Thank you, you may be seated please.
Now we'll hear from our brother, Mr. McDonald,
from Chicago.
Friend, our Bible's pleased to the Gospel
of Matthew, chapter 27.
Matthew's Gospel, chapter 27, beginning with verse 32.
And as
they came out, they found a man of
Cyrene, Simon by name, him they compelled to
bear his cross.
And when they were come unto a place
called Golgotha, that is to say, a place
of a skull, 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.
Then were there two thieves crucified with him,
one on the right hand and another on
the left.
And they that passed by reviled him, wagging
their heads, and saying, Thou that destroyest the
temple, and buildest it in three days, save
thyself, if thou be the Son of God,
come down from the cross.
Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with
the scribes and elders said, He saved others,
himself he cannot save.
If he be the King of Israel, let
him now come down from the cross, and
we will believe him.
He trusted in God, let him deliver him
now, if he will have him.
For he saith, I am the Son of
God.
The thieves also which were crucified with him
cast the same in his teeth.
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness
over all the land unto the ninth hour.
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with
a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
That is to say, My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
Some of them that stood there when they
heard that said, This man calleth for Elias.
And straightway one of them ran and took
a sponge and filled it with vinegar, and
put it on a reed, and gave him
to drink.
The rest said, Let us see whether Elias
will come to save him.
Jesus, when he had cried again with a
loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
It was just a short time before that
Judas had come out with a multitude with
staves and spears, and planted that treacherous kiss
upon the cheek of the Son of God.
And then they hurried him to the palace
of Caiaphas, the high priest for the religious
trial.
You know, it is most unusual to do
that.
Ordinarily a man who is accused of a
crime is permitted to go to prison and
to have opportunity for his case to be
prepared.
Ordinarily it would have been most unusual to
disturb the high priest at that time of
the night, but he didn't care.
In fact, he rather welcomed the intrusion, because
the hearts of the people had been filling
with hatred for the Son of God for
three years now.
And at last his time had come, and
the cup of their hatred was bubbling over,
and they were determined to take action and
to take it quickly.
And so the words of the prophet Isaiah
were fulfilled.
He was hurried away from prison and from
justice.
And who shall declare his generation?
For he was cut off out of the
land of the living.
So Caiaphas was the judge, the chief priests
and the elders were the prosecution, and the
lovely Lord Jesus was the defendant.
Those who should have been the first to
recognize him as the Messiah of Israel were
the first to try him in an attempt
to put him to death.
And at the outset of this trial there
was an embarrassing lack of witnesses.
There was no one to come forth and
state the charges against the Son of God.
And finally they found some false witnesses who
were willing to come with a garbled account
of something the Lord Jesus had said.
They said, they quoted him as saying that
he would destroy the temple in Jerusalem and
would rebuild it in three days.
What he had said was, destroy this temple
that is his body, and I will raise
it again in three days.
And when these charges were made, the Lord
Jesus had nothing to say.
He was led as a lamb to the
slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers
is done.
So he opened not his mouth, and his
adversaries could not stand the silence of the
Lord of life and glory.
And finally the high priest said to him,
I adjure you by the living God that
you tell me whether you are the Messiah,
the Son of God.
And the Lord Jesus stood before him as
a Jew.
And the Lord Jesus well knew the Jewish
scriptures.
He wrote them.
And his mind would then have gone back
to Leviticus chapter 5 and verse 1, where
the Jew was instructed that when heard the
voice of adjuration, the voice of swearing, he
must testify.
The Lord Jesus could be silent up to
that point, but now he had heard the
voice of adjuration.
He had heard the voice of the high
priest, and he said, thou hast said.
And you know, sometimes as we read that
in our English Bible, it might sound as
if he said, well, you said it, but
I didn't.
But that isn't what it means.
It means you've said it, and it's absolutely
true.
And then it was as if the Lord
Jesus said to Caiaphas, yes, it's true, I
am the Messiah, the Son of God, but
you see me today in humiliation standing before
you?
You see me with the glory of deity
veiled in a body of flesh, but the
day is coming when you will see me
coming on the clouds of glory at the
right hand of God the Father.
The high priest, in a great dramatic gesture,
said, why this is blasphemy, he said.
And he took and he rent his garments
as an indication of the fact that blasphemy
had been committed in those most sacred to
him precincts.
And so he turned to the crowd and
he said, what is the verdict?
But he well knew before he asked.
