David Pawson -7 Wonders of His Story: His Death

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Thoughtful Thoughts 29.3.24 by John Dunning;- Passover.

Introduction…

Imagine you are in Gethsemane when Jesus is betrayed by one of his own disciples, (Judas Iscariot.) The religious leaders arrived with their Temple guards to arrest Jesus by night because they didn't want the public to see what they were doing. Jesus was then put on trial at night, which was forbidden by law. It is the time of the Jewish Passover in AD29.

Jesus is 33. (As the church worked out the dates of Jesus’ birth incorrectly, we have to live with that discrepancy.)

Trial by a Jewish leader’s jury…

Jesus is accused by false witnesses who have been bribed and couldn’t get their stories to agree. Because of that, the High Priest commanded Jesus, quite illegally, to condemn Himself, by ordering Jesus to answer his question as he was that year's High Priest, to say if He was the Son of God. (Matthew 26:63).

That tells us that the Jewish religious leaders in Bible times knew of the Son of God. (He is mentioned in the Old Testament.) The authority of the High Priest was such that he was called the leader of the Jewish people. Jesus came to earth to die for us, and He came to live as a man. It was as the only perfect and sinless man He was able to pay for our sin. 

Hebrews points out that the real High Priest that year was Jesus. He was to be the sacrificial Ram of God, to be sacrificed to take away the sins of the world.

Jesus was a Son of David through Mary by blood and legally through His step father, Joseph. 

The High Priest’s question to Jesus as to whether He was the Son of God, was an illegal question, as a defendent did not have to answer questions that would incriminate himself. Anyway, Jesus’ answer led to His sentence of death, but the High Priest wasn't allowed to execute anybody, so He was sent to Pilate to have the Romans do the dirty work for them. So, the High Priest changed the charge to treason as blasphemy was not a capital offence in Rome, as they had hundreds of gods and couldn't care less. As the charge of treason against Rome was a capital offence, they could get their way illegally.

Trial by a Gentile jury…

Pilate

This meant that Jesus had two trials;- a Jewish trial and now a Gentile one. This makes us all guilty so no-one can point the finger. The problem now was that Pilate didn’t want to execute an innocent man, and had been warned by his wife against sentencing Jesus, and so he sent Jesus to Herod as Jesus had spent most of his early life in Nazareth, and it was an excuse to let Herod make a decision. 

Herod

Herod had paid Rome to be given the throne. Luke and Matthew point out that Jesus was actually the rightful king by both blood and legally. Anyway, Herod mocked Jesus by having a mock crown made from a thorn bush, pushed into His head, and then he sent Jesus back to Pilate, with a royal garment on his shoulders to mock Jesus. 

Pilate

As Jesus was returned to him, Pilate then hoped that if he had Jesus whipped with a threshing whip that that would satisfy the Jewish leaders. (This whip had bones and stones inserted into the cord to cut through flesh. Jesus was beaten to within an inch of His life). 

Herod then tried to use a prisoner release programme, but the crowd wanted a freedom fighter called Barabbas, (meaning ‘son of the father’). 

The religious leaders forced Pilate’s hand, saying that Jesus claimed to be a king. (Of course, the person who had really committed treason was Barabbas who had murdered as a terrorist, but the religious leaders goaded the crowd to have him released. They told Pilate that they wanted him to kill Jesus instead of Barabbas. So the excuse they came up with, that Jesus committed treason wasn’t even remotely genuine, as they wanted a genuine terrorist to be released.

The crowd…

A lynch mob was stirred up to chant “Crucify Him”...

Jesus crucifixion…

Out of weakness, Pilate physically washed his hands. (A stone has been found in Caesarea with the name of Pontius Pilate on it – proving he really existed.)

Jesus was taken out to be crucified and Pilate had a sign put up, “The King of the Jews”, which was hated by the religious leaders. 

Jesus was so physically weak by now from the whipping, that He collapsed, unable to carry the cross any longer. He fell with His hands outstretched whilst tied to the wooden beam. 

