The Death of Christ (Part 2 of 2)

In Luke chapter 23, we learned that when Jesus was crucified, the sky grew dark in the middle of the day. And then the curtain in the temple was torn in two. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg continues his study on the death of Christ by teaching us about another event that took place. We're picking up our study in chapter 23 verse 46.

Simply referred to as the grand finale, because that is surely what it is—a total blackout, a divine vandalism, and a grand finale. Jesus, verse 46, called out with a loud voice. Now, you will notice that each of the Gospel writers makes something of this, and of course they should, because crucifixion was routinely a long, gradual loss of strength and consciousness. Whatever strength a victim may have had in the initial moments of their pain—if they had breath in the early hours to hurl abuse at their captors, to shout down from the cross, to engage in conversation—that would very quickly go away. And as the various functions of their body began to close in on them and close down, then their ability to think properly, their ability to process information properly, and certainly their ability to have breath to convey properly and definitely loudly would be going from them. Now, that's the point the Gospel writers is making. The soldiers were familiar with the normal processes.

But they weren't familiar with a three-hour blackout. And as routine as crucifixion was, they were not used to somebody ending with a loud cry. And what we have here is the fact that Jesus is not going out with a whimper, but he's going out in full possession of his faculties. Indeed, it appeared as though he just came to a point where he decided that it was time for him to leave. He came to a point where he decided that his work had been accomplished, that he was done, and he said, I'm out of here.

And that is, in a kind of contemporary paraphrase, exactly what Jesus is saying. Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. After all of the darkness and all of the dereliction, all of the pain, all of the suffering, all of the forsakenness, here we find him in closest communion with his father once again, entrusting himself into his care. Can you remember back to your childhood, when you fell asleep on a trip from your grandmother's house to your own home, let's say, and you spent the final few miles of the journey in a state of semi-consciousness, coming to, recognizing traffic lights without opening your eyes, knowing because you know the road so well, and then finally, that moment where you feel yourself being picked up out of the back seat, and you open your eyes just long enough to look up and say, It's my dad. He's got me.

I'm okay. And you entrusted yourself completely into the care of your father, and he took you to where you needed to be, and when you wakened up, you were home. That's what's happening here for Jesus. Okay, Father, it's over to you.

Let me just entrust myself to you. Incidentally, that is death for the Christian. What you fear most, you won't experience.

You'll fall asleep in the arms of Jesus, and you'll waken up, and you're in your own room. Well, this was very unsettling. Total blackout. Divine vandalism. And what a grand finale. Now, come to the other side of the phrase he breathed his last, and let me point out to you three separate reactions. They're here for us.

We'll take them in reverse. So we'll start in verse 49 with those who knew him. Notice, but all those who knew him, including the women—the women get a good press, and they deserve it. Brave women, scared men, story of life for most of us. All those who knew him, including the women—the women will be back in a moment or two, and the first thing in the morning they're up and out and ready to go, the men hiding away in a cupboard somewhere. But this is a description of all those who knew him. If you've been wondering where these characters have been since they all deserted him and fled, apparently some of them are back now, standing over away from the events, and they're simply watching these things. It's an interesting fulfillment of a prophetic word in the Psalms in Psalm 38, where the psalmist says, My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds.

My neighbors stay far away. That's Psalm 38, 11. You can read it at your leisure. And as we read this account, we're left to wonder, Well, I wonder what'll happen with these people. What is going to happen now that Jesus has died?

He's breathed his last. There's a little group of the people who knew him best. They're standing over there on the corner of the street. They're looking across at the scene. We remember that Peter also followed at a distance, and he made a royal mess of things.

I wonder what's going to happen with these characters. And in describing this little scene, Luke is reminding us that here he has in this company the very eyewitnesses, presumably, that gave him a significant amount of the information necessary in order to give us the orderly account so that we might know with certainty the things we believe. See how it all fits together?

Isn't that a group of people sitting down in a room somewhere in a university library saying, No, we've got to come up with a gospel. We've got something we need to do here. We've got a story that we want to tell.

No, this is careful investigative journalism. Were you there? Yes, I was. Where were you standing? I was one of the group over on the corner.

