Jesus' Execution

Yesterday we started looking at the illegal trials of Jesus…Annas, Caiaphas, but we today we pick up with Pilate. They can’t sentence Jesus to death, but Pilate can. Pilate is the Roman in charge and he is on a short leash—Caesar has chastised him for not being able to keep the Jews in line and you can tell three things about Pilate:

(1) He believes Jesus is innocent (38, 19:4 and 6) and

(2) you can tell he wants nothing to do with Jesus—he was warned by his wife to leave him alone and he tries to do it over and over again—he sends Him to Herod, He gives the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, and finally in verse 38 he says, “I find no fault in him.”

The (3) final thing you see is he is a coward. He found no fault, but the Jews hold Caesar over him and he delivers Jesus, an innocent man, over to be crucified to save his job and his own neck. Jewish law was violated and Roman law was manipulated and Jesus was led away just like Isaiah said he would be—“By oppression and judgment he was taken away.”

The next line leads us to the next point—, remember this week we’ve looked at the spiritual and physical agony of Jesus, we’ve looked at the response of Jesus, but here we see the execution of Jesus.

“And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?”

Not one person bothered to stop and ask why Jesus was being crucified. Not when He lived out Isaiah 53, not when He quoted Psalm 22 which described the scene going on around Him—they completely disregarded Him and refused to ask—“Could this be the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53?” They simply watched, called out for His crucifixion, asked for His blood to be on their heads, and mocked Him as he was “cut off out of the land of the living.”

The word “cut off” has an unbroken record of violence in the Bible—literally it speaks of being hacked and killed. No one noticed, but there is a reason for that. You and I will never see the value of the Cross until we first see our own sin. The moment that, by God’s grace, we see our sin and know that we need a Redeemer is the moment we will treasure the Cross above all other things—that is the moment Jesus will become more precious than silver, more costly than gold, and more beautiful than diamonds and nothing, absolutely nothing, will compare with Him.

The final verse speaks of (e) the burial of Jesus. “And they made his grave with the wicked.” It is amazing to see the detail of prophecy—he was assigned a grave with the wicked—Rome would crucify a man and then as a final act of humiliation they would throw the body into a common grave. There was a common grave with Jesus and the two thieves’ name on it, but Isaiah said, “and with a rich man in his death.” What do we find in the Gospels? A rich man by the name of Joseph of Arimathea—up to that time a secret disciple—went to Pilate and asked for His body and placed him in the grave he had dug for himself.

Pilate, no doubt, agreed as a slap in the face of the Jews, but what Pilate didn’t understand was that every single event of Jesus death, burial, and eventual resurrection was predetermined by God and foretold by Isaiah and many others in the pages of the OT. On the Cross, as horrible as it was, God fulfilled His Word. Tomorrow we will continue to see what He did there on the Cross as He suffered and died.