Eight Days that Changed the World – Good Friday
Now we’re going to read in Matthew chapter 27. Matthew chapter 27. And I should have announced or would rather do it now than later. There is a supper here at six o’clock tomorrow night, followed by a gospel meeting. And then the final meeting of this series, the wonderful resurrection night. If the Lord has not come, that is what we’ll be considering on Sunday evening. Matthew chapter 27, look at verse 26.
Then released he, this is Pilate, then released he Barabbas unto them. And when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers. Now that word band is the Greek word for a Roman cohort. That’s not a word that we use often. The Roman army had 28 legions. There were 28 legions in the Roman army and each legion comprised 10 cohorts. And each cohort was made up of approximately 500 men. So what Matthew was saying is that the whole cohort, hundreds of men were in the barracks that day. We don’t know how many came out to mock the savior, but he might’ve been surrounded by hundreds of leering soldiers in what they were doing. Verse 28, they stripped him and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head and a reed in his right hand. And they bowed the knee before him and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews.
And they spit upon him, and took the reed and smote him on the head. And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from him and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him. And as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name, him they compelled to bear his cross. Please notice there is no mention of the Lord Jesus stumbling under the cross or unable to carry the cross.
I think actually that the Romans wanted the Lord Jesus to be more visible to the multitude so that they could see what Rome did to the supposed king of the Jews. Verse 34, they gave him, again, when they come to the place called Golgotha, that is to say a place of a skull, verse 34, they gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall. And when he had tasted, thereof he would not drink. And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet. They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots. And sitting down, they watched him there, and set up over his head his accusation written, This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Now one more reading, please in the book of Romans, chapter 5.
Romans chapter 5 and verse 6.
Romans 5 and verse 6, For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely, that is hardly, for a righteous man will one die. Yet peradventure, perhaps for a good man, some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Now, the topic this evening is of immense and incomparable importance, and I hope God will bless to you the scriptures that we read and the truths that we’re going to consider. If somebody has come to the meeting tonight searching for salvation, trying to find out how to be saved, then by the grace of God, I can say that you have come to the right place at the right time, because tonight is all about Christ and his cross, and that is equivalent to my saying it is all about what he has done for you and the salvation that he is offering to you tonight. On July 24th, 1969, the then president of the United States, President Richard Nixon, expressed his opinion of the successful mission of Apollo 11. It was a mission which included the first moonwalk. This is what he said to the astronauts. This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation. This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.
Now, my gracious audience will allow me to differ with the late president. Laying aside for a moment how far reaching, of course, were the effects of creation, without which there would be no earth, or the flood of Noah’s day, where the future of humanity hinged on the survival of just eight people. There are two events that without exception have had an impact on every mortal human being, every mortal member of the human race. Those events are what happened in Genesis chapter three and what happened at Calvary. And both of those events are linked with two men, Adam and the Lord Jesus.
And the Lord Jesus. It is significant that in the New Testament, the Lord Jesus is called the last Adam, and he is called the second man. Those are significant titles, because when the Bible says he is the second man, it is telling us that if you shuffle through all of humanity from Adam to Christ, everybody was the same. Everybody was a sinner. And then you come to the second man, the one man who was different from all others, the Lord Jesus. But when the Bible calls him the last Adam. That’s a look ahead. And it’s telling us there will never be another head of the human race. Everybody is either linked with Adam or with Christ, either with that first Adam or with the Lord Jesus, the last Adam. In Genesis 3, Adam disobeyed God. He rebelled against the Lord. And as a result, he imparted to each of us, every one of us, and every human being a sinful nature that we obtain at our conception. As the head of the human race, Adam dragged his entire human family into ruin, rendering us helpless, helpless to save ourselves, consigning us to an eternal banishment from God. And all of that was because he just did what he wanted to do rather than listen to God.
But the second man, the last Adam, is the one we’re going to consider tonight. And the Lord Jesus came into the world to save sinners, not to do his own will, but to do the will of his father by sacrificing himself so that by laying down his life, you could have eternal life. So that by shedding his blood, your many sins could be washed away.
He, the Lord Jesus, lifts everyone who trusts him. Adam dragged his whole family down into the ruin and catastrophe of sin. The Lord Jesus lifts everyone who trusts him into the position of being forever a child of God. Now, we have looked at very important events all through this remarkable week.