And they said, he's worthy of death.
And the only lovely man who ever lived,
they spat upon him at that point.
They slapped him and they pushed him around
and committed all of these indecencies of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
And it was at that time that Peter
was not very far away and he was
warming his hands at the fires of the
world.
And a maiden came to him and she
said, let's see, aren't you a follower of
this Jesus?
Peter said, I don't know him.
And then he left the court and went
out to the porch.
And another maiden was waiting for him there.
And she said, you were with this Jesus
of Nazareth, weren't you?
But he said, I don't know what you're
saying.
And not very long after that, somebody else
came to him.
They said, yes, but your accent is just
like the accent of all of those who
are with Jesus.
They have a Galilean accent and you do.
And you know, just a simple denial from
Peter would no longer do, he felt.
And so now he confirmed his denial with
oaths and with curses.
And with disquieting promptness, a rooster in the
neighborhood crowed.
And Peter remembered the words of the Lord
Jesus.
And he went out and wept bitterly.
This was a night of all nights.
And strange and discomforting things were happening in
the city of Jerusalem.
Now, the Jewish people had no power in
themselves to inflict capital punishment.
They could pronounce their own verdict on the
Messiah of Israel.
But they themselves were subject to the power
of Rome.
And ordinarily, the Jews would have something less
than love for a man called Pilate.
They would look on him with scorn and
with contempt.
But now it was very pleasing to them
that they could rush Jesus off from the
home of Caiaphas to the palace of Pilate.
It's strange, isn't it, how enmity against the
Lord Jesus binds men together, men that otherwise
would be hostile one against another.
And it was just at about this time
that a man named Judas began to realize
something of what he had done.
Judas, who had accompanied with the Lord Jesus
for those three years, who had heard the
lovely words that proceeded out of his mouth,
who had seen the miracles that he did,
and who had received nothing but kindness from
him.
Judas, who held the bag, who was jealous
of the ointment that was poured upon the
feet of the Lord Jesus, who sold his
lord and master for thirty pieces of silver.
And now we learn that Judas repented.
But just a minute.
It wasn't godly repentance.
Judas' repentance was the repentance of remorse, and
that's all it was.
Judas was sorry for what his sin had
brought upon himself, but he wasn't sorry for
what he had done to the Prince of
Life.
And so he took those thirty pieces of
silver, and he went back to the temple,
and he went back to the chief priests
and the elders, and he said, in effect,
I want to return this money to you,
for I have betrayed innocent blood.
You know, the way of a transgressor is
hard.
They said, you can't return that money to
us now.
Strange thing.
They were the ones who paid it, but
they wouldn't take it back now.
These men were too spiritual to do that.
They said, why, this is the price of
blood.
We couldn't take that back.
They washed the outside of the cup, as
the Lord Jesus had so aptly said, but
inside it was filled with deceit and treachery
and murder.
And they said, no, we can't take that
money back.
That's your problem.
You see to it.
You know how characteristic that is of the
world.
Gets a man down to where it wants
him, then turns its back on him.
And so Judas took the money, the thirty
pieces of silver, and in an act of
despondency, he threw it down on the floor
of a sanctuary.
We don't know exactly where he threw it,
but there it was.
And they said, now, now, we must take
careful action with this money.
And so they decided that they would buy
a cemetery for it, with it.
A little cemetery where they could bury strangers.
Dear friends, little did they know the significance
of that act.
Little did they know that down through the
centuries, their land would be invaded by strangers,
by the Gentile hordes, by the Crusaders, and
all the rest.
Little did they know how they would be
chased from pogrom to ghetto.
And little did they know how some of
those invading conquerors would perish in the battle
and would need a place for burial.
And so they purchased the potter's field with
the thirty pieces of silver that the Lord
Jesus had been betrayed for.
And so now he's before Pilate, and a
trial begins that was the gravest miscarriage of
justice that this world of ours has ever
seen.
He stands before Pilate, and Pilate says to
him, Are you the King of the Jews?
And the Lord Jesus acknowledges the fact, and
when he does, a torrent of abuse and
evil epithets comes forth from those in the
courtroom, from those who were standing by.
Now it was the custom at that time
for the Roman power to seek to ingratiate
the Jewish population, which was always stirring up
and always uneasy against Rome, and they thought
at the feast time it would be a
good political thing to release some notorious criminal
to the Jewish people.
And they had a notorious criminal at that
time.
His name was Barabbas.
