Footprints of the Savior: Part 5

Fifteen words can carry a whole world of meaning. We follow a simple but unforgettable outline of Jesus’ final hours, tracing a path from “silver” and betrayal to the “stone” at the tomb, stopping at Gethsemane, the trial, the scourging, the cross, and the moment Scripture records as darkness at noon. If you’ve ever wanted a clear, Bible-rooted meditation on the suffering of Christ, the crucifixion, and why the resurrection is not a symbol but a victory, this message is built to help you see the gospel with fresh weight and wonder.

Then we leave Jerusalem’s sorrow for the Emmaus Road, where two discouraged disciples trudge home with shattered hopes. Jesus Himself draws near, walks with them, and patiently pulls their story out with questions before opening the Scriptures from Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms. The result is one of the most personal pictures of how Bible truth restores faith: opened eyes, opened Scriptures, opened understanding, and hearts that burn again with hope in the risen Christ.

We also bring it home with direct application for anyone listening who feels sad, downcast, or troubled. Christ still calls us to ask Him to abide with us, to repent and trust Him for salvation, and to live out our faith in the strength of the Holy Spirit. And we end with a needed challenge: Christian radio can encourage you, but it cannot replace a faithful, Bible-believing local church.

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Transcript

Welcome And Series Purpose

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Alright, now I'm Brother James, and I welcome you one more time to the Preaching of the Cross Radio broadcast. I greet you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world, and I'm so very happy, really I am, that you've tuned into the program today. In fact, I'm not the only one that's happy and that appreciates it. Uh we've got hundreds and and actually thousands of people all around the world that pray that God would use this broadcast to draw men and women of the Lord Jesus Christ that they might be born again, and that God would use this program as a real blessing and encouragement to those that are that are already saved. And uh we just uh know that each and every one of them as they pray that they're so happy that you've tuned in today. And also, I believe that God is happy. I believe the Lord is pleased when you listen and hear someone exalt and magnify the person of his own dear son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And uh that's what we try our very best to do, not exalt ourselves, not to uh get you to put your faith or trust in uh this preacher, Brother James, or in our uh home church, the Bible Baptist Church of the Land, uh, Florida, in the United States. But uh we just want you to trust Jesus and uh lean upon him with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, to love him, to uh follow him, to walk in his footsteps. And you know that's what we've been studying if you've been with us for the last uh four broadcasts, and this will be the uh fifth broadcast in this series on the footprints of Jesus Christ, in which we are studying the life that he lived by studying uh the places that he walked and the various things which took place in these particular cities, and we're going to talk on the broadcast today about Jerusalem and about the Emmaus Road. About Jerusalem and about the Emmaus Road.

Why Jerusalem Stands Central

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Now our Lord Jesus Christ ever walked with Jerusalem in view. Wherever he might be in his gracious ministry, he would ultimately return to Jerusalem to die outside its walls. It would become eventually the city of his tears, his trial, his tree, and his tomb. He set his face to go to Jerusalem. Matthew puts the story of those last hours at Jerusalem between the evenings of Matthew twenty six twenty and Matthew twenty seven fifty seven. John puts the story between the gardens of chapter eighteen verse one and chapter nineteen verse forty one. Some years ago, on a visit to Jerusalem, a man by the name of Flanagan was asked to speak to a little company of believers on the subject of the sufferings of Christ. The meeting was to take place in the garden near the tomb, and he said he prayed for some fresh approach to the precious, familiar story of our Lord's sorrows as he pursued the gospel records. He said it came to him that there must have been at least fifteen hours of suffering between the Garden of Gethsemane and the garden tomb where they buried him. He said he read again and again the records of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, comparing and contrasting, and after some time, some words from these chapters seemed to group themselves in his mind and he jotted them down. He said later when he counted them, he found that he had fifteen words. And the fifteen words seemed to tell the story of fifteen hours of suffering by the Lord Jesus Christ on that last night. And these are the words that he came up with, and we want to talk about them in the first half of our broadcast

