"They crucified him"- Luke 23:33

They say that God is no respecter of Persons. That is scripturally true.

They say further that He is no respecter of places, but looks everywhere with the same esteem. I think in this they speak amiss. Earth contains one spot that exceeds all others in its nearness to the heart of God. It may be found just beyond the eastern wall of Jerusalem, chief city of Judaea, where rises the hill called Calvary.

I care not which of the evangelists you consult, whether Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, each will take you to the same place. In your thinking you will be transported far away to this hill. This is "the place of a skull." Here tragic lives and murderous careers found an untimely end. This is the setting for blood and of death. Calvary - the place of the cross!

All the glory and horror of six millenniums of human history come to focus here. Hate and love reach their zenith together, as the place of execution becomes the scene of sacrifice. While sin mounts to fill to the brim earth's cup of wrath, Heaven is busy erecting a sacrificial altar upon which the Lamb of God must be for sinners slain.

In my fancy I climb that mournful hill and stand upon the summit. A wild, bloodthirsty multitude surrounds me and ushers me rudely into the presence of three crosses of wood. One stands apart and rises in central prominence against the lowering sky. A feeling of mixed wonder and terror steals over me! That is His Cross!

Here dies the only perfect Man who ever lived. His record is as pure as the driven snow. His question, "Which of you convinceth me of sin?" has remained unanswered. His lips spoke the greatest sermons ever preached; the wisest lessons ever taught. No physician ever effected more perfect cures. The blind received sight; deaf ears heard; mute lips spoke at his command. He went about breaking up funeral processions. The grave could not keep its prey when Jesus said, "Come forth"! Soldiers, sent out to take Him, returned amazed, bearing with them nothing save the statement, "Never man spake like this man." When trying Him for His life, the judge could only say, "I find in him no fault at all."

Now He is a mangled form upon a rough-hewn cross. Against a background of rabid jeers and frenzied howlings, a voice rises unmistakably. Bruised and battered lips are forming a prayer. Hear the supplication: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do"! The world has had time to weigh the significance of that prayer, and the heart experience of untold millions forbids its being attributed to a martyr. It was the impassioned plea of earth's mighty Redeemer! Forth from His regal veins that day flowed a fountain of cleansing for never-dying souls. Heaven's purposes were being realized when the Representative of sinful man and holy God bowed His head and died. The crown of thorns and the scarlet robe could not hide the identity of the eternal One who became flesh and dwelt among us. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself."

The incarnation is a mystery of the greatest magnitude. The Man Christ Jesus was God! Explain it? You can't. Believe it? You must! There is no other explanation for Him who thirsted, yet had authority to quiet troubled seas; who hungered, yet had power to feed thousands with a scant handful of food. Jesus of Nazareth was older than His mother! Mary did not give birth to a personality when the Christ child was born. She bore a body into which entered a Personality that existed with God, and was God, before the worlds were framed. "A body hast thou prepared me." Jesus made the atmosphere Mary breathed and the earth on which she lived. His hand fashioned the star that shone in the eastern sky on that first Christmas night to guide the wise men from afar. He formed the trees felled by men to build a rough stable, His first earthly shelter; and a crude manger, His first terrestrial bed. The prophet's title was not misleading. He was "Emmanuel. . . God with us"!

"Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost." Oh, the depths of this mystery! God in finite form sleeping on the bosom of Mary. God at the mercy of wicked Herod fleeing for His life into Egypt. God with blistered feet trudging the road to Nazareth. God with calloused hands wielding tools in a carpenter shop. God in an agony in Gethsemane. God with torn, bleeding back in the judgment hall. God crushed beneath a heavy cross with His face in the dirt on a mountainside. Heaven knew it! Hell knew it! Earth will find it out! He whose dying lips gasped, "It is finished" atop dark Calvary was the incarnate God, dying that men might live!

