Luke 18:31 Commentary and Bible Study

The Lord Jesus Christ gathered to him the twelve and said to them, ‘Behold we go up to Jerusalem.’ He is now engaged on his final journey to Jerusalem, there to the feast of the passover, and then he will allow himself to be arrested, to be taken, and he will be crucified, and he will be offered up to bear the punishment of the sins of all those who will be forgiven in the history of the world. But here he begins this journey and he tells the disciples, ‘Behold we go up to Jerusalem and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man shall be accomplished.’ All the things that happened to him were prophesied. We remember for instance the prophecy of Isaiah in chapter 53, how he would suffer and die in indescribable agony and bear away sins. Those prophecies are the ones that he is referring to.And he goes into detail in the verse 32, ‘For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: ³³ And they shall scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise again’. and all those things took place. ‘And they understood none of these things: and this saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.’ At this point even the disciples of the Lord who loved him and believed in him and knew he was truly from God, the Christ the Son of God; even they had not grasped – probably because of their affection for him – and could not take in that he was going to suffer and die. They could not accept the way in which the Messiah would deal with the sins of the world would be by taking the punishment himself. That is how God forgives, that is the way of salvation, that's what the Bible is all about from cover to cover, prophesied in the Old Testament, described in the Bible. God knew that he would leave heaven and come to earth in the person of the second person of the Trinity, the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of the Father. He knew that he would suffer and die upon a cross, and God the Father would put upon Jesus Christ all the guilt of all those who would be forgiven and punish him instead of them. That is how we have to be forgiven, there is no other way. God cannot just forget about our sins, he cannot just pretend they never happened, he cannot say you were forgiven in a word because to God sin is a deep moral offence and it must be dealt with, it must be punished and therefore in order for God to be merciful to us Christ had to come from glory to earth and take that punishment on our behalf. That is the wonderful message of the Bible. The only way God can forgive is to take the punishment himself and Christ came and took upon him a human body and he suffered and died as the God-man, two natures united together in one person, so that he could purchase the right to forgive us.