Luke 23:44-56

Okay, let's uh let's read the text together.

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.

For the sun stopped shining, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

Jesus called out with a loud voice, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

When he had said this, he breathed his last breath.

The centurion, seeing what had happened, praised God and said, Surely this was a righteous man.

When all the people had gathered to witness this sight, saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away.

But all those who knew him, including the women who had followed him to Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things.

Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the council, a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action.

He came from the Judea town of Amarevia, and he himself was waiting for the kingdom of God.

Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus' body.

Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth, and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock.

One in which no one had yet been laid.

It was preparation day, and the Sabbath was about to begin.

The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it.

Then he went home and prepared spices and perfumes.

But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandments.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

Thank you.

Let's pray together.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

And we ask, God, that you would now speak into our lives through your word.

You have the authority and you have the precision and you have the clarity, God, to speak right into our story through this text.

And so, God, we pray that the power of the Holy Spirit would be upon this time in our lives, giving us the ability to hear what you would say to us, and then stir up our faith that we might obey and respond in faith.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

You may be seated.

You may be seated.

And we believe that it is the authority in our life.

You know, when you go to work for a big corporation, they have something called a flow chart, right?

If you take a management class, you have a flow chart, and the flow chart indicates hierarchy and authority, right?

And in our life, if there was a flow chart for those of us that follow Jesus, we would be on it, but there would be something higher than us.

And that's God, right?

And his word.

So God reveals himself to us through his word, and he wants to govern over our lives, to lead us with his word.

And so his word is the authority.

So for the last year, longer than that, we've been opening up the book of Luke.

In the New, you do not have a Bible.

I've printed the text.

Also have um in the text, uh, we you also have a Bible app on your phone, which you probably can grab.

So Luke is in the New Testament.

Luke is one of three writers that wrote the synoptic gospels, right?

And so Luke was a, he wasn't an uh he wasn't a disciple of Jesus.

He was a probably a Gentile.

He came to Christ probably after Jesus' death.

He was a doctor, and he was a doctor, probably serving one specific man, who's mentioned in the beginning of Luke.

He wrote this account for that wealthy patron, so that you and I would believe the things that we read.

So when we look at Luke, we're looking at volume one of the story of Jesus.

If you would have, this would have been written in a scroll.

If you would have rolled this out, it would have been over 30 feet long, the scroll.

Volume two was the book of Acts.

The book of Acts.

We'll look at that book later on this year.

We're going to look at the first 12 chapters of Acts once we get past um, once we get into the summer.

Um, but Luke was the writer, and he says, right when he begins the book, he says, I've written these things so that you might believe what you've heard.

So Luke is very interested in the believability of the story of Jesus, that you can trust what you've heard about Jesus.

So we're here in the story of Jesus' crucifixion.

We're right in the middle of it.

You know, if you're not familiar with the church setting, you probably know at least that there's this Christian faith has something to do with Jesus dying on the cross.

So if if you're new to Scripture, you came on a good day.

Because it's on this day in the text that Jesus dies.

He breathes his last breath.

So we've talked um quite a bit about just kind of our process of um reading the Bible and interpreting the Bible and then applying it to our life, right?

And so the the process we go through is we want to make observations of the text first.

So one of the reasons we print it out in the bulletin is so that you can write on it, right?

And we and I showed you last week my notes.

Here they are, right?

I've had it with me.

I've been carrying the Bible around with me in my pocket, and it's all written all over with different observations from the text.

And one of the things that you would see there if you were making your notes in the text, you'd probably notice that in verse 47 through verse 49, there is similar words being used.

Similar words, not repeated words, which is another type of observate observation we make in the text, but similar words.

It's this idea seeing what had happened.

The centurion was seeing it.

Then we see that there were other people, all the people who gathered to witness this sight, they saw what took place.

And then we see that the women of Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.

What's the similar language that we see there?

Seeing, yeah.

So they're seeing.

So they're observing what's going on.

That's one thing that we would look at in the text.

Another thing that we see here is that there's a really clean break after the um uh text about in verse 49.

Basically, if we were going to outline the text, we'd start in verse 44 and 49 would be a clump.

And that clump is talking about the um last three hours of Jesus' life, what took place.

So um we see here that the that that about noontime darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, and then there's a substantiation there.

