The Sign of His Suffering

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If you’ve not been with us the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about the signs of His coming, talking about Jesus Christ, and not the signs of His second coming. And we do believe that Jesus will come again one day, as He said, and as the other writers of the New Testament said. But we’re talking about Jesus’ first coming.

And how can we know with certainty that Jesus Christ is the one we ought to place our faith in? I’ve told you many times that a lot of people have a lot of faith in a lot of things, but it’s worthless faith. Because you can believe something unto death, but you put your faith in the wrong object, and it’s worthless.

You put your faith in an idol or a non-existent God or in yourself or things that will fail, and your faith is worthless even if you believe it so strongly you’re willing to die for it. Faith is only as valuable as its object. And I don’t mean object in the sense that God is an object.

I mean as opposed to subject object. He’s what we place our faith in. How do we know that Jesus Christ is worth putting our faith in?

A lot of people have claimed to be the Messiah, the promised one of God over the years. There’s a man that ran for president several times. Not a famous man, but he has a website up and everything, and it’s kind of crazy.

He claims to be Jesus reincarnated, and he’s running for president of the United States. Crazy stuff, and there are actually people who voted for him. People claim to be the Messiah all the time.

How do we know that Jesus Christ is the one and only one who is worth putting our faith in? was because there are signs throughout the entire Old Testament. From Genesis on to Malachi, there are pictures of Jesus Christ. There are pictures of what He came to do.

And in the middle of those pictures, we can see things like the bronze serpent that Moses had to raise up among the people when they were bitten by snakes. And God told him, make this bronze serpent and raise it up on a pole, and whoever looks on it will be healed. And Jesus even compared Himself to that and said that was a picture of Himself, that he would be crucified, raised up from the earth.

There are pictures like that. But there are also outright prophecies where men of God, moved by the Holy Spirit, said this is what the Messiah will be. This is what he will do.

This is how he will come. And we’ve talked in the last several weeks about some of these he could have fulfilled by himself even if he wasn’t the Messiah. Some of these he didn’t get to pick, like where he was born, who he was born to.

And some of these were prophecies about what his enemies would do and things that he wouldn’t be able to force them to do if they were trying to prove he wasn’t the Messiah. We talked about some of those last week. This week is another one of those prophecies that he couldn’t fulfill if he wasn’t the Messiah.

When Jesus hung on the cross, if he wasn’t the Messiah, he was just a normal man like you or me, then he was completely powerless over the situation. Could not control what they did to him. Couldn’t control how they did it.

Couldn’t make it line up with the scriptures to try to prove that he was the Messiah if he was just a man like you and me. Somebody nailed me up on a cross, I would be completely powerless to do anything about anything else they were doing. But if Jesus Christ was the Messiah, then he could have orchestrated all of this to fit because he was the Messiah.

And the fact is that the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus’ crucifixion, just like everything else we’ve talked about so far up to this point, all the other Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah fit perfectly with Jesus Christ. The prophecies of the crucifixion fit with the crucifixion that Jesus Christ endured. And if he was up there on that cross and was not the Messiah, he couldn’t have controlled it. So it takes a lot, I submit to you, it takes more faith to believe that he’s not the Messiah than to believe that he is based on the evidence and the prophecies that we’ve been looking at the last few weeks.

Psalm chapter 22, we’re going to start in verse, we’ll start in verse 14. I really want to look at verses 16 through 19. We’ll start back in 14.

This whole chapter is about suffering. As a matter of fact, if you look back at verse 1 of chapter 22, it says, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? If you’re familiar with the crucifixion story at all, those ought to be very familiar words.

That’s one of the things Jesus cries out on the cross. But in verse 14, it says, I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

My strength is dried up like a pot sherd, and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws. And thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me about, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me.

They pierced my hands and my feet. I may tell all my bones. They look and stare upon me.

They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture. Be not thou, but be not thou far from me, O Lord. O my strength, haste thee to help me.

And the heading says this is a psalm of David. Most of the psalms were written by David. A few were written by other people.

But if this was written by David, it doesn’t seem to be talking about David. I know David went through some hard times in his life. David went through wars, not only to become king, he struggled running from Saul because Saul thought Saul was crazy after a while, and Saul thought David was out to get him, and so Saul went out to get David, and David was on the run for a long time.

Saul would try to battle him, and he didn’t want to hurt Saul because Saul was God’s anointed, and so he had hardships there. Then he had to fight to become king, and he became king over Judah. And for seven years, I believe, he was king over Judah.

