Okay. How good are you at making decisions? You think you're a decisive person? Tell you what, would you just lean over to the people next to you? I just want to say hi to those of you online at Grants Trail, Fenton, Mid Rivers Hub, and Overflow. Would you just tell someone next to you how decisive you are? In fact, if you look at them and say, "If you want, I'll just make decisions for you." Or maybe you look at them and say, "I barely decided to turn and talk to you." Whatever it is, just tell them where you are on that whole continuum. Okay, we'll get back in a second. Okay. All right. I would like for you to decide to come back here and listen to me for a second. No. So how many decisions do you think you make in a day? Yeah. There's a number that gets bandied about in the Internet, and I'll be honest with you, I tried to dive into kind of the research methodology. I'm not really buying the number, but the number that gets quoted is 35,000. Like you make 35,000 choices. Now, I don't know if it's that many, but you make a lot of choices if you count them all up. Like, "Hey, I'm tired. I just stood up to stretch my legs. Was that a decision?" "I think I'm going to get in the next lane over because it looks like it's a little bit faster." "Should I text her? Do I try to leave now? Should I get a double shot of espresso in my Americano?" Yes. Oh. By the way, I saw something. Starbucks says that their baristas have over 170,000 different ways to prepare your choices. Maybe that's why some people talk about decision fatigue. There was an article in Forbes magazine a couple of years ago. The title of the article was Decisions Are For Suckers. Now, the point there was, is that if you just kind of wait and hold back and let things evolve, then you might not have to make as many choices, dude. You just kind of let it flow. But I really think the punchline of it was, and this part I understand, not every choice you make is a capital D decision. But we do have those in our life, don't we? I mean, "I'm going to call my dad. I'm going to go back to the doctor. I'm going to a meeting tonight. I'm going to apply for that job. I'm going to ask my friend for forgiveness." Listen, those decisions aren't for suckers, are they? Those are capital D decisions that could change things. I'm going to ask you to consider something today. I'm going to ask you, capital D decision. I'm going to ask you to make the choice, for some of you, to turn towards something that is so familiar that you kind of think you've heard all of the details, and you probably have. You could stand up here and tell this story. But you're going to make the choice to hear from God one more time. And then some of you are going to turn towards this story that is so odd and so otherworldly, that your first impression or your first instinct is, "I think I'm just going to hold back a little bit." You see, what I'm going to ask us to do now is to make the choice, the decision, to turn our hearts, our thoughts, our eyes towards the cross. So let me pray for us, and we'll begin to prepare ourselves for Easter. Father, we come before you now. This is a story that some of us know well. It's a story that most of us know at least a little bit about. But God, it is a story that each of us, at one level or another, you know this about us. We struggle. God, we struggle with this story. We struggle with how brutal it is. We struggle understanding the mystery. So now please help us. Holy Spirit, move through our midst and through our church family. Move through these conversations now and help us to know what this means for us personally. So I ask this now in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Lots of questions about the cross. What we're going to do is we're going to put it in the context of this study that we've been in. We've been looking at a variety of hilltops and mountaintops throughout the scriptures, and part of what we've seen, yes, is that decisions are made there that can change the course of a life, of an entire nation, of history, and boy, does today apply. Now to just kind of set this up, I need you to know there's going to be like three different hills or mountains that we're going to look at. And so let's just familiarize ourself with Jerusalem again. So, this is the upper city. We talked about this last week. So much of what happens on the night Jesus is betrayed takes place in the upper city. That is on Mount Zion. Now, the temple kind of just is over all of ancient Israel, and that is built on Mount Moriah. We talked about that. The lower city, that's the old city. That's the city of David. That's just so much history there. Off in the distance is the Mount of Olives. So you can see there are a variety of high hills, I would call them. These aren't like mountains, snow-capped mountains, but high hills there on which Jerusalem is built. And we're going to kind of ping back and forth between all of these. But let's start with Moriah.You see, there's an almost impossible task that is given to a man named Abraham, and it's the first time we hear of Mount Moriah. So let's go back. We