Our scriptures and bulletins, so take a look, it’s across the page from the hymn. And it’s Mark chapter 15, verses 16 through 32. This is God’s holy word. And the soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is the governor’s headquarters, and they called together the whole battalion.
And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him. And they began to salute him, Hail, King of the Jews! And they were striking his head with a reed, that’s a stick by the way, with a reed, and spitting on him, and kneeling down in homage to him.
And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, and put his own clothes on him, and they led him out to crucify him. And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. And they brought him to the place called Golgotha, which means place of a skull. And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them to decide what each should take. And it was the third hour when they crucified him.
And the inscription of the charge against him read, the king of Jews. And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. And those who passed by derided Him, wagging their heads and saying, Aha, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross. So also the chief priests and the scribes mocked Him to one another, saying, He saved others, He cannot save Himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe. Those who were crucified with Him also reviled Him.
Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible Word. It will please the Lord to take His Word, accomplish in us that for which He intends it. We can always give thanks to God. Let’s pray again. Father in heaven, I want to pray especially today that you help us to keep our minds clear and focused upon you. Be with Jo today and help her, Lord, to think clearly and not to be disturbed by whatever remains of her illness. And we pray, Lord, also for Judy, who can’t be with us, but we pray that you would nevertheless comfort her and strengthen her. The rest of us, Lord, need your attention and help.
We are people whose minds wander and Maybe sometimes it’s good, Lord, for us to think longer on certain things, but help us to take it all in and appreciate it, especially now as we come into this time of thinking about the death of Christ on the cross and what it means.
We do ask all this now in Jesus’ name. Amen. Mark, and he had some help, we think, from Simon Peter, has presented the life the miracles, the ministry of Jesus, and he does so in a nice, compact document. The other Gospels are stretched out a little more, and we appreciate that because they give us more detail, and we’ve even borrowed some of the other just for our own clarification and so forth.
We are entering that time of Jesus’ earthly ministry that we call the end time, the Passion of Jesus. And we’re zeroing in now on the death and resurrection of the Lord. After the trials before the high priest Caiaphas and the Roman governor Pilate, Jesus is handed over to what we can only call the executioners, the people who are trained in how to put people to death.
Now, it didn’t take a lot of training, I might add. They were soldiers, and they knew how to do that, but that was their job, so Jesus is now in their hands. They take him and beat him, and may I say, beat him nearly to death. You know, they used a device called a cat-and-nine-tails, and that was a wooden stick, and it had leather thongs attached to it, and at the end of each thong was a piece of metal. So that when they whipped you with it, it tore out the flesh. Sorry if that sounds disturbing, but maybe we should realize just how serious the beating was that Jesus took. In any event, that having been completed, they compelled him to carry his heavy wooden cross to Golgotha.
Now, he didn’t make it all the way there. He fell under the weight of it, and so they pressed into service a traveler, a man who was just coming into the city. Hey, you! pick up his cross and carry it. And you couldn’t exactly say, forget it, I’ve got other things to do. He had to pick it up and carry it.
The only thing we know about him is he was the father of Alexander and Rufus. And those names are mentioned later in the New Testament, and we kind of think that they’re all related. Whether it had anything to do with the experience of Simon or not, they all later sort of appear in the subsequent preaching of the gospel in different places in the world. Well, they succeed, of course, in crucifying him.
Before the guards were able to drive nails, And they drove them right here, not out here in the palm, but around the wrist and in the feet also. And so that the weight of the person made the pain very excruciating. I mean, it’s bad enough to have nails driven through your hands, but then the weight of the person as it pushed against where these nails were, it was a very terrible thing. A lot of people, they just tied with ropes. But I suppose if you were considered an extremely dangerous criminal, then they nailed you to the cross.
The way that people died, I’ll discuss a little bit later. But the fact is that this is a very terrible situation, a dark situation in which we’re entering. And in fact, the atmosphere reflected that. The sky got dark. because of all that was going on there. That was the Lord’s doing, of course, but something for us to think seriously about.
Now we have several points to make this morning. The first, and may I congratulate Walt Disney, he sort of influenced me in this, we have the crown, the robe, and the stick. That’s our first point. And then the Via Dolorosa and the Via Crucis. Then back to three again, the cross, the inscription, and the derision. And finally, a daring challenge and unbelief. All of those things we’ll come to as we go along here. So the crown, the robe, and the stick.
Everything that Jesus received from these brutal soldiers, beginning with the beating that he took, it was all designed to humiliate him. And I’m sure it had been communicated to these soldiers, this man claims to be a king, this man claims to be somebody very important, and their mentality would have run, well, we’ll humble him. We’ll make sure he doesn’t think very highly of himself when we get through with him. But it was, and it’s hard to believe, but it was Jesus’ glory to suffer. to pay for the sins of his precious people. That’s why it was a glory for him. A lot of people suffered. A lot of people have been crucified and would still be crucified. But Jesus was suffering for the sins of his people that he might take those sins away.
