GOLGOTHA, when the cross was planted there, on which Jesus suffered and died, has been fathomed by no one who stood by, not one of those who were pesent there has in the least understood it in its deep significance.
Execution of capital punishment was common in those times; crucifixion was even a frequent occurrence. You know that on the day when Jesus died His bitter death, Pilate put no less than two others with Him to the cross.
Consequently to see such an execution the curious and idle populace would go out of the city gate, while the rank and file of the people of Jerusalem paid no attention to it.
That nevertheless when Jesus was led to the crosshill, so large a multitude went along, and even a small group of priests mingled among the crowd, and a few of His disciples in anxiety and astonishment of soul followed from afar, shows very plainly that at this time people saw something special in the execution that was about to take place. Thus an impression prevailed about Golgotha of something extraordinary, which was presently deepened by the holy nobility of soul that was shown by the Crucified, and finally, by the fear-inspiring signs, which at the cross overtook the bystanders.
Even the officer of the Roman army, who stood watch at the cross and was in command, could in the end not free himself from this overpowering impression; and his cry after Jesus was dead: “Truly, this was the Son of God”, shows how strongly even this hardened soldier was moved.
Hence it would be a mistake to imagine that on that dreadful afternoon of wickedness everything took an ordinary course.
Rather everything on Golgotha bore this time a very uncommon character. A certain dread of something mysterious and strange took possession of every heart. And doubtless it was a relief, when at last everything was “accomplished”; and the light of the sun returned; and with the return of the light Jesus was seen, with the pale color of death upon His face and person, and the head impotently hanging down upon the breast, dead.
Then fear was removed from many a heart. For, as it was thought, now that He was dead, Jerusalem and the troubled multitudes, had nothing more to fear, at least not from Him.
But though in this way the cross on Golgotha on that Friday before Easter violently moved the hearts of the people in Jerusalem, threw restlessness upon them, and by a mysterious fear made the multitude afraid, that cross and that dying was not understood in its depths by any one there, much less was it comprehended in its far-reaching significance.
Not even by a Mary and by a John.
This you observe on Easter-morn.
For even when they heard that Jesus was risen from the dead, His disciples did not understand the secret of salvation, and they stood before a riddle, the solution of which escaped them.
What in reading Isaiah 63 involuntarily you apply to Jesus, that He “has trodden the winepress alone, and that of the people there was none with Him”, intends by no means to say merely, that His disciples fled and turned their back upon Him, but has a far deeper sense.
On Golgotha has happened far more, than any one of the bystanders surmised. In Jesus’ death struggle, a conflict has been fought, which He alone knew, and of which He alone had knowledge, and which He has fought to the finish, without the surmisal of such a conflict suggesting itself, even to a John.
In the suffering and dying of Jesus there was something that appeared in the foreground, something that was evident, and which consequently every one could observe; but also an entirely other something, and much more, took place in the background, which as behind a curtain remained hidden, and which could be understood by no one there, whose eye was not opened, to peer through the folds of that curtain.
What one saw was the convulsion of one, who had been sentenced to die, who in the bitterness of the death struggle, at last from sheer exhaustion succumbed and expired. But what one did not see, was the dreadful conflict of the Mediator of God and men with the eternal Death, His writhing in anguish of soul to extricate Himself from Satan, His succumbing under the weight of the wrath of God.
Later on the eyes of His apostles have been opened to this. And Paul, and Peter, and John have vied as it were to bind it upon the heart of Christ’s church. And no child of God, but has at length understood at least something of that “being forsaken of God that we of God should never be forsaken”. But at the time no one understood it. No one but He, Who Himself fought it through. No one save Jesus alone.
What the multitude, and His disciples, saw of it and understood of it, was a small part of the matter. A single drop of the full cup. The outward form, in which the suffering showed itself. But of the real, of the actual, of what was above everything else so awful in this dying, they perceived nothing.
They saw the dying, but not the actual conflict with Satan, and with that eternal Death, the violence of which was in Satan’s hand.
They saw much sin in the revilings of those priests, in the roughness of some of those bystanders, in the cruelty of the soldiers; but they saw nothing of the sin of the world which had been laid on Jesus, and which Jesus bore.