studied this in the fall. God says to him, "Take your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you." Now, if you were with us last fall, we went in-depth on this, and so if you want more answers to your questions, I would suggest go back. But I will say this much for now. There's no way I can fully explain what God's doing here. We're in the mystery, okay? I do know a few things. I know that God does not grind people to dust for fun. I know the scriptures tell us that God hates child sacrifice. In fact, it's what was going on in the pagan religion surrounding the ancient Israelites, and God speaks against that. I do know that it says that God is stretching him here. Maybe he's teaching him the depth of his own faith. I do know that God is teaching us, all of us who came after Abraham, because we get to look at this story and we see a loving father who trusts God enough. Now, if you read the story, we talk about this, Abraham seems to believe that even if this happens, God will bring his son back to him. He'll bring him back to life. Woo. But I do know that in that moment, God says, "No. I will provide a substitute. I'll provide a substitute." And so the whole story now, because there's a ram caught in a thicket, we're going to get to sacrifice in just a second, but the whole story wraps up with these words, "And to this day it is said, 'On the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.'" What I want you to remember about that ancient story is that God provides a substitute, and the mountain of the Lord is where? It's Moriah. It's Moriah. And on top of Moriah, what is now built? The temple. You'll remember that. Now let's go to the Mount of Olives because it is Palm Sunday, and for many of us, it's like, well, I'm used to a different part of the story. Well, let's go there right now. On that first Palm Sunday, there was a gathering of people in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. This is the feast that remembers and celebrates the rescue of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt. So the city is jam-packed. Everyone wants to come in and be near the city for this big feast. But the word on the street that year was, "Is he going to show up?" This famous rabbi, this teacher who teaches like no other, this one who performs miracles that cannot be denied, will he show up? And is he really Messiah? Because that's what I hear. Oh, and by the way, did you hear how much the religious leaders hate him? Because he always seems to be in a debate with them. So all of this is happening, and sure enough, Jesus does show up. Now, let's go to a different map here and see if we can just orient ourselves. He's staying with his friends in Bethany. All you need to know about Bethany is it's over here on the other side of the Mount of Olives. And so there's a road, and Jesus makes his way on that Sunday. It would've been the first day of the work week for them. Sabbath is Saturday, so this is like their Monday. Jesus comes into town and goes down this road and enters Jerusalem. Now, the other part of it, and this is where it gets really interesting, is that somewhere along the way, Jesus intentionally gets on the colt of a donkey and begins to ride in. Now, what is he doing there? There are people that will say that this is a bit of prophetic theater because this is an intentional callback to a prophet named Zechariah. And in the ninth chapter of his book, his prophecy, he says that Messiah, the king, is going to come to Israel in this humble way, riding on the colt of a donkey. So what's going on here? People notice this. Jesus is intentionally saying, "Yep, it's me. I am Israel's king. I am coming into the city." And they go berserk. Now, for some of us, it's like, I don't get it. How could that be? How did that happen? Well, let me ask you this. Do you have a favorite music artist that you have seen in concert? Anybody seen in concert somebody that they absolutely love? Nobody here. Okay. All right. For you music lovers at the other sites, you know what I'm talking about. And I'm talking about if you're a fan, there is a moment where you're going to hear, and maybe it's a deep cut, but you're going to hear one chord, two or three notes, and you lose it. Yeah. And the person that you came with is like, "What are you doing?" "Oh, this is my favorite song." And you're like, "You got that from two notes?" I'm telling you, this is a deep cut. But when they see him on a young donkey, these people lose it, and then other people are like, "Wait, what's going on? Do you see? The prophet. You get it?" And now they're laying their coats down. They're grabbing these palm branches, hence the name, and it's all symbolic, and they're welcoming the king. But they are expecting something else from this king. They want a political, maybe a military answer, and so they're crying out, "Hosanna," which means save us. But what they want to be saved from is Rome. They're not interested in being saved from their relational break with God. They're not interested in being saved from their sin, from a life apart from God. They want to