Reposting daily through Easter – excerpts from The Cross He Bore by Frederick S. Leahy
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Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns... (KJV)
John 19:5
If we are to receive the crown of life, Christ must receive the crown of thorns. He cannot be our Saviour any other way....
It is in his diadem of thorns that he stoops low in humiliation and shame and sorrow to seek and to save sinners.
It is only by the sharp thorn of his suffering that the poisonous thorn of our sin is drawn.
And he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called the place of a skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha.
John 19:17
Christ had to die at Jerusalem, the city of the Word. No other city would have done. It was the only place in the economy of redemption where the Lamb of God could die outside the gates as one accursed of God.
As the priests hustled Christ outside the gates, they ministered, in spite of themselves, to the preparation of the one and final sacrifice for sin.
Jerusalem was the only place; the Passover was the only time. ‘For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival’ (1 Corinthians 5:7,8). ‘What remains now,’ says Calvin, ‘is that we eat, not once a year, but continually.’
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- More from The Crown of Thorns
- More from Outside the Gates
