Matthew 27:33-66

[0:00] Praise the Lord. Matthew 27. I've got some slides to show this morning and so I'll be doing my usual seamless operation of the technology to show you these slides.

[0:17] ! But that comes in a little while. We're going to cover Matthew 27 from verse 33 to 66. So that's 30 verses. Can you imagine Ray doing that?

[0:30] The thing is, it's a very difficult bit to break up. I could have, and I may still run out of time and therefore finish up doing this anyway, but I could have left the burial of Jesus as a separate study.

[0:44] But I decided to try to press through it and we'll see whether that was a wise thing or not. So verse 33. Now what you will remember is we've arrived at the point where Jesus was taken away for crucifixion.

[1:03] He'd already been mocked, beaten, scourged, a crown of thorns rammed upon his head. And in doing this or going through this, he'd already fulfilled part of Isaiah 53.

[1:16] He'd also fulfilled Genesis 3 verse 18, which is the curse of the thorns. And Joe, I wish I could say you stole my thunder last week when you mentioned it, but you didn't because I'd completely forgotten to mention it.

[1:32] So I'm glad you did. But in Genesis 3 verse 18, there was a curse pronounced on humanity that thorns would grow. And so for Jesus to shed his blood because of a crown of thorns was a demonstration of him undoing that curse that was originally put upon mankind.

[1:54] It reads like this, cursed is the ground because of you in pain, you shall eat of it all the days of your life, thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you. And so these Roman soldiers unknowingly took an object or an emblem of the curse and fashioned it into a crown for the one who would deliver us from that curse.

[2:15] Remarkable things. And so in Galatians 3 verse 13, we read Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. So having already fulfilled several prophetic scriptures and already shed his blood for us in the garden through the beatings during his scourging through the crown of thorns.

[2:39] He was then led away to be crucified. The prophetic background of the crucifixion is remarkable. It's breathtaking. Because it reveals the intentional nature of it all on the Lord's part.

[2:55] If it had just happened, you'd be forgiven for thinking, well, some poor guy got butchered by the Romans on that day. But because he spoke of it hundreds, and in the case of the Psalms of David, a thousand years before the event, he always intended this outcome.

[3:16] And when it says they led him away to be crucified, they led him to a place outside the city. And I thought I'd start with that. Because in Leviticus 4 verse 12, it says that blood sacrifices must be made outside the city.

[3:32] So he was led outside the city. And that is probably the first fulfillment of prophecy. And it's also referred to in Hebrews 13 and verse 12, the fact that he was outside the city when he was sacrificed, which makes him a blood sacrifice, not just a dead person.

[3:50] Now, I kind of want to, you know, we always try to make application. But it's very difficult as we go through this narrative to pick out every point of application.

[4:01] And what I would say is this. Ask ourselves, punctuate this talk with the question, what did Jesus say he would do for me? Because understanding that is the application.

[4:15] Taking to one's own heart what Jesus said he would do and what happened on the day. And that is quite a moving thing to go through.

[4:27] So let's read first. So it's from verse 33 through to the end of the chapter. And when they came to a place called Golgotha, which means place of the skull, they gave him wine to drink mixed with gall.

[4:43] And after tasting it, he was unwilling to drink. And when they had crucified him, they divided up his garments among themselves, casting lots. And sitting down, they began to keep watch over him.

[4:56] And above his head, they put up this charge against him, which read, this is Jesus, King of the Jews. At that time, two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.

[5:08] And those passing by were hurling abuse at him, wagging their heads and saying, you who are going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself. If you're the son of God, come down from the cross.

[5:20] In the same way, the chief priests also, along with the scribes and the elders, were mocking him and saying, he saved others. He cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel.

[5:33] Let him now come down from the cross and we will believe him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him. Now, if he delights in him, for he said, I am the son of God.

[5:44] The robbers who had been crucified with him were also insulting him with the same words. Now, from the sixth hour, darkness fell upon the land until the ninth hour.