This meant He couldn’t save Himself from falling and would have landed flat on His face.

The hands that flung stars into space were now tied to the cross beam of the cross and the Romans forced a bystander to carry the cross to Golgotha as Jesus couldn’t even get up with the weight of it on His back. Once at Golgotha, Jesus was stripped, which was a Roman practice designed to humiliate those being crucified. Nails were put through His wrists and ankles – which were the only places strong enough to hold the body. The word “excruciating” in English came about because of the pain created through crucifixion. It came into the language to articulate tortuous pain.

Despite all this, Jesus was thinking of others. Jesus asked His Father in Heaven to forgive the soldiers, as they didn’t know what they were doing. He forgave a thief who repented from his cross, as a result of a moment in time meeting Jesus. Jesus then asked John to look after Mary and turned to praying Psalm 22. By now His body was going into such shock that He was gasping for water. Cynically he was offered vinegar, which makes the thirst far worse. The fact that they had already had the vinegar indicates that they played that vinegar trick often, to increase the thirst.

Jesus’ death…

At 3pm when the priests were cutting the throats of the rams for the Passover sacrifice, Jesus who was both the real High Priest and the sacrificial ram being slaughtered for sin. The sheep reared for slaughter in the temple were all reared in Bethlehem. It was the main cottage industry for Bethlehem. Jesus was born in the only place from where priests could accept the sacrificial sheep as they were reared in a special way.

The apostle John records that water and blood flowed out of Jesus body when the soldier piercing His heart with his spear, to ensure He was dead.

A researcher replicated this on dead pigs and proved that when the heart bursts, the red blood corpuscles separated from the white ones. This is called a “ruptured pericardium” by doctors– (or a burst heart for lay people like us.)

The horror that Jesus’ own creation had inflicted on Him was so terrible, that it resulted 

in Him becoming the fastest-dying crucified person on the Roman records.

Normally it took between 2 to 7 days to die in agony on the cross. The soldiers were very surprised that Jesus had died in 6 hours. They only discovered that He had already died because the Jewish leaders had gone to Pilate saying that the dead could not be left on the cross on the Sabbath. So Pilate ordered that the prisoners be killed and taken down. Crucified prisoners were thrown into Jerusalem’s rubbish incinerator – the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna. 

Jesus’ burial…

To avoid that happening to Jesus, a secret believer who had prepared a tomb for himself in a garden close by, asked if he could bury Jesus in his own garden tomb; (a place I have seen.) Pilate agreed and so after the soldiers had put a spear through His side, and up into His heart, the disciples were allowed to take His body. They placed Jesus’ body in the tomb just before the High Sabbath started and Pilate had it sealed and guarded.

Epilogue

The hands that flug stars into space, were crucified on a cross in excruciating agony, taking the weight of His body on a cross, to enable forgiveness to be available to repentant sinners. There were different reactions to Jesus’s sacrifice. 

— Judas monetised his position as a disciple in the inner circle.

— A weeping woman repented and poured the most expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet. 

— Others didn’t care - but some were changed. If we fail to respond to His invitation to join His family, He can’t help us when He comes next time.

This is John Dunning signing off from “Thoughtful Thoughts” for another week.

This link takes you to our devotional https://blog.inspirationalmedia.org.nz/

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David Pawson - 7 Wonders of His Story: His Resurrection

( * The video above will be available for viewing on 5th April. 5pm NZ Time)

Thoughtful Thoughts 5.4.24 by John Dunning. The Resurrection of Jesus.

A). INTRODUCTION… Jesus’ death was witnessed…

God accepted Jesus’ crucifixion as the price needed to pay for the forgiveness of those who repent of sin. Jesus’ crucifixion shows the seriousness of sin and words can’t possibly express the true cost to Jesus of paying for our sins. 

Unlike the two criminals on either side of Jesus, His knees were not broken when the soldiers came to take down the bodies, as He had already died from the agony He had endured. 

Note that in Exodus 12:46 it says that the animals made by way of a sacrifice to God must not have their bones broken, confirmed in Numbers 9:12. 