And one of Saul’s sons was the usurper of the throne for the northern tribes, and he battled them for several years. And after about seven years, he became king of all Israel. And he ruled for a while, and he fought with different tribes and different groups of people around them.

And at some point, he fell into sin, and God punished him by allowing disruption and discord in his family. One of his sons rebelled against him and David was on the run again and fought against him. David’s life, David was a man after God’s own heart, God even said.

But David sinned at times in his life and sinned in some big ways that it messed up his whole family. And David’s life was just a life of continuous warfare and continuous struggle. And so he writes about suffering and there are some ways in here that I believe this applies to David’s life.

But if you look at the passage we’ve looked at just right here, it really doesn’t look like it’s talking about David. And even in the Old Testament, even the rabbis, I believe, recognized this as pointing to something that would come later. And as we read through it, it really parallels the story of the crucifixion.

So much so that people have recognized for thousands of years now that when David wrote this, it was actually God, through David, foretelling the crucifixion. Because there are several other places where David foretells the coming of Christ. Even though David wasn’t strictly a prophet, God used him to write these words that would point to the coming Messiah. And he says in verse 14, I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart is like wax, melted in the midst of my bowels. This and some other things point to the idea of a crucifixion. Point to the idea of the suffering that Jesus went through.

And that’s what I want to talk to you about this morning, is the sign of his suffering. Last week we talked about the sign of his humiliation. The fact that contrary to what some people think today, some people that miss Jesus as the Messiah, Jews and non-Jews who say, yes, there was a Messiah that was predicted here, and it wasn’t Jesus, and so we’re still looking.

They missed it because they said he’s come to be an earthly triumphant king, and yes, he was, but there were some other things that they missed in there. They said the Messiah wouldn’t have been somebody that was beaten down and crucified and cut off, but that’s exactly what the Bible points to. We talked about the sign of his suffering, the fact that he would be beaten, the fact that his beard would be ripped out, all of these things that he suffered through.

Today I want to talk about his suffering of the actual crucifixion. And next week we’re going to talk about a little more in depth about what Isaiah says the crucifixion was for. But here it talks about the crucifixion and the suffering that he went through.

And it points to Jesus Christ in what I think is an unmistakable way. And we’ve talked about how early these prophecies were written, because some people will say these prophecies were made up by Christians after the fact because they just fit too well. They just look so much like Jesus.

Well, that ought to tell you something. But they just fit too well. The Christians had to have made them up afterwards.

When some of these from the Old Testament we know predate Christ by at least 200 to 300 years because the Old Testament was translated into Greek 200 or 300 years before Christ, and it’s in those two. The book of Psalms was written about 1,000 years before Christ. Of all of the passages we’ve talked about so far, this is the one that was written the longest before His coming. So even a thousand years beforehand, we see God beginning to reveal the fact that there would be a Messiah come and what would happen.

And it tells, I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax and melted in the midst of my bowels. Skip forward to verse 17, I may tell all my bones, they look and stare upon me.

And he says in verse 16, they pierced my hands and feet. Here he’s talked about his bones being stretched out of joint. And when he says, I may count my bones, that indicates that the bones were pulled so far.

Whoever David’s writing about, this Messiah that David’s writing about, his bones would be pulled out of joint and would be pulled apart so far that you could see the sockets of them and would be able to count the individual bones. I can’t count the individual. Well, I could, but I can’t really feel exactly where they meet and see exactly where the bones meet in my arm, especially after I got married and married to a good cook and I put on a little more weight than I used to have. It’s a little harder to find the joint.

And in my hands, it’s harder to tell where all the individual bones are and the feet. I know they’re there, but it’s hard to feel exactly where they meet up. But his bones were pulled out of joint, and so far that they were separated and he could count them, could tell where one ended and the other began.

It talks about His hands and feet being pierced, this Messiah. Folks, that’s a perfect picture of crucifixion. Because they didn’t just nail Him to the cross.

When Jesus died, they didn’t just nail Him to the cross. They nailed Him with arms outstretched so far that it pulled bones out of joint. That’s how they crucified you.

You didn’t die from crucifixion from the bleeding. You died from suffocation. Do you know that?

It normally took several days for somebody to die on the cross when they would hang Him there because they would hang Him by the nails. everything disjointed, and they would have to pull up for every breath and let themselves back down. Because when you’re hung with your arms back, and I’m not a, I’m not a, what do they call people who study anatomy?

Anatomist, is that the word? I’m not one of those, but I’ve had enough people who are talk about it and tell me that when you’re hung with your arms behind you in a certain way and at a certain angle and they’re disjointed and pulled behind you, you can’t really get a deep breath. I’m getting a little out of breath just trying to show you, but you can’t get a deep breath, When all these bones are out of joint, and it was made to be excruciating.

