Welcome to Connect with Skip Heitzig Weekend Edition. I grew up, like you did probably, seeing this everywhere. We live in a culture where the cross is prominent. Go to a cemetery and you will see, frequently displayed, a cross.
Go to jewelry stores, you'll see a cross or crosses that you could buy. Look at some people's necks and they will wear a cross. I grew up looking at a cross every Sunday at church.
I didn't want to go to church as a kid. I was dragged there by my parents, but I do remember looking at that cross every week. And then coming home and looking down the hallway was also a cross they put on the wall. We live in a culture that has displayed the cross. At the same time, there is a desensitization to the meaning of the cross. If you ask most people, what's the meaning of this? They would say, this is the symbol of Christianity.
Others might, from a historical perspective, say this is the symbolic icon of Western civilization. But again, we have been desensitized to the meaning of the cross. There was a woman who went to a jewelry store in Denver to buy a necklace with a gold cross. She said, I'd like a gold cross, please. And the man behind the counter said, do you want a plain one or do you want one with a little man on it?
Can you imagine even saying that? This guy was so out of touch with the meaning of the cross of Christ and the sacrifice that all he knew is there's two types, a plain one and one with a little man on it. Why is it that we have been desensitized to the meaning of the cross?
Well, a couple reasons. Number one, because of ministry exposure, we as Christians, if we go to church frequently, hear the message of the cross, stories of the crucifixion. We take communion and commemorate the cross, and rightfully so. It's the very core of who we are.
But when you hear something over and over again for year after year after year, if your heart isn't made right every time you hear it, you can become hardened to what this really means. There's another reason, I think, and that's just media exposure. The media depicts frequently bloodshed and gore, even news agencies are more graphic than ever before. So we can be at home watching bloodshed and suffering and gore while we say, pass the potatoes and the gravy.
And we just sort of become numb to the kind of suffering that Jesus Christ went through on the cross. There was a family that lived out in the country on a dirt road. Traffic didn't go by very often.
And so the kids would play freely in the yard. One day the youngest son was riding his bicycle across that dirt road. He never looked either direction because cars never were there, but on this day a car was barreling down the road and didn't see in time that boy crossing the street and plowed right into him and killed that young boy on the bicycle. His brother would tell the story years later in these words. Later when my father picked up the mangled twisted bike, I heard him sob out loud for the first time in my life.
He carried it to the barn and he placed it in a spot that we seldom used. Father's terrible sorrow eased with the passing of time, but for many years whenever he saw that bike, tears began streaming down his face. Since then I've often prayed, Lord, keep the memory of your death as fresh as that to me. That every time I partake of your memorial supper, let my heart be as stirred as though you died only yesterday.
Never let the communion service become a mere formality, but also always a tender and touching experience. I pray that happens today and in the next few weeks as we enter really holy ground of the Gospel of John and that is the crucifixion, the execution, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. We have been in the Gospel of John a long time. You know how long? Two years and three months. But we're already in chapter 19 so there's light at the end of this tunnel.
But it's not a tunnel we want to go through too quickly, especially here. We really want to grapple with the meaning of it because we have seen Jesus portrayed in so many different ways in the Gospel of John, right? He said, I'm the bread of life. He said, I'm the light of the world. I am the good shepherd.
I am the living water. We have seen so many different aspects of his character. But here in chapter 19, it's like we're going back to John chapter 1 when John the Baptist said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We're entering into that what John saw as prophetic ministry of Christ as the sin bearer. So we want to look carefully at the cross. Oswald Chambers once said, Heaven is interested in the cross. Hell is terrified of the cross.
The only beings that more or less ignore its meaning are people. We don't want to do that as we go through. This morning, we're going to begin in verse 17 and go down to verse 22. Those are all the verses we're going to cover. There's three things I want us to consider together. His cross, and I'll give you some background on crucifixion and the significance of that.
Second, his company. There were people next to him when he died. And number three, his coronation, as we see here by Pontius Pilate. Verse 17, we read, And he bearing his cross went out to a place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Golgotha, where they crucified him and two others with him, one on either side, Jesus in the center. Now Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross. And the writing was Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. Many of the Jews read this title for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Therefore, the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, Do not write the King of the Jews, but he said, I am the King of the Jews.
Pilate answered, What I have written, I have written. We begin by considering his cross. Crucifixion, let me back up, death by crucifixion, that form of execution, was invented by the Persians originally because of their superstitious belief that the earth itself was sacred. And whenever executing a criminal, you should never execute a person where he is touching the earth.
He should be raised up off the earth and killed in that manner. Now as time went on, other people picked up this form of execution, and dare I say that the Romans perfected the art. They managed to figure out a way to let the victim linger so long as to have the most excruciating, brutal type of death known to man. Most victims of crucifixion lingered for hours and days. That is why a person on a cross was given a footrest and sometimes a place to sit even, not to alleviate pain, but to increase the pain because they would last longer in the process. There were two types of crosses that the Romans used. The first type was a simple vertical stake where the victim was tied or nailed, hands and feet, to a single vertical stake called the crux simplex, the Romans called it, a simple stake. The second type, and we think Jesus was crucified in this type, was a vertical stake with a cross beam.