Fifteen S Words Of Suffering

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today. These are the fifteen words that he came up with the silver, the sweat, the spitting, the smiting, the stripping, the scourging, the sentence, the shame, the spike, the superscription, the sin bearing, the sponge, the spear, the sepulcher, and the stone. Let's make a brief remark about each of these. First of all, the silver the counting out of thirty pieces of silver to Judas Isariot began the night of suffering. In Israel's laws for compensations, Exodus twenty-one, verse thirty-two, this was the price of a slave. Men bartered and bargained and finally agreed the Savior's value at thirty pieces of silver. This was man's estimate of the worthy one, and sadly it was very, very low. He who was so precious to the father was valued by man at just the price of a slave. Secondly, the sil the silver we talked about, secondly the sweating the sweating. Gethsemane means by definition the oil press. Here the olives were crushed, and here in the mysterious conflict of those last hours, our Lord sweat, as it were, great drops of blood. It was not that he perspired blood, or even blood tinged sweat, but rather that his perspiration in his agony fell from his brow as heavy as blood drops. He prayed more earnestly, a stone's cast from his disciples. Like the holy ark of earlier days he was distanced from the people. His holy sweat moistened the ground of Gethsemane's garden, as did his tears, until in the late evening they arrested him, betrayed with the kiss of a friend. And then the spitting. Across the Brookron was the house of Caiaphas, the high priest. They took Jesus there, bound, and there they spat upon his precious face. The spittle has ever been the most foul form of insult among men. With certain animals it is their way of expressing hostility and enmity. And in their baseness, in their in their fully giving themselves over to their animal nature, these men spat upon our Lord. How tenderly amazing it is that the Father should have watched in silence while men did that to his beloved son. Then fourthly, the smiting. The smitey. How literally so many scriptures were fulfilled during these fifteen hours of suffering. They smote the judge of Israel upon the cheek, as promised in Micah chapter 5 and verse 1. They buffeted him. The gentle one who will not retaliate is punished and jostled and struck by puny, wicked men. From the house of Caiaphas in the early morning hours our Lord was taken to Gabbatha. Here was the fortress of Antonia, built on the corner of the Temple Mount. Here was Pilate's judgment hall, and here the sorrows continued with the stripping. The Bible says they took his own clothes from off him, dressed him in purple. They did not know, of course, that in earlier times, when Israel was on the move in the wilderness, the golden altar was covered with a purple cloth. You read this in Numbers chapter four and verse thirteen, and so we see that he, from whom there had ever ascended sweet fragrance to God, was not stripped of his Galilean garments and draped in purple for no mere accidental reason, but once again not only to fulfill scripture, but to fulfill typology contained in that Old Testament scripture. The scourging. At the whipping post they scourged him. The prophet had written in Psalm 129 and verse 3, The ploughers ploughed upon my back, they made long their furrows. The prophet wrote in Isaiah chapter 50 and verse number six I gave my back to the smiters. Not Jewish scourging, this, which would have been limited to forty stripes according to Deuteronomy 25 and verse 3. This was Roman scourging, limited only by the whim of the soldiers and by the time at their disposal. The suffering, the physical torture of this beating is beyond the description of words. And then the sentence He who only was entitled to live was condemned to die. Crucify him was the cry. And vacillating, weak, compromising Pilate gave sentence against his own conscience and his own good judgment. The Prince of Life was sentenced to death. Man, who in Eden had forfeited his right to live, condemns him to die who had no link with either Eden or Adam. Take ye him and crucify him. What a horrible sentence. The shame. Crowned with thorns, carrying his cross, our Lord leaves Jerusalem. Beneath an eastern sky, amid a rabble cry, a man went forth to die for me. Thorn crowned his lovely head, blood stained is every tread, cross laden on he sped for me. Oh, my friend, you can echo those words, and trust Christ is your Lord and Savior. And what about the spike? They pierced my hands and my feet was the prophetic word. Crude, coarse spikes of iron were the nails with which they nailed him there, at the place of the skull, and having crucified, they put over his head the superscription. This is Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. It was a superscription called by Matthew, his accusation, but by John, his title, his title, for so it rightly was. And then the sin bearing. The sin bearing. At bright noonday, the sun withdraws its light. In the darkness that covers the earth, the Savior suffers what we cannot know. He bare our sins in his own body on the tree. Man is closed out. God and the holy sin bearer are alone in the darkness. And from the shadows the orphan cry, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And again, let me say, as we've said so many times before, where we cannot understand, we bow and worship. The sponge. The sponge. He cries, I thirst. When his ministry began, he had sat on a well asking, Give me to drink at Sikar. Now at the close of that ministry he hangs alone upon his cross, saying, I thirst. A sponge is filled with vinegar. The sour wine, the common drink of the Roman soldier. It is put to his lips in literal fulfillment of Psalm 69, verse 21. And he cries, It is finished. What had the psalmist written there? Prophetically so many centuries before? Psalm 69, verse 21. They gave me also gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. Then comes the spear. They pierce his side with a lance. As the late Harold St. John has said, a highway has been opened to the heart of God. For the skeptic, for the scoffer, for the cynic of a later day, it can be said that man has with that spear provided his own proof that Jesus really died. One day the Bible says, They shall look on him whom they pierced, and wail because of him. And then the sepulchre, near to the skull hill, was the rock hewn tomb, nigh to the city, but outside. And in the late afternoon they laid him there. Spices most sweet they chose, aloes they brought in myrrh, wound him with these in linen clothes, and gave him a sepulchre. And the last of these fifteen words all I'm sure you've gathered by now, beginning with the letter S, the stone. It sealed his tomb, but for just a little while. Soon it was rolled away, and an angel sat upon it, declaring, He is not here. The man of sorrows was risen and alive, his tomb was empty. In the city of the great king our Lord had suffered, and outside its gate he had died. It was the only night in the records of his life that he had spent inside the walls of Jerusalem. Now the desolate city awaits his return. One day, in power and glory he will come back. The prophetic word, lift up your hands, O ye gates. The king of glory will one day get his rightful place, and Jerusalem shall be the city of peace

From Sin Bearing To Empty Tomb

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once more. Not until Christ returns, but when Christ returns.

