How patient our God is! The boasts of atheists and scoffers mean nothing to him. To allow them to believe they are right, and that they have defeated his purposes is all part of his handling to those whose hearts are opposed to him. By letting them think in this way, he gives them scope to express their unbelief in an uninhibited way, so that their character is seen by all. But what remorse they will suffer! What terrible self-recrimination they will experience! When God acts in judgment, there will be no more gloating, but only eternal shame. The cause of the gospel will have suffered nothing because for a short time the enemies of the faith believed they had the victory.
All the dignitaries who passed by yelled insults and curses, and everything Christ suffered represented something we must go through. You might be rich when you die. You might be influential. You might be looked up to by people. You may have great influence. All of it must be taken from you. Life will be taken from you, as you stand before God in judgment.
Who did they crucify? A criminal? A murderer? No, the Lord of glory, the eternal God, the second person of the Trinity. What love, what compassion that God who created all things, Christ the second person, who has all the attributes of God, who is infinite, eternal, equal with the Father, who knows all things, who is love, should come down from heaven above into this world because he loved you and me, if we are among those who turn to him. He wanted us set free, set free from condemnation and eternal judgment, because he wanted us forgiven, because he wanted us for himself throughout all eternity. What love, what a cost! As he looks upon us, he sees our sin and our selfishness and our pride. He knows he has to do so much work in us. He knows he has to transform us and show such patience toward us. We shall let him down a thousand times. We shall show so little gratitude to him, and yet out of love, he was ready to come and suffer and die for us. There is no greater condescension than this. Can you reject him, the Son of God? Can you join the scribes and the Pharisees in wilful unbelief? Seek him with all your heart. Trust in him and see what he has done for lost souls.
Why did God determine that Christ dies by crucifixion? Crucifixion is a slow death. If the Jews had had the liberty to kill him their way, they would have stoned him. That would have been the punishment for what they were charging him with, blasphemy – they didn't believe him when he said he was the Son of God. Stoning would have been their way of doing it. Of course, it wasn't permitted for them to stone him because Judah was a Roman-occupied country, and it was against the law for the Jews to impose the death penalty. As far as Rome was concerned, the Jews couldn't take life. They had to appeal to the Roman government, the Roman procurator if they wanted someone put to death, and then it would be done the Roman way.
It couldn't have been a stoning for other reasons. The experts tell us that a stoning can be very quick. The first stone may kill you, or else the first or the second stone may render you completely unconscious, so that it is almost as though you were under an anaesthetic; you wouldn't be aware of the subsequent stones which crushed your body and ended your life. So stoning may be terrible; it may last longer, but it can be too quick, and that would be no good for the death of Christ. His death had to be a slow, intolerably painful death, and for good reason: to show the extensiveness of his suffering. You couldn't have people saying, ‘How can Christ die for the sins of billions when it was all over in a second?’ People who suffer from a lingering diseases suffer more than that. Even the earthly part of the sufferings of Christ had to be slow, so that everybody could see this man was suffering in an extreme way; it had to cross the hours. Of course, the greatest suffering by far was not the physical suffering, but that which could not be seen, when God the Father – veiling his face, we may believe – poured out upon Christ from heaven all the wrath and the pain and the punishment upon his soul, which we deserve to bear forever. Nevertheless, what he is seen to bear must be a long and a painful suffering. Only crucifixion could show that.
Also, when Christ was on the cross, it was necessary that all those people watching could see that he was the Holy One, that he never cursed, that he never became antagonistic even to his murderers. They could see, and of course the Roman soldier, the centurion, who was nearest said, ‘Truly this was a righteous man’, because what was going on as a secondary matter was Christ's demonstration of his holy perfect character. If the first stone had destroyed him, there would be no such demonstration. So it had to be a slow death that was seen and witnessed and would speak to the hearts of people.
Then again, it had to be an agonizing death, a terribly agonizing death, to show the seriousness of sin. Christ died in our place. The punishment due to us for sin is so great that when the Son of God suffered on Calvary and made that substitutionary atonement for us, it had to be a death which showed terrible suffering, great nails driven through his hands and feet, the wrath of God and the anger of God against sin and unbelief demonstrated – excruciating pain. That word excruciating comes directly from the word crucified. There can be nothing more excruciating death than death by crucifixion.