Some hold that Christ's greatest value is to be found in His teachings. "He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes," said His countrymen. Certainly the teachings of Jesus eclipse those of all other teachers of time. His code of ethics is flawless. His philosophy of love is unexcelled. If the teachings of Jesus were owned and practiced by all the world, they would effect the cessation of war and the inauguration of universal peace. Yet Christ did not come primarily to teach.

Others insist that Christ left His greatest legacy in the stellar example of His life and death. Certainly the pattern of Jesus' life and death provides a high-water mark in humanity that has never been equalled. All ages must look to Him as the solitary One who lived an exemplary life and died an irreproachable death. Yet these facts remain minor in the face of His supreme mission.

There are those who feel that Christ is best remembered for His noble and unselfish works. Who will minimize charitable deeds and a philanthropic spirit? Who will dare to slight the healing miracles? We stand in awe when reminded of the broken bodies He restored, the lepers He cured, the maimed and withered He made whole. But the miracles and teachings and noble deeds of Jesus were only incidental to the main purpose of His advent to earth.

He came to die!

John the Baptist was preaching on the banks of the Jordan. This "greatest prophet born of woman" did not lack for crowds. Interest never waned when the mighty preacher of repentance unleashed his vitriolic attack on sin. But it was not so on this occasion. The milling throng looked past him. Every eye was riveted to one spot. John stopped in his preaching and turned to see who had attracted the attention of his disciples. It was then his eyes beheld Him, and he stood for a moment watching Jesus make His approach through the wilderness. He marked the regal lines of His body, firm with courage and character. He saw the rare beauty of His visage. He noticed the lines of concern and the haunting trace of loneliness. He knew who He was! And from that moment something from deep within kept repeating, "He must increase, but I must decrease"!

John turned back to the people. He grasped for an introduction. He might have called Him "The Christ." That's who He was. He might have cried, "Receive your Messiah." Old Testament prophecies were finding their fulfillment here. He might have borrowed the language of Isaiah, and in a celestial tongue have acclaimed Him the "Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." He would not have spoken amiss. All these titles referred to Jesus.

But when the thundering preacher spoke, none of these was heard. His introduction was mixed with blood and freighted with pain. It shadowed a cruel cross upon a hill and the blotting out of the sun in the heavens. It spoke of infinite loneliness, of untold agony. We who live on this side of Calvary understand more perfectly the deep significance of John's words than did those who stood close that day, yet the fact remains and endures. John the Baptist's introduction was revealing and conclusive. "Behold the lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world"!

Jesus was born beneath the shadow of the cross. He lived for the cross. Every step He took was toward the cross. Every sermon He preached and every miracle He wrought looked to the cross. One day, staggering up Golgotha, He felt His body pressed to the ground beneath the cross and knew His supreme purpose was nearing fulfillment. Oh, day of darkest gloom, when the sound of hammer-on-nail rang through the valley and across Jerusalem, and the bleeding body of our Lord was lifted up to die upon the cross! "For this cause came I unto this hour," He said, "to pour out my life a ransom for many"!

The Bible states that man is a sinful creature. He is corrupt in character and in conduct. The evidence against him is accumulative and final. Like a vile serpent, man's sins have left a horrid trail from Eden's garden until now. Sin left its mark in the all-consuming flood. Its evidence was found in the charred ruins of those proud Cities of the Plains. Currently, its tracks may be discovered nationally and internationally in ceaseless wars, broken moral laws, and unmitigated crime. The whole record supports Solomon in his plain statement, "There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not!" Again, David queried, "If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?" Paul writes, "There is none righteous, no, not one: . . . for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Those who deny the fact of sin meet with God's irrevocable reply, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Sin is everywhere. Observation adds testimony to revelation. It is a fact of human experience. Man with dulled mind and seared conscience must ever listen to the insistent voice of God's Holy Spirit who has come into the world to "convince of sin"!

