Turining Point Church

It is the month before Easter, the time we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. In the next few weeks we will consider four key aspects, not of His resurrection, but rather of His crucifixion. My hope is that these brief messages will help prepare you to celebrate the reason for which He arose!

It was no accident that the Lord of glory was crucified between two thieves. There are no accidents in a world ruled by God. Certainly there can be no accident on that day and with that event which lies at the center of world history. No. God was in charge. From eternity He had decreed when and where and how and with whom His Son would die. Nothing was left to chance or the whim and fancy of man. All that God had eternally decided came to pass exactly as He had ordained, and nothing happened except that which He had eternally purposed. Everything man did, God's "power and will had decided beforehand should happen" (Acts 4:28).

When Pilate gave orders that the Lord Jesus should be crucified between the two criminals he, unknowingly, was carrying out the eternal decree of God and fulfilling the prophecy of Scripture. Seven hundred years before Pilate gave this command, God had declared through Isaiah that His Son was to be "numbered with the transgressors" (Is 53:12). How inconceivable this must have seemed, that the Holy One of God should be numbered with the transgressors; that He Who wrote the law with His very own finger on the two tablets of stone would be assigned a place with the ungodly; that the Son of God was to be executed with criminals. Incredible as it may seem, it actually came to pass: on Good Friday Jesus hung on the cross with a criminal on his left and right. This reminds us that not a single Word of God can fall to the ground. What God ordains and announces comes to pass.

Why did God ordain it that His only begotten Son should be crucified between two criminals?

Jesus was crucified with two thieves in order to demonstrate, as the Lord's Supper reminds us, the full extent of His humiliation. At His birth He was surrounded by the animals of the stable and placed in a manger. Now, at His death, He is numbered with criminals. As the early Christian song tells us, He "made himself nothing" and "humbled himself" (Phil 2:7, 8).

Though sinless, holy, and perfect, the Lord Jesus was crucified between two criminals; He was "numbered with the transgressors" (Is 53:12). This reminds us of what the Lord's Supper shows us: that He hung there in our place, as our Substitute. We, not Christ, are the transgressors. It should have been us hanging there on the tree between the two thieves. It should have been us suffering the shameful death of the cross. But Christ took our place. He was numbered among the transgressors in our stead.

In His Sovereign will, God used those two men to dramatize the only two possible responses to the Christ: belief and unbelief, acceptance and rejection, repentance and impenitence.

CONSIDER the grace of God in your own life; how easily you could have been that other thief who died in his sins.