That’s where the word excruciating comes from, from the Latin. Ex meaning out of, and crux meaning cross, out of the cross. Excruciating describes an agony greater than anything we can imagine.

When all those bones are pulled out of joint, and he was nailed to the cross and had to struggle and pull himself up for every breath and let himself back down while being nailed there by the hands and feet. And so the idea that the bones would be out of joint and the hands and feet would be pierced, A thousand years ahead of time, they’re talking about a method of execution that was not even around in David’s day. They didn’t crucify people in David’s day.

Say, well, it’d be so easy for David to just make stuff up. Not if that was something unknown to them. They didn’t really begin crucifying people until later with the Persians and the Romans really got it going.

David’s writing about something he can’t even imagine because God is revealing it to him that it was going to happen. The piercing of the hands and feet and the disjointed bones and everything that Jesus would go through. And he tells us, my heart is like wax and is melted in the midst of my bowels.

The Bible talks about the blood and the water and the blood that came out when they stabbed him with the spear. I read the book, is it the case for, I believe it’s the case for Easter, the case for the resurrection by Lee Strobel. It talks about the idea of Jesus being crucified and rising again from the dead and the science behind the water and the blood coming out.

And they said that spear would have gone in and would have just basically ruptured, exploded the heart. Well, then the heart, the blood, and everything just looks like it’s melting. Again, David’s writing about things he had no idea about.

My strength is dried up like a pot shirt, and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws. The Bible talks about Jesus being thirsty because he hung on the cross for so many hours. I think we’ve all been there.

You work outside on a hot summer day, and you get busy working and forget to go in and drink water, and you get what we call cotton mouth. I don’t know what you call it here, but your mouth just gets all dry, and your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and to the side, and you’re just desperate for a drink of water. Well, the Bible, David writes a thousand years ahead of time that the Messiah’s tongue would cleave to his jaws.

And Jesus seems like such a little detail in the crucifixion story, but it’s important because it points to him being the Messiah. It talks about being thirsty. Now it’s brought me into the dust of death, for the dogs have compassed me.

The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me. Well, there are no dogs in the crucifixion story. Dogs was a euphemism in that day for wicked men.

Kind of like we would call somebody today that was preaching false doctrine. We’d call him a wolf in sheep’s clothing. A wolf, a dog, it’s still a ravenous beast. And these were wicked men who surrounded him.

Remember talking the last few weeks about the trial? These men that had to lie just to even get something done about Jesus. They hated him so much and couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing and so they had to bring in people to lie so they could crucify somebody because he disagreed with them.

Folks, that’s a pretty wretched individual. That’s a dog of a human being. And these wicked people, it says, compassed him about. They were in a circle around him, even on the cross.

They were all around him. And the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me, and they’ve pierced my hands and feet. We know what that means.

They’ve pierced his hands and feet. I may tell all my bones they look and stare upon me. They part my garments upon them and cast lots upon my vesture.

But be not thou far from me, O Lord, my strength. Haste thee to help me. So they had to complete the humiliation.

They took his clothes and they gambled. They cast lots for him to see who would get his clothes. And the Messiah would call out to God, call out to the Father for his help, for his strength.

Now, this would just be an interesting little footnote in Old Testament history if it wasn’t for the New Testament, if it wasn’t for the fact that this was fulfilled. And we can turn over to Matthew 27, and I would ask you to do so. Turn over to Matthew 27, and we can see how this is fulfilled.

Matthew 27, verse 33. And when they were coming to a place called Golgotha, that is to say a place of a skull, they gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall. And when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink.

And they crucified him and parted his garments, casting lots that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet. They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots. And sitting down, they watched him there.

So we see he’s hung on the cross. It mentions him being on the cross. And we know from history, as I’ve just described to you, what that entails with the pulling of bones out of joint and the piercing of the hands and feet.

He’s on the cross here. That’s fulfilled. And it says in other gospel accounts, Jesus even cried out from the cross, I thirst. So their answer was to give him this vinegar to drink mixed with gall.

And it says when he had tasted it, he would not drink it. Their answer to his thirst was to give him this vinegar to drink mixed with, I don’t know if you’d call it a sedative or I’m trying to remember the word for it, an analgesic, a painkiller basically. They wanted to keep, the Romans were masters at what they did.

They wanted to keep him from going into shock because they didn’t want him to bleed out and die. They enjoyed the torture. And so they gave him this not as mercy, but to keep him alive, keep him around longer to endure the crucifixion.

