CROSS WHAT KIND OF DEATH HE MUST DIE.

    Our Saviour warned His disciples when ‘going up to Jerusalem, He took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem,  and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify.  And the third day He will rise again.’ ( Matthew 20:17-19 )

    Notice how the Jewish authorities would surrender their Messiah to the Gentiles for punishment and execution.  That is unbelievable that the men who had the Old Testament Scriptures in their charge, and had memorised portions of the word of God, that they should allow the ‘infidels’, the Gentiles, to decide the fate of the Person, Jesus Christ.

    This prophecy told how the Lord would be betrayed ( a fearful , contemptuous act ) by His own people, for example, Judas to the religious hierarchy, ‘for He came to His own, and His own received Him not.’ How dare the religious leaders disown the Son of God.  Furthermore, they would condemn Him to death, even though Governor Pilate pleaded that ‘He could find no fault with this Man.’

    Israel would ‘deliver’ the Lord Jesus to the Gentiles’. This is an extraordinary term telling, that He would be ‘taken into custody; judged; condemned; punished; scourged; tormented; and put to death.  That one Greek word extended to the entire humiliation meted out to the dear Lamb of God.  Christ’s prophecy was accurately fulfilled within  His last hours on earth. Every facet of enduring suffering had been foretold.

    Just before the Paschal feast, our Lord said, ‘You know that after two days is the Passover, and the son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.’’ ( Matthew 26:2 )

He prepared His disciples for His surrender to total shame and suffering.  Nothing would surprise after the Lord had warned of the imminence of this event.  This was the moment for which the Son of God had prepared as ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.’

    Dr Luke presented it somewhat differently, ‘ Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all these things written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished.  (18:32)  This was an all-inclusive claim concerning the numerous foretellings in the Old Testament that would come to pass.  The Holy Spirit prepared  the unchallengeable proofs of the divine Source of scripture in these perfect prophecies.

‘ All these things ‘ will surely be completed.’ 

    Where you are challenged by unbelievers, open your bible, take some of the Old Testament passages of the sufferings of the Saviour, and confidently and humbly show their minute accuracy. You have every right to do so, not to belittle or to proudly ‘claim a scalp’, but to show God’s word must be honoured and cherished.

    Luke varied it slightly when he wrote, ‘He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spat on. ‘ ‘And they will scourge Him and put Him to death.

( He does not refer here to the form of death),  and the third day He will rise again.’

    Early in  our Lord’s ministry, Jesus told Nicodemus that ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of Man be lifted up’. ( John 3:14)

 This clearly showed death by crucifixion rather than the usual Jewish stoning.    

    After Christ had risen from the dead,  Matthew wrote, ‘He is not here, but is risen. Remember how He spoke unto you when you were in Galilee, saying’, The Son of Man must be delivered into the hand of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.  And they remembered His words.’ ( Matthew 24:4-8 )  God’s truth often takes time to dawn upon us.  He was so patient with his disciples; and with us also.   

    It is a marvel that our Lord Jesus was not killed by stoning, which was the common Jewish punishment of serious offences.  His mother Mary’s life was endangered when she was pregnant of the Holy Spirit, before Joseph had taken her to be his wife. Remember how Joseph wanted to put her away to spare her an ignominious death by stoning, through which the BABE in her womb would have died, and the tender embryonic bones shattered. David prophesied, ‘that not a bone in His body was broken’.

    After our Lord had spoken those marvellous  words in John 10:29, ‘ My Father, Who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hand, He added the impressive claim,  ‘ I and My father are one’ ( v30 ) .  The Jewish leaders were infuriated, so that ‘then the Jews took up stones again to stone Him.’  This implied that they had previously tried.  They further fumed,

‘For a good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy, and because you being a man make yourself God. ‘( v33)  He was in terrible danger. ‘Therefore, they sought to seize Him, but He escaped out of their hands. ( v39 )  Christ was no coward, but it was not the Saviour’s hour to be sacrificed for our sin.   

    Jewish hatred burned white-hot as Stephen preached Christ to them, so that

‘ They stoned Stephen, as he was calling on God and saying, ‘ Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ So the first martyr in the christian era died from the brutal Jewish act of stoning. 

In 2 Cor 11;25 Paul had been stoned once. Possibly God had raised him from the dead.

    Death by crucifixion was not practised until 250 years BC. Numerous nations, Egypt, Carthage, Persia, Assyria, Germany,Greece, Rome ( Unger’s Bible dictionary ) ) practised this Barbarism. However, King David in 1000 BC prophesied in Psalm 22:16,

‘ They pierced My hands and my feet.’ This accurately foretold the hideous cross suffering, by which the Saviour would die.  The simple-minded believer is strengthened in His trust with such predictions, as I have been.  It had been in the heart and plan of God, for He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

    That remarkable prophecy in Zechariah 12:9, pointed to the death He would die.

‘I will pour on the house of David, and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on ME, whom they have pierced, and they will mourn for Him as one mourns for his only Son; and grieve for Him as one grieves for a first-born.  The Bible showed that the people of Israel crucified their Messiah; that Jerusalem would be the scene of this infamous act; that the Holy Spirit would be poured out as at Pentecost; and the second Person of the Godhead , even our beloved Lord, would be the object of every eye, as they gaze on Me.  ‘Turn your eyes on Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth shall grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.’ was a chorus of our younger days.  Let’s sing it now!

    Paul writes of the cross in Galatians 3;13 , ‘ Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’   He who is the Tree of Life hung on the accursed tree to buy our freedom  from slavery to sin and weight of guilt . He is our great Redeemer.  Let us praise Him that He took our shame, suffering , loneliness, weight of sin when He hung pinioned to the wooden beam, we call the cross.  No other death was acceptable to the Father.  No other death could prevail for us. 

    Like Paul we cry, ‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus  Christ., by Whom the world has been crucified unto me and I unto the world. ‘