Matthew 27:39

In Matthew 27:39-44 the Bible says, “Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left. And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, And saying, You who destroys the temple and builds it in three days, save yourself. If you be the Son of God, come down from the cross. Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders said, He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him. He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God. The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.”

Of course, if Jesus had saved himself, then none of us could be saved. As the people mocked Jesus, notice the words that they threw back at Him. They laughed at Him. How ridiculous to think that He could be the King of Israel. He was stripped naked and was dying as a common criminal. He was no King, not from a human standpoint. They also ridiculed Him for saying that He was the Son of God. It goes without saying that anyone with divine power could have performed a miracle and come off of the cross, and could certainly have kept himself from even going to the cross. Of course, it did not enter their minds that He allowed it to happen for their sake. God has a purpose for all things: even an untimely death. The death of Jesus had the greatest purpose of all: to die for the sins of the world.

Notice in verse 43 that the mockers said, “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him.” A similar accusation was made against Job when bad things happened to him. Those who observed Job’s life said that God had forsaken him when things went wrong. Now people were saying it about Christ. The same kind of thing happens today. If you serve God, eventually something is going to go wrong, but whatever you do, don’t let anyone tell you that God has forsaken you. Jesus said, “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” God has a purpose to all things.

Jesus tasted alienation from God the Father for us, so that we could always have the presence and companionship of God. Matthew 27:45-46 says, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus suffered many things during His torture and crucifixion, but His greatest suffering was spiritual in nature and took place during these three hours when darkness covered the land. No human would see the final agony, but they would hear the final agonizing cry. It was the cry of One who was made sin for us. It was the agony of suffering the curse of spiritual death for every single human being. That is suffering that we cannot even imagine.

Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” Spiritual death is one of the consequences of sin, and spiritual death is separation from God. In order for Jesus to die for our sins, He had to suffer spiritual death in our place. And He had to suffer separation from God the Father in order to suffer spiritual death. The worst thing about hell will be separation from God and separation from all that is good. In this world both the servants of God and the people who oppose God enjoy equally many of the blessings that God gives us. It rains on the just and on the unjust. But it will not be so in the next life. There will be those who will go to the place of eternal bliss and happiness because of the forgiveness of sins that is in Jesus, and there will be those who will go to the place where they will be eternally tormented by their own guilty conscience because they refused the forgiveness of sins that is in Jesus.

Hell is also called in the Bible outer darkness, because it is separation from God who is light. For three hours when Jesus was hanging on His cross there was total darkness probably because He was tasting the suffering of hell for us.

Matthew 27:47-50 says, “Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calls for Elijah. And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink. The rest said, Let be, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him. Jesus, when He had cried with a loud voice, yielded up the spirit.”

It is interesting that the Bible says about the death of Jesus that He “yielded up the spirit.” Jesus said in the Gospel of John about His life that “no man takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself.” What happened here was not so much the fact that wicked men took the life of Jesus, but rather that He freely gave His life. Once He had finished suffering the penalty for our sins, He left this world. The torture and beatings did not kill Him, and the crucifixion did not kill him. Normally, people hung on their cross for several days before dying.

When we die, it will be when God takes our spirit out of our bodies. Jesus left His body when His work on earth was done. The death of Jesus gives us a picture of death, at least what it will be for the believer. Death comes when God causes our spirit to leave our body, and we go to be with God.

Life on this earth is a privilege. The gift of life is a great opportunity to be enjoyed and to be spent fulfilling the will of God, and it must end with death. But for those who have eternal life, death is nothing to fear. Paul said, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” In the Gospel of John, when Jesus spoke of His death He said, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there you may be also.” If you know anyone who has died who knew the Lord, try not to be saddened because of the separation. Remember that they are now better off than we are. They are with the Lord.

Matthew 27:51 says, “And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom: and the earth did quake, and the rocks split.” The fact that the veil in the temple was torn was a very significant event. The innermost part of the temple was called the holy of holies. It represented the most intimate presence of God. For those who lived under the law in the age of the Old Testament no one but the high priest was allowed to enter, and him only once a year. A veil marked the entrance to the holy of holies, and absolutely no one else was permitted to lift that veil and pass through into the most intimate presence of God.

Therefore, when Jesus died the fact that the veil of the temple was miraculously torn, was as though God Himself reached out of heaven with His hand and ripped that veil, thus declaring that because of the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins, everyone in the world now has free access into the closest presence of God. Hebrews 4:14 and 16 says, “Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God...Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” There is no longer a need for priests. We are all priests of God. Revelation 1:6 says that Jesus “has made us kings and priests unto God.” There is no longer a need for a priesthood that would give us a high priest, who would enter once a year into the holy of holies for us. Jesus is our high priest. We can go directly to God through Him. We don’t need a temple and we don’t need a priest to do that. We only need to look to Christ in order to come to God and to be rightly related to God.