And when he had tasted the vinegar mixed with gall, he wouldn’t drink it. And the reason that he wouldn’t drink it, I believe, is because God did not force him to be there. The Father did not force him to be there.

Jesus went there willingly because he knew he had to endure all of this. He had to endure the wrath of God poured out on sin. He had to go through that and he had to suffer all of this for us.

And he could not suffer these things for us if he didn’t feel it. And so once again, we see proof that Jesus was not held there by anything other than his will to be there. In fact, that he was fulfilling his father’s will for him.

He would not drink. And they crucified him and parted his garments, casting lots that it might be fulfilled that which was spoken by the prophet. And we read that they took his garments and they divided them among themselves, gambling and casting lots to see who got what part.

And sitting down, they watched him there. The wicked men compassed him about. They enclosed him.

Sitting down, they watched him there. And set up over his head the accusation written, This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand and another on the left.

And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, and saying, Thou that destroyest the temple and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. These people were still believing a lie.

At his trial, they couldn’t find any evidence that he had done anything wrong, and so he was accused of saying he would tear down the temple and in three days rebuild it. That’s not what he said, is it? He said, if you destroy this temple, I will in three days raise it up again.

Talking about his body, and yet they twisted his words and misinterpreted his words and just outright lied and said that he was claiming he would tear down God’s temple and raise it up again in three days. And they screamed, blasphemy! and that was all they needed to hear.

Their kangaroo court was over and they sent him out to be crucified. And even here, people are still believing the lie that he had said he was going to tear down God’s temple and they’re mocking him about it, saying, if you can do that, save yourself. If you’re the son of God, come down from the cross.

Likewise, also the chief priests mocking him with the scribes and elders said, he saved others, he himself, he cannot save. If he be the king of Israel, let him now come down from the cross and we will believe him. He trusted in God, let him deliver him now, if he will have him.

For he said, I am the Son of God. The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth. So the priests are saying, oh, he saved other people, but he can’t save himself.

They’re saying, oh, if he would just come down from the cross and prove that he is who he said he was, then we’d believe. And the fact is, there wasn’t a thing that was going to make these people believe. These priests, these religious leaders, they had seen every miracle that Jesus had done.

They had heard all the teaching that Jesus had done and the fact that it was in line with the Old Testament. It wasn’t their interpretation of God’s Word, but it was in line with God’s Word. They’d heard Him teach, they’d saw Him work miracles, and they still hadn’t believed Him coming down off the cross.

They would have just screamed, I believe that He was a worker of Satan. They wouldn’t have believed. They’re still lying up until the very end.

And Jesus is suffering through all of this, not only the physical agony, but just listening to the mockery that was put forward to Him. And He’s enduring all of it, and He’s doing it willingly. and it’s bad enough that he got attitude from these religious leaders, this brood of vipers that he and John the Baptist had called out on numerous occasions, but he’s getting attitude from the two thieves being crucified on either side of him.

That would have made me mad. I’m glad God did not send me to be the Savior of the world because I would have come down off the cross and that would have been the end of it, taking everybody out. But Jesus went and willingly suffered all these things.

It says, Now was the sixth hour. There was darkness all over the land unto the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, which is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias. And straightaway one of them ran and took a sponge and filled it with vinegar and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. And the rest said, Let us see whether Elias will come and save him.

So they’re still mocking him when he’s called out for God. Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent, and the graves were open, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. Now when the centurion and they that were with him watching Jesus saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

And many women were there beholding afar off, which followed Jesus from Galilee ministering unto him, among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children. So there we have Matthew’s account of the crucifixion, and it matches up amazingly well with David’s account of what was going to happen from a thousand years earlier. You see, David says that, David writes of one whose bones would be, he doesn’t say they’d be broken, but he says they would be pulled out of joint, so much so that you could count them.

To be crucified, his bones were pulled out of joint. He talks of somebody whose hands and feet would be pierced. In crucifixion, Jesus’ hands and feet were pierced.

He talks about his heart being like wax, melting in his body. And folks, in the other gospel accounts, when they stabbed him with the spear and the blood and the water came out, it meant that they hit the heart and the sack of fluid around the heart. And all of that just exploded, melted like wax.

It says that his strength would be dried up like a pot sherd. Folks, after all those hours on the cross, he would have been exhausted, had no strength left. My tongue cleaveth unto my jaws.

He thirsted there on the cross. The dogs have compassed me, and the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me. They pierced my hands and feet.

These wicked men were around him from the time they arrested him in the garden until the time that he finally gave up the ghost, as the Bible says. He was surrounded by wicked men who hated him, who wanted to see him tortured and see him dead. I may tell all my bones they look and stare upon me.

