Jesus willingly swapped his life for ours to give us the opportunity to be freed from the enemy who was holding us hostage to sin.
By Taju Tijani
“An instructive writer has made a mournful list of the honours which the blinded people of Israel awarded to their long-expected King. They gave him a procession of honour, in which Roman legionaries, Jewish priests, men and women, took part. He himself bearing his cross. This is the triumph which the world awards to him who comes to overthrow man’s direst foes. Derisive shouts are his only acclamations and cruel taunts his only paeans of praise.
They presented him with the wine of honour. Instead of a golden cup of generous wine, they offered him the criminal’s stupefying death-draught, which he refused because he would preserve an uninjured taste wherewith to taste of death; and afterwards when he cried, ‘I thirst’, they gave him vinegar mixed with gall, thrust to his mouth upon a sponge. Oh! wretched detestable inhospitality to the King’s Son.
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He was provided with a guard of honour, who showed their esteem of him by gambling over his garments, which they had seized as their booty. Such was the bodyguard of the adored of heaven; a quaternion of brutal gamblers. A throne of honour was found for him upon the bloody tree; no easier place of rest would rebel men yield to their liege Lord. The cross was, in fact, the full expression of the world’s feeling towards him; ‘There,’ they seemed to say, ‘Thou son of God, this is the manner in which God himself should be treated, could we reach him.
The title of honour was nominally ‘King of the Jews’, but that the blinded nation distinctly repudiated, and really called him ‘King of thieves’, by preferring Barabbas, and by placing Jesus in the place of highest shame between two thieves. His glory was thus in all things turned into shame by the sons of men, but it shall yet gladden the eyes of saints and angels, world without end.”
“Jesus willingly swapped his life for ours to give us the opportunity to be freed from the enemy who was holding us hostage to sin. Nothing that happened in this life was ever forced on him, but it was all something Jesus consciously and willingly gave himself over to do. From his incarnation to his last breath on the cross, Jesus came to give life and life abundantly, even as he voluntarily gave himself over to death so that sinners like me and you could be redeemed. Just the thought that God would spare his son to save someone like me makes me want to shout, ‘Hallelujah! What a saviour’. You know the feeling. And so, at this time of year, as we remember that Jesus paid the ultimate sacrifice, let us never forget the message of Easter: that Jesus not only took our place in dying for us, but he rose up triumphantly that you and I may not only have life, but life to the full.”
Happy Easter to all my readers.