be saved from Rome. Jesus knows this.Even as he's entering the city, he knows that in mere days, some of these people are going to be screaming something else. He knows that they're trying to squeeze him into a little box of their own expectations. But hear me now, God never fits into our little boxes. Amen. Yeah. And so Jesus, in this moment, knows. But still, all of that happened on Sunday. Now it's Monday. On Monday, Jesus goes back into the city and he clears the temple. Now, this is a big deal. We should talk about the temple for a second because there was a lot of corruption in the temple. It's a different story. We won't go into that today. But the temple was the center of life for ancient Israel. The temple was where sin was admitted and where sin was addressed. God was teaching his people, "Sin's a bigger deal than you think it is," and so he's requiring sacrifices. From the very beginning, God was requiring a sacrifice, and this is the part that kind of is weird for us. In short order, I want you to think of a sacrifice as kind of an object lesson. God is teaching people, "This is a bigger deal than you think it is, and to make things right is going to cost more than you think it's going to cost. In fact, you're going to bring me a sacrifice, but it's all going to point to the one and only sacrifice." Now, I want to be really clear on this. God isn't interested in mere ritual. He wasn't interested then, he isn't interested now. In fact, one of the writers of the New Testament says it real bluntly, "It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." So then what is it? It's about trusting him, trusting what he says, trusting what he has done for us, and we need to know that there will come a day, even then, when God is going to deal with this once and forever. But until then, we've got the temple, and the temple is the heartbeat of the nation. So Jesus goes into the temple. He clears out the corruption. He has the audacity to say, "It's my Father's house." He takes it really personally, and that kind of seals his fate, because these religious leaders hear about it, they're all a part of this, and from that moment on, they vow to destroy Jesus. He's got to be gone, and by gone, I mean dead. But how are they going to do that? Because at this point, early in the week, his poll numbers are through the roof. They get their answer in the form of one of Jesus' own, one of the 12. Judas, who is disillusioned. He's got his own thoughts about what Jesus should be doing. Darkness, we're told, enters into him. Now the Evil One is a part of this. And he agrees to deliver Jesus to them away from a watching crowd. But first, Jesus has one last meal with his followers. He's been sidestepping all of this all week long, but now he gathers the 12 in the upper room that's in that upper part of the city on Mount Zion, and they have a meal together, and that meal is the highly symbolic, storytelling meal of the Passover, and it's here that he shocks them and he says, "Hey, there's one of you guys who's going to betray me." Eventually, Judas is identified, he leaves, and now as we often say Jesus is on the clock because he knows it's only a matter of time. Judas is out of the room. Judas is now going to go find the authorities. How much time does he have with this group that he loves so much? He begins to pour into them. In the middle of this meal, he says to them, "I'm going to take these elements, bread and wine, and pour meaning into them." He connects himself to the Passover lamb. "It's all coming to me, fellas. I've been telling you all along, I'm going to pour out my life for the forgiveness of sins." Earlier, he's been saying things like, "I'm going to give my life as a ransom for many. I have come to seek and to save the lost." It's all rushing together. They have the meal. It's over. As we learned last week, they leave the upper room and they begin to wind their way to this place called Gethsemane. Now, as they make their way from the upper room to Gethsemane, he's teaching them the whole way, but he's also now wanting to get to this favorite spot of his where he prays. This is on the western slope of the Mount of Olives. It's a little grove of olive trees. If you go there today, people will tell you that those olive trees were there when Jesus prayed that night. Probably not. But you're in the location, you're there- Yes ... and you feel it. Jesus tucks his disciples in. He basically gives them one assignment. "Y'all just pray. Stay awake. Pray." None of them do. He goes off on his own. Now, this is where it gets a little difficult because now what we're going to see is God in the dirt, and he begins to pray. And what does he say? "Abba, Father, everything is possible for you." Right before that, we see that he began to be distressed and troubled, and the word there means horrified. Jesus is horrified, and so he's talking now about the cup, and when we say the cup, it's a reach back to what we see all throughout the Old Testament. The cup is a symbol of God's judgment. It's a symbol of God's wrath. This is a really difficult topic. We don't like