Oh, yes! Yes, of course, you'd been a follower of Jesus. You were standing at a distance.

It's quite humble of them as well, isn't it? I think many of us would be tempted to say, Well, I was standing right underneath the cross. And a friend would say, No, you weren't, Alistair. You were actually hiding around the corner.

So we're not putting that in. The onlookers are described in verse 48, working our way back up the text. All the people who had gathered to witness this sight—the crowd, the folks who had wandered down the Via della Rosa, the people who had maintained their interest in this event—are now beginning to drift away. The crowd realizes, Well, there's nothing much left now. Just the taking down of the body, perhaps.

Although that was no foregone conclusion for a criminal. Many bodies were left to be eaten by the birds. They were swallowed by beasts. They decayed.

Some people think that the reason the hill is called the Hill of the Skull is because it was full of the skulls of the victims of crucifixion that had never been taken down and given a formal and proper burial. So they drift off, a mixture of emotions, grieved, thoughtful, distressed, disturbed, convicted. Interesting little note, isn't it, that they beat their breasts and went away? In the same way that people would put ash on their head or prostrate themselves as an expression of sorrow or grief, the beating of the breast, the banging of the chest was an expression of the fact.

Some of us had schoolteachers in England who used to do this, Oh boys, oh boys, oh boys, and when they banged themselves like that, you knew that the results that they were about to read were not good at all. It was an expression of their grief. And they walked away, realizing that at some level they were responsible for the death of this innocent Nazarene preacher. But that walk home was doubtless for some the entry onto the path of personal faith and obedience. Surely there were some from that crowd who on the day when Peter preached and said, You know, God handed him over and delivered him up, and you wicked men crucified him, nailing him to a cross.

There were some who went from the beating of their chests to the faster beating of their hearts to the opening of their hearts and lives to this Christ and their own personal faith. And finally, in verse 47, the reaction of the centurion—probably not an officer of rank, someone who had worked himself up, being promoted through the ranks into a position, a small position, really, of authority, the routine responsibility of these death sentences being carried out under his watch, and the centurion seeing what had happened. Incidentally, will you just notice all the emphasis on seeing and watching in these few verses? If you go back down to 49, they were watching these things, the final phrase.

You go up to 48, all the people who had gathered to witness this sight saw what took place. And then, verse 47, and the centurion seeing what had happened. Do you think that Luke, with his eye for detail and his orderly account, doesn't, at least in his mind, hope and wonder that there will be some who will remember that when Jesus read from the scroll in Luke chapter 4 and he said, And the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, and the liberation of the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind. That the whole picture that runs through the Gospel of Luke is in part the fact of darkness being invaded by light—the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. It is the picture of the density of the heart and mind of a man being invaded by the liberating power of God's truth.

It is the picture of blindness being replaced with sight. And the thing that is most striking here is the fact that the one who makes the best declaration out of the threefold reaction is not someone with a background in Old Testament studies, not even a Jew, certainly not a disciple. But the one who makes the best of all reactions is a Gentile army officer with no previous connection to Jesus.

I love this. It gets me very excited. It gets me excited in the same way that when the Pharisees put their religious party together, the focus of the event turned out to be a woman who was a woman of the street who had no right to be there and was welcomed by Jesus. That when the muttering Pharisees were concerned about whether things were going their way, Jesus told stories about individuals who came from the periphery of things right to the very heart of his Gospel. And here, once again, in the events of the drama that has unfolded in this amazing scene, what the Jewish leaders have denied and what the disciples have failed to grasp, an ordinary soldier at some measure understands, doesn't he?

I mean, he does better than any of the rest. The group that you would think would be standing there saying, Well, here is the Savior of the world, and giving out tracts, they're over here at a distance. Nothing to say.

We don't know what's going to happen to them. The onlookers, who are now penetrated by the awesomeness of what has taken place, they're off down the street beating on themselves, saying, There's something sadly wrong with this. And the centurion, who awakened to a normal day to engage in his routine procedures, confronted by this darkness, this unraveling of creation, was confronted also by some kind of invasion in his mind. And he declares, essentially, he was a good man and quite right in calling God his father. Mark tells us that he says, Surely this man was a Son of God. He wouldn't attach significance to Son of God. He wouldn't theologize it. So it's a moot point to argue about, Well, how much do you think he understood? We don't know how much he understood.

