Numbered with the Transgressors

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St.

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John, the 19th chapter. Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him, and the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe.

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They came to him saying, Hail, King of the Jews. And they struck him with their hands.

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Pilate went out again and said to them, See I'm bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in him.

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So Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them,

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Behold the man. When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, Crucify him!

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Crucify him! Pilate said to them, Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.

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The Jews answered him, We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the

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Son of God. When Pilate heard the statement, he was even more afraid. He entered the headquarters again and said to Jesus, Where are you from?

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But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, You will not speak to me?

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Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you? Jesus answered,

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You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given to you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.

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From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, If you release this man, you are not

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Caesar's friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar. So when

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Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called the

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Stone Pavement and an Aramaic Gabbatha. Now it was the day of preparation of the

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Passover, and it was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, Behold your king! They cried out,

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Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him! Pilate said to them, Shall I crucify your king?

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The chief priests answered, We have no king but Caesar. So he delivered him over to them to be crucified.

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So they took Jesus and he went out bearing his own cross to the place called the

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Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him and with two others, one on either side and Jesus between them.

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Pilate also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It reads, Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the

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Jews. Many of the Jews read this inscription for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek.

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So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, Do not write the king of the Jews, but rather that this man said,

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I am the king of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written, I have written. When the soldiers had crucified

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Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier and also his tunic.

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But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. And they said to one another,

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Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be. This was to fulfill the scripture which says,

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They divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots. So the soldiers did these things.

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But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister,

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Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother,

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Woman, behold your son. And then he said to the disciple, Behold your mother.

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And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the scripture,

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I thirst. A jar full of sour wine stood there. So they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth.

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When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, It is finished. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

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Since it was the day of preparation so that the bodies would not remain on the cross on the Sabbath, for the Sabbath was a high day, the

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Jews asked Pilate that their legs might be broken and that they might be taken away. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him.

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But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.

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He who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true, and he knows that he's telling the truth, so that you may also believe.

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For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled. Not one of his bones will be broken. And again another scripture says,

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They will look on him whom they have pierced. After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus but secretly for fear of the

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Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus. And Pilate gave him permission.

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So he came and took away his body. Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about 75 pounds in weight.

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So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths, the spices, as the burial custom of the

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Jews. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid.

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So because of the Jewish day of preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid

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Jesus there. O Lord, have mercy on us. In the name of Jesus.

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Here again the third verse of the hymn we just sang. Ye who think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great, here may view its nature rightly, and here its guilt may estimate.

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Mark the sacrifice appointed. See the one who bears the awful load. It is the

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Word, the Lord's anointed, the Son of Man, the

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Son of God. We human beings are foolish.

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We think of sin as not all that important. And truth be told, we have little funny things we say about the sins that we commit.

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Oh, that was just a white lie. How strange that you would take something as horrifying as deceit and cover it in the color of righteousness.

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See, that's the thing. Part of our problem is we do not even begin to recognize the magnitude of our sin.

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And then comes Good Friday. We cannot extricate ourselves from our bondage to sin, death, the devil.

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We are utterly hopeless. We have no power.

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And here comes the Son of God. Born of the Virgin Mary, and as the

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Confession says, he now suffers under Pontius Pilate. And he goes to the cross and he dies.

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Who can tell me the value of the blood of the Son of God? Who can estimate its worth?

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Is it worth billions, trillions, maybe billions and trillions of galaxies?

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Maybe all of the wealth of creation. Couldn't even begin to estimate the cost that it took to free us.

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But that was a cost that Christ was willing to pay. If you were traveling on that Good Friday into Jerusalem, the place where he was crucified,

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John tells us wasn't too far out of the city. Lots of people saw the spectacle.

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There were three crosses erected, three poor, miserable fellows being made an example of by the

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Roman Empire. But if you were walking by, you couldn't even begin to tell me or anyone else the significance of what was happening there.

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In order for that to happen, God has to reveal that to us. Because to the naked eye, to the untrained observer, to those born dead in trespasses and sins in the darkness of the devil, it just looked like three criminals, three malcontents, three people who messed up royally, upset the

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Roman Empire, and went and got themselves nailed to a tree. And you can hear them calling out, crying out, yelling out in pain.

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You can see the blood, the gore. But what does it all mean? Six hundred years before Christ was conceived in the womb of the

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Virgin, the prophet Isaiah, by a revelation from the

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Lord himself, saw the day Christ's crucifixion, saw

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Good Friday. And he does something fascinating. He takes two seemingly contradictory themes and he weaves them together in a beautiful prophecy.