Jesus never asked for and never took what we would call an earthly diadem. If you go back and read some of the kings of Israel, particularly David, in their conquests, they took kings’ crowns away from them, put them on their own heads, or had somebody do it anyway. They liked the diadem, the kingly crown. As I say, Jesus never took one. And he never asked for one. Now, the Bible says that later on, there’ll be lots of crowns for him and for God’s people. But at this point, no. Rather, he accepted another crown, a crown of thorns.
I’m sure they had done this before, these soldiers, and they knew how to make it hurt. And they had the thorns just right where they were placed, and they pushed it right into his head. And he bled from that, of course. He had a purple robe. The purple robe belonged to the king, and especially to the emperor. Emperors and kings of kings, as it were, wore purple. And so they put a purple robe, an emperor’s toga, on Jesus, and then they laughed at him. because their point was to make him humble, to make him nothing in their sight. And it should have sobered everybody to see this terrible contrast.
And then there was an emperor’s scepter. And we all have our mental pictures of scepters. It could be something very simple, like just a stick of some sort. Or it could be jeweled and orbed. And a lot of times in these English coronations that we have on our knees and so forth, you see the scepter very solemnly carried in. The Parliament, they carry it in, but coronations and things. This is the king’s stick, if you will. It represents his authority, his control over everything. The irony here is they took the king’s stick and they beat him over the head with it. It says very clearly that’s what they did.
And so virtually everything that was used in this, and I would call it an obscene ceremony, everything that was used was meant to be derision, mocking, a thing to be laughed at. Here this nobody is dressed like a king, has this oddball crown on his head and this stick now that we take and swat him with it. It’s the opposite of truth, in other words. Everything here that’s done here with Jesus is the opposite of what’s real, what’s true, because Jesus does have a crown, as I said, it’s mentioned later on. Jesus does have that robe, it’s called a white robe at this point, because it just points to his purity and perfection. He does have a ruling person’s authoritative, not so much a stick, but just a symbol that he is in control of all things. It’s the opposite of truth, in what you see here in the hands of these Roman soldiers. So that’s the crown, the robe, and the stick.
Well, we come to two names for the same route. One, you hear it a lot when it’s Easter and the news people are talking about what’s going on in Jerusalem. They talk about the Via Dolorosa, which means the trail or the route of sadness. And then the via crucis is the way of the cross. It means the same thing, really. But these Latin words mean the way of sorrows, the way of the cross, and what they do is lead somewhere. These are not just roads going nowhere. You know, we’ve got a railroad out in the San Joaquin Valley that goes nowhere. These roads were going somewhere.
They were going to the cross, to the Golgotha, place of the skull crucifixion site. It was approximately one half mile from where Jesus was beaten in the praetorium to the place of the cross. I’m sorry, yeah, the place of the cross, but Golgotha, the place of the skull. And if you were perfectly healthy and felt like walking, you could get there between five and 10 minutes walk. It wasn’t that far. But Jesus, remember, was beaten nearly to death.
And I would guess, and this is only my summation or estimation here, that it took about a half an hour for Jesus actually to arrive at the place where the crucifixion was undertaken. Then consider now with Jesus at the place of crucifixion and having actually been crucified, there’s a lottery. They’re casting lots to see who gets his clothes because they examined it and said, this is a pretty good piece of cloth here.
Who gets it? Well, let’s cut it up. No, no, no, don’t cut it up. Let’s, you know, cast dice or lots or whatever you want to call it. And we’ll see who gets this as a prize. And of course, there’s that famous movie and book called The Robe. Supposedly, somebody saved it, and it was useful in converting somebody. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
But nevertheless, there was a lottery there, and the soldiers tried their luck. I use that word luck in quotation marks there. Because luck, you see, is not real. There’s no luck. Everything is controlled by the Lord. It says in the Old Testament that people cast lots, but God controls it. There’s no luck, because God is in control of what’s going on here. God’s plan is real. Whether you believe in luck, well, that’s not real. God’s control is real, and God has a purpose in all that’s going on here.
It may be sad to us, we may want to shed a tear ourselves when we think about it, and it’s worth it, but God’s in control. This is the plan of God. And before we move on, let’s think about Simon of Cyrene. Now, he helped to carry the cross, as we said. But I think Simon tells us that every person, every character in this drama is also appointed by God. Every person is controlled by God. And we think, well, that’s interesting. This is a real historical event. Pilate was real and his Roman soldiers were real. Jesus and the thieves on either side, they were real.