But what transpired on what we call Good Friday is of monumental importance for the universe, for this world, for every woman and man and girl and boy, and consequently for you. Good Friday, it is thought perhaps comes etymologically, comes from the idea of God’s Friday or God Friday, and then eventually merged into the idea of Good Friday. There is so much that we could have looked at and we’re going to have to overlook for the sake of time, because your time is valuable. We could have thought about the suicide of Judas, the traitor, the betrayer. We could have looked at the five or six trials that the Lord Jesus endured. We could have considered the choice of the murderous Barabbas instead of the Lord Jesus. We could think about Christ’s gentle care for his mother, even while he was enduring the absolutely excruciating pains of crucifixion. We could think about the salvation of the malefactor who was hanged beside the Lord. We could look at Christ’s seven sayings from the cross. You’ll understand that all of those things are vitally important.
But considering the time, there are two broad topics that we want to look at on this Good Friday night. I want you to think about what the Lord Jesus suffered from sinners and then what the Lord Jesus suffered for sinners. Just those two things. What he suffered from us and what he suffered for us. Here is what he suffered from us.
It was vicious, vicious. There was a cruel, sadistic, venomous character to the scorn and mockery that Christ endured. They mocked him as a prophet. They put a blindfold around his eyes, his head, and then a man slapped him. And then another slapped him. And at each slap, they asked, If you’re a prophet, prophesy, who’s slapping you? What’s my name? And they mocked his being a prophet. They mocked him as a king. They arrayed him in a gorgeous robe.
They placed a crown of thorns on his head. They put a stick in his hand like a royal, like a crude scepter. They spat in his face. They beat the thorns deeply into his brow and then bowing in front of him. Sometimes when I read it, I think of the choice of words. Is it Mark that just simply says they worshiped him? They worshiped him. Not that they mockingly worshiped him. Not that they faked worshiping him. Of course it was that. But just the bluntness of it.
These brutal soldiers bowing before this thorn-crowned man, and using words like you would hear Sunday mornings if you came to the breaking of bread and listen, using language about how worthy he was and how much they loved him and how he deserved to be honored. They worshiped him in a pretense of adoration. They mocked him as the Savior. They surrounded him at the cross and said, he saved others. If he’s the Savior, let’s see him save himself. If he’d be the king of Israel, let him come down from the cross and we will believe. Now, the apostle Peter describes the grace, the dignity, the forbearance with which the Lord Jesus endured all of this. Peter says, when Christ was reviled, he reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judges righteously. I read once somebody said, the Lord Jesus had never been slow of speech when it came to blessing others.
If a guilty sinner came to the Lord Jesus, there was no hesitation to want to bless that person. It was in his heart.
But he didn’t offer a single word in his own defense. So when the Bible says, never man spake like this man, the writer said, we can add, never man was silent like this man with all that he was enduring. It was vicious, but it was also violent. There were elements to their treatment of the Lord Jesus that seem absent from their treatment of the two malefactors and perhaps from all others. For instance, in the house of the high priest, he was slapped repeatedly. I’ve often wondered how that first slap, just that first, slap across the face of the Son of God must have made God the Father feel. That never happened up in heaven. It’s hard for us to grasp eternity. but from eternal ages, nobody ever laid a hand on the Lord Jesus.
We have no record. We have no record. As far as I can recollect, we have no record of anybody ever slapping the Lord Jesus or beating the Lord Jesus prior to his allowing himself to be turned over to them. There were occasions where they tried to lay hands on him to grab him.
But this was a slap that must have echoed through heaven itself because here for the first time ever a creature, a mere man described as one of the officers who stood by, a mere creature actually struck the creator, the son of God. In the palace of Herod, the men of war gathered around the Lord Jesus. Now, remember Pilate said to those howling leaders demanding in Christ’s death, he said, I sent you to Herod. So they trailed him.
When Pilate sent the Lord Jesus to Herod, it wasn’t just the Lord Jesus being taken by a couple of soldiers. The mob followed him and they’re bursting into Herod’s palace. Here were these chief priests saying, he’s got to die. He must die. And we read Herod with his men of war, set him at naught. But the word nought means nothing. They treated the son of the most high God, the Lord of countless angelic beings, as though he were worthless, as though he were beneath their dignity and beneath their position. And there is no expositor I have ever read, no commentary I have ever looked at that has been able to fully explain the awfulness of those words. They set him at nought. I used to work for Philadelphia Electric.
And there were times when I would walk home.
And on one occasion, I passed a bank. It was on the corner. And so both parts, of the building were window displays. And this was a particular anniversary of something connected with the Second World War. And there were a number of pictures. I will never forget one of them. It was of a man who, to all intents and to all appearances, was an Hasidic Jew. He had the hat on, the curls, the long beard, dressed in black. He was surrounded by Nazi soldiers, and some of them looked like SS men. They were armed. You could see from where his garments had been pulled, you could see what was going on.