Well, why did it get dark?

He tells us why it got dark.

Because sometimes was it was it cloudy day?

Was it sunset?

Why did it get dark?

Well, it got dark because the sun stopped shining, right?

So there's a substantiation in verse 45.

Then we have another description of what's going on in these last three hours.

The curtain of the temple was torn in two, right?

So us being, how many people in here are Jewish?

Anybody in here that's Jewish?

Only only one.

Okay, so unless so there's a gap, right?

So culturally, culturally, we don't know what's the curtain.

Was this the bath curtain?

Was this the new, you know, tapestries that were hung up?

What's the curtain?

No, this is a special curtain.

So there's a gap that we have as Gentile readers, 2,000 years away from this text.

There's a cultural time gap that separates us from the meaning, understanding what's going on in verse 45.

So many of you who grow have grown up in the church, you know what curtain we're talking about, right?

But but some of you are brand new to the scriptures and you're like, what curtain?

What's going on?

Well, that's what we want to, we kind of want to ask that question and find an answer to it.

So we go through these these last three hours of Jesus' life.

He says, we have the final statement of Jesus where he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, and then he breathed his last.

Then we have the statement from the centurion.

That takes us up, um, all these people are watching.

Then we get to verse 50, 50 through 56.

50 through 56 is the second major chunk of the text that we're studying.

So in my in my text, when I'm um writing in my notes, what I use is a slash, right?

I'll go through and I'll just put a slash at the end of 49 before we get to 50, so I have see a visual representation, representation that it's an end of one thought, beginning a new thought.

And we've got this whole part from 50 through 56 about Joseph of Arimathea.

Do you notice as as Albert was reading through the text how much of um how much biographical information we're given about Joseph of Arimathea?

We're told he's from Arimathea.

We're told that he was a part of the council, right?

We're told that he didn't consent to what was going on with the council.

So Luke kind of goes to pains to tell us quite a bit about who Joseph is.

Now, if you go over to John, we find out that this burial took place not just with Joseph, but Nicodemus.

And you Bible scholars know who Nicodemus is, right?

He's the Nicot Knight, right?

Nicodemus came at night, and he what?

What was the conversation?

Why do we know so much about Nicodemus?

John chapter 3.

John 3 · chapter mention

Yes, I'm asking a question, yes.

Yeah, how to be born again.

Yeah, and we get John 3.16, right?

That God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son.

I mean, what a great text.

John 3.16 is where we see Nicodemus.

So Nicodemus, he must have heard John, right?

He must have received that message of John 3.

He must have been born again.

So I'm kind of jumping ahead in the text.

But uh Joseph of Arimathea, fascinating guy, has a tomb.

He's 20, he Arimathea is like uh 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem.

So why did he have a tomb there?

Like, why was he so ready to bury Jesus within just this small window of time?

So there's a bunch of fascinating things, right, that we've gone through and observed.

One of the things that that I did this time, and this wasn't this isn't normally my method, but I just highlighted how much of this text um is cultural, right?

It's not uh this text was not written in you know 2019.

You've got the curtain, you've got these people that are there, they're beating their breasts.

How often do we like in cultural beat our breasts, right?

As it's not a cultural expression for us here in the U.S.

Then it talks about Joseph being a member of the council, we have the reference, and so like what's the council, right?

Well, the council is a Sanhedrin.

Um we have Arimathea, that's a geographical reference.

We have linen cloth and a tomb, right?

A different burial system.

Um we have references to the Sabbath, we have references to spices.

All of these things are cultural references.

So again, I want to just tell you, I'm I'm hoping that as you're reading the Bible throughout the week, that you're coming to scripture curious, that you're always finding things in the text where you're like, you know what, maybe I don't understand that well enough.

Because we live in an age where the answers are readily available.

Like Blue Letter Bible has great commentaries on it where you can just kind of go and read some other pastor that'll explain, well, what is this curtain?

What's it referring to?

Okay, so we go through the text and we make our observations.

One of the things that we look for are these structural laws.

There's two contrasts and a substantiation in the text here.

Contrasts are where you have the word, the flag word but, right?

So you have these two groups, the centurion witnessing and then responding.

You have the people that are kind of beating their breasts, and then you have a but the women, or this is 49, but all those who knew him, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things.

