Saving Sinners
Matthew 27:32-37 The soldiers were going out of the city with Jesus. They saw a man from Cyrene named Simon, and they forced him to carry Jesus’ cross. They came to the place called Golgotha. (Golgotha means “The Place of the Skull.”) There the soldiers gave Jesus some wine mixed with gall. But when he tasted it, he refused to drink it. The soldiers nailed Jesus to a cross. Then they threw dice to divide his clothes between them. The soldiers stayed there to guard him. They put a sign above his head with the charge against him written on it: “ THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
Yesterday we read about loving your enemy – one of the many intensely inconvenient things that Jesus had to say. And it’s not just something that He said. It’s something that He lived and died for.
It doesn’t matter who you are, where you live or what you believe … you, like all the rest of us no doubt, know that Jesus was nailed to a cross. Pretty much everyone on the planet knows that, even if many don’t know why – but how easy it is to gloss over the brutal reality of His crucifixion.
Matthew 27:32-37 The soldiers were going out of the city with Jesus. They saw a man from Cyrene named Simon, and they forced him to carry Jesus’ cross. They came to the place called Golgotha. (Golgotha means “The Place of the Skull.”) There the soldiers gave Jesus some wine mixed with gall. But when he tasted it, he refused to drink it. The soldiers nailed Jesus to a cross. Then they threw dice to divide his clothes between them. The soldiers stayed there to guard him. They put a sign above his head with the charge against him written on it: “THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS.”
Terrible stuff – but even worse when you look at it through Jesus’ eyes. Back in the mid 19th Century, a man by the name of Octavius Winslow put it like this:
So completely was Jesus bent upon saving sinners by the sacrifice of Himself, that He actually created the tree upon which He was to die, and nurtured from infancy the men who were to nail Him to the accursed wood.
I don’t know about you, but that realisation completely takes my breath away. It gives a whole new meaning to His injunction to us to love our enemy.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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