It seems to me from the record that
actually Barabbas had committed insurrection against Rome that
he had led in one of the great
uprisings against the Roman power, and of course
in a sense this would make him a
great national hero.
And so Pilate said to the crowd, Now
you know it's the custom for us to
release a prisoner to you at that time.
Whom shall I release?
Shall I release Jesus, or shall I release
Barabbas?
And you know the scripture says, For he
knew that for jealousy they had delivered up
Jesus.
What a condemnation.
And so of course their answer was Barabbas.
Barabbas was their hero, not Jesus.
And then at that moment a very strange
thing happened.
A messenger came stalking up to Pilate.
He brought a message from Pilate's wife.
She had had a disquieting dream, and she
told him that the man who stood before
him was a just man, that he shouldn't
get involved.
But you know the message was too late.
Pilate was already too deeply involved in this
mock trial of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he thought that just by releasing Barabbas
to them, well this would satisfy the Jewish
populace.
They wouldn't want anything more than that.
But dear friends, it wasn't Barabbas' life they
wanted.
It was Jesus' death.
And so when he was willing to release
Barabbas to them, they began to chant with
insane mob hysteria for the death of the
Lord Jesus Christ, their own creator.
And so in this symbolic act of self
-righteousness, Pilate took and he publicly washed his
hands before them.
And he said, I'm innocent of the blood
of this just man.
But oh dear friends, water would never wash
away the guilt of Pilate in the matter.
Some people feel sorry for Pilate.
They can say all kinds of gracious things
about Pilate.
But dear friends, the scripture writes his condemnation.
It says, Pilate willing to content the people.
He was more interested in what the people
said than in what God thought.
And he was willing to trample upon all
the principles of justice to deliver up to
them the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so he did.
He delivered Jesus to them.
He scourged him.
And he delivered Barabbas to freedom.
And so now the Lord Jesus was in
the hands of that Roman guard.
Rough, crude, profane, vile Roman soldiers.
And the first thing they did was to
call the whole cohort together.
Probably 500 or 600 more soldiers.
Because they must have their little fun.
They must have their party at the expense
of the Son of God.
And so when they had all gathered together,
they said, oh, so you are the king
of the Jews.
Very well, they said, the king must have
his robe of glory.
And so they took off him his own
clothes and put on him a scarlet robe.
That scarlet robe will always speak to me
of my sins placed on Christ.
Though your sins be as scarlet.
And little did they know the object lesson
they were presenting that day when they put
on him the scarlet robe.
And they said, now let's see.
They said, a king has to have a
crown, doesn't he?
And so they took and they wove a
crown of thorns and placed it on his
blessed brow.
He wore a crown of thorns that I
might wear a crown of glory.
And they said, oh, they said, a king
needs a scepter, doesn't he?
And so they took a scepter, they made
it out of a reed, perhaps something like
a shoot of bamboo, and they placed it
in his hand.
And then in utter mockery, they trailed in
front of the Lord Jesus, and they bowed
in knee, and they said, Hail, King of
the Jews.
Bowing the knee in mockery before one for
whom every knee shall bow, and every tongue
confess him, Lord, to the glory of God
the Father.
And then it says they spit on his
face and smote him on the head with
the reed.
It speaks to my heart that when God
visited our planet in the person of the
Lord Jesus Christ, they did to him something
I've never seen done to any man.
They covered his face with shame and with
spit.
I know many of his servants have endured
much at the hands of men, but not
many have gone through such humiliation as that.
And so they led him out from the
place where he was tried, and from the
place where the soldiers mocked him.
And as they went out, it seems that
he carried his cross part of the way.
And then they laid hold of Simon of
Cyrene.
He was probably a Jew who came from
the northern part of Africa.
Maybe he had come to Jerusalem for the
feast.
And they laid a hold of him, and
he either assisted the Lord Jesus in carrying
the cross, or he carried it alone.
Perhaps he did not think so at the
time, but what a privilege he had that
day.
He bore the cross for the one who
gave him breath, for the one who was
soon to suffer, bleed and die, for him.
And so they led him forth to a
place called Golgotha.
Golgotha means skull, or a place of a
skull.
Perhaps it was called that because of the
appearance of the hill.
Perhaps it was called that because it was
a place of execution, and skulls could often
be found there.
But this is where they took him, the
Lord Jesus, to the place of a skull.
And they gave him vinegar mingled with gall.
