The Cross of Christ

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

The Waning Interest in the Cross of Christ

I was looking back this week as I was preparing this sermon and, Lowell, you had mentioned with what excitement we are approaching the end of the Gospel of Mark. Not because we don't enjoy the Gospel of Mark, but because it is a good book and it's been a long haul.

We've been in the Gospel of Mark by my calculations. We started on May 15, 2022, and so we only have a few weeks left. But, after following Christ and seeing his humble birth in Bethlehem and after following him through his early ministry around the rolling hills of the Sea of Galilee and his tumultuous final week in the crowded city of Jerusalem, we have reached the very climax of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

And we have reached the very climax, indeed, in fact, when it comes to the very Gospel of Mark itself. Today, we arrive, as we've just read, at the cross of Christ. The cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The very scene where Christ will be hoisted up, I picture in my mind like a divine lightning rod, to absorb the very wrath of God as a substitute on his people's behalf. And it could be said that if Mark has one scene in the whole of his Gospel that he wants us to read and to see and to understand and to remember, it is this scene nestled in the middle of Mark chapter 15.

The cross of Christ. And yet, if we look around, look around even at the churches surrounding us today, and I have no intention of being hard on other local churches, but it is apparent that fewer and fewer Christians are interested in the cross of Christ.

At least fewer and fewer professing Christians. The story of the cross just doesn't draw the crowd like it used to. And I'm going to reach first for some low-hanging fruit to demonstrate this. If you were to look up the name Joel Osteen on the internet as an example, you'll find that he is a pastor of, if you can call him that, of one of the largest churches in North America.

And yet, by his own admission, he does not desire to preach on the cross. He's not interested in preaching on sin. But as he said in the past, he doesn't want to focus on the negative, but on what is positive and uplifting.

Now, of course, many of us know Joel Osteen, and we know that such a statement is ridiculous. And yet, today, on the Lord's Day, at Joel Osteen's church, 48 ,000 people went to worship at his three services.

And millions more online and on TV. Each week, tens of thousands of Christians and professing Christians send millions of dollars to prosperity gospel preachers around the world so that they can gain health and wealth and happiness.

Not eternal happiness, but temporal happiness. And I thought about, do I name names? I think I will for today. People like T .D. Jakes and Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Paula White, Jesse Duplantis, Stephen Furtick, Joyce Meyer, and others who preach a false gospel or some semblance of the gospel for their own benefit.

And I've been looking at trends. You know I'm a student of the church. I always like to see what churches are doing. There's a trend this summer where many of the largest and the fastest growing megachurches in North America are doing what's called an at-the-movies series.

Where instead of preaching the word of God, they're preaching Hollywood films like Star Wars and the Barbie movie and Super Mario. Some of them even coming dressed for their announcements or their sermon as the characters in the movies.

Tens of thousands of people today flocked to churches to hear their pastor preach Barbie and Kent instead of Christ. It's happening. A list of these churches, these largest and fastest growing churches in North America, show us that many church growers want big churches, big productions, motivational talks, short self-help sermons, but not the cross of Christ.

The cross of Christ is no longer good news, but for many it is old news. And as we listen to this, I realize that I'm probably preaching to the choir. Many of you are sitting here watching and going, well, we know the prosperity gospel preachers, and we know the trend towards many of the megachurches and the seeker-sensitive churches of today.

It can be really easy to dunk on these churches. After all, many of them are more interested in herding goats than they are feeding Christ's sheep. But we must nevertheless recognize that interest in the cross of Christ is waning today.

And I think if all of us were to examine ourselves for a moment, even in our own hearts, our interest and our wonder in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ is waning as well. Many of us no longer stand in awe of Calvary's tree where Christ was accursed in our place.

We can read the passages, we can hear the sermons, but our hearts remain cold and untouched as we hear about Christ on the cross in the stead of sinners. We no longer stop to pause and consider the cost and the meaning of the cross of Christ.

Such a reality we know is a travesty, and yet it is true. And it's not new either. Oswald Chambers, you might remember him, he wrote the devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest. He said this over 100 years ago, he said, All heaven is interested in the cross of Christ.

All hell terribly afraid of it. But men are the only beings who more or less ignore its meaning. I like how he even describes that, more or less. We have a casual relationship with the cross. And so it begs the question, what is the remedy of this ignorance of the cross?

