I'd like to ask the young people,
the kids, teenagers and stuff, you look up here just a minute,
I'd like to ask you a question. Do you all like to watch TV?
Yeah, you like to watch TV. Can you watch a one half hour
TV show without getting distracted? That's like how long a cartoon
show is, something like that. Okay, I'll make a deal with you. If you'll pay attention, I'll
be done in 25 minutes. That's less than a half hour.
And if you can watch TV that long, and I realize TV's more
fun. But if you can watch TV that
long, you can listen that long. And you know what? I got 25 minutes
right there. That's so I make sure and keep
my promise to you. Unless my phone quits. But I can watch
that clock back there too. But I have a message that it's
no different than the messages I preach otherwise, but I was
thinking of you. And I want to make these things
very clear to you if I can. So we'll start now. First, let me tell you a story.
You hear us talk about Jesus a lot here. Jesus is everything
to us. Without the Lord Jesus, nothing
that we do here means anything at all. It's totally useless. We talk about him a lot, and
I want to tell you about what happened to him on one particular
day. And I'm going to warn you, it's
a horrible story. It's not a pretty story. It's
not the kind of story that you read before you go to sleep at
night. It's not the kind of story that by itself will give you
happy thoughts. There were many people who hated
Jesus, and I mean they truly hated him. And they hated him
so much that they talked the most powerful person in their
city, to kill him in the worst way that you can imagine. It
all started very early one morning. And they began by beating him,
beating him with a whip. But it wasn't just any kind of
whip. Probably when you think of a whip, you think of the kind
of whip a cowboy might have. But this wasn't that kind of
whip. It was a kind of a short whip, and it had nine or 10 leather
strands coming out of it. And at the end of each strand,
they had tied a piece of sharp glass or broken clay pots. And the reason is, when they
whipped a person with that kind, it would tear the skin open.
It would be like whipping you with knife blades. And they whipped
our Lord Jesus so badly with a whip like that, that it's like
it shredded his skin off his back. Some accounts of this kind
of beating that they would give to criminals says that it would
be so bad, it would not only shred the skin, it would tear
into the muscles underneath the skin. and could shred them so
badly that sometimes the insides of the person were visible. Now some of you may have gotten
spankings from your parents. I sure enough got some from mine.
And they're painful. But they're nothing like this.
In fact, these beatings were so bad that many people died
just from the beating. After this, they took some branches
from a thorny plant. You all know what thorns are,
the stickers. And I've seen pictures of the
plant that they're talking about, and it has thorns on it about
that long, sharp. And this particular plant, the
branches, it may even be like a viney plant. You can bend them.
And so they took a bunch of this very thorny plant and they made
a circle out of it and again and again. You know how you do
a Christmas wreath? You know? Well, that's kind of
what they did, but they made it about this big. And then they
acted like it was a crown and they put it on his head and shoved
it down. so that all those long thorns
went into the skin on his head, the scalp, and caused the blood
just to pour down his head and face. They took a big, heavy beam of
wood, and they laid it across his shoulders. Now remember,
these are shoulders that had been beaten. They're bleeding. to open wounds, but they took
this beam of wood and put it up on his shoulders. This was
in the city of Jerusalem. And outside the city of Jerusalem,
there was a small hill. The Jewish people called it Golgotha,
but in Greek they pronounced it Calvary. But what it means
is the skull. And that's where they would take
very bad criminals and kill them. And so they put that beam of
wood across the shoulders of our Lord Jesus Christ. And they
pointed him and they said, walk. And it was about one and a half
miles to get to that hill. The Lord Jesus was already so
weak because of what they had done to him, that he stumbled
and fell. Now, it's bad enough to stumble
and fall, isn't it? You've done that. Have you ever
stumbled and fall, and particularly if you're like on a paved area
or something like that, you skin up your knee or your hands or
something? But imagine if that happened.
and your back is already torn to shreds, and there's a beam
of wood on your back, a heavy beam, and you stumble and fall,
and you do a face plant. You know what a face plant is,
don't you? You just fall down. That's what happened to our Lord.
And so they called another man to carry that beam of wood for
him, but he still had to walk all the way out to that hill.