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I think back when I was in grade school, I always marveled at the girls who would braid their hair, always marveled at watching a girl do that.

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You know, here you've got this one strand and then another strand, there's a third strand. I couldn't figure out how they managed it with two hands.

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And they wove them together into one unit. That's what we see in this prophecy from Isaiah 52 and 53.

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One strand is a strand of victory, the other strand is a strand of suffering and languishing.

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But taken together as a whole, they help us understand what it is that was accomplished for us on that Good Friday outside the city gates of Jerusalem so long ago.

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Isaiah writes, Behold, my servant shall act wisely, talking about Christ, and he shall be high and lifted up, and he shall be exalted.

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Opening verse for this prophecy. What a great theme, what a great start.

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High and lifted up and exalted. This sounds like victory talk to me. And here comes the other strand now, braided together with it.

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And as many as were astonished at you, his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of the children of mankind.

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And now we see something horrifying. None of the other gospel writers record it, but the beating that Christ took, the fists on his face, the lashes have so marred him that if you knew him and you were standing right in front of him and looking at him, you wouldn't be sure if it was

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Jesus or not. That's how brutal the beating was that he took.

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And now the other strand, and so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him.

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You see, because he was marred, now he's victorious, and so kings are going to be accountable to him for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand.

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So who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

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He grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.

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If you remember, it wasn't all that long ago. Beginning of the year, we celebrated the

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Epiphany, the visit of the Magi. But keep this in mind, it took a special star to lead them to where Christ was.

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At that time, he was still a toddler hiding behind the skirts of Mary, and he looked just like any other kid.

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There was nothing about that kid that set him apart from any other kid. Although the Renaissance artists always like to depict the young baby

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Jesus with a halo, that would have been a dead giveaway. But he had no halo.

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He had to take baths, do his chores, and learn to talk, and do all the things the young toddlers do.

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So he had no form or majesty that we should look on him. Now it turns very dark, one that doesn't make any sense when you think about it on the surface.

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He was despised. It's not that he was tolerated, he wasn't.

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He was despised. He was rejected by men. Jesus was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

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As one from whom men hid their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

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It wasn't all that long into Jesus's ministry he was already healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, the ability to walk to the paralytics, raising the dead.

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You would have thought that a man who can do such miraculous acts of mercy and kindness in our languishing and desperate condition, that he would have been the talk of the entire globe, and that people would have come all the way from China to see and to hear this carpenter's son from Nazareth.

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But see, Jesus's message was not one that we sinners want to hear. He, like John the

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Baptist, called us to repent. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent.

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Leave your sins. Repent. And so it wasn't too long into his ministry that the

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Pharisees came up the ultimate slander campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We know that Jesus performs miracles, but did you know that he performs them by the power of the devil himself?

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By the prince of the demons Beelzebul, Jesus worships the devil. He drinks blood and indulges in child sacrifice.

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That's where he's got all this power from. And yet you think of tin penny religious quacks who have global audiences today, rake in tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they're lauded and applauded, and they're completely fake and phony.

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They're charlatans, experts at telling us what we want to hear, coddling us in our sin.

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They think of sin quite lightly because they engage in it and indulge in it quite freely.

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But Jesus was despised. And surely he has borne our griefs and he's carried our sorrows.

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Yet we esteemed him stricken and smitten by God and afflicted. And when that verse is talking about what it's really referring to is that we've literally looked at Jesus and thought he was the one who was cursed while us were blessed.

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But Isaiah reveals here something amazing and quite tragic at the same time.

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Jesus was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed, and that's the word crushed, for our iniquities.

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And upon him was the chastisement, the punishment that brought us shalom, peace, even the word, soothing, calming, an end to hostilities, peace with God, reconciliation.

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And by his stripes we are healed, healed from sin sickness.

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You see all of us, like sheep, me included, you included, we've all gone astray.

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Each and every one of us, we've turned to our own ways. And that is where we are most like the devil, when a creature behaves like a deity, calling the shots, choosing his own fate, choosing his own purpose, thumbing his nose at his creator, going our own way.

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But Yahweh, the Lord, has laid on Jesus the iniquity of us all.

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The Lord took all of our sin, all of our rebellion, its consequences, all of our idolatry, all of our despising of God's Word and using

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God's name in vain, of all of our breakings, of all of the commandments regarding the honoring of our parents, not murdering, not committing adultery, not stealing, not lying, not coveting.

