Who verily was foreordained

'Who verily was foreordained'

— 1 Peter 1:20

God sovereignly ruled the whole affair of his Son’s death upon the cross. The death of Christ did not take God by surprise. He planned it in eternity and he was in control of the whole affair. If men had done what they wanted to do, they would have stoned Christ to death on several occasions. But they were not allowed to exercise their will until the time appointed by the Father. If Satan could have had his way, he would have killed Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, but God’s Son must die upon the cross of Calvary, according to God’s unalterable purpose.

It is true, those wicked men - the Jews, the Gentiles, Pilate and the Roman soldiers - did exactly what their wicked hearts wanted to do. They stripped him because they wanted to strip him. They beat him because they wanted to beat him. They lied about him because they wanted to lie about him. They nailed him to a tree, hung him up and laughed as they watched him die, because that is what man’s wicked free will wanted to do. They spat in his face and plucked out his beard because they hated the Son of God.

But God was in control all the while, secretly ruling the actions of those evil men, so that they did exactly what God from eternity ordained must be done. They did neither more nor less than what God had decreed. Peter told the Jews that Christ, ‘being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain’ (Acts 2:23). ‘Though they found no cause of death in him, yet desired they Pilate that he should be slain. And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre’ (Acts 13:28-29). All that our Lord Jesus Christ suffered in his crucifixion and death, he suffered because ‘it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief’ (Isa. 53: 10). God sovereignly determined that Christ would die, for whom he would die, when he would die, where he would die and all that he would suffer in his death.