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NASB | John 19:30 Therefore when Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, "It is finished!" And He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | John 19:30 When Jesus had received the sour wine, He said, "It is finished!" And He bowed His head and [voluntarily] gave up His spirit. |
Subject: "The Passion of the Christ" |
Bible Note: The question might have been taken as asking why Christ had to suffer anything but the cross itself. Why could he not have had an easy life up to that point? Was it not simply his death that was necessary for our salvation? Someone asks whether he could not have been simply ambushed and assassinated in a moment. He was the Lamb of God. Was it ever necessary to abuse a lamb before sacrificing it? Why was this prolonged passion necessary? Jesus said, “Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer”. Indeed, the Scriptures seem to indicate not only a day but a life of suffering. “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not”. To be born in a stable, to be thrown out of the synagogue, to be laughed at, to be accused of being an agent of Beelzebub, to have to tussle with the religious leaders, those things would not have been fun. It does say that as a child he had favor with God and with man, but even then he was misunderstood. He did have times of crowd adulation and occasions to rejoice, but his ministry seems to have been full of problems with Satan and with man. It may be said that his passion was only the climax to a life of suffering. Yet I am not sure why the intense suffering was also so prolonged, except it was so that no one could miss it. |