The writer here is contrasting the women as followers and the people who beat their breasts and just left.

Okay.

So um let's what I want to do this morning is I I want to specifically look at verse 50 or 49.

Verse 49.

Uh oh, sorry, no, verse 46 and 47.

46 and 47 says this.

And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, he said, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Having said this, he breathed his last.

So when the centurion saw what had happened, he glorified God, saying, Certainly, this was a righteous man.

So we have the final words of Christ.

There are seven words from Christ that he spoke on the cross.

This statement, um, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit, is either the last or second to the last.

The only other kind of competing phrase that Luke doesn't refer to, but the other gospels do, is to telesti.

You Greek, um, you Greek students, what does tatolesti mean?

It is finished, right?

We we translate to telesti into English as it is finished, right?

The work of the cross indicates that it's finished.

And we've been talking about how the cross is really it's God's story that started from the garden.

It's God's redemptive work.

So Jesus gets to the cross and he says, It is finished.

And then in our text that we're looking at this morning, he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Again, we're we're a bunch of Gentiles this morning.

We didn't grow up in a Jewish home, but if you had, you would recognize the phrase here.

Because this is a prayer from Psalm 31:5, and young Jewish kids were taught at night to pray this prayer.

Psalms 31:5

It's like like we have kind of our um, now I lay me down to sleep, you know?

We have that prayer that that kind of is is culturally familiar to the Jewish um listener.

Jesus on the cross is saying, Into your hands I commit my spirit.

But who is he committing it to?

He use he says, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

Into your hands I commit my spirit.

Amazing.

This relationship, Jesus is revealing this new relationship that people can have with the Father.

Because in Psalm 31, it doesn't say, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

It literally just says, Into your hands I commit my spirit.

So Jesus says these words, and then we have the centurion, a Roman guard who is watching, and he says, Certainly this was a righteous man.

Certainly this was a righteous man.

Now, two weeks ago we talked about the innocence of Christ.

Jesus dying on the cross means nothing unless Jesus was completely innocent and had never done anything wrong in his entire life.

That's absolutely necessary for Jesus' cross to be meaningful.

And the writer, Luke, is does not waste time in pointing out all of the references to Christ's innocency.

Here he is again.

And it's the witness of this Roman soldier.

It is so vital that you see what it says in verse 46.

After he speaks, he says, I commit my my uh spirit into your hands, and then he said, He after saying these things, he breathed his last.

Jesus died, in other words.

Now it is crucial, it is critical to our theology to recognize that Jesus died physically.

It is imperative that we believe in the death of Christ because you will not have the substitutionary payment of sin or the resurrection without Christ.

So if Jesus did not die, then you do not have the substitutionary death of Christ.

He didn't die on your behalf.

He may have suffered, but suffering wasn't good enough.

When you had the sacrificial system under the Old Testament law and you had this lamb that was designated as a sin offering, did you just beat it up and kick it around a few times in order for it to suffer on your behalf?

No, that lamb had to be killed in order to atone for the sin of the individual.

And so the death of Christ, even going back further in history, what did God say to Adam and Eve?

When you eat this fruit, in the day that you eat it, you will surely die.

That's right.

And so it was necessary that somebody pay the price of death, not just suffering, but death on the cross.

And so we see that he breathed his last.

But it is also important that we recognize Jesus' death because you do not have a resurrection unless he died.

You only have a reviving, right?

We've had we have people that, you know, will go and they'll OD, right?

Every day of the week in Baltimore City.

We have people that will OD.

And they come with the Narcan, I think.

Is that what it's called?

Narcan.

And they give the Narcan and they revive the person, right?

That's not a resurrection.

That's just reviving the person, right?

Um the that you get the body functioning again, right?

Yeah, in a hospital, you have a code blue, and we're gonna kind of zap their heart and get it functioning.

I know.

If you're in the medical field, I just butchered that.

Please forgive me.

But here's the thing, right?

That's reviving a person.

Jesus died.

Jesus died, and so unless you have the death of Christ, you do not have the resurrection.

This is essential to our faith.

In Romans chapter 5, Paul says this.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

You see, this is verse 6, 5, 6 through 10.

You see, at just the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.

But God, look at this.

God demonstrates his own love for us in this.

While we were still sinners, Christ took a nap.

