Day 313 – Jesus’ Crucifixion

• Well now. The sentencing is over and as the hot sun beats down over Jerusalem, we now see Jesus – who only 24 hours earlier was preparing for Passover – dragging His cross to Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. The hill. The time has come.
• Who helped Jesus to carry his cross? Why did he have to do this?
• What drink was offered to Jesus? Gall (or bitter wine), according to tradition, was a pain-killing drug to help ease the pain for people being crucified. Why do you think Jesus refused it?
• Check out Psalm 22:18. How does it link to Matthew 27:35?
• What words were put above Jesus’ head? Why did Pilate choose to write them, and were the chief priests happy?
• Flick to Matthew 27:39-40. Jesus was going to the cross to do exactly the thing that the people were mocking Him for not doing. Do you think it hurt Jesus to take this abuse?
• Similarly, look at the words of the priests in verses 41-43. There were mocking and self-congratulatory. These people would have been seen as the wisest men of the time, and yet God’s wisdom was far greater. Does that comfort you in today’s scientific and increasingly hostile world?
• Focus in on the amazing words we read in Acts 2. We’ll study Acts in greater detail later, but you’ll know that it follows on from the resurrection of Jesus. Cast your eyes up to verse 14, and note who’s preaching to the crowds about Jesus. It’s none other than Peter, who had earlier denied Jesus three times! Peter was now talking to the same chief priests whose actions put Jesus on the cross… but of course they would have known by that point that He didn’t stay dead. What must the religious leaders have been thinking as Peter boldly, and defiantly, told them that their blind and evil hearts had sent their Saviour to His death?
• We’ve looked at Luke 14 before, but this is a good time to remind ourselves that we’re called to do exactly as Jesus did: take up our cross. Jesus literally did it for us. Spend a moment or two thinking about how that could look in your life. In what ways are you taking up your cross for Jesus, and in what ways could you?

313 days of reading and we’ve come to the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion.

Think of all the ways that humanity had walked away from God. Adam and Eve’s unwise choice. Cain and Abel, the flood, the sin in the early Israelite community, the grumblings in the desert, the lawlessness of the time in the Promised Land, the failed human kings, the forgetting of God’s blessings, the idolatry of human hearts and the way that the teachers and leaders had taken God’s Son to His death.

And throughout all that sin-drenched history, God had been preparing, through the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and – later – David, a Saviour who would, through His death, unite a lost people to their Heavenly Father. That – my friends – is what is happening in today’s life-changing words. They don’t get bigger. Spend a moment or too not reading or writing, but just thinking and contemplating what is happening in these verses.

Tomorrow we’ll read about Jesus’ conversations on the cross, and then His sufferings, and finally His death and burial.