And he tasted it, and he realized that
if he drank it, that he would not
bear our sin's heavy load with his full
consciousness, and so he refused it.
Because when he went to the cross to
accomplish redemption's work, he must do it with
all his consciousness, with all his powers.
And dear friends, my heart was bowed in
worship when I read the word of God,
and read those simple words, they crucified him.
I noticed that in the revised version, verse
35 reads, and when they had crucified him,
and when they had crucified him.
I suppose if there were any English teachers
present, they could remind us that that is
known as a subordinate clause, when they had
crucified him.
And I don't mean to suggest by this
that there was anything subordinate about the crucifixion
of the Lord Jesus, but all the restraint
with which the Holy Spirit of God describes
that most important of all events, when they
had crucified him.
No dwelling on the details of his crucifixion,
such as it would be if man had
written this book, but a simple statement of
a wonderful fact that will never lose its
glory, and never lose its power.
And then, of course, the soldiers must have
their share in the spoil, you know.
And so they began dividing the garments of
the Lord Jesus among them.
Just, just think of it.
And when they came to that seamless robe,
and they could not defy that, they cast
lots for the seamless robe.
And then they put over his head the
accusation, this is Jesus, the King of the
Jews.
You know, men who think themselves clever go
to the Gospels, and they find in the
Gospels that the wording of that accusation is
different in the different Gospels.
They think that they have found something very
important, and the Bible is full of contradictions,
they say.
But the Bible is truly wonderful.
You know, it says in the scriptures that
the superscription was written in letters of Hebrew
and Greek and Latin.
And there's no reason to believe that the
words were exactly the same in each language.
In fact, it would be rather unusual if
they were.
And so why should not one Gospel writer
give the translation from Hebrew, and another from
Greek, and another from Latin?
And so there is his accusation, and this
is why he is nailed to the cross,
Jesus, the King of the Jews.
And he hangs there upon that cross of
shame, flanked by two thieves, that the scripture
might be fulfilled.
He was numbered with the transgressor.
Dear friends, nowhere does the vile guilt of
human nature appear more vividly than at the
cross of the Lord Jesus.
A perfect man comes into the world, and
fallen human nature puts him on a cross.
There's nothing good in man.
And yet these were the creatures for whom
he came to die.
Wonderful story of love.
Now, I think it's important to realize that
the people who attended this event were religious
people.
He was crucified outside the city of Jerusalem,
and the crowd was passing by.
Where were they going?
They were milling into the city, because it
was the feast time.
Why were they going into the city?
Why, dear friends, they were going into the
city to observe the Passover.
They were remembering that night in Egypt so
many years ago, when the Passover lamb was
killed.
And when God delivered his people by a
mighty and outstretched, they were religious people.
And as they passed by, they saw the
Passover lamb expiring for them, and they had
nothing but contempt.
Going in to celebrate the Passover in the
city, and outside the Passover lamb was dying.
And there were the chief priests and the
elders, and oh, they didn't know how true
those words that they spoke were.
He saved others.
Himself he could not save.
And how we rejoice in that fact tonight.
But dear friends, it wasn't because it was
physically impossible, but because it was impossible according
to the eternal counsels of God.
He on the cross must die, or mercy
could not come to ruin sinners.
Yes, Christ the Son of God must bleed
that sinners might from sin be freed.
Those words they spoke in jest and mockery
are precious to our hearts tonight.
Himself he cannot save.
And some of the others came along and
they said, Let him now come down from
the cross, and we will believe him.
Dear friends, you don't have to look very
deep to identify that voice, do you?
Let him come down from the cross, and
we will believe him.
It's the voice of unbelief, and it's the
voice of modernism.
The voice of unbelief says, Show me, and
I'll believe.
Show me a sign or a miracle, and
then I'll believe.
But I just won't believe on faith.
I just won't believe according to the naked
word of God.
I must have evidence, or I'll never come.
And so there they were, personifying unbelief.
So they said, If you just come down
from the cross, we'll believe.
Would they have?
You know they wouldn't.
And then it's the voice of modernism.
You come down from the cross.
The cross is offensive to us.
If you would just remove the offense of
the cross, then we could all get together
and have happy fellowship together.
And the Lord Jesus hangs there on the
cross and listens to that.
And then there were those three hours of
darkness, the crucial, central time of all.
It says from the sixth hour, there was
darkness over all the land until the ninth
hour.