[5:56] That's from midday till three o'clock in the afternoon. About the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli lama sabachthani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[6:09] And some of those who were standing there when they heard it began saying, this man is calling for Elijah. Immediately, one of them ran and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed and gave him to drink.

[6:22] But the rest of them said, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him. And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom and the earth shook and the rocks were split.

[6:39] The tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.

[6:50] Now, the centurion and those who were with him kept guard over Jesus. When they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, truly, this was the son of God.

[7:04] Many women who were looking on from a distance who had followed Jesus from Galilee while they were ministering to him. Among them was Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James and Joseph and the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

[7:16] When it was evening, there came a man from Arimathea named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.

[7:30] Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean cloth, a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock.

[7:43] And he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away. And Mary Magdalene was there and the other Mary sitting opposite the grave. Now, on the next day, the day after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate and said, Pilate said, Along with the guard, they set a seal on the stone.

[8:35] Wow. I'm beginning to wonder if I've bitten off more than I can chew here. But never mind. So, Golgotha. First of all, he was taken to Golgotha.

[8:46] Now, these days, Golgotha, there are lots of arguments about where it really was. There is a church called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and tradition has it that that is Golgotha.

[8:57] However, there are other people with other ideas, and it's far from proven. Although it does seem likely, because the more they unearth about the history, the more it seems that that is an accurate place as to where Golgotha was.

[9:13] And Golgotha is the same place as Mount Moriah. And Mount Moriah was the place of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. The sacrifice that never actually happened, where Isaac was ready to be put to death, and the Lord intervened.

[9:31] So, what did Jesus promise he would do for me? That the sacrifice that needed to be offered for Jesus at Golgotha would be replaced, and the Lord would provide himself a sacrifice.

[9:44] So, you've got all of these old, old promises that are coming to fruition at the time of the crucifixion. Purely an aside, there is a speculation that Goliath's head is buried at Golgotha.

[9:59] It may or may not be true. I do not know. However, it is interesting, because in 1 Samuel 17, verse 54, it says, he brought the head of Goliath to Jerusalem.

[10:09] Now, he's unlikely to have brought it into the city, because that would have made the city unclean. So, the chances are that was buried outside the city. And so, it could be the case. And it would be rather remarkable if it was.

[10:21] But nobody's ever dug it up. So, I throw that in just as an aside. But that giant's head was a trophy of a battle where righteousness overcame evil.

[10:36] And, of course, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross was another occasion where evil was overcome by supreme righteousness. Believe it or not, lots of archaeologists want to excavate to try to find this skull, but they're not quite sure where to dig.

[10:51] So, and if it is the Holy Sepulchre, they'd have to dig up the church, which isn't going to go down very well. That's all an aside. These things are interesting, but they're not the scripture.

[11:03] So, if we go to verse 34, what we read is, They gave him wine to drink, mixed with gall, and after tasting it, he was unwilling to drink it. Gall was reputed to have some pain-killing effects.

[11:19] It was to alleviate the suffering of the person being executed. Not like the Romans to be that kind, really. But he refused it. Most people that preach on this, and I would agree with them, they say that the Lord simply would not have his suffering reduced, because it was his suffering that saved us.

[11:40] He suffered so that we wouldn't have to suffer. That is also a fulfilment of prophecy. Psalm 69 verse 21 talks about them giving him gall to drink.

[11:52] I'm not sure what gall is. I believe it to be vinegar, but I could be wrong. Interestingly, whichever of the gospel accounts you read, there is no detail of the actual nailing of Christ to the cross.

[12:07] It's almost like an act of respect that that was left out of all the accounts, although there is an awful lot of brutality that is talked about. And so all of the accounts simply say, they crucified him, and they crucified him there, and they crucified him.

[12:24] He was crucified. They don't go into any detail about what that means. We know, though, that it was a form of execution so barbaric that the Romans would not use it against Roman criminals.