The cross beam was called the patibulum, and that cross beam weighed between 75 and 100 pounds. That would be the portion, and he only carried a portion, the portion of the cross, that one beam that Jesus would carry on the way to execution. Now, Roman citizens were never crucified.
Did you know that? If you were a bona fide citizen of the Roman Empire, you couldn't be crucified. It was against the law. Only slaves, conquered people, lower class, insurrectionists, mass murderers, they were crucified. A Roman statesman by the name of Cicero said, to bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him an abomination, to kill him is an act of murder, but to crucify him, he says there is no fitting word that can describe so horrible a deed.
And Cicero also said that the very term crucifixion should be removed from the memory of the Roman citizen. So what happened here? Verse 17 tells us, he, Christ, bearing or carrying his cross, that patibulum, went out to a place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha.
Here's how it went down. Once the gavel went down, guilty, take him away, Christ was placed in the middle of four soldiers called a quaternion. That's four soldiers would escort the victim to the place of execution.
The soldier in front was the guy who carried the sign, the placard reading the specified crimes of the victim going to be executed. You're listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig, Weekend Edition. Before we return to Skip's teaching, if you've ever wondered what the Bible has to say about some of our culture's big issues, we have a great resource for you. When you give a gift of $50 or more this month to support the ministry of Connect with Skip Heitzig, we'll send you God Speaks, Biblical Answers for Today's Issues. This special resource bundle contains six of Pastor Skip's booklets that address topics like suicide, why the truth matters, heaven and hell, and the church's response to racism. You'll gain valuable insight into what God's word says about the big questions in our culture and get equipped to stand for the timeless truth of Scripture.
Go to connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your copy when you give $50 or more. Now, let's get back to Skip for more of today's teaching. Typically, the Romans would parade their victims on the longest possible route through town to make a statement, crime doesn't pay, don't mess with the Roman government, this is what might happen to you. They wanted everybody to see it. So they placed the patibulum, that 75 to 100 pound block of crossbeam wood on Jesus' torn shoulders and had him walk toward Golgotha. He didn't make it all the way. The other gospel accounts tell us he fell just outside the gates of Jerusalem. Simon of Cyrene, an outsider, had to take it the rest of the way.
Keep in mind, Christ has already suffered immensely in the last 24 hours. He had been in the Garden of Gethsemane where the Bible says he sweat what? Great drops of blood. Now, there's a medical condition called hematidrosis. That is the tiny capillaries, blood vessels around the sweat glands burst when a person is in extreme emotional distress and the blood oozes through the sweat glands. So it looks like the person is sweating blood. Jesus did.
It drains a person of energy. Then he was arrested, taken before Caiaphas. He went through six trials, we saw. He was beat up by the Sanhedrin. After he was roughed up, he was taken before Pilate.
Pilate had the soldiers scourge him. We went through that last week, beat him up a little bit, and now he is bearing a cross on the way toward Golgotha. Now, we notice that it's a place of a skull. In Hebrew, it's called Golgotha. In Greek, it's called cranium. In Latin, it's called calvarium, or calvary, which means the skull. That's where we derive the name of this fellowship. This is skull fellowship.
That's what it means. Calvary means the place of a skull, commemorating the place that Jesus was crucified. Now, it's probably that the place looked resembled a skull.
I'm going to burst your bubble a little bit. Some of you, especially if you've been in churches a long time and you've sang a lot of songs about the cross, you've probably pictured three crosses on top of a hill. There's lots of crosses or songs about cross and crosses being on the top of a hill, and Calvary was a mountain, and Jesus was crucified on top of it.
He was not. Romans didn't do that. Typically, Romans would crucify their victim's roadside, not on top of a hill.
There was a hill in the background. That's the place of execution. But Josephus, the Jewish historian, tells us that the Roman emperors and governors would crucify them opposite the city on the road so everybody on the town could see it happening. So probably right next to the road on the way going up to Damascus as you leave the city of Jerusalem, at that place called Golgotha, Jesus was crucified. Now, there's something else before we move on to the second portion of this. Many of the early church commentators, in reading verse 17, and that wood placed on Jesus' shoulder as He's going up to the place to be crucified, it reminds them of a story in the Bible, and that story, they say, is a type of what is happening here, so that what is happening here is the anti-type of that story.
Get the picture? It's the story of Isaac, and it said his father laid the wood on his shoulders and marched him up to the place where he was going to be sacrificed. And so the early church commentators, 1,800 years ago and back, talk about the fact that John included this so our minds would go back to Isaac taking his son up to be sacrificed.
