15Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise– the fruit of lips that confess his name. ¹⁶And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased. (Heb. 13:11-16 –NIV)

Jesus is our sin offering. He sacrificed himself for us, once for all time. In keeping the Law of Moses, the high priest carried the blood of the sacrificial animal into the Most Holy Place –the earthly Most Holy Place – but Jesus carries his own blood into the heavenly Most Holy Place where he offers it for our sin before the throne of God. He is our sacrificial Lamb and he is our high priest. (I’ll talk more about the Most Holy Place next week.)

Now look at verse 18 in today’s passage. Verse 18 says that they crucified Jesus with two other men, one on either side of him with Jesus in the middle. The other gospel accounts tell us that these other two men were criminals. Matthew Henry, in his commentary, suggested that the Jewish leaders may have asked Pilate to crucify these two men at this time, even though they would not have been crucified until later. In this way Jesus would have had criminals at his right and left hand. It would have made him the chief of the criminals. (Remember how James and John wanted to be at Jesus’s right and left hand in his kingdom?)

But Jesus was crucified the way he was to fulfill prophecy. Isaiah says in his great prophetic passage about the suffering servant, that he was numbered among the transgressors, for he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isa. 53:12) (You know, Isaiah wrote hundreds of years before Jesus’s birth. But the liberal Bible scholars, who don’t accept that there is anything that is supernatural, concluded that Isaiah chapter 53 must have been added to the book of Isaiah after the time of Jesus. Guess what. When they found the Dead Sea scrolls back in the 1940’s and 50’s, they found a copy of the book of Isaiah that dated back to before the time of Jesus. One of the first things they checked was chapter 53. It was there and was virtually identical to our present version!)

Now look at verses 19 through 22 in today’s passage. Pilate had had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. Matthew and Mark say that it was actually a charge –what he was supposed to be guilty of. It said, “jesus of nazareth, the king of the. jews.” It was written in Latin, Greek and Aramaic so that there wouldn’t be anyone who couldn’t read it. (This was the time of the Passover celebration, so there were people there from all over, from Europe, from Asia Minor, from the Middle East and from Northern Africa. Simon of Cyrene, who helped carry Jesus’s cross after he had gone through the city gate, was from northern Africa.)

The chief priests were not happy with what Pilate had written. They told him that he should have said that “this man claimed to be king of the Jews.” Pilate said, “What I have written, I have written.” We don’t know why Pilate chose to word the notice the way he did, but I’m sure it wasn’t an accident. I think that he knew that, because of his own weakness, he was crucifying the Son of God.

Luke, in his account, says that, after the soldiers had put Jesus on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” I had to include this prayer –this is one of Jesus’s prayers – because this is so fundamental to our lives in Christ. Jesus asked his Father to forgive those who had beaten him almost beyond recognition and nailed him to the cross. How do you feel when someone attacks you, even in a relatively minor way? It’s so contrary to human nature –so contrary to the flesh –to resist wanting to retaliate. (It’s also contrary to the desire of that liar and murderer who wants to destroy us. But we must resist him. Jesus gives us strength.) Luke tells us that when they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he fell on his knees and cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep. (Acts 7:59,60) Stephen followed Jesus’s example. That what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

Now let’s look at verses 23 and 24 in today’s passage. In these verses the apostle John tells us that the soldiers divided up Jesus’s clothing. (They took off Jesus’s clothes before they crucified him.) When the soldiers came to Jesus’s undergarment, they decided that, rather than tearing it up so that each one would get some of the fabric, they would determine by lot which one would get the whole garment.

The reason John added the description of this incident is because it was a fulfillment of prophecy. Do you remember that last week I quoted from Psalm 22, “They have pierced my hands and my feet”? They pierced Jesus’s hands and his feet when they nailed him to the cross. (And crucifixion was something that simply didn’t exist at the time David wrote Psalm 22. That was around a thousand years before Jesus was born.) In Psalm 22 David also says, “They divide my garments among them and cast lots for my clothing.” David was a king, but he was also a prophet. J. Vernon McGee says that there are twenty-eight prophecies that were fulfilled during the time Jesus was on the cross!  That was a period of just six hours, by the way. He was on the cross from the third hour, around nine in the morning, to the ninth hour, around three in the afternoon.

Now let’s look at verses 25 through 27. Here’s what they say: