Scripture brims with the biblical prophecies. The amazing part, however, isn’t that they exist, but that Jesus came to fulfill all of them.
In one of his recent and deeply impactful sermons, Pastor Greg Locke of Mount Juliet, Tennessee, visually expressed the type of suffering and agony that Jesus went through on His journey to the cross. Yet, it’s not just the journey itself that is hard-hitting about what He went through. When held up to the light, Scripture had for hundreds of years plainly described what would happen to the Messiah, and no one understood it until after Jesus had died and rose from the grave.
If you look at Psalm 22, there are prophetic images of what would happen to Jesus, including the thirst He would feel in the sun, gasping for breath as He hung on the cross.
“On the cross, Jesus said, ‘I thirst,'” Locke says. “He said in Psalm 22, prophetically, ‘cleaveth to my jaws.'”
This particular psalm also opens up perfectly with the same words Jesus would say hanging on the cross: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”
Psalm 22 is also famous for verse 18 which reads, “They part my garments among them and cast lots for my clothes.” This happened when Jesus was upon the cross, as Matthew 27:35 reads, “When they crucified Him, they divided His garments by casting lots to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet…”
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Psalm 22 isn’t where the prophecies fulfilled by Jesus’ crucifixion stop. As Locke describes, Isaiah 52 and 53 were put on the spotlight at the time of Jesus’ death because they gave the physical depictions of the gruesome battering He would receive on our behalf.
“His face was unrecognizable,” Locke says. “Even before and after the scourging, they buffeted Him.”
Isaiah 53:5 for many people is notable and worth quoting as the verse that states “by His stripes we are healed.” And while this is true, these two passages offer much more to the understanding of the brutality that Jesus would take upon Himself on the cross for our sins. Being marred in a way that no person ever had or ever would again, Jesus had the physical wrath of God upon Himself. The Scriptures also reveal the true condition of the human heart.
“Religion hates Jesus today just as much as it did 2,000 years ago, and it spits in His face,” Locke says.
There was nothing that anyone could physically see by looking at Jesus which would reveal His glory and power as God.
“Jesus was so common that people who already met Him in the synagogue and the marketplace had to be told who He was at midnight in a garden by one of His friends to kiss Him. So, stop thinking that Jesus was floating around, angel wings coming out of His back and a halo over His head,” Locke says.
Perhaps the key, as Locke puts it, is that the people spent so much time looking for the wrong person—a warrior who would vindicate them from Rome—that the people completely missed it when the right person was in front of their face.
When the Old Testament is held up to the light of all the pain Jesus went through on the cross, it’s undeniable that God warned for years not only what would happen to the Messiah, but that He would experience all of it for the very people who would crucify Him.
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Abby Trivett is a marketing copywriter and coordinator for Charisma Media.
Stephen Strang