to talk about this. But I want you to see that if we're going to understand the cross, if we're going to understand Easter, we need to understand God's judgment against sin. And if we're going to understand that, there's two things I want you to remember as we go through this next section. We are broken, and we are beloved. Yeah. That's good. Okay. The only way this makes sense, the only way the cross makes sense, is if we hang on to both of those, okay?But God says, "I will not look away from your rebellion. I will not look away from the havoc that you have wreaked in the relationship I have with you and the way you're treating each other." If there's going to be an eternity without all of this, it's got to be dealt with. "I will not look away." And this applies to all of us because we're all broken. Amen? Amen. Yeah. I don't think that was unanimous, but I get it. I get it. I get it. Tell you what, would you just turn and talk to each other again and maybe get in a little bit of a bigger group. Let's do this. Would you rate yourself on your goodness? Now, here's the scale. Okay? One, you just turn to somebody and say, "Listen, you really shouldn't be sitting next to me. It's not safe." Two, you're on the struggle bus. Three, okay. Four, I'm pretty good. Five, if I'm going to be honest, I'm so close to perfect, I shouldn't be sitting next to you. Go ahead and rate yourself on the goodness meter. Give it a go. Okay. So how'd you do? Is anybody scared who you're sitting next to? Let's just say it's going to be hard to change seats in this room, but how many of you drifted towards the middle? Yeah. It's just the safe place, isn't it? Yeah. It's like, yeah. I'm not going to ask you, but you kind of wanted. Your aspiration is, "I want to think I'm pretty good. Like I know I'm pretty good," right? And what we do is whenever we start to feel awkward about our levels of goodness, it's like, Greg, I feel like you're getting personal here. What's our defense on that? We compare ourselves to someone else. Like maybe you compared yourself to somebody else. I know you are, but what am I? It's that kind of a thing. But it's one of those things like, "Oh, well, now I don't know if I'm... I'll tell you what, at least I'm not as bad as that gal at work, because man, she's a mess." "I'm not as bad as that guy five rows in front of me. I went to high school with him. I know stories." "I'm not as bad as that neighbor of mine. I'm not as bad as my ex. I'm not as bad as that famous villain in history." It's what we do, isn't it? When in doubt, we get in the comparison game and it's like, "Well, at least I'm not as bad as that." But you see, if we get into that game, we're missing the point because we're comparing ourselves to one another, and that's not it. We think the goal is to be pretty good. That's not the goal. If the goal is pretty good, we are absolutely underestimating the gravity of evil and we're missing how desperately we need God's grace. We got to get to a kind of a level reset. Mark McMahon wrote about this years ago, and he had a friend who's a physicist who helped him with an analogy to kind of understand this and why comparison is sort of a futile way to do this, and he said, just imagine that all of us are like we are a light bulb. And so, let's go ahead and take all the lights down if we could, because some of us are, well, we got 50 watts of goodness, and that's pretty good. And if we ever start feeling bad about ourselves, what we do is we compare ourselves to somebody who's got, I don't know, like 25 watts of goodness. None of us want to be the dim bulb on the strand, right? And so we just keep comparing ourselves and go, "Well, it could be worse. I'm pretty good." And then there are times, and there are a few people in history that we look at and we go, "Oh, my goodness, that's like 250 watts of goodness." And even though we get intimidated by that, this helps us feel better about ourselves. But I'm telling you, it's a trap because it's still the comparison game. It's trite, it's foolish, it's irrelevant because we forget, we need to compare our goodness against the brightness of the sun. And when we do that, our goodness, what? It goes away. It fades. What if the blinding goodness and glory and perfection of God... 1 Timothy 6 says, "He lives in unapproachable light." I don't even think we understand God's holiness, but if we began to even just glimpse it a little bit, we would see that our sin is undeniable before Him, and He says, "I will not look away." Our sin matters to Him because of God's holiness.Now here's the thing. Whenever we talk about this, some of us immediately run to, uh-oh. And I want you to know, to understand God's judgment, you must also see it in the light of how much He loves you because God is saying, "I cannot look away, and I will not allow sin to have the last word." But he's also saying, "I don't want it to destroy you." Becky Pippert puts it like this, "God's wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer of sin which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being." I want you to remember that