The work and ministry of Jesus was closely related to the temple, but not in ways that the Jews of His time would have expected of the Messiah. When Jesus was a baby, Mary and Joseph brought Him to the temple and it was there that Simeon took the baby Jesus in his arms and blessed God and said, “...my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all people.” At the age of twelve we saw Jesus in the temple, conversing with the doctors of the law.

But there was nothing in these two events that would have given us a hint about what Jesus would eventually teach in regards to the temple. In Matthew chapter 24 and verse 2 after Jesus and the disciples had visited the temple for the last time, Jesus declared about the temple, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” The disciples were astounded by such a statement coming from the mouth of the Messiah in regards to the great and holy temple.

For over a thousand years the temple had been not only the center of the Jewish religion, but also key to their national identity. They thought that the Messiah would build up and establish the greatness of the temple, not pronounce its destruction. Evidently what Jesus pronounced about the temple greatly affected the populace of Jerusalem. When Jesus was judged and condemned before the high priest, one of His accusers said in Matthew 27:61, “This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple, and build it in three days.” And again when Jesus was hanging on the cross, those who mocked Him said, “You who destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself.”

But God did not view the temple the way that the Jews did. The temple was meant to be temporary, and its time had ended. The temple was a part of the law, because it was based upon the tabernacle that was established by Moses at the giving of the law. But Jesus fulfilled the law, and once the law was fulfilled, there was no longer a need for the ceremonies, the sacrifices, the priesthood, or the temple. It says in the Gospel of John that the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.

Anyone who associates the worship of God with a building makes a serious mistake, and does not clearly understand the teachings of Jesus about the true worship of God. Because of Jesus, anyone can worship God anywhere. There is no place where you have to go to be closer to God. There is no building into which you must enter in order to be closer to God. This was exactly the meaning behind the conversation that Jesus had with the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4. He said to her in John 4:21, “...the hour comes, when you shall neither in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem worship the Father.” By the way, if Jesus said that one did not need to go to Jerusalem to worship, then it also meant that one did not need to go to the temple to worship, because the temple was in Jerusalem. Jesus also said in John 4:24, “God is a spirit; and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”

Remember that the work and ministry of Jesus put an end to temple worship. Don’t allow your church building to become similar to a temple after the way of the Old Testament. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the church building is some holy place where you must go in order to be in the presence of God. When Jesus wanted to be closer to God, He went out into nature. He went into the wilderness and into the mountains and not into a building. The day before He died on the cross Jesus pronounced the coming destruction of the temple, and then when He died on the cross, the veil of the temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom. This signified the end of temple worship. A church building is good to use from a practical standpoint as a place to gather together and be out of the sun or rain, but the building is not the church. The people are the church.

Matthew 27:52-53 says, “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after His resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” The word that is here used to refer to the death of believers is sleep. It is a gentle and quiet and comforting reference to death. Death is the last, great enemy of all humans. But for the believer in Christ, the sting of death has been removed and been replaced by the living hope of eternal life. The closed door of the coffin has been changed into the open door of the kingdom of God.

This event where the graves were opened and individuals appeared who had been buried in those graves is evidence for two things. It is an evidence of the truth of the resurrection. Matthew said that these who rose from the graves went into Jerusalem and were seen by many. Then he recorded the events in this public document that we call the Gospel of Matthew. Had Matthew not been telling the truth, he would have easily been laughed to scorn and his document would have been dismissed as false and would have had no ability to influence its readers to become believers in Jesus as the Messiah.

This event where the graves were opened is evidence for a second thing. It is evidence against the idea of reincarnation. If believers who were dead were raised from the dead, the direct implication is that they were raised with the same identity that they had previously. The Bible does not support the notion of classic reincarnation where one continues living by re-entering life under another identity.

It is a wonderful thing to know that there is a resurrection. No matter how many diseases are conquered by modern science, even if they find a cure to cancer, time and age will still win the battle against our bodies. No matter how good is your diet or your exercise program, the grave awaits you, and today you are one day closer to that grave. But thanks be to God, who has given us a hope beyond the grave, and has promised us a resurrection body similar to that of Jesus’ that will not grow old and will never die.

Matthew 27:54-56 says, “Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God. And many women were there beholding afar off, which followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto Him, Among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children.”

The centurion observed Jesus and the things that happened on the hill of Golgotha, and came to the conclusion that Jesus was the Son of God. Anyone who honestly considers the evidence about the person of Jesus will come to the same conclusion: that Jesus was the Son of God. The evidence is there. There is the historical evidence and the archeological evidence to verify the veracity and the historical accuracy of the account about Jesus of Nazareth. There is the evidence of the eyewitness testimonies of not only the apostles who left their written record, but of more than 500 people who saw Jesus after He rose from the dead. There is more than enough evidence to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. But even more than the evidence, you have God Himself who can prove Himself to you. Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find.”

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