Let us set the stage more completely. Two great morals receive the spotlight in Scripture. One is sin; the other is holiness. As surely as the Bible declares man's sinfulness, even so vehemently does it set forth the fact of a holy God. The word means "separated." It implies God's absolute isolation from all forms of evil and sin. God is holy! As a holy God, He must delight only in purity and sanctity. Nothing sinful can make its approach., He can have no company with sin or with the sinner in his sins. As a matter of fact, the holiness of God separates the sinner from His presence. "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear."

Hear is Isaiah's declaration of fatal estrangement. Two direct opposites are at work. Sinful man! Holy God! And herein lies the need of atonement. The substitutionary death of Jesus Christ at Calvary had its deepest demand in the combined facts of the sinfulness of man and the holiness of God!

The climaxing truth of all Scripture is the love of God. God is holy; but God is love. God's hatred for sin is only matched by His love for the sinner. I have tried to reason which of these attributes excels the other in God's great Person. I must conclude that the two stand together in their demands. True, the holiness of God created a great gulf between the creature and his Creator; But the love of God bridged the chasm. What man could not do for himself, God did for him. He formed an infinite system of redemption whereby He might lift the fallen creature with just, yet justifying, hands and grant him liberty and life. "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God"!

The system of redemption which Heaven devised has not met with the wholehearted approval of earth. From the beginning of time some have tried to come in by other doors and have found those doors locked and barred. Man wants to effect his own salvation through culture, morality, achievement. In short, he wantsd to merit it. But God's plan demanded an infinite ransom that salvation might be offered by grace through faith! Upon the cross Jesus paid sin's full price, affording grace so that man is saved by unmerited favor or not at all. Even the Law was but a schoolmaster leading to Christ. Salvation is in Him, not ourselves. Dispensationally, the Old Testament and the New met together at Calvary! "It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul," said the Old. "Without shedding of blood is no remission." reads the New, False prophets vie with one another to lure men to disaster on the shoals of error, but let God be true and every man a liar. The claims of God's holiness were not satisfied until Christ died upon the cross. What the blood of bulls and of goats could not do, He did. He took our sins away and buried them forever beneath His own blood. I care not what men may say - God has established it! "The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin"!

Oh, the cup, the torturous cup of Gethsemane!

A sinner spewed out blasphemy; it settled in the cup. A rascal plucked the sweet flower of virtue from a woman's breast and watched it wither in the hot blast of his lust; it stirred in the cup. A loving mother was strangled by a drunken son; murder made its way to the cup. A degenerate snatched away a wee babe and dashed it upon the rocks; depravity found its place in the cup. Blackest deeds of nameless shame spawned in the pit of Hell, all in the cup! Every breach of every law, every stain of every sin, all the smear of corruption and stench of debauch now mingled in the odious contents of the cup.

It is midnight, and the city has retired. But there is One whose eyes shall close in death before they close in sleep. A solitary figure in a garden of weird shadows, He kneels a stone's throw from those who are to keep watch. His lips move in prayer. He prays earnestly. He prays with agony. In such travail of soul does He pray that the chill of the night cannot absorb the sweat upon His brow. A disciple, aroused from sleep, observes. Afterward it was written, "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." His brow gleams crimson in the starlight that filters through the branches of the olives. A crimson flow trickles through His beard and splashes upon His vesture. And what is the prayer that throws the Son of God upon His face in such agony of soul? Listen to it: "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt"!

It seems almost I hear Him praying, "Father, I have never sinned. I have never tasted of forbidden fruit. I have kept my record clean and pure. I am one with Eternity and Thee. I stood upon the mountain of infinity and looked down through the dark valley of space and said, 'Let there be light!' Creation is the work of My fingers. I made the universe. I reached out with the torch of My Omnipotence and set the sun ablaze, and it has never gone out. I made this earth. I piled up all its mountains and carved out every valley. I put the seas in their places, and sent the rivers hunting for them. I am Holy as Thou art Holy!