They were mocking this man. They were going to kill him. But before they shot him, they wanted to make sure he knew that they absolutely, disdained him, detested him, despised him. And you know the thing that struck me? He stood there in the middle of this, circle of leering men. He just stood there, dignified, looking straight ahead, unresisting. Made me think of what Isaiah spoke about the Lord Jesus. And then suddenly I realized the difference. We sang it in the hymn, brother Zudema gave out. That man in the middle of those Nazi soldiers was absolutely helpless. They were armed. He was not. They were powerful and young. He was old.
But when Herod with his men of war set Jesus at naught, battalions of angels could have come if he called, but he didn’t. In the Praetorian courtyard, he was turned over to the Roman soldiers for added abuse and savagery. He was already condemned to die. He was already going to be taken to Calvary, but Matthew and Mark record that the whole band was there. Every soldier present in the barracks that day to join in the cruelty they would heap on the Savior. Secular history tells us that one of the things they did, the game that they played with these helpless victims, was that they would form a circle around them, just as I was talking to you about that Hasidic Jew. They would form a circle around them, and one of the soldiers would grab the prisoner and was allowed one punch, just one, and he would punch the prisoner that would knock him across to the other side of the circle where another soldier would turn the man around. He was allowed one punch. He would, by that punch, be sending the prisoner into the arms of another soldier who would turn him around, and on it would go. And the objective of the game was to say, who could do the most harm with just one punch?
Do you remember Isaiah’s words? That he was disfigured beyond recognition as a man. They pummeled the Lord Jesus. Then in an act of sheer barbarity, they scourged him. Unlike our concept of simple whippings, the Roman scourge was a whip with pieces of bone and metal attached to the ends of the cords. It was called the flagellum or the phlegrum at times. And there were occasions when they would have a hook at the end, and those whips were known as the scorpion because it’s the concept of those hooks biting into the flesh. And when the man handling that would pull back, of course, it would rip the flesh from the person. So they would take the prisoner and they would tie him to a post. He would be bent over so that his entire back all the way down to the waist would be exposed.
And the man who was wielding that phlegm or flagellum, he could kill a man right there, never have him alive to take to a cross, if he wished. He could lay organs open and tear them apart. And of course, the centurion who was in charge, he would signal to the lictor, That’s enough and make the scourging stop because they want a crucifixion. They don’t want the man to die there. Now, please remember the Jewish law.
Restricted the punishment to 39 stripes, 39 times a person whipped.
Roman law had no restriction. And it wasn’t the Jews who scourged Christ. It was the Romans. All of that he endured in silence. Isaiah wrote, he has brought us a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers as dumb. So he opened not his mouth. Now, most depictions or even considerations of what the Lord Jesus suffered, stop right there with what we have just discussed. If you’ve watched any movies depicting Calvary, that’s as far as they can go. And what I’ve told you is terrible. My words have been pathetic attempts to tell you a little of what he suffered. What the Lord Jesus endured from humans.
Was just a drop. In the immeasurable ocean of pain and suffering, he would later undergo on the cross when he was bearing our sins. Now, please, I’m gonna call on my audience. It is vital that you grasp the truths we are now going to look at. And I have asked God to help me make them unmistakably clear to you as we consider what the Lord Jesus suffered for sinners, what he suffered for you. We need to understand, first of all, that it was voluntary. Voluntary. It was decided. That’s a very poor word. I don’t know any other word to use. It was decided by the Trinity that it would be the Son of God, not the Father, not the Holy Spirit, but it would be the Son of God who would become one of us and would sacrifice his life to redeem fallen’s humanity. Failing to grasp that fact.
That the triune God, always working in unity, that the triune God had determined, that it would be the Son of God. When people fail to grasp that, they imagine that God has been unfair by punishing an innocent person for guilty people. But remember, please, this was Christ’s creation. His creatures had been ruined by sin. His creation had been attacked by Satan. So the Lord Jesus chose to come and undo the works of the devil, providing salvation for every human being so that an offer of salvation could be extended to you. And by his death, he would lay the foundation on which God eventually is going to expel sin from an entire new universe, all because of what the Lord Jesus accomplished on the cross. Now the Old Testament gives us wonderful pictures to help us understand. Let me just run some of them past you very quickly. Think about Judah. He was one of Jacob’s sons. And Judah begs this Egyptian premier, who was actually his brother, Joseph. He begs him to be a substitute, to take the place of Benjamin so that if one of these sons of Jacob have to go into prison and be held there, Judah says, let it be me.