[12:38] They would only use it against people who were not Romans. I can't remember the name of the emperor soon after all of this that said the word crucifixion should be deleted from their vocabulary.

[12:51] It should be a word that was never spoken. It was so barbaric. Most people were crucified not having been scourged. So they would be nailed to this.

[13:05] Effectively, you would lay the person on a cross. You would nail them to it with massive, great big nails, not through the palm of the hand, but through the wrist and through the ankle in between the radius and ulnar bones and in between the tib and fib in the lower leg, cross the ankles, put the nail through, and then they'd pick that cross up and they'd drop it in a socket in the floor.

[13:29] That in itself was excruciating. But then over time, as the person on the cross got fatigued, he would not be able to breathe because all of his weight hanging on his outstretched arms and the chest would not be able to expand.

[13:41] And so this person, who hadn't been scourged, would hang there for days in agony, fighting for every breath. And the recorded record is 13 days.

[13:55] So that just gives an inkling of just how barbaric this was and also how miraculous it was that later in the account, Jesus said, it's finished, and gave up the ghost.

[14:07] That in itself was a miracle. But this man had been scourged first. And scourging itself was often a fatal punishment. All the internal organs would have been exposed, the bones of the ribcage would have been exposed, and so on.

[14:23] It's a dreadful, dreadful thing. Hence, he couldn't even carry his own cross, which was normally part of the macabre mind games that crucifixion played, that everybody that was crucified had to carry their own means of death to the place of crucifixion.

[14:39] Jesus couldn't carry his. He was so already weakened and already in agony. And they put him on the cross, lifted it up, dropped it into the socket in the ground, stripped off his clothing.

[14:54] How humiliating. On the top of a hill in front of everybody, the King of kings and the Lord of lords was naked. Dreadful. But this fulfills Psalm 22, verse 18.

[15:07] So what did Jesus go through for me? Well, he went through this humiliation for me. He went through the act of crucifixion for me, but he also went through this humiliation. And they took off his garments, keeping the outer garment in one piece.

[15:24] So they drew lots for the cloth, really. They would have shredded the other bits of his garments and handed them out. But this garment, the outer garment, was evidently a nice and expensive garment.

[15:40] And they decided not to ruin it, but to cast lots for it. There are many people who preach on this subject that suggest, and I don't disagree. The truth is, I don't know.

[15:51] They suggest that this outer garment, which was all in one piece, was a symbol of completion of Jesus' ministry. And I can go with that, but I can't prove it.

[16:02] So I'll leave that for you to ponder and pray on. In Psalm 22, verse 18. And in fact, you ought to turn there, because you need to check out what Ray's going on about, really.

[16:16] Psalm 22. It says, They divide my garments among them. So divided and handed out. And for my clothing, they cast lots.

[16:27] So there was, they didn't cast lots for all of Jesus' clothing. They dished it out. But for some part of his clothing, they cast lots. So this prophetic word is being fulfilled at the crucifixion.

[16:42] And so anybody present could say, Hmm, but Jesus said he would do this. He said he would hang on the cross. He said they would cast lots for my outer garment. He also said they'd divide up the rest.

[16:55] Going back to verse 37, it says there was a sign above his head containing the charge against him. And that says, to me, this is me putting words where there aren't any, the charge against him was, this is Jesus, King of the Jews.

[17:12] What's the crime there? There's no crime. There's no wrongdoing, even alleged, even at the point of his death, the most public allegation against him is, this is Jesus, King of the Jews.

[17:27] It's the ultimate injustice. And what did he go through for me? What did he promise he would go through for me? Psalm 22 was written a thousand years before this event.

[17:39] And he said, they're going to cast lots for my clothing. Two robbers were crucified with him, one on either side. Isaiah 53.

[17:49] Quickly turn to Isaiah 53. And verse 12. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he will divide the booty with the strong, because he poured out himself unto death and was numbered with the transgressors.