And when they got there, They shoved him down on his back,
that raw, torn, shredded back. And they took that beam of wood,
and they laid it under his shoulders and stretched out his arms. And
this is gruesome, but this is what they did to him. They took
nails about that long. They were square. And right here,
between the two bones of the wrist, They nailed His hands
to that cross, stretched out like that. Have you ever had a nail poke you? Have you
ever had a nail go through your hand like that or your wrist? Have you ever had anybody that
hated you so much they'd be willing to do that? But that's what happened,
but it's not over. They took that beam of wood that
they'd nailed his hands to, and they put it on the top end of
a pole. It's laying down, the pole's
laying down there, and they stuck that beam to where it'd be on
the top of the pole. And then they took a nail, and
they nailed his feet right through the heel bone, and nailed that
to the post. Then they lifted up that post
with the cross beam on it, and they dug a hole about that big
around. I don't know just how deep it
was, but deep enough so that when you put that post in there,
it wouldn't fall over. And they didn't go over there
and gently let it down to the hole. But they picked up that
post with our Lord Jesus, with His weight hanging on His arms,
some of it trying to be held up with His feet, and they got
it to that hole and they dropped it. And when they dropped it, the
Bible says it pulled His shoulders out of joint, His bones out of
joint. I don't know if that's ever happened
to you. I'm glad it's never happened to me. I've heard that that is
Horribly, horribly painful. It pulled so hard on his arms
that if you've ever seen a picture of a skeleton or seen a model
of a skeleton, you know that this arm bone at the very top
of it has kind of a ball on the end of it and it fits up inside
a bone here in your shoulder. And it's held in there by what
they call ligaments. And sometimes you might see in
sports football especially, somebody will get their shoulder pulled
out of joint and it hurts. It hurts to get it pulled out
of joint, it hurts to get it put back in place. But they pulled
our Lord's joints out of place when they dropped him in that
hole and then just let him hang there. I want you to think for
a minute what it would be like to hang with nothing to support
you, all your weight on two nails that they drove through your
wrist. Your hands are out like this. Unimaginable pain. Have you ever
heard the word excruciating? That word was invented to describe
the pain of being crucified. But that's not all. They left
him to hang there. Nobody pitied him. Nobody cared. They made fun of him. They mocked
him. They had spit on him. The soldiers
that crucified him like that took his clothes, and they didn't want to tear
it into several pieces so that each one gets a piece of it. They decided that they would,
you know what dice are? Well, they had something kind
of like that back then, and they had a contest rolling the dice
to see who could keep as close. But hour after hour went by.
And when you hang like that, you can't breathe. When you hang like that, it causes,
it pulls up your ribcage and you can't get a breath. And the
only way you can get a breath then is to stand up. That is, push against that nail
that they nailed your feet with. And you rise up and you take
a breath and then you sag back down. And they would do that to the
worst kind of criminals. Sometimes it would take them
days to die. But the reason that they died, they eventually got
so tired that they couldn't lift themselves up to take a breath.
But for hours, our Lord hung there just like that. Hang there as long as he could
until, and you know what it's like when you hold your breath
a long time and how it burns inside? And when he couldn't
bear it anymore, he'd lift up on his feet and take a breath
and then sag down. And he got thirsty. You ever
been so thirsty that your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth
and you do that and it sounds all sticky inside your mouth?
Our Lord was like that. They didn't bring him water.
They gave him essentially vinegar as a drink. And our Lord hung there like
that for six hours and then he died. Now there is nothing more gruesome
than what they did to the Lord Jesus. The Bible says that it
was so awful and he looked so awful, he'd been beaten. I mean,
I didn't mention that they'd taken their fist and beaten and
bruised his face. They pulled out his beard. Now,
you young kids don't have beards, but imagine that somebody grabs
a bunch of your hair and just pull, doesn't just pull on it
to make a little paint, pulls it clear out. That's what they
did to him with the hair of his beard. And there he is. And then he
dies. Now, I want you to keep that
scene in mind, and I'm going to ask a few questions and answer
them. The first question I want to
ask about that is we, in our minds, in our imagination, we
think about Jesus Christ nailed to a cross, dying in horrible,
horrible pain. First question is this, who is
he? Who is he? Well, you might think,
well, you told us it's Jesus. Yeah, but who is Jesus? Many people think he's the best
man that ever lived. And they're right. He is the
best man that ever lived. He never sinned, not even once.
He never did anything wrong. That's the best man that ever
lived. But it's much, much more than that. He's more, much, much
more than the best man that ever lived. He is the son of God. God is his father. Now, my father was a man named
Raymond Terrell. And my middle name is Raymond.
He gave me, for a middle name, his first name. Well, you know,
Jesus' mother was named Mary, and she was married to a man
named Joseph. But Joseph was not Jesus' father. God was. The Bible says that
God performed a miracle, and he caused Jesus to begin forming
inside of his mother, Mary. And then he was born, just like
you and I are, as a little baby, and he went through all the stages
of growing up to full adulthood. He was a little baby. He was
a toddler. He was a young child and then
an older child, then a teenager. And then he was in his 20s and
probably worked with his father, his earthly father, Joseph. and he grew to full adulthood. But, when we say that he is God's
son, we mean more than he's just a human who has God as a father. We mean that he is God himself.