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He took all of that and he made Jesus to be the sinner. So he was oppressed, he was afflicted.

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I would even argue nobody has suffered as greatly as he has. And yet, in the midst of all of that, he did not open up his mouth, he did not even utter a peep.

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Like the lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before it shears is silent, he didn't even open his mouth.

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By oppression and judgment, he was taken away. And as for his generation who consider that he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgressions of my people.

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And here is a startling prophecy, one that Jesus could not have fulfilled.

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They made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death. And you think of Joseph of Arimathea and this ultimate act of kindness and mercy to this poor carpenter from Nazareth, who had done nothing wrong.

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And so in an act of just pure humanity and worship of who

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Jesus really is, he offers up his own tomb. And Isaiah called it 600 years beforehand.

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Although he had done no violence, there was no deceit in Jesus's mouth, none.

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And here's the hardest part, it was the will of the Lord to crush him, the text says.

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There's Jesus, late Monday, Thursday, on into Friday morning.

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In the wee hours, the night, praying the Mount of Olives. His prayer is fervent.

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Oh Father, Father, if it be, if there's any way, let this cup pass from me.

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Yet not my will, your will be done. And so the

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Father's will was to crush the Son, like a cluster of grapes in the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God.

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This is what we deserve, to be crushed by God for our iniquities.

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And God put Jesus to grief. And when his soul makes an offering for sin, listen to this, he shall see his offspring and he shall prolong his days.

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And now comes that other strand that seems so odd here. And the will of the

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Lord will prosper in his hand. You see, out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and he shall be satisfied.

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I always like making this point. In the Gospel of John, the last words of Christ that John heard that he recorded, were that Jesus said to Telestai, it is finished.

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It is finished. These are the words of a man who's been laboring at something, building something, doing something, and finally accomplished it.

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Think of those do -it -yourself projects that we like to do. Maybe you had your house in shambles while you refurbished a bathroom or a bedroom.

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Or you repainted part of your hallway or something like that. And you remember coming out and stripping everything down and then putting all the tape up and the plastic and all the nails and the patchwork.

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And finally at the end of it when you were done, the last daub of paint goes on there and you've got paint on your hands and on your face and on your clothes.

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And then you step back, you take it in. Yeah, it's finished.

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Yeah. You see, that's what Jesus said. It is finished. And Isaiah tells us that he was satisfied.

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You see, Jesus couldn't have his life taken from him. Nobody could have taken it from him, had they tried.

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And many did. Instead, Jesus willingly laid it down. He willingly laid it down at the time appointed, under the will of his

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Father. And when he laid it down, he did something amazing. He won.

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One text talks about the fact that if the principalities and powers of the demonic realm had understood what

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Jesus was doing and accomplishing on the cross, they would have never allowed him to be crucified. They would have stopped the whole thing.

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Because in the way of sin, the way you win is by killing.

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We all know this. It's the survival of the fittest. Dead men tell no tales.

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And better yet, dead men are no longer rivals. You see,

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Jesus did the unthinkable. He overthrew the dominion of darkness and defeated it by dying.

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He played by the devil's rules, allowed the devil to win. And by allowing the devil to win, the devil lost.

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He lost control of us. He lost the ability to accuse us. And Christ has now won for us the ability for us to be numbered with the righteous, which is unbelievable if you think about it.

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Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied. By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, listen to the words, make many to be accounted righteous.

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We who are numbered as transgressors, and rightly so, because of what

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Christ has done in his victory on the cross, when he cries out in satisfaction, it is finished.

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It makes it now possible for each and every one of us to be accounted and numbered with the righteous, because he bore our iniquities.

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So God will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.

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That's right. Always the victor gets the spoils, and now Christ is the one who is victorious by dying.

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So he shall divide the spoil with the strong. And here's the reason why, because he poured out his soul to death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, so that we can be numbered with the righteous, so that we can be forgiven, reconciled to the

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Father, and once again, as the text says, have shalom.

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So as we leave here tonight, we ponder anew, and again, the sufferings of Jesus.

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Here again, those words, if you think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great.

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Here you may view on the cross its nature, rightly, and here your guilt you can begin to estimate.

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Mark the sacrifice appointed. See the one who bears the awful load, the awful load of your sin and mine.

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It is the word of the Lord's anointed, the Son of Man, and the

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Son of God. In the name of Jesus, Amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. And again, that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue Northwest, Oslo, Minnesota, 56744. We thank you for your support.

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