[18:04] He died amongst transgressors, and yet he was not a transgressor himself. All were hurling insults at him. So back in Psalm 22, verse 7, it talked about that they would insult him.

[18:22] You may as well turn back there. We may as well jump around between the two. Psalm 22, verse 7. All who see me sneer at me, they separate with the lip, they wag the head, saying, commit yourself to the Lord, let him deliver him, let him rescue him, because he delights in him.

[18:42] The mocking that took place was prophesied. God himself, in Christ, said a thousand years before it happened, he would be prepared to undertake mocking for me.

[18:56] That moves me. And then in verse 45, darkness fell upon the land from the ninth hour, sorry, from the sixth hour, which would be noon, to the ninth hour, three o'clock in the afternoon.

[19:11] The Hebrew clock started at six in the morning. So this is the brightest part of the day. Lots of people say, oh, it's probably an eclipse. You can look this up online.

[19:23] I'm not going to go into it in detail now, but the Passover, always took place at a new moon. And an eclipse at a new moon is impossible. It could not have been.

[19:35] And I'm not going to say any more about it than that. People who tried to dismiss this whole thing, probably an eclipse. First of all, an eclipse takes quite a while to happen. Everything suddenly, slowly, starts to go dark.

[19:48] And over a period of time, gets darker and darker, and then gets lighter and lighter. And the whole thing, I don't know, the last time there was an eclipse, I was aware of, somewhere between half an hour and an hour. This was three hours, at the brightest part of the day, at a new moon.

[20:02] This was a miraculous thing. This was God, showing, that he wouldn't even look upon this, and he didn't even want, humanity to look upon this.

[20:14] It was so awful. because the sin of the whole of mankind, was being dealt with at that moment. And he was a sin offering for us. And then, when the lights came back on, he cried out, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.

[20:30] I haven't a clue if I've pronounced that right. A thousand years before the event, it was recorded, and if you're still in Psalm 22, it's verse 1. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[20:43] So what did he do for me? And what did he know he was going to do for me, a thousand years before he did it? He was going to be forsaken of the Father.

[20:54] I mean that, the Son and the Father, both eternal, and both dwelling in perfect harmony, perfect unity, perfect righteousness, always, and he's now forsaken.

[21:07] He was prepared to be forsaken, for me. Because when he took, my sin, God could not look upon his Son, until God's justice had been satisfied, and that sin had been punished.

[21:24] And, we've read how silent he was when accused, how silent he was through the beatings. You don't read of any exclamations of pain, or anything like that, but when he was separated from the Father, he cried out in a loud voice.

[21:42] It meant, it caused him more pain to be separated from God, on my behalf, than all of that brutality that he suffered. And that, again, moves me.

[21:55] He'd enjoyed the best and closest fellowship with the Father, and now, God could not look upon him. Now, a little bit further on, go back to Matthew. I can't promise we'll stay there, but, verse 46, about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabbatini, that is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

[22:19] And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began saying, this man is calling for Elijah. Why would they think that? Well, two reasons. First, he's calling Eli, and he's been beaten, and battered, and therefore, there's every reason to assume, that it wasn't necessarily clear.

[22:38] Now, Elijah's name, we say Elijah, in Hebrew, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, is Eli, is that about right? Eli, so when he's calling Eli, Eli, you can understand why they would think he was calling for Elijah.

[22:55] The other thing was, in Malachi 4, verses 4 and 6, if you want to turn there, verses 4 to 6, remember the law of Moses, my servant, even the statutes and ordinances, which I commanded him at Horeb, for all Israel, behold, I am going to send you, Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord, he will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.

[23:28] So they were making a scriptural connection. Unfortunately, they were making it in the wrong place. But they had made this spiritual connection that, well, if he was Messiah, he could well be calling out for Elijah.

[23:40] So let's wait and see if Elijah comes and rescues him. Back to Matthew. We told everybody to bring multiple bookmarks with them this week. Immediately, one of them ran, taking the sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed, and gave him a drink.