God's judgment is more closely tied to his love than you might realize. You see, the plot twist of all plot twists is that God says, "Yes, I'm going to deal with it," but God says, "I'm going to take on the consequence of your sin onto myself. I'm going to take the suffering. I'm going to take the pain. I'm going to take the judgment on myself because I want you to have a way out. I don't want this to destroy you." And that gets us back to Jesus drinking this cup. You see, when Jesus is talking about drinking the cup and he says, "Father, please, just take this away from me," part of what he is saying is, "I don't want to go through this." This is the human part of him. He's fully God, and he's fully human. Never forget that he's fully human. But all of this, if we're going to be honest, this cup runs back through everything that's happening in the temple and everything he said in the upper room. "Abba, please, is there another way?" By the way, nobody had ever called God Abba before. There's a few places in the Old Testament where you will see Israel calling him Father, kind of in a general sort of a way, but this is a really intimate term. It's Aramaic. This is the everyday language of Jesus. It's going to come up here in a minute, but this is the everyday language of Jesus, and it's a family term. It means Dad. It means Papa. It's also a sign of respect, so don't minimize it. But what is going on here is Jesus crying, face in the dirt, "Papa, is there another way? Yet not my will, yours." Now, this was always the plan. I promise you, this was always the plan. Jesus knew this. The Father knew this. The Spirit knew this. It's all running to this moment, but Jesus right here is saying yes. Please note Jesus is in control here. This is Jesus' choice here. Sometimes people make the mistake of going, "Well, I think God forced this on him, and this feels like abuse in some ways." No, be careful there. That is not what's going on at all. That would be another injustice piled on top of this. No. God knew what was going on. Jesus is crying out in anguish, but Jesus is in control, and Jesus says yes to the cross. He gets up. He wakes the disciples up. He sees these torches coming from up. Remember, they're up elevation-wise. He sees these torches, this mob that's moving towards him, and he knows. He knows. Judas gets there. He's leading the way. He betrays him. These thugs grab Jesus. They now take him back, if we just want to kind of keep with our geography lesson, they take him back to the upper city because that's where the high priest lives, and really what's going to happen here is over the rest of the night and early morning, there's just going to be a lot of back and forth, back and forth, where Jesus goes through what are essentially a series of illegal trials. I'm not going to bore you with the illegalities of it, but these are illegal trials. He's taken to the high priest and to these religious leaders. They want him gone, so they keep looking for a way to sentence him to death, but even their perjured witnesses can't get their stories straight. Jesus isn't cooperating with them at all, but at one point, only one point to the high priest, does he answer the question: "Are you the Son of the Blessed One? Are you the Son of God? Are you Messiah? Come." And Jesus says, "I am," but he doesn't stop there. He begins to quote this mysterious passage in the prophet Daniel who talks about the Son of Man who will co-reign with God, and he says, "You'll see me coming in glory. You'll see me on clouds of glory." It's a big, mysterious passage, but I promise you, this guy knew what he was saying, and he's so upset. Why is he upset? He's upset not because Jesus claims to be Messiah. Well, I think first of all, he's upset because he just hates him. But he's not just upset because he claims to be Messiah. He is actually saying, "I am equal to Yahweh." And what the scriptures say here is something really interesting. It says that he tore his clothes. Now, the Greek there suggests that it was probably an undershirt, a nightshirt that he had on underneath his clothing. And some of us are like, "Well, that seems like a really dramatic thing." No, you need to know in ancient world, this was a thing. When you tore your clothes, it was a thing. It's a way to show dismay. It's a way to show anger. It's a way to say no. It was also a way Elisha, way back in 2 Kings 2, Elisha, when he's mourning the loss of his mentor and friend Elijah, it's Elisha who takes his cloak and tears it in two. It's this expression of grief. It's an expression of anger. And in this moment, this high priest has lost it, and that's it. Jesus has to die. Now, he doesn't have the authority to condemn Jesus to dieHe's going to have to get the Romans to do this. After they have beaten him, after they have mocked him, they take him. It's early morning, let's say it's pre-dawn now, and they take him, still in the upper city, to Pontius Pilate. He's the Roman in charge of things. Romans would usually have their courts early in the morning. So they're getting him there early, and the way that they're