They part my garments among them and cast lots upon my vesture. They divided up his clothing. Then it says, But be not thou far from me, O Lord, or my strength haste thee to help me.

He would call out to God, which he did. Called out to God when he felt God far away and called out for God to be his strength. Folks, Psalm 22, a thousand years before Jesus Christ walked the earth.

Psalm 22 paints a perfect picture of the crucifixion. It doesn’t give every detail of the crucifixion. Four gospel accounts don’t even give every detail that we would have seen if we were there that day.

But every detail given in Psalm 22 is matched up somewhere in the gospel accounts because Jesus fulfilled what was written in Psalm 22. We’ll say, couldn’t the disciples have made it up? Couldn’t Jesus have made this happen?

Folks, if Jesus was not the Messiah of God, if He was not the promised Savior that God mentioned a thousand years beforehand, seven hundred years beforehand, five hundred years beforehand, if Jesus Christ was not that person, He could not have made them take Him and crucify Him. He could not have made them kill Him in exactly that way. He couldn’t have made them cast lots for His garments.

He couldn’t make them offer Him the vinegar for His thirst. He couldn’t do any of the things that were prophesied about if He was just an ordinary man. And we look at the passage here in Psalm 22, And we look at the other passages that we’ve talked about in the last several weeks and the next few weeks coming up as we draw close to the end of this series. And folks, I’m going to be honest with you, I’m a pretty skeptical person.

I hear something and I go check it out. I hear it on the radio. Christian can attest to this.

I don’t automatically assume it’s true. I hear something on TV. I don’t automatically assume it’s true.

I go check it out. And I have a pretty high threshold for evidence of believing something’s true, especially if it sounds unbelievable. But there’s no way I’ve been able to figure out.

I’ve looked at the arguments that atheists put up that Jesus wasn’t who he said he was. And by the way, most historians do believe Jesus Christ was a historical figure. And if you believe that as they do, I’ve looked at the evidence.

I don’t see any way that this could have worked out with the crucifixion, with the resurrection, with all of this, unless Jesus Christ was exactly who he claimed to be. He couldn’t have met all of the Old Testament prophecies. He couldn’t have been crucified in exactly the way David said he was going to be crucified when David didn’t know about crucifixion.

He couldn’t have risen again from the dead. He couldn’t have done all of the things he said he would do that God said he would do if he was not the Messiah, the promised one of God, sent to be our Redeemer. The reason I tell you I’m a skeptical person is because I want you to know I don’t automatically believe everything I hear and see.

But I’m to the point now where if it says it in the Bible, I believe it. Because everything I’ve read in there checks out. Everything.

The list of contradictions that people put out and say, oh, this is a contradiction here because it says something in one place and says something in another. Just a basic looking it up. in the original languages or what they meant in the idioms of the day, in the expressions of the day.

Folks, those things just vanished. There are no contradictions in the Bible. The Bible’s true from cover to cover and it points to a perfect Savior.

It’s not just a perfect book, it points to a perfect Savior. It points to this promised Messiah of God who fulfilled everything that we’ve talked about today and everything we’ve talked about in the past several weeks. Every place in the Old Testament where David or Isaiah or Zechariah or Micah or Malachi or any of them Talk about the Messiah coming.

It was fulfilled perfectly in Jesus Christ. He came to be a triumphant king and will be one day. That’s what the Jews expected then. That’s what they still expect today, that he wouldn’t have gone through all of this if he came to be the Messiah because he came to be a triumphant king.

And he will be. The Bible tells us he will be one day. But there are all these passages about the Messiah that the world seemed to have missed 2,000 years ago, that the people of Jerusalem seemed to have missed 2,000 years ago.

all of these passages that were written thousands and hundreds of years before about the suffering. Folks, it’s important not just that he came and taught things and died on the cross, but it’s important the way he did it. All of the little details in the story that may sound inconsequential are important because they point to the fact that Jesus Christ was not just a man who came and got himself killed for being a political and religious revolutionary.

He was the Messiah of God. He was the promised one. And his suffering, folks, points to the fact that he’s the chosen one that God had told about all this time, that would come to save Israel and the rest of the world from their sins.

I’ve already talked to you about some of the points here today that I’ve got written down, these signs of His suffering, the things about His suffering that point to Him being the Messiah. I don’t want to belabor them very much, but some of these signs of His suffering, of Him being the Messiah, the Messiah would be surrounded by wicked men, as it says in Psalm 22, 16, and He was. Read any of the gospel accounts.

He was surrounded by wicked men 

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