Brothers and sisters, I would suggest to you it is nothing more and nothing less than preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified every day of the week in your own hearts.

Where you become the preacher of Christ, bearing witness to what Christ has done for you. And certainly it is preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified on the Lord's Day from this pulpit. And so today we're going to preach, I'm going to preach the cross of Christ.

And we're going to consider, it's a very simple sermon in many respects. What is the meaning of the cross? Why ought the cross to hold our attention today for this 50 minutes? Or for the next millennia?

Or the next 10 billion years? What is so special about the cross of Christ? We're going to see that in this passage that is before us. And so I'll invite you to turn, if you haven't already, in our Bibles to Mark chapter 15.

I want to read verses 21 through 32. And then we're going to unpack this together. So Mark 15 verse 21, it says,. And they compelled a pastor by Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.

And they brought him to the place called Golgotha, which means place of a skull. And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them to decide what each should take.

And it was the third hour when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, The King of the Jews. And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left.

And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, Aha, you who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross. So also the chief priests of the scribes mocked him to one another, saying he saved others, he cannot save himself.

But the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe. Those who are crucified with him also reviled him. What I've done for today's purposes is I'm breaking this text up into four different units, four different facets of the narrative that we're going to focus our attention on.

And the first facet, I've alliterated again today, I'm not sure why, it's two weeks in a row, but we've alliterated, we're going to look at four C's. And the first one we're going to look at is the cross.

Two weeks ago, you'll remember that we heard about Pontius Pilate and the subsequent persecutions that Christ endured after his trial under Pilate at the hands of the Roman guards. And in so doing, you might remember that as we heard about the torments of scourging and the mocking that Christ endured and the suffering that Christ endured for us, we noted that Christ was in that position, condemned as a substitute, a penal substitute in our place.

And we looked at how the wicked insurrectionist Barabbas was let go, was freed, was given life in lieu of Christ, who became a penal substitutionary atonement, in a sense, in his place, pointing forward to a greater atonement that was to come.

And last week in verse 20, verse 20B, in the second half of verse 20, we saw that it read this, and they led him out to crucify him. And that's where we're picking up in our text today. The day has arrived.

The time has come for the Savior of the world to die. In verse 21, we're told that Christ was escorted from this praetorium in Jerusalem to the place where he was to be crucified outside the city walls.

Now, our text for today doesn't explicitly tell us this, but it's very likely that Christ was already physically exhausted, depleted, drained at this point. And we can recognize this looking at a few different things.

We see, for instance, that the Roman guards were forced to recruit Simon of Cyrene. In fact, it wasn't recruiting, it was forcing Simon of Cyrene to take Christ's cross for him. And this was the case, or this was the cultural context in that scenario.

In Roman times, as a final act of humiliation, it was customary for the condemned criminal to carry his or her own crossbeam, their own instrument of execution, to the place where they were to die. And this rough piece of wood that weighed somewhere between 30 to 40 pounds was to be slung on their shoulders, their raw shoulders from the scourging that had just taken place.

And they were to carry it to the place of their execution. All the while, a herald would go ahead of them, crying out the charge that they were guilty of. That charge would be held on a plaque, which would then be fastened to the top of the cross so that every passerby would know what that person's charge was, what they were convicted of, in order that they might die on a cross.

So we see here that Christ was so debilitated by his sleepless night of horrific beatings, both at the hands of the Jews and the Roman guards, that this Simon of Cyrene was to carry the crossbeam. And it's interesting, none of the other gospel writers do this, but Mark points out that this was Simon of Cyrene, he says in verse 21, the father of Alexander and Rufus.

You might have noticed in the last little while I've been on a bit of a kick in terms of demonstrating the historicity of the gospel claims. And here again, we see an example of that. That Mark leans not on just a random individual who came from the crowd to carry Christ's cross, but Simon of Cyrene in modern-day Libya, where there was a large Jewish settlement.

And he mentions Alexander and Rufus. Interestingly enough, we see, many scholars believe, we see Rufus in Romans 16, 13. Mark, after all, was likely writing to the church in Rome. And so they would have known Alexander and Rufus.