going to present him to this Roman who's in charge is that he's a political threat. They focus on Jesus being Messiah. He's a king, he's a threat. He's not Caesar. You need to deal with him. But Pilate can't see anything to convict him of. In fact, there's a whole big thing we won't go into, a back and forth, he and Pilate inside, outside. They send him to another authority that's in town, and nobody can seem to convict him of anything because Jesus really isn't cooperating that much. Pilate sniffs it out. He's a political animal. He understands, in fact, the text tells us that he begins to sense that this whole thing is about the insecurities of the religious leaders. But he thinks he sees a way out, because there's really nothing on Jesus. But there is a tradition at this time, remember, it's Passover, so there was a tradition where you would release a prisoner kind of to just celebrate and to give something to the people. So here's what he does. He's about to give this crowd that has formed outside of his palace, he's about to give them a really easy choice. "Do you want me to release this convicted criminal, this terrorist, this known murderer named Barabbas, or do you want me to release Jesus?" An interesting name, by the way, Barabbas. Now, a lot of times we'll say Barabbas. Oh, this is the story about Barabbas. The only reason I'm goofing on our Midwest dialect here is that I need you to know what the story is telling us. His name was Bar Abbas. Did you hear it? Let's break it down again. Bar, son of Abbas. Abba. His name literally means the son of Abba, the son of the father. It's a common name. The son of the father. Pilate doesn't even know what he's asking. "Do you want me to release the son of the Abba, or do you want me to release Jesus, who is the son of the Abba?" Whole plan backfires. "We want Barabbas. We want Barabbas." They actually are now crying out for Jesus to be crucified. There's a whole lot of behind-the-scenes kind of stirring up of the crowd, but it's almost a riot. Pilate has lost control of everything. For his own sake, for his own political expediency, he now gives in to the crowd. He releases the convicted murderer and convicts the one innocent soul in all of history to death. It says that he had him flogged and then handed him over to be crucified. Flogged, we're not going to go into these details, but those scourgings, those whippings, usually amounted to so much blood loss that history tells us there were a lot of people who didn't even make it to the cross. They died during the flogging. The Romans knew how to kill people. But he's flogged. An entire company of men are abusing him now. They jam a crown of thorns on his head because he's a king, and then they begin to walk him out, and so we can just kind of get a sense of this. They begin to walk him out of the upper city and more than likely to that location. Now, let's talk about this for a second. Maybe it's because of the beatings, maybe it was because of the blood loss, but Jesus isn't moving fast enough for these soldiers through the streets. So they grab a fellow who's there. His name is Simon of Cyrene. He's from North Africa, and they make him carry the crossbeam, more than likely just the crossbeam, through the streets. And then John tells us Jesus is taken to the place of death. He uses another Aramaic term, Golgotha. Golgotha. Now, it means place of the skull. Did it look like a skull or was it just a place of death? We don't know. For those of you who are familiar with old-time songs and worship terms, in the Latin translation, it is Calvaria. We get our word calvary from that. So now you know how all of that works. But he is taken to Golgotha. Now, again, we don't know where it is, but let's just look at this. I want you to see that most archaeologists will say our best guess... Now, all of this has been built up, so it doesn't look like this today. But our best guess is that it's west of the second wall and north of-- I'm sorry, east of the second wall and north of the first wall. And if you zoom in, can we just zoom in here? There are people, there are archaeologists who have begun to see that it looks like this area was a quarry. And so maybe there was a mound there. Maybe there was an elevated area there. Maybe that's what looked like a skull. We don't know. But it was a place of death. It's close to the city because Rome wanted people to come out and see this. They wanted this to be a deterrent to anybody messing with them. But here it is, at this place, that Jesus is now stripped, again, history would tell us naked. He's attached to this cross with spikes, probably through his wrists. In the ancient world, the wrist was a part of the hand. If you want to be really graphic about it, it's the only way that you could support the weightHis feet are attached. The cross is raised. Probably not as high as some of the movies show you. He's put between two criminals, and there Jesus dies. It's 9:00 in the morning. Now, it would be dishonest of me to ignore the physical torture that Jesus went through, because Jesus is fully human, remember that. The