I find that fascinating because I've always thought that. In fact, let me take you back. You don't have to turn there, but let me read to you a portion of Genesis 22, that very story.
Here's how it goes. It came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and He said to him, Abraham, and He said, Here I am. I've always liked that, that He said, Here I am. Sort of like God knows where he's at, but He has to say, Over here. And then He said, Take now your son.
Now listen. Take now your son, your only son, Isaac. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that is He didn't have an only son. He had two sons. He had Ishmael, firstborn. He had Isaac, secondborn. But God doesn't recognize Ishmael, only the son of Promise Isaac. So God says, Take now your son, your only son.
It goes on. Take now your son, your only son, whom you love. Did you know the very first time the word love ever mentioned in the Bible is found in this verse?
That's significant because what kind of love is it? It's the love of a father for his only begotten son as he's about to take him up to a hill to sacrifice him. And take him to the land of Moriah. Mount Moriah in Abraham's day would become in David's day the threshing floor of Ornan where a temple would be built. In Jesus' day, the name of that same mountain, the upper elevation, was called Golgotha.
Same place. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled a donkey, took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and he split the wood for the burnt offering and he arose and he went to the place God told him. Then on the third day, Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. Now you know the story. How that he goes up to the place on the third day, and he raises a knife and an angel of the Lord stops him and says, Don't do it.
Now I want you to think about that. It was on the third day. For three days, in the mind of Abraham, Isaac was dead to him because God said, Go take and sacrifice him.
So he did. So for three days, he's living with the notion, I'm going to kill my son. I'm going to kill my son. My son's dead. He's dead. It wasn't until the third day that his son comes back to life as the angel stops him. Later on we read this.
It's very, very fascinating. Verse 7, Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, My father. And he said, Here I am, my son.
He likes saying that. And he said, Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? And Abraham said, My son, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering. The way it should be rendered in its original language, God will provide himself the lamb. He will be the lamb. Behold, the lamb of God. And the lamb of God is God in human flesh. So no wonder the early church fathers said this Jesus bearing this wood on his shoulders is so much like Isaac because one prefigured the other. Let's go back to the text in John and look at the second thing I want you to notice. Not just his cross, but his company. It says in the 18th verse, Where they crucified him and two others with him, one on either side and Jesus in the center.
All right, all right. Mark's gospel tells us these two guys were robbers, thieves. Talk about the thief on the cross that comes from the gospel of Mark.
Luke calls them simply criminals. John just says two other guys, two others. But John in chapter 18 calls Barabbas. Remember Barabbas? Gives him the same title Mark gives these two guys. Barabbas was a robber. Mark says these two guys were robbers.
The word means insurrectionists, revolutionaries, freedom fighters. Probably these two criminals were in the same ring as Barabbas. Barabbas should have been on that cross. But the crowd said release Barabbas, crucify Christ. So Jesus is literally dying in the place of Barabbas. And his two buddies are on either side. Now the fact that John says Jesus was placed in the center and one was on this side and one was on that side is very important. In those days, it was an act of disgrace to put the worst criminal in the middle.
The ringleader, if you will. The place Barabbas is gonna take, but it was like saying you are disgraced, you are disgusting, you are in the middle of this pack of people we are executing. That's from a human perspective. I believe John wants us to know that Jesus died in the center of these sinful men because that's how he lived his life. It was predicted by the prophet Isaiah.
Let me just read this to you real quick. And he was numbered with the transgressors. And he bore the sin of many and he made intercession for the transgressors. You see, Jesus dying with sinners was a lot like Jesus living. He was called the friend of sinners. That was the nickname of Christ. He's the friend of sinners.
I love that name. He could be my friend because he's the friend of sinners. The scribes and the Pharisees said to the disciples, how come your master eats with tax collectors and sinners? Jesus died and the closest people that died to him were the riff-raff because that's who Jesus hung out with because Jesus believed anybody can be saved. You know that nobody's ever too bad to be saved.
The problem is so many people think they're too good. I don't need that. Oh yeah, you really need that. I don't need to be forgiven. Oh man, we know you so well.
You need to be forgiven a lot. We're glad you joined us today. Before you go, remember that when you give $50 or more to help reach more people with the gospel through Connect with Skip Heitzig, we'll send you God Speaks, Biblical Answers for Today's Issues, which contains six of Pastor Skip's booklets to help you understand what the Bible says about big issues like racism, the importance of truth, suicide, and heaven and hell. To request your copy of God Speaks, Biblical Answers for Today's Issues, call 800-922-1888.
That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. For more from Skip, be sure to check out the many resources available at connectwithskip.com slash store. We'll see you next time for more verse-by-verse teaching of God's Word. Here on Connect with Skip Heitzig Weekend Edition. Make a connection Make a connection At the foot of the crossing Cast your burdens on His Word Make a connection Connection Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications. Connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.