Psalm 34:20 prophesies this will not happen to the Messiah. 

John 19:31-33 tells us that Jesus did not have His bones broken. Jesus' death was a sacrifice for sin.

We know now that Jesus was born in 4 BC due to a church miscalculation. Jesus was 33 when He was crucified in 29 AD. We know the year as a result of historical records of rulers. In addition, in 29 AD, the Passover had a “High Sabbath” that year, mentioned in the gospels, and that High Sabbath started on what we call Wednesday. The church got the day of the week wrong, by guessing it was a Friday, just because that was the normal Sabbath Day. By being crucified on Wednesday it shows how Jesus came to be dead and buried for 3 days AND 3 nights, rising on the 3rd day. 

As Jesus died, the Temple curtain was torn in two from top to bottom. That curtain was like a theatre curtain on a stage and God tore it down, signifying that the Old Covenant route to God was now closed. Forgiveness was only through the cross of Jesus now. Upon Jesus dying, the Centurion in charge who would have crucified a lot of people, commented that Jesus really was the Son of God. Jesus really was dead, as noted by John when he saw white and red blood corpuscles coming out from where the spear made a wound in Jesus’ side… 

Jesus’ body was taken down and buried before the High Sabbath started on what we call Wednesday at sundown. 

B). WHAT DID JESUS DO BETWEEN DYING ON THE CROSS AND RISING?

Peter tells us in his letter, (1 Peter 3:18-20), that after Jesus died, He preached

"to those who had lived at the time of Noah’s flood". WOW! What a statement! So who would all those people have been? 

Well, hades is the place where those who died before they repented of their sin, await the day of judgment. (ie Hades is not hell. It is more like a waiting room for the Day of Judgment.) The Anglican Book of Common Prayer was updated not so long ago because it originally stated that Jesus went down to hell. Eventually, it was corrected to say "hades", recognizing the church’s mistake, a bit late in the day. 

In Hades, Jesus was busy preaching to those drowned in Noah's flood.  A clue as to why Jesus may have made an exception to preach to those drowned in Noah’s flood by giving them another chance may be in Matthew 11:21-22 and 15:21. 

Quite separately we are also told in Matthew (27:52-53), that just after Jesus died, graves opened and many bodies were allowed to be raised to live another day. 

Jesus had previously said that the Gentile towns of Tyre and Sidon would have repented if only they had seen in their towns what Jesus had done in the Jewish towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida, (beside Galilee). The Jews had had more opportunity to repent than others, but they didn’t. So Jesus then went directly to the Gentile towns of Tyre and Sidon to preach. 

Now, back to the people around at the time of Noah’s flood… who were the only people group not allowed to live out their natural life expectancy, and to have the same opportunity to repent and to live out their natural life so that they could not say they had been treated differently. The point of covering all that here is to show that God is fair. What WE need is God’s mercy. 

C). THE RESURRECTION…

Jesus was resurrected in the early hours of what we call Sunday morning. 

i). 500 people saw Jesus after He was resurrected. 

ii). The disciples changed from being afraid for their lives, to fearlessly preaching about Jesus until they were murdered.

iii). The whole world started to change for the better. 

We have an e-book by Dr Victor Pearce “What the World Owes to Christians”, giving us a few examples of the differences those changed by Jesus made to the world. The Easter holiday is a remembrance of what Jesus did at Passover.

D). EPILOGUE

If God gave us what we deserved, heaven would not be an option… God could just say to us “The wages of sin is death.” That would be justice. Sin had to be paid for first before He could forgive us and make us “white as snow”. 

Paul goes on to tell us in Romans, “But the free gift of God is eternal life – THROUGH Jesus Christ our Lord.” Jesus Christ paid the price for us to be forgiven and to enable us to be made righteous. (“He died to make us good”.) God wants to take away our sin, in exchange for His righteousness, but we have to respond to His invitation… RSVP.

This is John Dunning signing off from “Thoughtful Thoughts” for another week.

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