"And now must I, who have never done wrong, drink this cup, polluted and vile?

"Must I, who am sinless, become sin?"

The tears of white-winged seraphs must have descended like rain over Judea when God's reply was given. "It is the only way to be Just and the Justifier of them who believe! You must drink it! Not part, but all of it."

Drink that awful cup, Lord Jesus! Drink it for poor perishing souls! Drink it that sinners might have a Saviour! Drink it that whosoever will may drink of the Fountain of Eternal Life!

His Gethsemane prayer was not the prayer of a coward. Jesus fearful? Jesus afraid? No! a thousand times no! He was a Man among men. His bravery and courage have never been equaled. But when you realize the significance of the cup and analyze its contents; and when you learn of His perfect sinlessness and holiness, then shall you know why He thus prayed. 'Take this cup away'! Oh, the enormity of this occasion as the Christ reaches out to stay the hand of one who would choose a different way! 'Put up the sword, Peter; the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?' Let not the mystery of His kenosis keep you from the truth. He had come to learn the Father's will, and had found it revealed! Go, you rebel to grace, learn the meaning of those glorious words, "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who know no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." The rebel is at hand. With sticks and staves they come, but not before He drank the cup! I see His head go back, the cup is to His lips and the contents slip away.

Long years before, a prophet's pen had written.

"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way;

and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all . . . . "

O eternal hills, fall upon these ingrates! O oceans that roll, drown within your depths these transgressors! They have your God in the judgment hall, and the puny hands of men smite His cheek. They beat Him about the head with reeds. They blindfold Him and shoot out the lip saying, "Prophesy who it was that smote thee'! Their spittle hangs in His beard and clings to His garment. They plait a crown for Him, but not of gold., A wreath of long thorns is held above His head and brought down into His temples until His whole head is gory with blood. They strip Him naked and bind Him to be scourged. The scream of the lash splits the air as stripe after stripe is laid upon His quivering back. They drape Him with a purple robe of shame and place a wilted reed in His hand and mock Him. "Hail, King of the Jews!" With curled lip they encircled Him like skinny-faced jackals with razor teeth, seeking to prolong the suffering of their prey. His last friend has fled and forsaken Him. Was it not foretold in the prophet"s book?

"He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:

and we hid as it were our faces from him . . . He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,

yet he opened not his mouth . . . . "

O marvelous silence! O holy calm! Scornful questions die unanswered! Of what avail to add to the already perfect testimony? Had not the prophet the answer to all men's questions of every age?

"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the

chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed . . . "

Yet others spoke. A woman's muffled warning was heard clearly, "Have thou nothing to do with this just man!" A voice cried out from the judge's bench, "Why, what evil hath he done?" Later a centurion bowed his head at the foot of a cross and exclaimed, "Truly this was the Son of God"! It was all in the book of the prophet:

"It pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his

soul an offering for sin, . . . he shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied."

"They crucified Him!"

Human execution is not a pretty sight. How gruesome to watch a hooded figure drop through a scaffold; to see the hurtling body; to hear the snap of the rope and observe the struggling form grow limp in death. It is just as horrible to see a victim stiffen and burn beneath the tremendous voltage of an electric chair. Spectators at lethal gas chambers have come away with the sickening memory of spasmodic gasping for air; the widened nostrils; the taut tendons of the neck; the bulging eyes. But no hangman's rope or electric chair or gas chamber can deal a death as terrible as death by crucifixion.

The cross is more than a trinket. No instrument of execution ever dealt more terror to the hearts of those condemned. Its purpose was human destruction. Don't wear a cross unless its power has changed your life and brought you to God. Better to wear a small gallows around your neck, ladies; or a miniature electric chair from your watch chain, men. These symbols represent more merciful forms of death. Have pity! Don't wear a cross until you have found, at Calvary, a Saviour for your guilty soul.