[23:55] But the rest of them said, let's see whether Elijah will come to save him. And then subsequent to all this, verse 50, Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit.

[24:07] Now, Matthew doesn't mention what he cried out. It just says he cried out in a loud voice. But if you turn to John chapter 19, by the way, when you get the notes this time, the very first slide is a harmonization of the Gospels, on the crucifixion.

[24:26] And it enables you to look at what each Gospel says about the crucifixion, and cross-reference all the statements. So we want John chapter 19, verses 38 and 39.

[24:37] And I seem to have that wrong. Yes, it's verse 30. Therefore, when Jesus received the sour wine, he said, it is finished.

[24:48] And he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit. This is a very important mistranslation. Almost every English version I've ever looked at, translates this as, it is finished.

[25:02] And if that was the right translation, you could be forgiven for thinking, that what he meant was, thank goodness, this crucifixion process is finished. But the word used is the word, tetelestai.

[25:14] And the word tetelestai is a word that was used, so if you had a debt, and that debt was redeemed, then they would stamp your bill, tetelestai, paid in full.

[25:27] Also, if you bought a slave out of the slave market, you would take your money, and you'd get a thing saying, tetelestai, the slave is now yours, you've paid in full.

[25:39] So what Jesus said, is not it is finished, but he said, paid in full. And it was one of his, and I don't want to shout too loud, because Joe's got to deal with the recording, but it was, he said, paid!

[25:56] It's all done. Paid! So, it was the redemption of the debt, that we all owed. What did he say he would do for me?

[26:08] He said he would pay my debt. You'll find that in Isaiah 53. Paid in full. And to be honest, that little translation, although I suppose in English, you'd maybe say it was right, but to me it's a mistranslation.

[26:24] It's a long way from it is finished, to paid! Paid in full! And with that declaration, he gave up the ghosts. But that declaration means that his ministry, or his mission, which is spoken of by Matthew in chapter 1, verse 21, to deliver his people from their sins, is now complete.

[26:47] Done it. The price has been paid, in full, for all time, for every person, he has redeemed every one of us from the slave market of sin. And some of us want to stay in the slave market, and that is the tragic fact.

[27:03] He satisfied the wrath of God against sin. And you will recall that awkward word, propitiation, which you read in 1 John 2, verse 2, in Romans 3, verse 25.

[27:14] He was the propitiation for our sin. A propitiation was a sacrifice you made to a pagan god, to get God's favour. Jesus was the propitiation for our sin.

[27:28] Paid in full! Done and dusted! And at this same time, and this is, the timing here is miraculous, and so important, and we've just read about it, at this precise time, the veil in the temple was torn in two.

[27:43] So, there was always a curtain. Now this is the, this is a diagram of the old tabernacle, and when you get the notes, there are a few misspellings, I think it was done by someone who doesn't speak English ever so well, but that doesn't matter.

[27:56] What you will realise is that there were these barriers, you've got an outer veil and an inner veil, they said inter-veil, but it's an inner veil. Well, that inner veil was always there because when the tabernacle was set up, behind that veil, only God could be.

[28:16] Anybody else that went in there got fried alive. It was, and this was a genuine fear of the Jews, that if they stepped inappropriately inside the veil, they would not survive a second.

[28:29] Fire would depend, descend from heaven and would consume them. And if you turn with me to Leviticus chapter 10, there's this, starting in verse 1, Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them.

[28:57] and fire came out of the presence of the Lord and consumed them and they died before the Lord. And I don't need to read any more. That makes the point perfectly.

[29:09] If you stepped inside that, apart from the high priest, the high priest is a type of Christ, an Old Testament type of Christ, the high priest could go inside that curtain once a year to pay for the sins of the people for the previous year at the Feast of Atonement.

[29:28] But in order to make that sacrifice, he had to be ritually clean. He had to go and take off all his regalia. He had to be washed. He had to put on just his clean linen outer garments, his inner garments rather, undergarments.