Think about Moses going up the mountain the next day after Israel had worshiped the golden calf, and saying to God, if somebody has to be blotted out from living, if somebody has to be removed from the planet and die because of this sin, let it be me. He’s offering himself instead of the nation. Think of Boaz outside the city gates at Bethlehem, paying the full and complete price to redeem Ruth. Those are pictures, those are cameos of what the Lord Jesus would accomplish at Calvary. And the most telling picture of all, likely, think about Abraham and Isaac, father and son, going to the altar together. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son, confident that God would raise him from the dead. Isaac was willing to be bound to the altar, confident that his father would do the right thing. It foreshadowed the truth expressed by the Savior in John chapter three, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. I’m looking at some of you tonight and I can see the glazed look on your face. You’ve heard these verses so many times. You’ve heard this truth countless times.
I wish I could just impress on you tonight how incredible, how absolutely astounding, are the facts that we’re looking at tonight. God’s love for the world led him to give his son. Christ’s love for your soul, for you, led him to give his life.
And he did it voluntarily. Some years ago, there was a man in California, worked in an aerospace plant in Burbank. And he got a call to come in earlier to replace someone who was not well or, whatever the case was, wouldn’t come in. So I’ll just give you his first name. He was a 44-year-old man. His first name was John.
He’s on a train that he shouldn’t have been on. He wouldn’t have normally been on that train. It was a double-decker. He went to the upper deck. It was very early. Settled back. Fell asleep, trying to get some sleep before his train stop arrived. And the next thing he knows…
He’s flat on his stomach. He’s pressed down by debris. He can’t get up. He can hardly move. There’s something wet dripping on him, and when he puts his hand up to see what it is, it’s his blood. The train had crashed. It was a January day. Eleven people died. Two of the eleven who died were right where he was, right in his car. John is pinned down, bleeding. Trapped. He said later, he began to sing a hymn. I don’t know the hymn, but I can understand the words. Why me, Lord? Whatever that hymn is, he’s singing as he’s trapped under that debris, bleeding, and thinking he’s going to die. And with that thought in his mind and the blood on his hand. He dipped into the blood again. And then on the twisted chair back that was in front of him, he lifted his hand and he wrote this, I, and then instead of the word love, he made the usual symbol of a heart. I love my kids. I love Leslie. That’s his wife. and in a short time he passed out.
Rescuers eventually reached where he was on that train. And as they were prying the debris off of him to free him, he was unconscious. One of the men spotted the seat back with that message. Now, what he said is, I knew one thing. I knew that once we got him out of here, I had to get that seat. I had to get that to his family. Before they even were able to do that, Leslie, his wife, saw a picture of it.
I love my kids. I love Leslie. And she said, Hallmark, you know the card company? Hallmark is never going to top this. Never, never going to top this. Where would you find a card? Written in his own blood, how much he loved his family. If you look at Calvary, you will see a message written in the most precious blood ever shed on this planet. And its message is that God loves you and Christ died for you. Do not miss that message. Do not overlook that phenomenal truth that Christ came to save you. And the way the apostle Paul put it, as we read, is God displayed his love toward us. He put it out there for you to see. In that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Now that leads us to the truth that since the Lord Jesus suffered for sins as a substitute, that is in my place, it was also, if I could use a big theological word, it was also vicarious. That is, it was on my behalf. It was for my benefit. Look back at those scenes again.
After all the mockery, they laid the horizontal piece of the Roman cross, that ponderous patibulum, they laid that on his back. He made his way out of Jerusalem’s north gate to the place of execution. Eventually, they impressed a man named Simon the Cyrenian to carry the cross. As I say, I think they did that so that everyone could see what the king of the Jews looked like after Rome had beaten him and crowned him. The place of execution outside the walls was called Calvary. That’s from the Latin word for skull. And the word Golgotha, the name Golgotha, is from the Aramaic for skull. Therefore, it was called the place of a skull. And for.
Six hours from the third to the ninth hour, 9 a.m. To 3 p.m. our time, six interminable, seemingly never-ending hours, the Creator hung on a cross to save you from hell. Maybe you’ve heard Christians sing these words, what He endured, no tongue can tell to save our souls from death and hell.
The kind of death he died centuries before God had singled it out and said it’s the death of the curse. The person who hangs on a tree is dying the death of the curse. And he died that kind of a death to deal with this monstrous thing that’s in your heart and is threatening to kill you and destroy you forever. Christ died for our sins.