No, no, right?

No.

Christ took a lunch break.

No, no, Christ died for us.

It goes on.

It says, since we have now been justified by his.

Coupon?

No.

No.

We've been justified by his blood.

How much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him?

For if while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life?

You see, it was essential to the Christian faith that Jesus died on the cross.

Not just go into a coma, not just cease to function for seven minutes and have blood cut off to his brain for a little while.

No, he had to die.

It is essential.

Now, there are skeptics and there are Muslims that reject the death of Christ.

And there are two different reasons.

In the surahs, in Muslim teaching, they reject the um, they they they hold up Jesus as a prophet, but they reject the crucifixion and death of Christ.

They say that he was caught away, because um in their hero narrative, the story arc of who heroes are, prophets, heroes don't suffer.

They're victorious.

And so it is impossible, it's incongruent to believe that Jesus is a prophet and that he died.

And so uh the surahs teach, I think it's surah 4, um somewhere in the 150s, that it teaches that Jesus did not die on the cross.

Um, it also, the death of Christ for a Muslim, would challenge the sovereignty of God.

How could God be absolutely in control and yet allow his good prophet to die on the cross?

Skeptics, and even to this day, we're getting into Easter season, um uh, you know, the History Channel is gonna start running those specials on how Jesus, you know, what do the historian the historians say about Jesus?

You're gonna see skeptics say that Jesus didn't really die.

They're gonna say that it was the swoon theory, that he was really in a state of a coma, that that somehow he had drugs on the cross and went to sleep only to be um awakened a little bit later.

But I just want you to know that in 1986, the American Medical Association says this.

This is a statement from the American Medical Association.

Clearly, the weight of historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted, and it supports the traditional view that a spear thrust between his right rib probably perforated not only the right lung, but also the paradictium and heart, and thereby ensured his death.

Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.

Isn't that fascinating?

That's the American Medical Association.

It is inconvenient that Jesus died on the cross, especially because the historical record, which we'll see next week, is that he rose from the dead.

That is an inconvenient truth.

You'll remember that the Romans at nighttime, because they're these are these are Roman guards that are serving in Israel, it was um not kosher.

It was not okay for a dead body to hang on a tree according to Jewish law in Deuteronomy.

You couldn't have a dead body up on the Sabbath day.

And so the Sabbath started at 6 p.m.

on Friday night, and we are now like three hours out from uh the Sabbath starting, and so the Roman guards came along and they broke the legs of the the two criminals so that they couldn't push themselves up on the cross to continue breathing.

They had to hasten the death of um those uh those who had been crucified.

But when they came to Jesus, they punctured his side with a spear and with water and blood coming out that indicated that he had already died.

His legs did not need to be broken, and that fulfilled Psalm 22, right?

Amazingly enough, that not a bone was broken.

Um that was a prophecy from thousands of years earlier.

His bones were not broken and because he had already died.

So here's the thing.

In John 19, 33, it says this when they came, this is the the um the Roman guard, it says, when they came to Jesus, they found that he had already he was already dead, they did not break his legs.

Then the report goes to Pilate.

So remember, Pilate's the one who had the final say on behalf of the Roman government that Jesus could be crucified.

Pilate hears that he's dead, and in Mark chapter 15, verse 44 and 45, Pilate says, No, no, no, go back and check.

Mark 15:44

Because Pilate was so surprised that Jesus had already died.

The reason why crucifixion was so horrendous was because it was this slow, agonizing death.

You were pierced, but you had to, you could continue to kind of push yourself up off of your own body weight and continue to breathe.

And the way that the person who was crucified ultimately died was because they ran out of strength to continue pushing themselves up, getting that oxygen into their lungs.

It was a death by asphyxiation.

And so Pilate was surprised when he heard that Jesus had died.

And so here's what's interesting, right?

Just in the historical, the the the um history of this, Joseph of Arimathea has to go to Pilate and get permission to get the body of Jesus.

Then he has to wrap Jesus in about a hundred pounds of linen and spices, right?

This was a fast burial, faster than what would have been normal, because once 6 p.m.

Friday night comes around, there's no more work that can be done because if you're Jewish, the Sabbath indicates that's it.

No more burying the bodies.

So that's why we have this indication in verse 56 that the women they prepared more spices, they had more spices that they were going to use in the embalming process, but they couldn't go any further.

