Luke 23:33 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

Navigator

Luke 23:33

Comments

Only Luke’s Gospel renders the Greek with the name Calvary, but this has become the Christian church’s preferred name for the place of the crucifixion. Calvary is the Latin translation of the Greek word which the other three Gospels tell us means ‘the place of the skull’. The other Gospels use the name Golgotha, which is an Aramaic word meaning the same.‘There they crucified him.’ It was the place where the leaders had been planning to see him executed for some time. They had planned it, longed for it, and finally they had got their way; they had wanted to see him there, impaled on a cross. Now the time had come for him to voluntarily lay down his life for his people. He permitted himself therefore to be taken by them, deliberately leaving Galilee and coming to Jerusalem for that purpose. But the scribes and Pharisees thought that he was in their power. They believed that it was their scheming that had finally succeeded in trapping him. They saw their opportunity for revenge at last and were determined to satisfy their hatred. But although they planned it, at the same time – and this is much more significant – God planned for it also. The Jewish leaders committed the crime, but God, the Father, and Christ himself, and the Holy Spirit, the three persons of the Godhead: they knew that he must go, and he must suffer and die on Calvary, and he must make an atonement, and stand in the place of sinners, and take in his own body the punishment due to all who would repent in order that they could be saved and forgiven. It was necessary by God's design that he would be executed in a public place, so that a vast number of people could witness it. This is the greatest event of all history: that Christ the Saviour came to suffer and die in our place, to be punished on our behalf, to take our eternal punishment for us. It cannot be done out of the public eye, where it may be doubted that it ever happened. God planned that through Calvary, a vast multitude of people throughout the history of time would be forgiven their sin, and given access to heaven by what Christ achieved on Calvary's cross. The Jewish leaders intended that it would be the end of the road for Christ, but God planned that it would be the beginning of a new era, the last phase of earth's history, the age of grace, the Christian era. He was abandoned. There was no one who could help him. Isaiah speaks prophetically for Christ, ‘I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me’ (Isaiah 63:3). Christ was the only one who could make an atonement for our sin, and he must do this alone. No man could help him. No angel could help him. He must suffer as we should suffer, feeling the intense concentrated pain, but his divinity will enable him to go through with it and to sustain it all. Nobody could possibly help. He was even forsaken by the Father. That's a great mystery, but it had to be. He must go through the experience that we deserve of being abandoned and deserted by God. Crucifixion was designed to be the ultimate humiliation. One moment you may be a great leader, then you are crucified. You are stripped and nailed to a cross or a tree. There you die slowly in torment before everybody's gaze. Your dignity is gone. Your power has been stripped from you. Your future has been taken from you. If you had followers, now they would see you as somebody who had been utterly deposed and debased. Can you understand that? That God the Son should come down willingly out of his great love for you and I to endure all that, the spitting and the shame and the ignominy. And this was only the prelude to what followed. He was then taken and he was forced up the hill to the place called Calvary. And there they cast him onto the ground, and stretched out his hands and his feet upon a cross and drove the nails through each hand and through each foot and hoisted it up and left him there to hang and to bleed in the heat of the sun. They prance around the bottom of the cross and they taunt him and they spit at him and they jibe at him – these so-called chief priests and scribes and Pharisees taunting him, insulting him – and he hangs there bearing the agony of his wounds.

Application

Why did he have to bear the ignominy, the shame of all these insults? Because he was taking our place, and we have insulted him. We have spat upon God, every one of us in our arrogance and our conceit. We have taken these lives and these bodies and we have just given them to ourselves, and there is only one punishment for that, and that is that we should have to suffer in return the full quota of insults and humiliation and ignominy. The Lord Jesus willingly came down out of heaven in order to bear it for us. When they spat upon him, when they insulted him, when they punched him and beat him, it was just a token to us of the amount of shame and pain he had to bear before he had paid for the insults we have given to him and to his Father. When they drove the nails into his hands and feet, and when they lashed his flesh with those leather thongs, that was just an indication to us of the misery and the agony which Christ had to bear in order to write off the consequences of our living and our behaviour.

But there was something even deeper and even worse. He died a violent death, a painful death, but remember, he was the Holy Son of God. He was pure and undefiled, and he had to have heaped upon him the result of our sin. On the cross of Calvary, the wounds, the bruising, the nails, the crown of thorns upon his brow, the heat and the hanging on that cross; that physical suffering was really just a fraction of what happened, because the immeasurably greater part came when God the Father put upon him all the guilt of our sins. How have I lived in this world? I have lived as a selfish sinner. I have lived for my own lusts. I am rotten in heart, deceitful, full of sin. All that had to be put on the Lord Jesus Christ. He had to wear, like a thick garment, the stench and the foulness of our sinfulness in order to bear our punishment for us.

This is the greatest event in all history. Do you doubt that? You say, ‘Surely that is a massive overstatement.’ Not if we understand the cross of Christ and what happened and what God has done and its profound aspects and accomplishments. Then we see it and we grasp it. If we are unaware of the cross of Christ, then really we won't understand the purpose of life and we won't have any hold on our eternal destiny. There, according to Scripture, something so profound happened: he bore away all the punishment due to the sin of all the people who would ever be forgiven during the history of the world, and he suffered that everlasting punishment compressed into the space of a few hours. He suffered things we cannot contemplate in his soul, separation from his Father – he tasted even our eternal separation and banishment. He took it all in his astonishing love so that he could purchase the right to forgive us. You know that God is so holy and so just, he cannot let us off our sin. In order for God to be just and kind and forgiving at the same time, he must come himself, which he did in the person of Christ, and suffer the punishment of sin himself, so it was essential that he should be crucified.

Questions

Outline

Purpose

Introduction

Luke 23:33 Commentary and Bible Study

The meaning of Luke 23:33 explained