And that’s all correct, but don’t leave yourself out. Because every time you’re confronted with this story, and I don’t mean by story, something fictional, but every time you’re confronted with the real event here, you get involved. Because either you’re going to say, I don’t want to hear it, or isn’t that interesting? And then you don’t do anything. It involves you that way. Or when you say, Lord, have mercy on me. I believe in Your cross. I believe in Your death. I believe that Your shed blood washes away my sins. You’re involved that way too.
And so we sing, were you there when they crucified my Lord? And the idea of the hymn is, no, you weren’t there physically, but now Scripture and the Holy Spirit take you right there and say, what do you think about this? Whether it was the crucifixion or the resurrection or whatever is mentioned in the hymn, you get the idea that you’re pulled right into that. It’s not just something that happened a long time ago that makes interesting historical reading. But yes, I was there because God brought me there and did a work of grace in my life.
The Via Dolorosa, the Via Crucis, was a route with an end, and the end was the cross. Now one other thing I want to say before we move on, in that they offered Jesus a drug. The drug was mixed with wine, it was myrrh, but it was some sort of painkiller. That shows you how generous and kind and thoughtful the Romans were, but they did offer these people, who were going to probably take two or three days to die, they offered them a sedative, as it were, And they thought, well, you know, we’ll show this little bit of kindness.
But Jesus said, no thanks, I don’t want it. Now I’m being silly in my choice of words here. He wouldn’t take it because he wanted nothing to lessen the impact of the wrath of God. How harsh is the wrath of God? You and I have no idea. Only Jesus knows that. I heard a story one time, a man said, let me just taste a little bit of the sufferings of Christ.
And he took it, the Lord blessed him and answered his prayer. And he took it for about 10 seconds and said, that’s enough, I can’t take anymore. The wrath of God is represented by the fact that Jesus said, I will take nothing to hold that back or ameliorate it in any way. He says, I’m going to bear it all. And sometimes we sing a hymn, Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe.
We don’t really understand everything about that statement. It’s not a scriptural statement, but it means that what he bore, he bore completely and thoroughly. He let nothing get in the way of it. And if we could even taste of it, we wouldn’t last hardly a second with it.
All right, let’s move on then to the cross, the inscription, that is the writing. and the derision. Now, crucifixion as we’ve, I hope by now, indicated was a horrible death, lots of pain, blood loss, exposure, thirst, and suffocation. Especially the ordinary person who was crucified would be exposed to cold, heat, rain, whatever. He would also suffocate because the more his body sagged the less he was able to breathe and finally the suffocation overcame him and he died of that. Thirst, even Jesus said as he honed the cross, I thirst, I thirst.
And we probably can’t even begin to understand that particular matter. How much blood did he lose? Well, I don’t know, but his head had been pierced with the thorns and his hands and feet, and there were veins and arteries and things all around. I don’t know how much blood he lost, but it was significant. Lots of pain too.
Now the Jewish law was that when you were hanged on a tree, of course this was a cross that they called a tree. When you were hanged on a tree, you couldn’t be left there overnight because you became a curse. Now what did I say earlier? I said that to die on a cross usually took two or three days. They didn’t, evidently, the Jewish people didn’t have any control over it, so whatever the Romans wanted, they got there. But Jesus did not hang overnight.
But he did become a curse for us, the Bible says. Whoever’s hanged on a tree is cursed. Well, Pilate’s inscription was aimed at the unruly Jews. It was a sarcastic thing that Pilate, I should say, put on the cross of Jesus. The full inscription was, Jesus of Nazareth. I said this was a compact gospel, but the whole thing said, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.
And it showed that he didn’t have any respect for the Jewish law. There’s nothing wrong with the law when you pay attention to it, when you use it in the right context. Pilate didn’t have any use for it. He didn’t have any appreciation for these courts that Jesus had been through at the house of Annas and the house of Caiaphas and so forth. The only way the Jews could get Jesus put to death was to turn him over to the Romans. Now they didn’t always go by that, and I’ve mentioned this before, even Stephen later on, they just took him out and stoned him, didn’t ask the Romans permission for that. But in this case, we find that Pilate’s inscription was a mockery of the Jews themselves and their so-called justice because they really weren’t paying attention either to the Bible or to their own rules about trials as I pointed out before.
But Jesus was indeed, and there’s a verse in some versions of the Bible, it’s left out of others, but it says he was numbered with the transgressions. That in his death he fulfilled that scripture. Now you can find it in other gospels, so we don’t think it’s wrong. Whether it actually belongs in Mark or not, I don’t know, but I don’t see any reason to get rid of it.
Jesus was indeed numbered with the transgressors. That is, He was treated like He was a criminal. But the irony is He was no criminal at all. He was the most innocent of all men that ever lived on the face of the earth. The derision. The derision was very harsh. And it was demand of Pilate to rewrite the charge. They said, you won’t find this in Mark, but they said, Change it to read, he claimed to be the king of the Jews. Pilate said, what I have written, I have written. I’m not changing anything.