[29:44] And he would go back in and he would make this once a year sacrifice. And that was the only time a human being was allowed to enter this place. It was for God and God alone.

[29:57] So the idea of God being accessible, and we're here today and we're all worshipping God and we treat God, rightly, as accessible. We can get on our knees before God at any time and he's accessible.

[30:09] He's there, he's available, he'll listen, he'll answer prayers. Sometimes he'll say no. But he answers prayers and we can have interchange with him with no curtain.

[30:23] To the Jew, this was completely anathema. It was completely wrong. You never went inside the curtain. And this curtain, and I've had various, I'll just put the next slide up.

[30:37] This is the more modern temple. And what you see here, you've got the various courts, you've got the holy place and then you've got the most holy place or the holy of holies.

[30:49] And the curtain would be across this gap here. People have said, oh, it was 60 feet high. Some have said 30 feet high. I haven't been there. I don't know. I know it's high. I also know it's said to be as thick as a man's span.

[31:04] So this piece of cloth, finely woven cloth, that is thicker than some walls, was hanging there. And you could attach two teams of horses to this and pull them in opposite directions and they would not be able to tear this curtain.

[31:22] And on this day, at the very moment that he said, it's finished, the curtain split from top to bottom. That is an indescribable force and apart from it just being, wow, God's powerful, to me it emphasises how badly God wanted that way to be clear for his man to get back in fellowship with him.

[31:45] Didn't even wait for the next day or half an hour or take the curtain down or... It was instantaneous. It is finished.

[31:56] Rip. And history has it that one of the things the Jews did afterwards, those who were unbelievers, would try to sew it back up. Which blows my mind.

[32:09] At the same time, there was an earthquake, rocks split. God was ensuring that this event would never be forgotten. And the question arises when people deal with this is, did he really die?

[32:23] Now, most of us who've got a bit of common sense would say no man could go through that and not die. And that's true. However, you get the faint theory where, oh, he just passed out and then he was put in the tomb in a passed out state and he came to.

[32:38] And he came out. Yeah, there's a couple of tonne of rock in the way. We won't even go there. What I will do is this, look. This is a sort of diagram of your heart and lungs.

[32:50] And when a man goes through this kind of incredible trauma that the crucifixion would bring, you get what's called a pericardial effusion. The remaining bodily fluid draws into the core and wraps itself around all the vital organs to try and protect you from dying.

[33:11] And so you get this fluid sac in the pericardial sac and it fills up with effectively water. It's clear liquid.

[33:22] So what you would then have, Jesus is hanging on the cross already dead and the soldier comes along and sticks his spear in. So the spear goes in.

[33:32] This is a section through a body. The spear would go in into the pericardial sac which is engorged with water and water would flow out and then carry on through that into the heart where you would get blood flow out.

[33:47] It's not a survivable injury. And if you had no other information than this, it tells you enough to know that Jesus is well and truly dead.

[33:58] I mean, they have all sorts of theories about not only the ones the Romans favoured, which was, oh, they came and stole him. And you think about how. We'll get to that maybe in a moment. So, his heart would have literally burst and he was already dead when this happened and it was his, it was the promptness of his death accompanied by the earthquakes and the rocks splitting that made these hard-bitten Roman centurion killers say, wow, he must be the son of God.

[34:33] Shame the Jews didn't take the same hint really. It means he chose when to die because he got through the three hours of darkness. He cried out, it is finished and he gave up his spirit and he chose when to die.

[34:46] And in John 10, verse 18, he says, no one takes my life from me. I lay it down. Once the wrath of God was satisfied, he passed from this life.

[34:57] Job done. For me, he did this. So, spectators, from a distance, you had Mary Magdalene watching, Mary the mother of James, the mother of the sons of Zebedee.

[35:09] We'll talk about them again at the resurrection. And we meet Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin who had become a secret disciple of Jesus.

[35:21] You don't read that in Matthew's Gospel. You just read that he was a disciple of Jesus. But in John 19, verse 38, it says he was a secret disciple because of the Jews. And he asks for the body of Jesus.