And so those who doubted Christ's crucifixion, the historicity of these events could go to Alexander and Rufus and say, is it true that your father was the one who carried the cross? And they could say, he was.

And if he was still alive, they could say, and you might even be able to find him in Cyrene. A historical man, in a historical setting, carrying Christ's cross. And verse 22 tells us the final location where Christ was to be crucified and killed.

We've heard that Golgotha means place of the skull. And it was located outside of the walls of Jerusalem, likely a common place where Romans would execute criminals. And this was something that we would expect among the Jews.

Wherever something or someone that was ceremoniously unclean was, they had to go outside of the camp. And so this is exactly where they went, outside the walls of the city. Now there is some debate, if you were to go to Israel today, where that hill of Golgotha is, that Mount of Calvary.

There are two main areas, two main hills that scholars point to, but conservative evangelical scholars believe that it's the lesser known of the two. And in fact, it's not enshrined with a bunch of church buildings or fancy things, but it is Golgotha's hill next to an Arab bus stop in the middle of Jerusalem.

If you were to go there today, you'd certainly find tourists coming and going, but the vast majority of people are just coming and going throughout their day, ignoring the very place where Christ was killed.

Unlike the world that we live in today. And verse 23 tells us that as Christ went to the cross, he was offered wine mixed with myrrh. This was, perhaps it was an offer of mercy, perhaps not, but what wine mixed with myrrh was, was an ancient painkiller that would be used to dull the pain of crucifixion.

And it was very likely that the Romans were giving him this so that he would resist less as they drove the nails through his hands and through his feet. But we see that Christ declines the wine and the myrrh.

Now why would that be? Someone might ask, why would Christ want to make his own crucifixion any harder than it had to be? And it was because of this. Because when Christ went to that cross, he was on a mission.

A mission from God. And a mission to drink every last drop from the cup of God's wrath. And in order for him to do that, he needed to be fully present, fully conscious, wide awake, both to the torments of the cross and the punishment for sin that awaited him.

And then in perfect fulfillment of Psalm 28 verse 18, sorry, 22 and verse 18, which David penned some 1 ,000 years earlier, Roman soldiers cast lots for his clothing. In verse 25, if we skip along, we read that according to the clock, the Roman clock at the third hour that is nine in the morning, Christ's hands were nailed to that cross that Simon had helped him carry up the hill.

A nail was driven through his ankles to prolong his suffering, to allow him to push himself up to breathe. And his cross was lifted up for all to see his uncovered body in the morning sun. And verse 26 tells us what that herald would have called out as they went ahead of Christ on the way to Golgotha.

This was his only charge. Jesus Christ, the King of the Jews. John chapter 19 tells us that it was translated into Aramaic, Latin, and Greek so that all the passers-by would understand why Christ was there.

In fulfillment of Isaiah 53 .12, he was numbered amongst the transgressors and was crucified with one criminal to his right and one criminal to his left. Robbers, or the Greek translation might also be insurrectionists.

Maybe they were accomplices of Barabbas. Now whether or not that is true, it doesn't change the fact that as Christ hung there, he hung there in Barabbas' place, enduring one of the most cruel forms of execution that the human mind has ever conceived of.

I think we've all heard of descriptions of crucifixion and the horrors of it. I find it very interesting that Mark, in an almost unparalleled way, has an economy with words as he describes the crucifixion.

He says, and they crucified him. That is all. But it might be important for us to know, what did that crucifixion entail? What was happening as Christ went to the cross? As we noted last week, some people didn't even make it through the scourging.

They were so whipped and so beaten that they would die even before they got to the cross. But for those who did survive that flogging, that precursor to crucifixion, they would be placed on that cross, often nailed to that cross, to hang sometimes for hours or sometimes for days, depending on how long they survived and how much time the guards had.

Oftentimes, death on a Roman cross came by way of a combination of asphyxiation, dehydration, shock, and heart failure. It was a painful way to die. There are some accounts of criminals who would contract tetanus.

Anyone here is familiar with tetanus and getting your tetanus shot every 10 years? They would contract tetanus from the rusty nails that were driven through the criminal's hands and ankles. And the criminals were left there long enough, baking in the daytime sun, that the tetanus would begin to take hold.