Now, I can't explain that to you. But the Bible says to us
that Jesus the man is God in the form of a man. The God that created the universe,
that's Jesus. And He's the one that's hanging
on the tree. Well, the second question is,
why is he hanging on a cross? That doesn't seem the right place,
does it, for a man who is God? Why is he being crucified? Why
is he nailed there? Why is he in such pain? Let me ask you this. If you were
God, would you ever let anything bad happen to you? If you could
control everything, and God can, who's gonna stop God? If you were going to control
anything, would you let people nail you to a piece of wood? I wouldn't. So why is he up there? Well, that's a good question because
he never did anything wrong. He wasn't being punished for
anything he did, so why is he there on the cross? This is gonna
surprise you. God put him there. And you say,
wait a minute, I thought he, you said he is God. Yep, and
God put him there. There's things about God we don't
understand and can't understand. And so I'm not gonna try to explain
to you how that is. We talk about God, that there's
only one God, And the best way we can understand it, even though
he's only one being, that one being's made up of what we might
call three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the Son, God the Son, is
nailed to a tree, and God the Father put him there. You say,
well, I thought it was the soldiers did that. Yes, but he was the
one that caused it to happen. Now the father loves the son,
the Bible says. Then why would the father put
him there? I have three children. I would
never nail any one of them like that. I would never make any
of them suffer like that. Why did God the father make God
the son suffer like that? Well, Jesus never did anything
to deserve that. But the Bible says that God took
the sins of all of his people and put them on Christ. And that
means this, that God treated Jesus as though he was the one
that did all the bad things we have done. You say, well, I haven't
done very many bad things. Well, that's not true. But you say, well, I haven't
done things that are really bad. I've never killed anybody, and
I've never stolen anything. You know what the Bible says?
This might surprise you. You say you've never killed anybody.
Well, that's good. Has anybody ever made you so
angry, though, that you hit them? Or if you didn't hit them, you
really wanted to? Has anyone ever made you so angry
You called them some ugly name. Do you know that when God sees
that, it's just like murder to him because it comes from the
same kind of heart, same kind of thoughts that causes people
to kill others. Have you ever told a lie? Have you ever wanted something
really bad that didn't belong to you? Say, yeah, but I didn't
steal it. Well, did you think about it?
Did you want to? According to God, that's just
as bad as if you really did. Now, I'm not trying to make you
feel bad. I just want you to understand this, that when God
sees you, just like when he sees me and all these grown up here,
do you know what he sees? He sees a very wicked sinner. So why is Jesus up there? He
didn't do anything wrong. It says, the Lord laid on him
the iniquity, or all our iniquity. And it says, for the transgression,
that's a big word for sin, for the transgression of my people,
God's people, was he stricken, was he crucified. Jesus didn't
do any sin of his own, but the sins of other people were charged
to him just as though he did it. And God is just. Do you know
what I mean by just? That means he always does the
right thing. And when sin was put on Jesus
Christ, God, who is everyone's judge, did to Jesus exactly what
he does to everyone on whom he finds sin. For you see, the Lord's
suffering on that day went beyond being crucified. It was more
than that. That's bad enough, but it was
more. God, you've heard about a soul, the
inner part of us, God punished him in his soul. I can't describe to you what
that's like. But I know one thing that happened. The Lord Jesus
Christ was forsaken by God. What would you think if your
parents kicked you out of the house and said, I never want
to see you again? That's kind of what happened
to the Lord Jesus. And he died. But thankfully,
that's not the end of the story. The last question is about this
man that was one day crucified. The last question is, where is
he now? You might think, well, he died,
so they buried him. Yeah, they did. But he didn't
stay there. Three days later, he came out
of the tomb. And 40 days after that, he went right into heaven.
And right now, he is at the right hand of God. That means he's
in the place of special privilege. He said, all the authority in
heaven and earth has been given to me. So right now, everything is good
for the Lord Jesus. And why is that? Well, what he
suffered put away all the sins that he bore, and there's no
more sin on him. Now, here's the last question.
What does that mean for you and me? You and I have sin on us. And if we come before God, if
we come in the presence of God and there's still sin on us, God will destroy us. He will
cast us out of his presence forever. But there is a promise. It says that whoever comes to
the Lord Jesus Christ and asks for their sins to be forgiven,
and that means just put away, they will be. And that's what I have for you
today. May God bless your hearts with it.