The Emmaus Road And Broken Hope

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Let us turn our attention now to the Emmaus Road. Emmaus. This was a small village some seven miles from Jerusalem, today known as Amwas, AMWAS. The place is as insignificant as were Bethany and Cana, but the Savior was there, and this has made the difference and has preserved Emmaus in our memories and in our affections. It would be easy to believe that the two disciples were husband and wife as they walked the path of life together and communed together and reasoned in Luke 24. Recent events had saddened their circumstances and their conversation, and it showed in their faces. You read this in Luke twenty four, verse seventeen. Their Jewish dreams had in one day been shattered. Their bright hopes had been dimmed. They were disillusioned, dispirited, and forlorn. It was likely a slow and heavy pace that they trudged the dusty road from the holy city to Emmaus. They had walked it before often, but never in such despondency as now. And why? Well it's because they were doubters. We trusted, they said. Notice their trust is stated as being in the past tense. After three lonely days they had abandoned hope. It was as if the darkness of Golgotha still prevailed. But oh, my friends, as they walked in their sorrow, the Bible says Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. Oh, the beauty and accuracy of Holy Scripture, not just Jesus drew near, but Jesus Himself. He who had just recently told them the Father Himself loveth you in John 16, 27. He of whom it is said the Lord Himself should ascend from heaven with a shout in 1 Thessalonians 4.16. He of whom it is written, Jesus Himself stood in the midst of them in Luke 24 36. Himself drew near and went with them. How personal is his affection for his sorrowing people? He joins them on the Emmaus Road. Graciously the Lord will allow them to unburden their hearts to him, and he helps them to do so. He prompts them with questions, inviting answers. They marvel that he must be the only traveler in all Jerusalem who is apparently not aware of the things that happened there in recent days. How often we underestimate the Lord? Don't we all do it? He who had been the central figure in the whole sad story, now hears them ask, Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem and hast not known? And still in tender love and patience he draws them out. What things? he asks And they rehearse it all to one who knows it so well. Jesus of Nazareth, mighty indeed and word, betrayed, condemned, crucified, dead, the Redeemer of Israel, dead and buried, and now today the third day reports of an empty tomb, but they found not his body, they said in verse 23, they saw him not, they said in verse 24, and they're finished. Their stories told. That's all they had. But oh, don't you see, my friends, how gentle the Lord is even in reproving? If only they would believe all that the prophets had spoken. Not just that glory part which they wanted to believe, but all of it. And Jesus says to them, Ought not Christ to have suffered these things? And so begins that sweetest of all Bible lessons. I don't know about you, I've said this many times before in the church services of the Bible Baptist Church of Deland. I'll say it again to you, listening over this radio broadcast, if if all these events that took place in the Bible are recorded somewhere so that we could see them or view them. I don't know about you, but I I would choose above all else to walk along that Emmaus road as Jesus himself, from Moses, from the prophets, from the psalmists, and from the poets, showed to those two disciples all the scriptures that related to him, and to think that they had lived to see the glorious fulfillment of so many of the sacred predictions, and yet missed them, failed to see them because their faith was not in all the prophets had spoken. He must have told them about Abel's sacrifice of a lamb, about Isaac's altar, the lamb on Passover night, the brazen serpent in the wilderness that if a man would look upon, he would live, the Levitical offerings and how they pictured the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross at Calvary. Psalm 22, Psalm 69, Isaiah 53, Zechariah 12, Daniel 9, these and a multitude of other scriptures had pointed to these days, and had been fulfilled before their very eyes. Jesus said to them, O fool, saying what? That they hadn't taken God into account, and slow of heart to believe. Engrossed in his holy exposition, they had covered the miles and had arrived at Emmaus. The sun was setting over the distant hills of Moab. In perfect courtesy, the stranger made as though he would have gone farther, but they constrained him with the immortal words, Abide with us.

