Classic Christianity – A Closer Look at Jesus Christ P26 (12-08-20)
Synopsis
As we continue in our study, we now turn to look at a more magnified look at the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. We have a prophecy from the psalmist David, in Psalm 22, some thousand years before the event of his crucifixion ever occurred. Through this prophecy we gain insight into who Jesus is and why He came. The disciples of Jesus, both Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, record what they observed actually happen at the foot of the cross, concerning Jesus last words, as he hung there on a cross for you and me.
Recall also what Jesus told his disciples after his resurrection, as he walked on earth for many days.
Luke 24:44
44 He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
This alone tells you that Jesus said he fulfilled what was spoken in the Psalms concerning himself, and how that had to happen that way. In other words, this was just not some tragic unexpected event that happened to Jesus. There was a plan of God, for Jesus to die on a cross, only to rise again, planned out before the foundation of the world. As a means to rescue mankind from a fall, in God’s foreknowledge, knowing that in His design of man at creation, with free will, when man should choose to go his own way, decide for himself what is right and wrong, good and evil, God made provision for man to be redeemed and to choose Him so he may live again, eternally and forever with God.
Jesus Himself told us this plan of God when He explained this clearly to His disciples.
John 10:17-18
17 The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
So we look at Psalm 22 and see the fulfillment of various details, as recorded by the psalmist, and as we compare that with the actual events recorded down by the disciples as the actual events occurred. These things were all fulfilled in the person of Christ Jesus. For example, we come to realize that when Jesus cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, he was fulfilling what was prophesied concerning him in Psalm 22. Other things we observe, in comparing events, is that Jesus was crucified on a cross, that none of his bones were broken, and due to the harsh treatment of his body, his anguish of heart, a spear piercing his side, with a flow of water and blood, so his heart would burst, of a broken heart, and that you can count all his bones, that he was thirsty, that he was mocked, as people asked him, “If you are the Messiah, why don’t you get yourself down from there?”, and his clothes were torn in pieces and cast for lots.
But do not miss the purpose of why Jesus died. He did this for you and me. Because He took upon our sins, the sins of the entire world, God, who is perfectly Holy, had to turn His face away from Jesus. Jesus is the second Adam, and he reversed what happened in the garden of Eden. Since sin is what caused our death, Jesus took upon our sins, so that in his death, which is when the Holy Spirit left his human body and returned to the Father, he identified with us in this separation from God. Jesus experienced this anguish and soul-wrenching agony of being totally empty of God’s presence for our sake. The shed blood of Christ Jesus fully satisfied the just penalty of death for sin for all of us, back to Adam and to the man yet to be born. By His death we were reconciled to God so that a way was made possible in His soon resurrection in three days that He can offer eternal life, His resurrected life. If he did this while we were yet enemies, how much more will we be saved through His life. Will you receive His life today?
Transcript
Now Jesus did not have that conflict, being born of a virgin. His body did not have indwelling sin in it. So there was not a conflict here, and he walked in perfect dependency on his Father the entire time he was here on earth, which is not unusual for God to do. So everything he did and said was a total reflection of who He was, who is God. So that understanding of that, there is a dilemma that takes place with people when they read Psalm 22, written around 1000 years before Christ. I am saying what I am saying so we can come to grips with this fact that there is this human part of us, but there is also the spiritual part of us. And if you are born again, God’s Spirit lives in your soul. If you aren’t, then you have a soul, but it is not indwelt with God. But that is the aspect of man. This body of ours is one part, our humanity is one part and our spirit is something different. A total different entity altogether.
The same is true in Christ. Christ has a man-made physical body. It was born of a virgin but it was a physical body. But the real Jesus, the spiritual part of Him, is God. He is God in a human earthsuit. He is God in an earthsuit, but I am a man indwelt by God. I am an earthsuit indwelt by God. He is God clothed in an earthsuit. Total difference there.
Psalm 22 was written hundreds of years before the life of Christ, yet it contains an amazing detailed prophecy of what literally took place at a cross. From my understanding, a 1000 years B.C. was far beyond the Roman rule who brought in death by crucifixion. So it makes it even more amazing in the description of death by crucifixion before there was such a thing as a death by crucifixion. The Jews method of killing someone through capital punishment was stoning him to death, not hanging on a cross. Crucifixion was brought in by the Romans. Yet here is a detailed prophecy and a detailed picture of a death by crucifixion. I believe that God desired no one to miss the point that this was a prophecy about his crucifixion. Therefore at the end of three hours of darkness that occurred while he hung on that cross, he cried out, as what was recorded in Psalms.
