Prophecies Fulfilled
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 21 March 2021
We come now to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. For those of us who are believers, those of us who know and love the Lord, the crucifixion is everything. It is the heart of our gospel message, that’s why we focus on the sermons we preach. All of those things ultimately have to focus on the cross and the subsequent resurrection of Christ. So let us sum up the significance of the crucifixion.
All the writers of the gospels focus on the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ. Because, these are the culmination of redemptive purpose. The crucifixion of the Lord Jesus is the climax of redemptive history. It is the focal point of the plan of salvation. It is because God loved us that He sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Jesus Christ went to the cross, because God chose Him to be the Lamb.
Jesus would be the atoning sacrifice for the sins of all His people throughout all of history. “Jesus came,” he tells us, “to pour out His life as an offering to God, a sacrifice for sin.” We understand the divine purpose in the death of Christ. He died as a substitute for those who believe in Him. He took our punishment, our judgment, the full penalty for our sins so that now we can be forgiven.
Jesus “endured such hostility by sinners against Himself,” Hebrews 12 says. And why? Well, first of all, He was God incarnate; and just being God created hostility, because as the apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8, “The mind of the flesh is hostile toward God.” The fact that He was God literally launched the hostility, because that is a universal reality: all sinners are hostile toward God.
You not only have the hostility of fallen man. This was the serpent bruising the heel of the Son of God, as Genesis 3:15 said He would do. But it wasn’t just Satan’s hour; it was God’s hour. In Isaiah 53:10, it says that “it pleased God to crush [the Lord Jesus Christ], to put Him to grief.” So it’s primarily the love of God who overrules human hate and demonic hate to accomplish His purpose.
God uses the evil schemes of men throughout redemptive history to accomplish His own purposes. And He used the worst thing that men ever did to accomplish the greatest thing He ever did, namely the salvation of His own people. God did this because He’s rich in mercy, and He loved us with an everlasting love. So while the cross is evidence of human hate and demonic hate, it is mainly proof of divine love.
The cross is the heart of Christianity. The theme of the cross then runs through all four gospels. They’re all moving toward their conclusion, which is at the cross, and followed by the resurrection. The rest of the epistles of the New Testament describe the theology of the cross. The book of Acts shows the preaching of the cross. And the book of Revelation tells us about His second coming.
Jesus comes to establish His kingdom on earth, and then everlastingly in the new heaven and the new earth. John’s gospel is concerned with sin and death - not just physical death, but spiritual death and eternal death. John’s gospel is concerned with judgment, eternal judgment, and eternal resurrection unto judgment in a body not like this body, but a body fitted for everlasting punishment in hell.
John makes sure we know that Jesus said this: “Unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins, and where I go you’ll never come.” Jesus is the only atoning sacrifice, and without the shedding of His blood there is no forgiveness and no salvation. Our Lord wants us to know that He had to be “lifted up in order to draw all men to Himself,” a reference to His being lifted up on a cross.
John does not describe any of the physical suffering. The other gospel writers give us a little more of that, but none of the gospel writers really major on the details of the suffering of Christ, the physical suffering of Christ, because that’s really not the primary issue. Tens of thousands of people were crucified, and they were crucified beginning back during the Persian era.
But what the New Testament wants us to understand is not the physical suffering of Christ, but the spiritual suffering of Christ, that He was suffering for sin in our place under the wrath of God. And so when we come to the New Testament we are always going to be led with a glimpse at the physical suffering directly to the spiritual suffering of Christ so we understand the theology of the cross.
Cicero, the Roman writer, declared it was the cruelest and horrifying death possible. Tacitus called it despicable. It was certainly the most shameful way to die, because you were basically stripped naked and suspended by nails along a road to be gawked at and picked at by birds and animals. It was a death reserved for slaves and bandits and prisoners of war and rebels.
What John wants us to understand is not the physical part of this, but the spiritual part. The first thing that we see in the crucifixion of Christ in John’s account is that everything that is happening fulfills Scripture. This is massive evidence, because the ones who are doing all of this to Jesus are pagans with no connection to Scripture. These Roman soldiers are doing what they normally do.
Apparently four Roman soldiers had the job of actually crucifying Jesus. This is routine stuff for them, they already have made a mockery of Jesus in treating Him the way they treated Him with the flogging, spitting on Him, punching Him in the face, hitting Him with a stick. They have no knowledge of anything in the Old Testament or any purposes of God whatsoever.
But nonetheless, they godlessly, stupidly fulfill Scripture, because it’s all under the control of the sovereign God, who controls every single detail. Now there are four separate features that show the glory of Christ, even in this horrible scene of His crucifixion. Let us begin with the first one, which is Scripture fulfillment. Go back into the Old Testament and you have statements made.
There are details predicted, prophesied, and pictured that are fulfilled explicitly at the minutest level. Canon Liddon years ago said that there are about 330 specific prophesies regarding Christ in His first coming. Somebody did some mathematical calculation and said, “For all 330 prophecies to happen by chance would be 1 in 84, with a hundred zeros, chance.” It’s not humanly possible.
Here John is just giving us a handful of these details. In John 19:16 it says, “Then he delivered Him to them to be crucified. Then they took Jesus and led Him away. There is panic in this scene in Pilate. Pilate has been essentially blackmailed, as we saw back in verse 12. If he was going to survive in his job he couldn’t anger the Jews again. He’s the one who’s frightened; and so he delivers Jesus over to be crucified.