They had to just stick the body into the tomb because that was it.

So we have the record of the centurion Jesus dies a righteous man.

He's put into this tomb of a wealthy individual.

You know, in 1956 there was discovered in a tomb another criminal who had been crucified, um buried in somebody else's tomb.

So this is not a necessarily what we would say culturally uncommon, but unless somebody came in and got the body of Jesus, normally a crucified person, their body would kind of been left out, taken down off the tree, and just left out to be picked apart by animals.

It was a part of kind of the disgrace of being of um being crucified.

Joseph buries the body.

I want to just close off with this, Isaiah 53, and we're we're heading into taking communion together.

Isaiah 53, 10.

The prophet Isaiah, years before Jesus was born and walked to the earth, he prophesies about Jesus coming.

And he says in verse 10, Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him, speaking of Jesus, and to cause him to suffer.

And though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will not see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied.

By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.

Therefore, I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death.

He poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors.

Right?

Who is who is he crucified between?

Two criminals.

For he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

Jesus, this was always the plan.

This was always the plan that Jesus would come and he would die on the cross.

And let me just tell you something.

If maybe maybe you've come this morning and and some of this stuff is new to you, and you've you've heard about Jesus dying on the cross, but it's it's been kind of a question for you.

I just want to say this.

Death in our culture, death in our culture is um it's poorly interpreted.

It's poorly interpreted.

But the Bible comes along and says death is both better and it is worse than how you understand it and how culture interprets it.

It's both better and it is worse.

How's it better?

Or how's it worse?

Let's start with how is it worse.

Well, first of all, when we look at people, I I have here in my hand and I don't have time to read it, but the obituaries.

This is a newspaper, by the way.

This is this thing that yeah, if you didn't get the newspaper, you can borrow mine.

This is a newspaper.

One of the things, those of you that are my age or younger, one of the things they do in newspapers is they publish who died, right?

It's a way to make money if you're a newspaper.

You run obituaries and you talk about here's these pert people who died.

Now, you go through and you read the obituaries, and it talks about the things that those people did in their life.

The events, their family members, who they were.

And so, death to our culture, it symbolizes this moment of kind of the story coming to an end.

But when we come to the Christian faith, the Bible says that death happens because sin is in the world, that there is a universal guilt of humanity, and the that requires death to be present ecologically, within relationships, spiritually, and physically.

And so people die.

People die as a symbol, as a representation that the world is guilty.

Now, you don't read that in the obituary.

It doesn't say that Joe Smith died, you know, March 21st because sin is in the world.

Right?

It doesn't say that.

It doesn't say that.

But that's the reality.

The Bible says that we die, we die as judgment for sin.

The problem is that judgment isn't enough to satisfy the wrath of God, right?

We die, but there's still death.

There's an eternal death to be died after that.

And so Jesus came and he died.

He died as the innocent man to pay for our guilt.

Now I know that sounds weird.

We talked about it last week, about how strange that may seem, but this is the thing.

We do recognize that guilt requires a payment.

Anytime somebody wrongs you, the reason why we struggle with forgiveness so much is because the accounts are opened when somebody wrongs us.

Right?

There's a sense of debt being paid.

And that's just a reflection of how God's created us, that wrong requires a payment.

And God comes through and he says, Look, it, the payment that's required is death.

But your death as a sinner is not good enough.

Jesus had to die.

So, first of all, the Bible says that death is worse than what your culture tells you.

The second thing, though, is that the Bible tells us that death is better than what our culture says.

Because death is referred to as sleeping, as literally changing a garment, just like you put on clothes or you changed clothes this morning.

That's what death is for the believer.

We change from one body into a new reality of being present with God.

We have a hope that follows death that we will be in the presence of God.

We as a as a culture, right now, we have a crisis of identity, purpose, and meaning.

Every millennial, every working uh professional, and and and and our our um society as a whole is struggling with what is what is our story, what is our identity, what is purpose, what is meaning.

And when we look at the cross, what we see is that God gives us meaning.

He gives us a meaning to life beyond what our cultural story is able to give to us.

So as we take the cup and as we take the bread, one of the things that we are recalling, and the ushers, why don't you guys come forward?

Um Marvin and um Tony.