Psalm 22:1-2
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.
This cry of Jesus mystifies people. Did God leave him? Was he questioning God? What happened? Let us look at those prophecies as recorded in both Matthew and Mark.
Matthew 27:45-47
45 From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli,[Eloi, Eloi] lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).[Psalm 22:1]47 When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.”
He was crying out “Eli” or “Eloi” but they heard him say “Elijah”.So they said that he is calling “Elijah”.
Matthew 27:48-50
48 Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. 49 The rest said, “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.”50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
Now Mark recorded the same deal in a little different verbiage.
Mark 15:33-37
33 At noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. 34 And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).[Psalm 22:1]35 When some of those standing near heard this, they said, “Listen, he’s calling Elijah.”
36 Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,” he said.
37 With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.
Mark added not to what was said, but did a more full understanding of what was said. “Let’s see if Elijah comes to take him down,”
2 Corinthians 5:21
21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Jesus literally became sin for us. You had God in an earthsuit, sinless God, the one who knew no sin, suddenly taking upon Himself the sins of the entire world. The sins of the entire world! Every sloppy thing that you and I have ever thought, said or done from the beginning of mankind until eternity, he took upon himself. It is like a little girl in Sunday school, when I was a brand new Christian, who asked me a question. She asked, “How could Jesus be in the garden of Gethsemane sweating great drops of blood? What caused that? Was he fearful of death?”
Luke 22:43-44
43 An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. 44 And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.
I responded, “No that could not be. There are many criminals in an electric chair who do not sweat as it were great drops of blood.” I asked her, “If you knew you were going to die in an electric chair, do you think you would be sweating as it were, great drops of blood?” She thought about it for a moment and said, “I do not think so”. “I do not think so either. But if you, as a young girl, but if you knew tomorrow that you were to go out into a field and be molested and raped by a hundred perverts, do you think you would sweat great drops of blood?”. She said, “without question”.
That is what Jesus had to go through. It was not his physical death causing agony in the spirit of Jesus. It was the fact of knowing, here is God, who has never known sin, experientially, or any other shape or form, who has to become sin for you and me. He did that for you and me! He did that for those listening right now. He did not have to do that.
Romans 5:6-8
6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
For a person to go and die for a person, and yes, possibly we could do that. I think a dedicated father could probably do that for his child. But for someone who never knew sin to take upon all the perverted things that have ever been thought, done or said in the world for you and for me? That is an unthinkable thought! There is no motivation at all that man can begin to grab a hold of that except for an unbelievable love that is called agape love.
As we continue here looking at all of this, the Lord Jesus Christ, when he hung on this cross, you are going to see at the end of this, his cry as recorded by Mark, “with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last”. Jesus yielded his Spirit up to the Father. Just as when Adam sinned, that Spirit of God had to be withdrawn from him. God the Father and God the Son in counsel of the godhead, said, “on the day, Adam, that you eat thereof, you shall surely die”.
Genesis 2:16-17
16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
In essence God said to Adam, “I am going to take the life of God from you whenever you decide you do not need it. You can eat every tree you want in the garden of Eden but the one in the center, the one of knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat. For the day you do will be the day you will die.” You have died when you do not need God to determine right from wrong, good from evil. That day the Spirit of God left Adam and left Adam on his own. Since you want to be on your own, so you are being left on your own. So his human spirit was now being programmed by the world, not by God, but by people, places and things.
On the day that he ate thereof he died a death. Again, he did not die bodily and soulishly. He died spiritually, death being the absence of life. Therefore, his human spirit was dead to who left him and that was God’s life living in him. His human spirit was not some kind of dead flabby thing. It is very much alive to the world but dead to God, who left him.
Now Jesus, in his humanity, was in the same situation, whereby the Spirit of God left him. The Spirit is God, the real Jesus. That is the invisible. Jesus is God. His humanity, the human part of him, was again going to be separated from his true being, from God. So the humanity of Jesus, the human part of Jesus, was separated from God, just like you and I were separated from God when we were born into this world.
We will never experience what Jesus did on the cross because it is impossible for you and me, who have been born again, to be separated from God. We will never be separated from Him. He did that for us. Being born again from the cross on, we are a different breed of humanity that has ever been placed on earth. We are the only people, including Jesus, who cannot lose life, once it was given to us, all of us. Adam was created with a life that could be lost through sin. Jesus as man, born of a virgin, different from us, but born in such a way that he too would be capable of dying through sin, not of his own, but of ours.
