Just 5 Days

Jesus rode into Jerusalem as a celebrated king. People were shouting His praises, throwing down their cloaks along the trail for the donkey he rode, waving palm branches in the air. It was just 5 days later those same people were shouting again, except this time it wasn’t words of praise, it was words of hate. They wanted him to die, and not just to come to death, but to be whipped and scourged. They wanted him to be beaten and spit on, to be forced on a 2 mile march through the city, and finally to be nailed to a cross to suffer the most horrifying death that the Romans could conceive. This is an image I made of a crown of thorns and the kind of nails they would have used to keep Jesus pinned to the cross.

They weren’t just little prickly thorns, they were inches long and sharp as needles. Get the image out of your mind of some kind of picture-hanging nail. Not even the kind they build houses with today. Thes nails were more along the fashion of railroad spikes. Long enough to pierce through a grown man’s feet, one on top of the other, and then into the lumber of the cross. They were used over and over again, so they were crooked and rusty from the blood washed over them time and time again. All this He suffered. He didn’t run away, He didn’t try to hide. He didn’t renounce His throne or change His mind. He chose to die. And after He chose to die, all but one of his disciples followed him in martyrdom to similar deaths. They didn’t run away or change their minds either. They didn’t admit it was all just a crafty ruse, that it was all a lie. They followed the only truth they knew, to death. A doc friend of mine just gave a lecture on the crucifixion and the death of Christ from a medical perspective. It was fascinating to see. If you’d like to watch, just click here.