Abide With Us As Day Fades

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For us, you and I, as for them, the day is far spent. You know, politically, you look around in this world and you realize that there's not much left to be done, except pray, even so come, Lord Jesus. What confusion, what chaos, what disarray. Prophetically, the day is far spent. You know, there's no scripture, no prophecy left to be fulfilled before the Lord Jesus Christ comes and catches his church out of this world. Nothing left to be done that has to be done prior to the coming of the Lord to receive his own. Prophetically, the day is far spent. And you know, for some of us, we don't know, none of us knows the day or the hour of his death. No man has power over the spirit to retain it in that day. There's no discharge in that war. You know, for some of us, personally, the day is far spent. The sun is going down. How much we need the abiding presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. He responded to their plea, and he went into the Emmaus home to tarry with them. And the divine guest, as happens so often in the case of Jesus, the divine guest soon becomes the host. In a quiet and gracious manner he presides at their table and breaks the bread. Then did they recognize the familiar thanksgiving? Or did the full sleeves of his garment fall back as he handed the loaf to reveal the nail prints? I think it was in that way. But in whatever way it might have been, he was made known to them in the breaking of bread. Oh that it might be more often true of us as we sit and partake of the Lord's supper, breaking the bread in remembrance of his death, drinking the cup in remembrance of the blood that was shed. Oh that we might behold him in all his resurrection glory. Thou glorious bridegroom of our hearts, thy present smile a heaven imparts. O lift the veil if veil there be Let every saint thy beauty see. This twenty-fourth chapter of Luke is the chapter of the opened eyes in verse thirty-one. It's the chapter of the opened scriptures in verse thirty-two. It's the chapter of the opened understanding in verse forty-five. And the Bible says, having revealed himself, he vanished out of their sight. What did they say? What did they recall? Note the singular heart. Did not our heart burn within us? This suggests that they were, husband and wife, indeed one heart. The two had been made one. And with what joy, with what unspeakable joy they hastened to Jerusalem, bearers of the message which had in fact already reached the eleven, the Lord is risen indeed. And still to this day, we may not walk in Emmaus Road with the resurrected Christ, but don't you know if you're saved and born again, he's given you his Holy Spirit to expound the word? Did he not promise that when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will speak of things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ and make him known to you and I from the scriptures of truth? And is it not our privilege to this day to carry to the world as his people the message of a risen Christ? And is it not still our privilege to have the risen Christ abide with us? He is the Christ of Emmaus still, though exalted in the heavens.

Invitation To Know Christ Personally

SPEAKER_01 23:40

You know, you may be listening to my voice right now, and you're sad, downcast, discouraged, upset and troubled over something or many things. My friend, God sent his only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, into this world. He suffered, he bled, he died outside the city gate of Jerusalem. He was buried. But oh my friend, three days and three nights later he rose from the dead, triumphantly conquering over sin and death and hell. And you know all that he asks, all that he desires is to abide with you. He desires that you repent of your sin, receive him as your personal Lord and Savior, and allow him to become the friend that sticketh closer than a brother, allow him to come and dwell with you and promise you that he will never leave you nor forsake you. Oh, my dear friend, how blessed, how wonderful, what a change was made in the life of these two. What a change was made when Jesus, the resurrected Jesus Christ, became so very real to them. Has he become so real to you? Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ in an intimate, personal way? If not, he's waiting for you to make his acquaintance. He's standing, ready, willing, able, waiting. He simply wants you to come to him and introduce yourself as the sinner for whom he died. Ask him to forgive you, to wash all your sins away. And when you do that, the Bible says, Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Christ Jesus the Lord will abide with you in the person of his Holy Spirit in this life, in his own glorious person in the life which is to come. I hope and pray that you know the Christ of Jerusalem, the Christ of the Emmaus Road, as your personal Lord and Savior.

Church Membership Matters More Than Radio

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All right, thank you so much for listening today to the Preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast. I'm gonna ask you a question, and I I'm I'm as sincere as I can be. We got a minute and a half left. Don't, don't, don't, don't leave. That's not a money. I'm not gonna ask you for money, I'm gonna ask you a question, sincere question. I'm assuming if you're listening to a Christian radio station, you are likely a Christian. So I want to know something. Are you a faithful, devoted member of a church in your community? Christian radio, thank God for Christian radio. It is not a substitute for church. It is not a replacement for church. You say, Brother James, there's not a church in my town that is true to the Bible. Well, if there wasn't a good job in your town, what would you do? Never work again or go to a different town? You need, according to Scripture, you need to be in fellowship in a good, sound, strong, Bible-believing church where the Word of God is never corrected, where the music never resembles of a nightclub, where people dress properly, where the doctrine is sound, but you need to find one. If you've not found it yet, you need to keep looking. I I'm glad you listen to this radio program and others like it. I am. But it's not a substitute for church attendance. Just thought I'd throw that in there. This is the Preaching of the Cross Radio Broadcast. And I'll should be on in just a moment and let you know when we be heard again on this radio station. Hope you'll join us then. Till that time, I'm Brother James. May the Lord richly bless you and have a good day.