So if we understand that, the humanity of Jesus, that on the day that he became sin for us, it says that he breathed his last. The human part of him, he died. That spiritual part, he entered into the presence of God. Just as Jesus and the Father had to withdraw the Holy Spirit from Adam when he sinned, therefore the Holy Spirit and the Father had to withdraw the Spirit from Christ the man. His own spirit had to be yielded to the Father. Jesus said, “no man could take my life from me”. Because it had to be done, but Jesus said, “no one can take my life from me”. He yielded His life to the Father. “Father, in thy hands I commend my spirit. I give it to you.”
John 10::17-18
17 The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life – only to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
I believe, and I have no biblical basis for that, but I believe that Jesus, rather than having the heart of the Father, having to withdraw His Spirit from Jesus, that Jesus offered it to Him. Now, with this it says he died. What died? Well, when the Son of God departed from Jesus, did that Spirit die? Of course not. That is God’s Spirit. It does not die. What died? The human part of Jesus. That which he got from his mom and the Holy Spirit. So that humanity part of him died. Before that occurred, He was separated. The Spirit of God separated from His human spirit. He died a death like ours. His body died just like ours. So humanity, the human part of Jesus, died. But the real Jesus is absent from the body and present with the Lord.
Now, in that process of the suffering and the waiting for all of that to occur, is where He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. He yielded himself up to the Father and was absolutely by himself.
Psalm 22:1
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
It is interesting that, in this passage of scripture, that Jesus does three things in regard to Psalm 22. This leads us back to where Psalm 22 begins.
First of all, he pointed to that awful fact that his being forsaken by the Father means that the Father left him. Why did He leave him? God gave his Spirit to him. In that period of time, is there a vacuum? Absolutely. Is their distress? Absolutely. Was their heartache? Absolutely. Jesus, God the Son, had never been separated from his Father’s presence in all of human history. Jesus, in his humanity, had never, obviously, been separated from his Father.
I know what it is like to be separated from my Father. I was separated for 36 years. So when you are talking about that emptiness that is there. I know what that is and so do you. Any person who is born again, later on in life, knows what it means to be separated from the Father. I know I will never experience that again. Thank God I never will. Jesus has never known anything except the presence with his Father, and suddenly was without that presence.
When I think about, in my own life, and a lot of people who live with this kind of fear, but if I ever thought that the Spirit of God could depart from me. A lot of people think you can lose your salvation. I say, kill me before that occurs. I cannot envision living without the Holy Spirit of God living in me. I remember a little bit of what that was like. If anyone said if you would ever go back to that, I would say you got to be kidding. Not a lifestyle, but that condition of being a man without God living in me.
And so Jesus’ points to that fact that he was all alone in his humanity. Jesus of Nazareth was all alone in his humanity. He had enjoyed that fellowship with the Father, not only in his being from eternity past, but since his birth, has never known anything different than that. So he lived his life on earth in total dependency upon the Father. He certainly did not go there to die for his own sins. He did not have any. He took upon the sins of the whole world, and as a result, was cut off from fellowship with the Father. That means he was cut off from his Father separated, gone from his Father, for that is what separation means.
That is what that means. We just perverted that to mean I am just a little out of fellowship with somebody. But in the bible we are called into fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ. That is salvation. It talks about in 1 John, that fellowship is not bouncing in and out of. Either you are in fellowship, saved, or out of fellowship, lost. If you are in fellowship, saved, it means you are saved, that God is living in you.
1 John 1:7
7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin.
If you are in the light as He is in the light, the result of that means the two of you have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus keeps cleansing you from every sin imaginable. That is a by-product. Cleansing is a by-product of being in the Light. That is a condition we are in. That is where we are forever. I will never be in darkness. Again, you and I will never be in darkness again.
Colossians 1:13-14
13 For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
So we are in the Light forever. That is why, as Christians, if we are going to sin, we have to sin in the Light. That is why it is not much fun. We cannot get into darkness any more. We have to sin in the Light, if that is what I am going to do.
So Jesus was there at the cross, enjoying his fellowship forever, and suddenly God was now out of his being. So, he was crying out.
Psalm 22:1
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
The second point, Christ points to the explanation of his cry.
Psalm 22:3
Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
you are the one Israel praises.
In other words, God in His holiness cannot have fellowship with sin, so that He had to turn His back on His beloved Son, who at that point took upon Himself the sins of the whole world. Since Christ is holy, Christ bearing our sins was forsaken on the cross.
