Transcript
Stephen:
I want to explore the death of Christ by understanding something he said about it. It’s in Luke chapter 24. The Lord has risen from the dead and has come alongside these two people who are travelling from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They don’t recognise who he is, but they’re sad. They’re despondent. They were followers of Christ and had hoped that he was going to be the Saviour of Israel and deliver them from Rome. But they had seen him die, and they were looking really sad and depressed. They had also heard this rumour that Christ had maybe risen from the dead.
Into that situation, the Lord Jesus says these words: “O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into his glory?”
So, in what way should the death of Christ have not been a surprise?
Joel:
There’s a number of ways in which that’s the case, but I think the main thing is because both he and the Old Testament prophets had said this is what was going to happen. Right back as far as Genesis chapter 3, when Adam and Eve committed the first sin, the first act of rebellion against God, God had said he would provide a deliverer—that there would be a seed, a descendant of the woman, and he would crush the head of the serpent. The serpent would bruise his heel. So in some way he is going to defeat evil, defeat Satan, but in doing that he’s going to have to suffer.
As you come through the Old Testament, you discover a number of prophecies that point to this reality. We even see this in picture form in the book of Exodus: the Passover lamb. The nation of Israel should have understood that the basis for redemption, the basis for deliverance from bondage, is the shed blood of another—the death of a sacrificial substitute.
When you come to Isaiah chapter 53, the central verse of that poem is this: “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon him. And by his stripes we are healed.”
I think this is what the Lord Jesus does in Luke 24. He goes back to all these prophecies and says, “This is what God was saying all along. This has always been the message. It was always going to be this way.”
Stephen:
I take it that these people had looked at the Old Testament and, as we maybe all do, when we look at our hope we look for the most optimistic parts of it. They saw things like the kingdom coming, universal righteousness, all the enemies of the Lord put away, and the Christ on the throne. They were hoping for all this to happen in Jesus, but for some reason they had missed the fact that he must suffer first before the glory.
Joel:
I think it’s like you say—they saw what they wanted. The thing is, you just said that all these things they hoped would be fulfilled in Jesus—they will be, but not yet.
This has always been the way for God. God’s way is that suffering precedes glory, particularly in relation to dealing with sin. God can’t just ignore sin and bring in righteousness so that there will be peace. Sin has to be surfaced. It has to be confronted. Evil has to be dealt with.
Stephen:
So Christ himself must first suffer if glory is to follow. He must first suffer.