That involved God’s charging Christ with the sins of guilty sinners. That’s why I say when man was done, God did something that no man could do. He laid my sins on the Savior. Isaiah put it this way. He said, all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He added words like this. He said that he was stricken for the transgression of others, that his soul would become an offering for sin, that he would bear or carry the sins of many. Zechariah, the prophet, spoke of an ancient sword being drawn by God, and in the hand of omnipotence, in one awful, incredible stroke of divine judgment, the sword would pierce the heart of the Lord Jesus.
And he would suffer to save you, suffer so that your sins could be paid for. And the Bible just expresses it so simply. I can’t improve on it. Listen to what it says. Christ died for our sins. All that he went through was so that you could go home tonight with every sin forgiven. Because when he charged Christ with my sins on the cross, God then punished Jesus in my place. See, I know that my sins were put on him. Because God’s word says that. I know that there were my iniquities for which he was bruised. I know that because God’s word says that.
So allow me to ask you, each of you here tonight.
Was he wounded for you? Was he bruised for you? On the cross, when he was dying for my sins, did he die for yours? His suffering, his stripes have healed me. Are they enough to heal you? Only one other topic this week. Only one other topic this week. Easter Sunday topic equals in importance what we are considering tonight. So please allow me to be crystal clear. If it seems somewhat repetitious, please listen. The death of Christ on that cross was a substitutionary death. I know he took my place. Jesus died instead of me. or as Paul so succinctly put it, the son of God loved me and he gave himself for me. Years ago, preachers had a wonderful phrase they used to explain what happened at Calvary and they called it the marvelous exchange, the marvelous exchange, Jesus instead of me.
And one of those delightful little books about assembly preachers and workers, if you ever happen to read the Donald Ross book, you’ll find out that as a young man in a place called Inchdown, Scotland, he was deeply troubled about his sins. He was 15 years of age. And he was reading the gospel, searching for salvation. And he found himself reading John 18, the Garden of Gethsemane. And he got down to verse eight. The band had come armed, ready to capture Christ. And the Lord Jesus stood between them and his disciples. And he said, if you seek me, let these go their way. The disciples run. And the Lord Jesus allows himself to be bound and led away. And the thought just came into this man’s mind, Mr. Ross’s mind. He’s 15 years of age. He thought to himself, Jesus, Jesus took their place. He’s bound and they go free.
And it dawned on him that that is exactly what happened at Calvary, that Jesus took Donald Ross’s place and Donald Ross goes free. Well, I’m thankful that I know he took my place and I go free. So would you ask yourself in the quiet of your own mind and heart, just this question, did Jesus do anything for you?
Did Jesus do anything for you, when he died on the cross?
I’m going to just take a couple more minutes and tell you his death was a sufficient payment. He fully accomplished the work. He said it is finished. He has provided salvation for everyone. There is enough in what Christ did at Calvary to save every human being who ever lived. Therefore, I can tell you it’s enough to save you tonight if you will simply come and trust him. Let go of any other idea about how to be saved and simply turn to the Lord Jesus and he will save you. Now, I can’t close this meeting tonight without telling you that the hymn at the beginning of the meeting was written by a man who was not saved. Not when he started the hymn.
He was just, to give you his own words He said, I was a profane man, I drank a lot He meant if anybody needed a savior, I needed a savior His name was Ray Overholt He was, playing in a band in a dance hall in Battle Creek, Michigan When he started to write this song, And I was struck by his words, he said I couldn’t write a song and not know the man I was writing about. I didn’t know much about the Bible. I didn’t know much about Jesus. I thought, I better find out about him if I’m going to write about him. So he said, I opened the Bible. I began to read the portion of scripture that describes Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he said he could send 12 legions of angels. He said, at that time, I didn’t realize 12 legions of angels was far more than 10,000. But he said, I thought he could have called 10,000 angels would be a good title. So he said, I wrote the first verse. He was a sinner. He wrote the first verse. He said, I threw it in my guitar case.
And while I was trying to find out who this man Jesus was and writing the rest of the song, I was saved. People need to remember the power Jesus has as the son of God. He was so powerful, he could have cried out for 10,000 angels, but he stayed on the cross alone, alone at Calvary. And if you ever find out, what Jesus did for you at Calvary, I think you’ll find yourself often singing with deep appreciation. Oh, the love that drew salvation’s plan. Oh, the grace that brought it down to man. Oh, the mighty gulf that God did span at Calvary. I can’t say it any better than the Bible’s simple, clear statement to get home with you tonight. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.
Filed under: Gospel Series, higgins-eugene