Above all else they clearly saw, that God from heaven did not deliver Jesus from the cross, but, that in that terrible moment, all the wrath of God centered itself upon Him, and that under this and under this alone, He succumbed—no one of them surmised, and no one saw. Friend nor enemy had any thought of this. This, Jesus alone understood, and Jesus alone endured.
Something which naturally even now has no hold upon your heart, when to you Satan is merely a name, death merely a falling asleep, and the “sin of the world” little less than a shortcoming in holiness, and the wrath of God merely a figurative manner of speech.
But then also, something, the dreadfulness of which goes though your bone and marrow, the moment you personally recognize in Satan your mightiest enemy; when death is become to you the power of corruption; when under the sin of the world, and therefore under your own sin, as under a burden, which weighs your soul down and distresses it, you have labored; and above all when the wrath of God has appeared to you in that terrible reality, which has made you feel in your own soul, that under the woe and the weight of that wrath of your God you must eternally be undone.
Then the terrible fact, that in one moment of time by that anger of Satan, by that horror of Death, by that curse of sin, and by the wrath of God, Jesus was overwhelmed as by a destructive flood, and was swallowed up by it, becomes to you something so altogether different from that outward dying on the cross, that you would almost forget that cross, that you might concentrate all the seriousness and all the attention of your loving soul upon that deeper suffering, and to become amazed, as often as again from that mysterious dark background of Golgotha the plaintive cry sounds in your ears: “O, all ye, that pass by, behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger.”
But, alas, on the way that runs back of the visible, and crosses the fields of the spirit, even now so few pass by.
Almost every one walks on the foreside, and also at Golgotha has no eye except for what the bodily eye sees, and ear save for what the bodily ear hears.
Only those among the Lord’s people who are more deeply initiated have any desire to take that dark way across the background, where in so heartbreaking and soul-lacerating a manner they hear their Mediator moan.
Very few have the courage to pursue that way though the darknesses to the end.
And when that conflict with eternal Death took place, there was literally no one who dared to follow the Mediator in that bitter way. In that awful wilderness of eternal Death no one was with Him. Into the deepest abyss of Death He went down alone.
He, Immanuel, for us sinners, that we should never sink away into that eternal Death.
And therefore in the most crucial moment, when at last the gate of the eternal Death opened before Him and He was to sink away in it, His cry for compassion is not to any child of man, not to Peter with His defenceless sword, not to John with his shortcoming love.
Even Mary, Jesus had dismissed from the cross.
No, in this dreadful moment, when He had already put one foot on the threshold of the gate of Death, and presently this awful gate was to close itself behind Him, all that passed from His soul across His lips, was a last cry to Above, a cry to His God, under Whose wrath He was sinking away, seeking a refuge with His Father, in the dying outcry: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
Breath was still in Him, the soul was still in the blood, He felt Himself still alive, but life was ebbing. He felt succumbency approach. One moment more, and the breath of life would fail Him, to let His consciousness set in the night of Death.
And, in that moment, when He could no longer hold on to life, and felt it slip away from Him, He gave that breath, that life, that spirit which was passing from Him, over to His God.
Father, when the spirit of my life passes from me, let my soul be safe in thy hand.
Dying-word of confidence. Prophecy of resurrection.
I die away under the sin of the world, but God shall hold fast my life, and once He shall give it back to me.
Thus, before He died away in the eternal Death, was His last prayer on earth. And truly that importuning prayer of Jesus could not remain unanswered.
When Jesus sank away in Death, God held fast to His life. Though He sank away, in the hands of the Father the life of our Savior was indestructible.
He succumbed and still He continued to be, for though His God in anger had forsaken Him, in His eternal love, His Father held His life immovably fast, and no one could snatch it out of the hand of His Omnipotence.
More still. In that prayer Jesus as Head of the Body prayed for all His redeemed.
When presently, having come to the end of your life, you feel the damp shadow of death settle upon you; and you feel the warmth of life withdraw itself from your blood, and the breath of life from your lips; and dying you commend your spirit into your Father’s hands, this also is a fruit of the cross of Golgotha, a fruit of what upon that cross Jesus has prayed in your behalf.
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