And, oh dear friends, this is the time
that is veiled, that is shrouded as far
as human sight is concerned, when Jesus took
our sins upon Him and bore them away
in His body on the tree.
During those three hours on Him, almighty vengeance
fell that must have sunk a world to
hell.
He bore it for a sinful race and
thus became my hiding place.
During those three hours, God poured out His
wrath upon the Son of His love.
And the Lord Jesus bore the punishment in
His body that sinners who reject Him will
bear for all eternity.
Down to the depths of woe, Christ came
to save my soul.
And none of the ransomed ever knew or
will ever know what the Lord Jesus went
through during those hours of darkness.
Who can ever plumb the depths of those
words that He cried, My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?
Eli, Eli, lama sabaxonai, most blessed, most awful
sight.
Now, those who were standing by heard Him
say that word, Eli.
I think they know, they knew what He
meant.
And I think they said in mockery, He's
calling for Elias.
I don't think they were just ignorant or
deceived.
They knew.
It was just a further case of mockery.
And they said, Oh, He's calling for Elias.
Let's see if Elias will come and help
him.
And they ran and put vinegar, sour wine,
on a sponge and gave it to him
to drink.
Dear friends, this is the awful prostitution of
all human intellect and of the use of
the human body that the creatures whom His
hands had made should ever treat the Savior
so.
And then at the end, it said He
cried with a loud voice, It is finished.
And when He cried that, He gave up
the ghost.
And we see in this, first of all,
the fact that He died in the full
strength of His manhood.
He cried with a loud voice.
And we see, too, His deity.
It said He gave up the ghost.
That's something we can't do.
He gave His life voluntarily.
We die when the end comes.
And just at that time, a very strange
thing happened in the temple at Jerusalem.
There was the veil separating the most holy
place from the holy place.
And that veil was a heavy braided veil,
heavily woven.
It couldn't be torn by a human hand.
And yet a wrench appeared at the top
of that veil and went right down to
the very bottom of it.
A strange thing indeed.
Imagine the consternation of any who might have
been there at the time.
And yet what a wonderful object lesson it
was.
God was saying, The veil has been rent.
The veil, that is to say, His body
and access to God has been made through
the death of My beloved Son.
The veil is rent.
Our souls draw near unto a throne of
grace.
The merits of the Lord appear.
They fill the holy place.
At that time, too, nature itself reacted with
violence.
There was a great earthquake.
The graves were opened.
And after the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,
the bodies of some of the saints came
out of those graves and went into the
holy city and appeared to many.
The Roman centurion that was standing there with
his guard of men by the cross, seeing
all the things that had transpired, said, Truly
this was the Son of God.
God did not leave Himself without witness in
this dark hour.
Dear friends, this is marvelous.
That person who died on the center cross
was no mere man.
That person was God manifest in the flesh.
Now, that proves shocking and surprising to you
tonight.
There is something that should be even more
so, and that is this.
He died for you.
I don't know anything that should impress us
more in all our lives than this, that
someone has died as a substitute for us.
And that person was not a sinful man,
but the sinless, spotless Son of God.
We would have perished in our sins forever,
but God sent His only begotten Son that
He might pay the penalty that our sins
deserved, that we might be everlastingly saved, blessed
with Him in heaven forever.
And now God is saying to men and
women, Yes, the Savior has died.
A righteous basis has been found upon which
I can save ungodly sinners and still be
just in doing it.
But, dear friends, you must accept Him by
an act of faith.
You must come to the Lord Jesus Christ
and in total commitment of yourself, spirit, soul,
and body, you must bow to Him and
say, Lord Jesus, I believe you died for
me, that you were buried, that you rose
again and ascended back to heaven.
And I believe that through that work of
thine, I can have eternal life as I
here and now accept you as my Lord
and Savior.
And, dear friend of mine tonight, without that,
you'll never see heaven.
This is the gospel.
This is the good news of salvation.
Jesus died.
The invitation is given.
The command goes out.
You must make the choice.
And we invite you tonight at the close
of this meeting, if you have never done
so before, to come to the Lord Jesus
Christ in comprehension, in repentance of sin.
And by a definite act of faith, receive
Him, acknowledging Him to be your Lord and
your Savior.
The moment you do that, God will save
your guilty soul and the value of His
work at Calvary's cross will be credited to
your account.
May the Lord give you grace tonight to
step out for the Lord Jesus Christ, to
make sure that your soul is saved, that
you'll have a home in heaven.