He Died That Day - Part Three

 

So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.” Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but rather, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’” Pilate answered, “What I have written I have written.”

---

 

Look back for a moment, if you will, to John 11:47. The chief priests and the Pharisees were in a council and they said, "What are we going to do? This man is doing so many miracles that if we let Him alone, all men will believe on Him and the Romans will come and take our place-and we'll lose our meal ticket. If there is a difficulty of any kind, we will be put out as leaders!" And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, "Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not" (John 11:49-50).

 

Now here he was hating Christ and here he was in the office of high priest, yet God Almighty, in spite of the man's unbelief, honored the office which He had created in the time of Aaron. And He put in the vocal cords of that man-He forced that man-to make a confession that Jesus Christ was the Saviour. We see this in John 11:51 where it says that Caiaphas did not speak this of his own accord, "but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation." So you have the religious leader of the people saying, "Christ is the Saviour."

 

Then in John 19 you have the political leader saying that Christ is the King. And you may be sure that God Almighty caught hold of Pilate just as He caught hold of Caiaphas. And Pilate said, "What I have written, I have written." So God has the high priest say, "This is the Saviour," and God has the political leader say, "This is the King." This unconscious testimony is declared before the religious leaders and before all of the people. Jesus Christ is God. He is the King, He is the Saviour.

 

"Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout" (John 19:23). In other words, it was the coat of the poor. You see, if you just had a big blanket-like thing that you could just throw over your shoulder, it would be simple to weave. But to tailor a garment that has coat sleeves in it, you've got to cut the sleeves.

 

And by the way, the Revised Standard Version, in the book of Genesis, says that Joseph had a coat "with sleeves" (see Gen. 37:3), and the old King James Version says a coat "of many colours." I'm sorry to dissipate the childhood thought that Joseph had a nice little rainbow-red-orange-yellow-green-blue-and-violet coat. He didn't. His older brothers had the simple throw-over garment and Jacob had given Joseph a tailored coat. The Hebrew word here refers to the breadth of the palm of your hand-"a coat of breadths."

 

Somehow the translations in the sixteenth century didn't know much Hebrew and when they reached this passage, they translated it "a coat of many colours," but it does not mean that at all. What Joseph's brothers wore, and what Jesus wore, were the simple cloaks of the poor. You can see the garment of the poor, like the poncho or the serape, throughout the world, even today. To get a tailored coat costs more money. Jesus wore this single garment of the poor, a coat without seam woven from the top throughout.

 

"They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the Scripture might be fulfilled which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did" (John 19:24). Oh, how God took care of the fulfillment of all the things that had been inspired in the Scriptures. Tucked into the Old Testament here and there, from Genesis all the way through Malachi, are those little phrases that were fulfilled in Christ. And here we have this great fulfillment that they gambled for His garments.

 

Now someone has written a novel called The Robe and they've made a movie out of it based on a proposition that the "robe" had miracle power. In churches all over Europe, there are supposedly pieces of Christ's garment, made out of about nine different kinds of cloth. It's been estimated that pieces of the "true cross" are made out of eleven different kinds of wood, at least. So that cross must have been fearfully and wonderfully made! If you go into the Escorial in the north side of Madrid in Spain, there is a bronze tablet on the wall which catalogs the relics in its church. I copied the inscription and translated it from the Spanish and put it in our magazine once. The bronze plaque says that they have the following relics: complete skeletons of saints-17 (my figures are not exact but the idea is here); bones as big as the tibia-76; skulls 115; bones as small as the carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges-2,785; hairs from the beard of Christ4; 5 drops of milk from the Virgin Mary's breast; 2 pieces of the seamless robe; 11 pieces of the true cross-and it goes down all this list, this folderol, that they have there for the gullible people to come in and worship, and to which they're supposed to bow in veneration.

 

Oh, thank God, that we know these things are false! But how do we know? Well, in the first place, let's stop and think about a comparison. How far away are we from George Washington? About two hundred years-two hundred years in a land where there is printing and where it is possible to keep accurate records. If someone came and said to you, "I've got a button that was on George Washington's coat," you would think about as much of that as if someone said, "Here's a string from Nero's fiddle when he burned Rome." This is total folly!

---

STUDY QUESTIONS