But the point is that the derision that was directed toward Jesus was not mild. It was very harsh, very harsh. And nevertheless, And I’m taking this from Luke’s gospel now. There were those who wept for him. As he came along the road, it says the women were moaning and crying. And he said, women, cry for yourselves. He says, if they’re doing this when the tree is green, what are they going to do when it’s dry? In other words, when I’m gone and you don’t have my presence anymore, how are you going to stand up to this? Jesus was pointing out that to his very death, even those who felt sorry for him didn’t realize what a serious thing that was, that this derision was really the road to hell in itself.
Well, one last point to make, and that is the daring, the challenge, and unbelief here. Evidently, some of Jesus’ enemies were able to get close to the cross. Did you ever think about that? How were they able to get close? Because the Romans were there, you know, they weren’t going to let people get there and they might try to do something. illegal or anti-Roman or something. So that Jesus was sort of guarded with these other people who were crucified. And yet somebody got close enough to speak so that Jesus could hear. And even some of the people who were standing close could hear.
He said, aha. That interests me, the way that the translation goes there, aha. You said you could destroy the temple. In other words, you said you were all powerful and look at you now. And he got close, got close enough to say that. Now, although, you know, sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.
I think these words hurt Jesus because he could have. He told when he was arrested, he said, I could call 12 legions of angels to deliver me if that was what God wanted. And he could have, from the cross, he could have said, now destroy all these people that are after me and heal all my wounds. And that could have happened, but he didn’t, why? Because he was substituting himself for me and for you, that we might not perish, but have eternal life.
We might say that the Romans, as vicious and brutal as they were, the Romans maintained a more civil demeanor And one of them even said, surely this man was the son of God. One of the centurions that crucified Jesus. Surely this man was the son of God. In other words, the Jews were very unkind and even the brutal Romans showed a little measure of kindness. Surely this man was the son of God. That’s in the 39th verse.
We hadn’t come to that yet, but we will. There is no doubt that the worst sin is the sin of unbelief. Come down from the cross, they said. I didn’t believe He could come down from the cross. They weren’t expecting it. If He had, you and I would be in big trouble because we wouldn’t have a Savior. But just from the standpoint of what was expected, they didn’t expect Jesus to come down from the cross.
They just made a big deal of it. Aha, you who destroy the temple in three days and build it again, come down from the cross, show us that you’re really the Savior. Then we will believe, they said. But the interesting thing is, it’s unbelief. This whole thing is unbelief. Now, somebody will say, well, the unforgivable sin is mentioned by Jesus. If you sin against the Holy Spirit, it can’t be forgiven you. But this exactly speaks to that right here.
If you don’t have a Savior, if He could come down from the cross, then you couldn’t be saved. He wouldn’t be a Savior. He would be a judge only. And He would condemn you for it. The worst sin is unbelief. That is the sin against the Holy Spirit, to look at Jesus dying on the cross and mock it and say it’s not worth even considering. Jesus’ opponents were in disbelief. They were in disbelief regarding his innocence. Was he an innocent man? No, they said he’s a terrible criminal. That’s what they said to Pilate. If he weren’t guilty, we wouldn’t have brought him to you. Pilate said, huh? What has he done? But if he wasn’t guilty, we wouldn’t have brought him to you. They were in disbelief about his innocence, his Messiahship. Was he the Messiah? Was he the Christ? Or not? They said, no way. Not this man. Is he a king? Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews? Oh, he’s no king, they said.
Is he a priest? Well, the priests work in the temple. You see, that cross was an altar where the sacrifice for sins was laid down there so that our sins would be paid for. And was he God? He was no less than God. I and my Father are one, he said. How’s that possible? I can’t tell you how the Trinity is possible, the triune God, but it’s true.
And God came to earth and God died on the cross in the person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Father in heaven was still in heaven. The Holy Spirit was still at work and would participate in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. But it was the Lord Jesus Christ, God with us, Emmanuel, that we might not perish. So I close with this today. Don’t be an unbeliever. Don’t disbelieve. as the Lord draws you into that experience. Were you there? Yes, you’re there. By the Spirit, by the Scriptures, you’re there. What will you do? Will you mock Jesus and turn from Him? Will you commit the unforgivable sin by not believing in Him? Or will you come to faith and trust in Him?
That’s my prayer for you today. May the Lord help you to do that. Let us pray. Father, we ask now that you will take your word and apply it. Apply it to our hearts. Help us to say, yes, I was there. Yes, it was my sins that sent him to the cross. Yes, Lord, I deserve to be there and not he. Nevertheless, Lord, have mercy on me, the sinner, and save me for his sake. And this is our prayer in his name. Amen. Please look at the back of your bulletin and we’ll sing a closing hymn together. Now blessed be the Lord our God, the God of Israel.