© 2019 Don Pinson | [Download]
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Why did the Roman soldier beneath Jesus’ Cross feel afraid to face God at the Judgment?  He may, just then, have realized the repentant thief had the answer.  “We, indeed, suffer justly.”  That was it:  We’re wrong!  Doing things the way we want was not right after all!  It was our Creator’s right to tell us—His creation—how to live.  After all, only then would we know how to fulfill His purpose for us.  We were guilty of “insubordination”!  This a soldier could understand.

By now it was noon, and a strange thing begins to happen.  The sky begins to darken with an eerie blackness.  For a few brief moments, the air was so still it seemed to choke you as the darkness deepened.  Then the earth began to tremble.  Lightning bolts were exploding against the ground.

Then, unexpectedly, the voice of Jesus pierces the darkness.  In a loud, wrenching voice Jesus cries out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46, emphasis added)

The level of emotional pain expressed by this outcry was incomprehensible.  All who heard it were arrested by its intensity.  They temporarily forgot the present danger to themselves and turned toward Jesus’ cross.  While the light produced by the lightning bolts was short-lived, the pain in His face which it revealed was unforgettable.  His brow was deeply wrinkled.  The blood on his battered face was streaked with the trails of tears.  One felt as if He was experiencing loneliness on a level never before known by man.

Though the initial tremors subsided after a while, the insecure feeling surrounding Jesus’ cross did not.  As the minutes crawled by, it felt like the rejection of all the ages was pouring into Jesus.  Indeed, later it would be revealed that the punishment for every man’s rebellion against God was being absorbed into Jesus’ being in those hours.  He was taking, in our place, the wrath of His Father, the righteous Judge (2 Corinthians 5:21).  That afternoon on the cross, He became, in every sense of the word, our substitute (1 John 2:2).

From then on He rapidly weakened.  His breathing became more labored.  Exhaling became more and more difficult.  The effort to breathe became increasingly futile.

At one point He moaned, “I thirst!” (John 19:28)  One of the callous soldiers stuck a sponge on the end of his spear, soaked it with sour wine, and held it up against the lips of Jesus.  Refused the last act of kindness He ever requested from those He had created, Jesus weakly turned His face away.

Now the end was near.  His breathing was so labored those watching expected death to come at any moment.  But then, in an unmistakable voice of triumph, Jesus cried out, “It…is…finished!” (John 19:30)  The words rang with victory, with accomplishment!  It was as if His perspective on this whole ordeal was that a work was being done.  The tone of His voice spoke of completing something that had been planned from eternity past.  The books were now balanced!  He had paid man’s debt to God:  That debt of one perfect life which man had incurred in Eden when he used, for selfish purposes, the perfect life God had loaned him.  That debt was now paid.  Jesus’ perfect life had been offered up as a sacrifice to God to pay man’s debt.  The work was now accomplished (Colossians 2:13-15)!

Do you have the victorious life of the victorious Christ living in and through you?  You can, if you surrender your will to Him.

Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you—and for your children!  And you won’t like what that brings to you.  I’m Don Pinson; this has been Think About It.