Tetanus, after all, is called lockjaw in some countries. And so the criminals would shake and tremor with such violence that it would nearly tear the nails through their limbs. And yet they were left there to die until their last breath.

One commentator writes, every totalitarian regime needs a terror apparatus, and crucifixion was Rome's terror apparatus. Ad horrendum. The Roman statesman, Cicero, called it the most cruel and horrifying punishment that he had ever seen.

One Roman official wrote, whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen.

Why?

Where the most people can see and be moved by this fear. It was a terrible thing to see. An even more terrible thing to endure. The author, Greg Gilbert, who wrote the book, The Gospel, I think we've handed out some of his gospel tracts, which is just a condensed version of that book.

He says this,. Shredded flesh against unforgiving wood. Iron stakes pounded through bone. Joints wrenched out of socket by the sheer dead weight of the body. Public humiliation before the eyes of family, friends, and the world.

That was death on the cross. The infamous stake, the Romans called it. Parents hid their children's eyes from it. It was a loathsome thing. And the one who died on it was loathsome too. A vile criminal whose only use was to hang there as a putrid, decaying warning to anyone who might follow his example.

This is how Jesus died. Crucifixion was a special kind of cruelty, and for this reason it was reserved for the lowest and the most despised segments of society. And we've heard this before, that they would not crucify Roman citizens.

They wouldn't even crucify a Roman traitor. But poor slaves, violent insurrectionists, prisoners of war, and the Son of God. And the irony, if we fast forward to verse 31. As the chief priests and the scribes mocked him, they said, He saved others.

He cannot save himself. Why, that is exactly what Christ was doing on that cross, wasn't it? Not saving himself, but saving others at the expense of himself. And so here we have a picture of the physical sufferings that Christ endured on the cross.

The Cost of the Cross and the Wrath of God

Let's look next to the cost of the cross. The cost, and I will read verses 33 through 37. It says,. And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lima sabachthani, which means, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And some of the bystanders hearing it said, behold, he is calling Elijah. And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.

And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.

The cost.

For three hours, Christ hung from that cross in the morning sun. All the while, the crowds parroted Satan intempting Christ to come down from that cross. And think about this for a moment. If Christ would have just heard those words and acted on them, he would have derailed eternal redemption, our eternal redemption that he accomplished.

He would have derailed that forever. But praise God, Christ stayed on that cross. Even as the men cried for him to come down to their own demise. But the worst was yet to come. So we've already heard in recent weeks, we've heard a lot about liberal scholars.

Liberal scholars have tried to say that Christ's death, or that Christ's dread in the garden as he sought the Father in prayer, that that dread was due to the physical torments of Roman crucifixion. And we settled that a number of weeks ago.

That his anxiety in the garden had nothing to do with the floggings. It had nothing to do with the nails. It had nothing to do with the taunts of the people. These liberal scholars would deny that there is any unseen spiritual transaction that occurred on the cross on that Good Friday.

But as we will see, this couldn't be further from the truth. In verse 33, we read that at the sixth hour, this is now 12 noon. Ezra is too young to ask, so I'll ask Noah. Noah, where is the sun at 12 noon?

In the middle of the sky, at or near the middle of the sky. But at 12 noon, when the sun should have been at its highest point, there was darkness over the whole land that lasted three hours, until the ninth hour, until 3 p .m. that day.

Now, we can go back into the history books and see the validity of this event. Early church fathers speak of eyewitness accounts who spoke of the widespread nature of this darkness. That there were people all through the land of Palestine who experienced this dark sky, dark as night.

Even Tertullian, another early church father, references a Roman archive which spoke of this cosmic event that happened on that Friday. Now, it begs the question, why was the sky dark as night over Christ?

Some have argued that there was a lunar eclipse. There is always a good reason for something. I've told stories before of the man who served as pastor to the church where I was first saved. And the Lord saved me there, not because, but in spite of the ministry of that church.

But one of the things that he used to say is that, well, Jesus didn't actually walk on water. He was just walking in really shallow water. And the disciples thought he was walking on water. Or he said one time, God didn't actually part the Red Sea.

There's actually a really interesting land bridge that's there. And you can walk on the land bridge and you might get your ankles wet. But you can still cross the Red Sea. There are liberal scholars that would say, well, this was just an eclipse.

