Every Sunday I go to a Remembrance Meeting. This is a time where we praise and worship God, we take the Lord’s Supper and we remember what God and Christ has done for us. I am a Christian and this is a central point of my life. Sadly, sometimes I find it very easy to gloss over what the Son of God has done for us. We are talking about the greatest tragedy, the greatest love story and the greatest victory of all time. Nothing that man has ever done, will do, or could do, could compare. My goal over the next several days is to write about the tragedy, the love story and the victory that our Savior gave us to help us remember the importance of living for Him.
Jesus, the Son of God, who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens, tempted but never sinned. He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. He came down to earth as a man, ”but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross! He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter. (Hebrews 4:15; 7:26 Philipians 2:7-8; Isaiah 53:7,9). And that is exactly what we did to Him.
In the United States, in this day and age we execute people as humanely as possible. Execution is the exception, usually taking years before it happens making sure every legal recourse is taken. Two thousand years ago, there was no such legal protection. Crucifixion was designed to produce a slow death with maximum pain and suffering. There is an article written by doctors at the Mayo Clinic and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association called “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” which details the physical trauma that the human body goes through in crucifixion. This article gives us some perspective on what a heinous death our Lord suffered. The article details how flogging was the legal preliminary to most crucifixion, the whip typically used had sharp sheep bones and iron balls braided into it. It details how scourging would tear into the underlying skeletal muscles and produce quivering ribbons of flesh. Usually by the time the flogging is done the victim is going into shock. It talks about the condemned having to carry the cross bar (patibulum) which weighs between 75 - 100 pounds and carrying it to execution ground. The Romans then took the spikes and nailed His wrist to the cross. The positioning of the spike went through nerve and muscle would have caused excruciating pain. To prolong the crucifixion process, a horizontal block would be secured serving as a crude seat. One poignant detail to me is this statement ”The major pathophysicologic effect, beyond the excruciating pain, was a marked interference with normal exhalation…. Adequate exhaltion required lifting the body by pushing up on the feet and by flexing the elbows and adducting the shoulders… However this maneuver would place the entire weight of the body on the tarsals and would produce searing pain.“ Crucifixion was not about killing someone it was about torturing him, punishing him, death was only the end of the process.
Christ came down as the least of men, to be tortured and to die the most humiliating and painful death man could conceive. Jesus certainly didn’t have to do this, he could of stopped this at any time, he could of called legions of angels to prevent this. Why didn’t he? One answer is found in Matthew 26:53-54. Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”
More on this in part 2.