emotional torture, his mom is right there watching him suffer. He's trying to take care of her. His disciples, all but one of them, have just scattered. The religious leaders, how much did they have to hate him to come outside the city and stand there at the foot of that cross and mock him and say, "If you're the Son of God, why don't you come off of the cross?" You want to talk about blasphemy. All of this is happening, but there's a spiritual price that has to be paid. You see, at noon, we're told that the sky grows dark. It's inexplicable, it's supernatural. What's going on here? Darkness is a symbol in God's word of the day of reckoning, of the day of judgment. All the way back in the plagues of Egypt, there was a plague of darkness so thick you could feel it. There is darkness now. I want you to understand that darkness is now enveloping this whole area, that judgment is now engulfing the area, that judgment is taking over the one innocent life that has ever lived. McMinn puts it this way, "Herein lies the stunning truth of God's grace. God knows every darkened corner of our existence, every rebellious thought, every distorted passion, every insecurity, every prodigal's venture to a faraway land, and still He chooses to reach out with forgiveness." Y'all, that's why the cross happened. It's forgiveness. Now, we've said this before, and I want to just explain it to you. When you forgive someone of something, I mean something that hurts, I mean something that took its toll on you, but you choose to not pay them back, guess what? You are absorbing that hurt. You're the one who suffers when you choose to say, "I'm not going to make you suffer back." That's a part of forgiveness, and that is what is happening here. God is saying, "I want to absorb this for you." Jesus is enduring the consequence for us on the cross. But the question some of you are asking, particularly if you're new to this story, is, "I don't get how one horrible afternoon outside of Jerusalem covers all of our sins." Well, I would ask it to you this way. How brilliant is God? You ever taken a look at the intricacies of the human eye? Whew, it's a lot. How powerful is God? Have you ever even studied for a half a second the blazing galaxies across this universe? So God creates all of this just with a word. God is infinite. Last question. How much can God suffer? This infinite being, this Jesus, the eternal God, I don't think we can understand, but his suffering now reaches to the depths of humanity's problem, and it stretches out across the universe. And in the darkness, Jesus cries again in Aramaic, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Now it's at this point, some of us really feel uncomfortable because it's like, uh-oh, I feel like Jesus is almost disillusioned here. He's almost giving up. No, not at all. Jesus is in the moment, and he's quoting scripture. He's quoting Psalm 22, which was written a thousand years before this with shockingly accurate details. Part of what he's doing is he's crying out his anguish to God, this godforsakenness to the Father. He's admitting this, but he's using scripture, and I think partly he's telling all of us, this was the plan all along. But Jesus now is crying out in this moment because there's that relational thing. We talk about sin breaking relationship. Well, right here, he is experiencing something he has never experienced before, which is a distance in the relationship with the Father. Later, Paul would explain it this way, "God made him," Jesus, "who had no sin to be sin for us so that we could enjoy the righteousness of God." He's the substitute here. He's never sinned. He's never done any of this. But now in this moment, all of the evil, all of the rebellion, the devastation of moral failure, it's all piling on him, and in this moment, the Father has to turn away from the Son. Keller puts it like this, "His body was being destroyed in the worst possible way, but that was a flea bite compared to what was happening to his soul. When he cried out that his God had forsaken him, he was experiencing hell itself." And so against the darkness, with a loud cry, Jesus breathes his last. Now, that phrase in the Greek is also used by Homer in the Iliad to describe a howling storm. I want you to see that Jesus is howling, and he breathes his last. Now, John, who's an eyewitness, who's the one disciple who's up close, he heard more. And most commentators will tell you that this loud cry was when Jesus said, "It is finished." But you got to hear me. When he says it's finished, it's not a cry of defeat. It is a cry of victory. Jesus is saying, "That's it. Papa, that's it. The debt's been paid." That's literally what it means. Humanity has a chance. I'm telling you all, all of the promises, all of the prophecies, all of the geography, all of the quirky little details that we've been looking at for months, it's all rushing together to this point. God promised to make a way home, and it happened. Yes. One more detailIt's said, it's recorded by Mark, that at this very moment, the curtain in the temple is torn in two from the top to the