But he had got enough to say, This wasn't right. This was a good man. This fellow did the righteous thing. And the righteous man is the God-man, and it is right enough for him to call himself the Son of God.

I don't mind him saying, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Indeed, says the centurion, it seems to make perfect sense to me. And I have a sneaking suspicion that I can't verify that this centurion proved to be, for Luke, again, one of the key eyewitnesses when he put together his orderly account.

Who can I talk to about the events of the cross? Someone said, Talk to Levi the centurion. He was there.

It was a short step for this man, from this declaration to personal faith and allegiance. I guess, if we were to summarize it, we'd have to admit that basically people were leaving the scene and all saying the same thing. It's over. It's finished.

It's finished. How can we expect anything beyond this? He was a good man. We thought he had something about a kingdom or his mother looking on the death of her son. His antagonists, it's over for them. There's nothing more you can do with a dead man.

He can't hear you. There's no more curses or abuse you can hurl upon them. It's over. His followers, well, I guess it's finished. And, of course, Jesus says, Yes, it is finished, actually.

But it's not finished in the way you think. It is finished in the sense of a work completed, of a sacrifice accepted, and of a communion between the Father and the Son restored. And it's for this reason that the Christian's declaration must ever be, We preach Christ crucified.

And here is my final word to you. The focus of revelation in the Bible, the focus of God's disclosure in the Bible, which comes finally and fully and savingly to us in the first of his Son—the focus is not Bethlehem but Calvary. And any attempt to articulate Christianity that begins and ends with the incarnation, that diminishes or denies the centrality of the cross, can never accurately refer to itself as a biblical Christianity. Examine the records, friends, and see whether it is not right for me to tell you that the emphasis is not on Jesus being here, but the emphasis is upon Jesus being here as the atoning sacrifice for sin. So, in other words, Christmas is really dangerous, because it is surrounded by sentimentality. It is surrounded by so much that smacks of well-wishing and hopefulness. Well, I guess man will live forevermore because of Christmas Day.

No, he won't. Man may live forevermore because of this day—the day when he bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. So what's the kicker?

The kicker is obvious. You and I return this week to a world that is completely confused religiously and spiritually, and not least of all in these fair shores, and not least of all about the Christmas story. And the challenge and the privilege and the opportunity is this—to seize the moment in your own language and in your own way, when you come across somebody saying, Well, I suppose that's really what it's about. You know, God came to say, Well, no, that's not really what it's all about. The real question is, Why did he come?

And how did he achieve what he set out to achieve? And then you will be able to make the step from Bethlehem to Calvary, and you'll be able to tell them in your own words the best news. Just the very best news. Just the very, very best news. You are the witnesses.

Go out into your field and let people know, won't you? The best news about Jesus isn't simply that he came, it's why he came. That's from today's message on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg.

Alistair will close in prayer in just a minute, so please keep listening. In the meantime, if you've benefited from our study in Luke's Gospel, you'll be happy to know you can own all of Alistair's teaching through the entire book of Luke. You can order a copy of The Gospel According to Luke on USB.

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You can give by tapping the book image on the mobile app or by going online to truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can call to donate at 888-588-7884. Now let's join Alistair as he closes today in prayer. Father, send us out from here with our hearts in tune with you, with our minds freshly furnished with the facts of the gospel, and with at least a willing spirit to go tell everyone the news that the kingdom of God has come—to go tell everyone the news that today salvation may come to your house, that today we may be in paradise, that today is the only day we have. Bless us then and help us. May your grace and your mercy and peace descend upon us and fill us and frame our lives now and forevermore. Amen. I'm Bob Lapeen. Thanks for listening today. Be sure to join us again tomorrow when we'll learn about a man named Joseph who faced a critical decision that ultimately put his faith in Jesus on full display as a follower of Christ. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.