The cross of itself is not beautiful. It is splintered with spikes! It is smeared with dried human blood. It is the emblem of the most excruciating torment ever dealt to man. From its merciless crosspiece ascended the weeping and wailing of culprits in dying agonies. Upon its cruel structures lost souls were engulfed in a flaming Hell before the time.

Come, tread softly, mortal! The Prince of Glory dies upon the cross!

See the aching fingers clenched over torn flesh and cold spikes. See the eyelids quiver, the features twist and distort in gnawing pain. Infinite in nature, His sufferings were never known among the sons of men. The haggard face is drawn and white, giving greater contrast to the crimson still oozing from jagged gashes in head and body. Was ever blood so rich a red? Strength ebbs; anguish increases. The once magnificent body becomes a raging inferno. Fever mounts to staggering proportions. Exhausted by unendurable tortures, He lifts His bruised and battered face in one last plea:

"I thirst!"

He begs for water!

O Judaean skies, have you not one cloud to send or one shower to dispatch to that wretched hill where moans your Maker for water? O sweet fountains of Hermon, fresh streams and limpid pools of Lebanon, can you not spare one single drop from all your vast reservoirs to cool the parched tongue and fevered lips of your God? "I thirst!" O solemn tragedy, that that cry should have to be hushed by the dry, cracked lips of death!

How Isaiah must have felt the inadequacy of human vocabulary when he spanned seven hundred years with prophetic glass and published his morbid findings. "His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men." No beautiful pictures for me. There is no physical enhancement here. "There is no beauty that we should desire him." Tongue cannot tell, throat cannot sing, hand cannot paint the tragedy that was enacted on that hill. Gather the wail of icy winds that howl through the frozen north; extract the heart-despair of a mother watching wild beasts tear at the throat of her babe; capture all the hopeless groans and helpless shrieks of the damned in the land of shadows and unending doom; and with all this at your command, you will still be unable to paint the picture that is Calvary!

I make one observation. Earth's sun has looked down through the ages on countless tragedies. Wars have raged beneath it. Bodies have lain in pools of blood in its scorching rays. Famine and pestilence have alike been disclosed to it. Swollen, bloated bodies of sailors drowned at sea have been revealed to it. Acts of infamy, pollution and filth have never made it to blush. Murder and rape and pillage have never received its frown. Oh, the lewdness and lawlessness the sun has gazed upon since first it was placed in space by the creative hand of God! Yet it never ceased looking. Its surveillance was uninterrupted. It kept right on gazing as though everything were in order.

But on the day of the great atonement when, weighted with the sins of all the world, the Lamb of God was nailed to the cross; when suffering was infinite and God in Heaven turned His back upon His sinless Son, now become sin; when the broken Messiah raised His bleeding, lacerated face to the heavens and cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" - I tell you when the sun beheld that sight, though it was high noon, it shuddered and trembled - it blushed and frowned - it drew the curtain of darkness across its face and drenched earth in the blackest night it has ever known! Here was a scene which the sun itself could not endure!

It was History's Horror Picture!

How much He suffered, I cannot tell. A blanket of total darkness shrouded all mankind, so earth does not know. God, estranged from sin, could not look upon the Sin-bearer, so Heaven does not know. Only Christ knew the combined pain of Hell's awful infinity that surged through His mighty breast that day on which a cross of shame became the emblem of earth's greatest glory!

But this I know, He drank the cup! He walked the burning corridors of the damned! He plucked the sting from Death, and robbed the grave of its victory! With sainted dead in grand procession, He led captivity captive and climbed the glittering stairway of the stars. At last, with the golden pavements of the Capitol City beneath His riven feet, He mounted to His throne, picked up His everlasting scepter and received once more His eternal kingdom. There behold Him, the King of kings! Adored of God! Blessed of angels! Worshipped of saints! He is man's only Saviour!

The keys of death and Hell are at His side.

The gift of eternal life is in His hand!