers appreciated it not because they wanted to show kindness, but because it was easier to crucify a drugged victim. So it accommodated them as well.
He tasted it and wouldn’t drink it because He wanted to go to the cross with all of His senses acute and alert …
The crucifixion
I’m so amazed at the fact that the crucifixion itself is passed over with such brevity. In fact, as I told you, in the Greek text it actually says the having crucified Him on[ce] parted His garments. It almost throws away the crucifixion in the original text. And we really don’t have anything given to us about the details of it so we need to kind of fill in just for a moment. The cross would be lying on the ground, the victim would be placed down on the cross and first His feet would be extended, His toes pulled down and then a large nail would be driven through the arch of one foot and then the arch of another foot. And then His hands would be extended allowing His knees to flex a little bit and there would be great nails driven through His wrists just below the bottom part of His hand, the heel of His hand because there is the place where it would hold. In the middle of the hand it wouldn’t hold, it would pull through the fingers.
Once the victim was nailed there, the cross would be picked up and dropped into a hole. And when it hit the bottom of the socket, of course, it would rip and tear the flesh and send the nerve impulses to make explosions in the brain in regard to pain. The victim is now crucified. Slowly He would begin to sag down more and more the weight being placed upon the nails running through His wrists, excruciating fiery pain would shoot up the arms and into the mind. Pressure put on the median nerves would be beyond almost the ability to endure.
The Lord then would try to push to relieve the pain and so He would push with His feet and be pushing on the two wounds in His feet. And the same thing would happen. And hour after hour this wrenching twisting torment of the body back and forth, trying to relieve one and then the other, the hands and the feet, it would become very impossible after a while to do any pushing upward because of the pain and the sagging would put the greatest weight upon the hands.
Dr. Truman, Davis writes, “At this point, another phenomenon occurred as the arms fatigued, great waves of cramps sweep over the muscles nodding them in deep relentless throbbing pain. With these cramps comes the inability to push Himself upward. Hanging by His arms, the pectoral muscles are paralyzed and the inner costal muscles are unable to act. Air can be drawn into the lungs but it can’t be exhaled. Jesus fights to raise Himself to get even one short breath. Finally carbon dioxide builds up in the lungs and in the blood stream and the cramps subside. He would grasps short breaths of air, hours of limitless pain, cycles of twisting joint‑rending cramps, intermittent partial asphyxiation, searing pain as tissue is torn from His lacerated back as He moves up and down the rough timber. A deep crushing pain in the chest as the pericardium slowly fills with scorum (?) and begins to compress the heart. And this leads to death.”
‘King of the Jews’
After Jesus took His last breath, the soldiers had to nail to the cross the reason for His death. Pilate gave that to them:
They set over His head an accusation because it was required that a man who was crucified be crucified for some criminal reason. And there was no legitimate criminal reason to crucify Christ. Pilate, wanting to make his statement of the innocence of Christ and also wanting to affirm his … despising of the Jews, puts over the head of Jesus, “THIS IS JESUS,” the other writers tell us he put, “THIS IS JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” And in all three languages of the times so everyone could read it. And the Jews … protested and said, “We don’t want that up there, we want, “He said He is king of the Jews.'” And Pilate said, “What I have written I have written.” And thus in cynical sarcastic words he mocked the Jews by saying to the whole world, “There’s your king, there’s your king, you despicable people, you deserve such a king.”
A statement
There is much more to read. This is a compelling sermon, not to be missed.
The same types of people who sentenced, mocked and killed Jesus are around today. Some even attend church.
All of them are convinced of their own self-righteousness. They reject Jesus Christ. They reject the Bible. They do not want to know. Their way is better.
They know more than the Christian humbly praying for more grace, praying for sanctification, praying to be delivered from temptation.
The day will come when we will be at the seat of divine and holy judgement. Where are we now? Where will we be then?
MacArthur concludes with this:
I don’t know where you are today. He longs to embrace you into His arms, to give you the salvation He so freely offered. He stayed on the cross not because He couldn’t come down, He stayed on the cross because He wouldn’t come down. And I believe that the Savior shed tears for those who shed His very blood. Such is the compassion of God and the gift of salvation. Let’s bow in prayer.
Thank You, Father, for the scene that we have viewed today from Your holy Word. Thank You for the friend of sinners who died for the very ones who crucified Him in all generations. Thank You that His arms are open to all who come. O Father, may we be grateful enough, thankful enough not only to receive the Lord Jesus Christ, but to live our lives totally in obedience to Him.
Amen.
Churchmouse Campanologist 