That needs a little bit of explanation. I do not believe it is the case that God is necessarily, as turning your back, saying I do not like you anymore. It is the fact he took upon himself, the real Jesus, the spiritual Jesus. God returned to His Father, but the physical Jesus was left without an awareness at all of a presence of God because God was no longer in that physical Jesus during that period of time. When someone forsakes you, they are not there anymore. That is how Jesus of Nazareth found himself.
Another reason Christ quotes Psalm 22 was to point to that prophecy of his death, to get us to realize that that event on the cross was not just some tragic event in history, but was God’s way of dealing with sin and it was an event foreknown by God and planned in accordance to His purpose.
So when one reads the first part of Psalm 22, he has got to be aware of the description of the events that were fulfilled at the cross. It is interesting to note that at the time these prophecies were written, there was no such thing as death by crucifixion. This type of penalty was introduced by the Romans hundreds of years after this prophecy was written.
1 Peter 1:18-19
18 For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
So once again, he who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in Him, in his resurrected life, we could become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21
21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Let us turn back to Psalm 22. What a prophecy, a thousand years before these events occurred!
Psalm 22:1-5
1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest.3 Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
you are the one Israel praises.
4 In you our ancestors put their trust;
they trusted and you delivered them.
5 To you they cried out and were saved;
in you they trusted and were not put to shame.
The contrast between God’s deliverance of His people Israel, again and again, in its long history, and here we see Jesus of Nazareth forsaken of God. God has not delivered him from death!
Psalm 22:6-8
6 But I am a worm and not a man,
scorned by everyone, despised by the people.
7 All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
8 “He trusts in the Lord,” they say,
“let the Lord rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
since he delights in him.”
Here the psalmist writes that he was scorned. “All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads.” You hear the voices of those who say, ‘He trusts in the Lord; let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.‘”. Were those things fulfilled? Of course it was.
Psalm 22:9-18
9 Yet you brought me out of the womb;
you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.
10 From birth I was cast on you;
from my mother’s womb you have been my God.11 Do not be far from me,
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.12 Many bulls surround me;
strong bulls of Bashan encircle me.
13 Roaring lions that tear their prey
open their mouths wide against me.
14 I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
Psalm 22:14-15
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Among other things, the psalmist writes, “My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death.” The psalmist continues to write that he suffered thirst. His strength is dried up like a potsherd and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.
Psalm 22:16-18
16 Dogs surround me,
a band of evil men encircles me;
they pierce my hands and my feet.
17 All my bones are on display;
people stare and gloat over me.
18 They divide my clothes among them
and cast lots for my garment.
It is an interesting thing that when we look at all the fulfillments of these in just a moment, you will see the fulfillment of all these things.
Let us look at the fulfillment in Matthew 7 and Luke 23.
Matthew 27:45-46
45 From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).[Psalm 22:1]
He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” just as David the psalmist wrote in Psalm 22:1
Luke 23:35
35 The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.”
As we just read in verses 7 and 8 in Psalm 22.
Psalm 22:7-8
7 All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
8 “He trusts in the Lord,” they say,
“let the Lord rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
since he delights in him.”
John 19:34-37
34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. 35 The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36 These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,”[Exodus 12:46; Num. 9:12; Psalm 34:20] 37 and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.”[Zech. 12:10]
Again, this shows the fulfillment of Psalm 22:14.
Psalm 22:14
14 I am poured out like water,
and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
Doctors will say that the manifestation of that, of putting a spear in someone’s heart and the outcoming water, is a sign of someone who died of a broken heart. Medically, that is what they have examined. One of these days, I will do a study on that, because it is a very interesting study.
In John 19:34, we read that the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. That blood and water that came from his pierced side, that indicates the heart had literally burst, and is an indication that death had occurred as well.
John 19:28-30
28 Later, knowing that everything had now been finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. 30 When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
Once again, we just got through reading about that, that he suffered thirst. So, his strength dried up like a potsherd, his tongue cleaved to his jaw and he lay in the dust of the earth.
Psalm 22:15
15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.
Luke 23:32-33
32 Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. 33 When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals – one on his right, the other on his left.
Jesus was crucified in the usual Roman manner, his hands and feet pierced with long dull spikes, which were driven into a stake. Due to the condition of a person hanging on a cross, you could literally count all his bones as they protruded through his flesh.
Again, we read that in Psalm 22:16-17.
Psalm 22:16-17
16 Dogs surround me,
a band of evil men encircles me;
they pierce my hands and my feet.
17 All my bones are on display;
people stare and gloat over me.
Order the Bible Study; “A Closer Look at Faith, Hope and Love” book today!