bottom. Now, let's just catch everybody up. The temple, remember the temple. The most holy place in the temple, the Holy of Holies some will call it, is a place where God resided with his people. This had been this way since the time of Moses. This is like where heaven and earth intersect, but there was a separation there because God's teaching the people that sin separates us from him. Now, this curtain wasn't just a curtain. This isn't grandma's lace. This thing was 30 feet high. It was braided. It was three to four inches thick. One historian, ancient historian, said that it took 300 grown men to lift it up. This is what separated the holiness of God from the rest of the temple, from the rest of Israel, really from the rest of the world. And only one day a year, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, could a priest go into that space behind that curtain and present a sacrifice for the sins of the people. But on this day, that fabric wall, Mark tells us, is gone. It's been torn, notice, from the top to the bottom. So God's the one who is doing this. It's as if God is saying, the sacrifice of all sacrifices, everything that has been pointing to this day, it's over. It's happened. The writer of Hebrews would say, because of Jesus, we now get to go boldly into the throne room of God. Not because of us, but because of what Jesus did for us. But where did this happen? At the temple. And where was the temple built? Y'all remember? Moriah. And what happened at Moriah? There was a father who walked up a hill with his son, and at the last minute, a substitute was made. And God provided, and there was no heartache. But on this day, God provided the substitute, and the heart of the father was broken. You see, if you really want to put it all together, there are some who would suggest, and I agree with them, that this is a little bit of an echo back to what even happened earlier in the night with the high priest. Remember when we said that there's this expression of dismay, and horror, and anger, and when it came to Elisha, there was this expression of just sadness and grief. There are some, like Raymond Brown, who will say that's what's going on in that moment. God the Son is suffering. God the Spirit is grieving. But God the Father, in that moment, even as this is happening, is going is my heart breaking. But the price has been paid, y'all. Yes. And God has made a way. Yes. And you and I have a chance to be forgiven because there is one who has come to make things right, and that's it. That's it. It's finished. It's paid in full. And God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit felt the grief and the suffering in that moment. Why? Because justice has to be served, but because you are the beloved. Yes. So, my question to you is this. How good are you at making decisions? Now here's your moment. If you've kind of been paying attention, you can see that really all over these hills, choices were made. Abraham chose to trust the Lord. That loud crowd chose shallow praise. Pilate chose compromise. Jesus chose surrender. The Father chose to reach out and say, "I'm not giving up." So what do we do? Well, here at the end, let's prepare our hearts for Easter. And we'll do it like this. We'll stand not at the foot of tradition, not at the foot of religious habit, but at the foot of the cross. And so what I would ask you to do now is to consider where you are with this Jesus. If you have received his grace, if you have turned away from trying to solve this on your own, if you are willing to admit, "I've got no hope except for what Jesus did for me on the cross," then in just a moment, I'm going to ask you to take the bread and the cup, just as Jesus instructed us to, right? So if you think about it, Jesus, with his disciples in that last meal, he took bread, and it says that he blessed it, and he broke it, and he said, "This is my body for you. Whenever you do this, remember me. Remember what I've done for you." Later, after the meal, he took the cup and said, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This is the new way. I have poured out my life for the forgiveness of your sins. Whenever you do this, remember me." So in just a moment, you'll have a chance to do that as you have considered all of this. You can do it quietly with your family, with the person you came with, on your own. But I guess what I want to say to you here at the end is, if that's not you yet, like if you haven't turned to Jesus yet, I want to respectfully say, don't take communion. It won't bring you peace. It won't bring you relationship. It won't bring you forgiveness. Don't take communion. Take Jesus instead. Take his hand. Reach out. Forgive me, redeem me, heal me, Jesus. I want what happened on the cross to be a part of my life. I invite you in. And then, if in these moments you do that, and afterwards, you come and find me or one of the pastors, it would be such an honor. Like everybody else has left, come find me. We'll celebrate communion together. But in this moment, no matter where we are, let's turn our eyes, our hearts, our thoughts to the cross.