The problem was they're ignorant to the Jewish calendar. For those of us who are familiar with the Jewish calendar, it was inextricably linked to the lunar calendar. And so on the Passover, it always took place on the 15th day of Nisan during a full moon.

And so to have a full moon, you cannot have a lunar eclipse at the same time. As a young Christian, I used to think that the sky became dark because it was a very sad day. That it conveyed the Father's sadness over Christ's death.

It was a nice thought. But I was incorrect. The sky did not darken because it was a lunar eclipse. The sky did not darken because the Father was sad. The sky was darkened because judgment was at hand.

Every time we see the sky darkening in the Scriptures, judgment is coming. If we look at the eschatological passages in Scripture, like Joel 2 .31, which has some interplay with Acts 2, it says, "...shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome," or some translations say, "...the great and terrible day of the Lord.".

In Matthew 24, in verses 29 and 30, it says, "...immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.

Then will appear in heaven the sign of the Son of Man, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn.".

Why?

They will see the Son of Man, it says, "...coming on the clouds of heaven with great power and glory.". And with that Son of Man, accountability. But perhaps fewer is uncanny as Exodus chapter 10. If we go all the way back to the Exodus of the Israelites.

In Exodus 10 .21, it says there that the Lord said to Moses, "...stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt.". A dark darkness. Have you ever felt darkness?

A darkness to be felt. So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. We're also talking about a number three in our passage. They did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all the people of Israel had light where they lived.

Now why did all of Egypt have darkness? Well, the Israelites still had light. Because it was a demonstration of the manifold judgment of God upon Egypt. That that darkness itself was judgment upon that nation.

It was the ninth plague. And what immediately came after the ninth plague? But the tenth plague, and the death of the firstborn son. Now you might think that I'm really stretching this. I'm going to lean on a little bit of help here.

R .C. Sproul writes that this three hours of darkness recalls the darkness in Egypt that lasted three days before the deaths of the firstborn son. It corroborates with Amos chapter 8, verses 9 and 10, where the Lord promises to darken the earth in broad daylight in a time like the morning for an only son.

The most fearful thing, brothers and sisters, about the cross, and it's hard for me to preach this because I know many of you already know this, but it wasn't the cross itself. It was the God of the cross on that Friday afternoon.

Hebrews 10 .31 says,. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And yet, on the cross, that is exactly where Christ fell. Into the hands of the living God. The sky was not dark because of Jesus.

Think about this distinction. The sky was not dark because of Jesus. The sky was dark for Jesus. The dark sky of God's disapproval hanging over his head. On that cross, as Jesus died, as the song goes, the wrath of God was satisfied for every sin on him was laid.

The Jews had rejected Christ. We read two weeks ago how the Gentiles had rejected Christ. We see in this passage how the passers-by reviled and rejected Christ. And now it was the Father's turn to reject the Son.

The Father's turn to reject the Christ. Mark 15 .34 tells us that Christ cried out on that cross, Eloi, Eloi, Lema, Sabachthani. The people couldn't make sense of this. They couldn't understand it. They thought he was calling for Elijah.

But dear friends, he wasn't calling for Elijah. He was crying out for his Father. The Father who he had known and lived in unbroken fellowship with since before the world began. The Father whom he had known and loved from eternity past.

As he cried, Eloi, Eloi, Lema, Sabachthani, he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Forsaken by the Father. It was not merely to quote the first verse of Psalm 22, which was spoken with perfect accuracy as to what was to come.

But our Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ, in time and in history, hung on that cross, pouring out his soul in bitter anguish as he was abandoned by the Father. This has been called, and this expression I find deeply moving, Emmanuel's orphan cry.

That Christ became an orphan on that cross. The one who promised in John 14 .18, I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. He was left to hang on that cross as Emmanuel's orphan son, crushed under the mighty hand of the Father as the vicarious sacrifice for our sins.

How many of us can hear that? And we are just not surprised. And we're just not moved. Far too many of us. H .A. Ironside says, on that cross, on that hill outside the camp, Christ experienced the awful abandonment of soul into which the Lord Jesus Christ went when he became the great sin bearer.

It was then that God, the righteous judge, dealt with Christ as a surety in the sinner's stead. And this reality of Christ going to the cross for our sins is replete in Scripture. Galatians 3 .13, we've looked at this before.