That statement in verse 16, means “to be delivered to punishment.” But that’s essentially what God did, according to Romans 8:32, “He spared not His own Son, but handed Him over for us all.” Pilate was the human instrument, but God was the divine cause. Man has his sinful purposes, and God has His holy ones and they intersect on this occasion. Sinful men never can restrict God’s program.
Just look a little closer at details. Matthew, Mark, and Luke say “He was led away.” Typical crucifixion victims were terrified. Historians tell us that they had to be driven like wild animals. But what we read about Jesus was “they led Him away,” which is to say “He followed them.” They led Him to His own execution. No panic, no struggle, no dragging, “they led Him.”
Isaiah 53:7 said, “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter.” Only about two-and-a-half hours had passed since Jesus first stood before Pilate, and now He’s on His way to Golgotha. The Jews were supposed to wait days before the execution of one they found guilty by their own law; and the Romans, they had a law that required two days between a sentence and an execution.
But in the case of the Lord Jesus, He went right from judgment to execution, straight to Golgotha, the place of execution. Isaiah 53:8 says this: “He was taken from prison and from judgment,” speaking of His death. That’s exactly what happened. Even by Jewish law there should have been days. The very specific words: “He was taken from prison and from judgment to death.”
That’s exactly what happened. Every step, every move, every act accurately predicted in the Old Testament. This is not a victim. This is a planned, designed death set in motion by God. And then, in verse 17, it says He was “bearing His own cross.” I don’t know how much it weighed. Some estimate 200 to 300 pounds, dragging that in the condition that He was in all the way up the hill to Golgotha.
Verse 17 says, “Jesus went out,” indicating out of Jerusalem. In Exodus 29 there is a command by God with regard to an offering, “the flesh of the bull and its hide and its refuse, you shall burn with fire outside the camp; it is a sin offering. Burn it outside the camp.” And here God makes sure that the ultimate and only true offering for sin is outside the camp, outside the city.
It says in verse 17 “to the place called the ‘Place of a Skull’, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha.” The Latin word is calvarias. That’s where we get “Calvary.” Why is this called “the Place of a Skull”? This is a hill shaped like a skull. Verse 18, “Where they crucified Him.” Now this is not how the Jews executed people. But the Old Testament said this would happen.
Remember in Numbers 21, snakes were biting the children of Israel? And they came to Moses and they said, “Look, we’re all going to die. You’ve got to do something.” And so Moses put up a pole, and he put a bronze serpent on it, and he said, “For anybody who looks at that serpent as a symbol really of repentance and calling out to God, you will not die, but you will live.”
That is a picture of Christ. Well listen to John 3:14, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.” The Jews didn’t lift somebody up when they executed them they stoned them. In fact, in the Old Testament it said, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” But here Jesus is lifted up.
That is not a Jewish form of execution, but that’s what happened to Him. Jesus predicted that in John 8:28, “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, you will know that I am He and that I do nothing of Myself.” And again in John 12:32-33, “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.’” 33 This He said, signifying by what death He would die.”
Crucifixion itself is described in Psalm 22. This is a messianic psalm, of Christ on the cross. How do you know this is the cross? Verse 1: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” It’s what He said on the cross. Verse 14 says: “I’m poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint. 16 A band of evildoers have encompassed me; they pierced my hands and my feet. 17 They look, they stare at me.”
Psalm 22:18 is quoted directly down in verse 24, “They divided My outer garments among them, and for My clothing they cast lots.’” That shows you that Psalm 22 is a picture of crucifixion, not just verse 18, but the rest also in every detail. Go back to verse 18: “They crucified Him with two other men.” The other gospel writers describe them as rebels, insurrectionists. That too is a fulfillment of prophecy.
In Isaiah 53:12 it says, “He was numbered with the transgressors.” There was Christ, and then there was two other thieves, crucified with others who were common criminals. And that’s exactly what the Romans did. And it needed to be the way God said it would be. And one of those thieves was the first man saved of His grace, and that was the one with Him in paradise.
John 19:23-24, “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments and made four parts, to each soldier a part, and also the tunic. Now the tunic was without seam, woven from the top in one piece. 24 They said among themselves, “Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be,” that the Scripture might be fulfilled which says: “They divided My garments among them. And for My clothing they cast lots.”
They had no idea what they were doing, but they were fulfilling Psalm 22:18, “They divide my outer garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots. [For my inner garment they cast lots].” It’s exactly what they did. There is someone in the Old Testament who also had a garment without seam, it was the high priest; and he had a seamless garment.
Just a note by the Holy Spirit to remind us that Jesus is the only true High Priest. The Latin for “priest” is pontifex. Pontifex is “bridge builder.” The function of a priest was to build a bridge between God and man. Jesus here wears the seamless garment as did the high priest, because He is the true bridge builder. He is God’s perfect High Priest. Every way you look at this, you see the fulfillment of these prophecies.
Verse 24 says, “Therefore the soldiers did these things.” Everything the soldiers did was fulfilling prophecy. Herein lies the glory of Christ in this scene of horror. It’s one fulfillment after another, down to the smallest detail. God is unfolding His purpose in Christ with magnificence. Much more to come as the deity of our Lord is demonstrated in other ways. And we’ll look at those next Sunday. Let’s bow in prayer.