[35:34] And that's a very courageous thing for him to do. It's why some people say he must have been related in some way to Jesus because the bodies of people who were executed were normally given to the family.

[35:46] Whether that's true, I have no idea. But it was very courageous given the persecution that was likely that he asked for the body of Jesus. And up to this time, he would have been flung into a mass grave.

[35:59] Just jumped in with all the other bodies of criminals and strangers who died locally and so on. He would have just been put in a mass grave. But Joseph had purchased a private tomb and he was a wealthy man.

[36:12] And so, what we see is a fulfillment of Isaiah 53, verse 9. Quickly turn there. Isaiah 53, and verse 9. His grave was assigned with wicked men.

[36:28] Yet he was a rich man in his death because he had done no violence nor was there any deceit found in his mouth. He was crucified and would have been chucked in the bin with everybody else, but in the end he had a rich man's burial.

[36:43] Joseph had purchased this private tomb. He was wrapped in a clean linen cloth, which presumably means Joseph of Arimathea had washed the body. And then he rolled a large stone over the mouth of the tomb.

[36:56] And it says a large stone in Matthew and in Mark 16 it says a very large stone. Now, this was at least several hundred kilograms, more likely to be a couple of tons.

[37:08] And what you have is a stone that is rolled down a slope across the hole and then they drive wedges in so that it can't be pushed back up the hill.

[37:22] And even given that, they were saying, but he said he'd rise from the dead so we need to guard this grave. Who's going to roll? Let's suppose the disciples wanted to nick it.

[37:32] How are you going to push that back uphill? I have no idea what that weighs but it's a lot. But that's the kind of tomb there's apparently, again, I haven't been there, apparently there are loads of tombs like this in Israel.

[37:47] Usually held by wealthy men and usually used for the burial of entire families. So you'd have little shelves in there for each particular body as people died off. But this was a new grave that had never been used before that Joseph of Arimathea had bought.

[38:02] Oh, just an aside, apparently Joseph of Arimathea is buried in Glastonbury in the UK. Now, whether that's true, I'm not sure but if you Google it and say, if you Google where did Joseph of Arimathea die, apparently he was an early evangelist in the UK and he died in Glastonbury.

[38:27] Now, it sounds to me like it's true because there's so much about it but there's also a lot of links to the myths of the Holy Grail and King Arthur and all that so you just don't know for sure.

[38:39] But I think it would be interesting if that was the case. Almost finished. So we've now got Jesus incarcerated and the Jews and the Romans are discussing that deceiver. He said he was going to rise again the third day.

[38:51] So they discuss precautions and they arrange to seal the tomb and to guard it and so it would have been something like this. This is only an artist's impression but where the stone was across the hole they would have likely put ropes across, driven stakes into the wall behind, ropes across or bands of some kind and then a seal in the middle which is the emperor's seal and the penalty for breaking that seal is death and the penalty for falling asleep on duty is also death.

[39:26] So they said you've got a guard seal the tomb as best you know how and so this guard would have been terrified to fall asleep because the penalty for that normally would be death and so these massive precautions protected against two things people raiding the tomb and the person in the tomb coming out.

[39:50] And what do I finish this with? Everything that we have discussed just impinges on my heart the immense love that God has for us that he would do this intentionally and record every bit of it before it ever happened in minute detail.

[40:10] I've only scratched the surface on the details. I could have easily done two or three hours on this. You're probably glad I didn't. For him to do this intentionally for me oh father we just thank you that you loved us that much that you would do such amazing things to save me from the penalty of my sin to save me from being separated from you father thank you for all that you've done and may these scriptures be imprinted on our hearts so that we never forget them and as we in a moment pause to break bread together the breaking of bread is so that we would do this in remembrance of him lord all of this is part of remembrance of you and we ask you lord that it should never ever depart from our memories in

[41:13] Jesus name amen