What was Christ doing on that tree at the summit of Golgotha? It says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. It is written, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.

Isaiah 53 .10, some people are very offended by these passages. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him. He has put him to grief when his soul makes an offering for sin. 2 Corinthians 5 .21, it's probably been my favorite Bible verse for the last ten years.

For our sake he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God on his behalf. You might remember, back to the Old Testament, on the Day of Atonement, there were two goats.

One goat was sacrificed and the other goat was what they called the scapegoat. William Tyndale coined that phrase, the scapegoat, a beautiful word. Just a translation of the Old Testament Scriptures. And like the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, Christ was taken outside of the camp.

The sins and the transgressions of the people, our sins and our transgressions were confessed over him. And with the force of only God himself, he was driven into the barren and godless wilderness to carry away the sin of the people as far as the east is from the west.

That Christ went to the cross and suffered physical torment was enough for the only Son of God. But that Christ would go to the cross and take your sin and take my sin and become accursed in our place, brothers and sisters, is unspeakable.

And yet he did it.

And why?

Why did Christ do this? Or maybe better said, let me rephrase that. Why am I saying this? Why am I highlighting this? I've gone to the greatest of lengths and I've fallen short to describe the suffering that Christ endured on the cross.

Not because I take pleasure in Christ's suffering, but because I want to demonstrate to you that because Christ endured all of this in his body and in his spirit on the cross, he has consumed every last dark drop from that chalice of God's wrath.

If you are found in Christ, there is not so much as an iota of wrath left for you. In verse 37, it says that Christ offered one final cry. Mark leaves us to wonder what that was. Praise be to God, John includes it in his gospel.

John chapter 19 and verse 30. John uses probably the sweetest Greek word to translate Christ's words. Steve knows it. Te telestai. It is finished. That on that cross, Christ finished it all. If you're a Christian, you can count on it.

Because Christ went to the cross and because you have placed your faith in him, there is no wrath left.

It is finished.

You can bet your eternity on it. Brothers and sisters, this is a call to believe on Christ with such force that if the gospel is not true, we are damned. But it is true. Christ took the Father's frown, that you might have the crown.

He took the Father's displeasure that we might be welcomed into his presence, reconciled with him forever. You'll have to forgive me, I've been reading Charles Spurgeon this week. He once said that the Christian's new standing to a man who has been declared not guilty in a court of law.

Sorry, he likens the Christian's new standing to a man who has been declared not guilty in a court of law. He writes, there is a prisoner at the bar. And the jury has brought in the verdict of not guilty.

Our brother is studying law. What does the judge do when the accused is bid not guilty? He says, you may go free. I've seen it before in my former line of work where you have a man in a jumpsuit and in shackles.

And at the end of the trial, he is found not guilty. I remember in one case, we took a man to northern Alberta and said, uniform and shackles. And at his trial, he was declared not guilty. And we realized we weren't prepared to release him.

And so we released him right then and there, handcuffs off, shackles off. And he left the courthouse in his prison jumpsuit. Spurgeon says, when a verdict of not guilty is brought in, the judge bids him go free.

There may be people in the court who gnash their teeth at him. Persons in the street who hate him. What does he care? He has been declared not guilty by the proper tribunal. The judge himself tells that I am acquitted.

Not a single law officer can touch me. Not the fiercest enemy in the world can drag me into court again. I have been tried and found not guilty. And who is it that condemns me now? And Spurgeon says, so it is with the Christian.

Christ's righteousness is put on him. Christ takes his sins. And when he stands before God's bar, the eternal voice seems to say, I see no sin in the man. And how can he? All that man sins, Christ took away at the cross.

I don't know how I can convey this any stronger to you. But if you're a Christian, you've repented of your sin. And you've placed your faith in Christ. Brothers and sisters, your sin is gone. And there's no lawman who can bring a charge against you.

You stand before the just judge of all the earth. God himself. And he has one verdict for you. And it is this. Not guilty. How often we trudge along through our weeks. Tormenting ourselves because of our own sin.

Brothers and sisters, if you're in Christ, that sin is gone.

It is gone.

And all that is left is the welcoming and joyous face of your father in heaven, who smote his son, that he might receive you at the cross. In verse 38, you read this. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.