Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. LukeMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. Luke
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
Still further, the word, as I think, suggests another kind of
fulfilment. He was to 'accomplish' His death. That is to say, every
drop of that bitter cup, drop by drop, bitterness by bitterness,
pang by pang, desolation by desolation, He was to drink; and He
drank it. Every step of that road sown with ploughshares and live
coals He was to tread, with bleeding, blistered, slow, unshrinking
feet. And He trod it. He _accomplished_ it; hurrying over none
of the sorrow, perfunctorily doing none of the tasks. And after the
weary moments had ticked themselves away, and the six hours of
agony, when the minutes were as drops of blood falling slowly to the
ground, were passed, He inverted the cup, and it was empty, and He
said 'It is finished'; and He gave up the ghost, having
accomplished His decease in Jerusalem.'
II. Further, note in this incident what that death is in regard to
previous revelation.
I need not remind you, I suppose, that we have here the two great
representative figures of the past history of Israel--the Lawgiver,
who, according to the Old Testament, was not only the medium of
declaring the divine will, but the medium of establishing Sacrifice
as well as Law, and the Prophet, who, though no written words of his
have been preserved, and nothing of a predictive and Messianic
character seems to have dropped from His lips, yet stood as the
representative and head of the great prophetic order to which so
much of the earlier revelation was entrusted. And now here they two
stand with Christ on the mountain; and the theme about which they
spake with Him there is the theme of which the former revelation had
spoken in type and shadow, in stammering words, 'at sundry times and
in divers manners,' to the former generations--viz. the coming of
the great Sacrifice and the offering of the great Propitiation. All
the past of Israel pointed onwards to the Cross, and in that Cross
its highest word was transcended, its faintest emblems were
explained and expressed, its unsolved problems which it had raised
in order that they might be felt to be unsolved, were all answered,
and that which had been set forth but in shadow and symbol was given
to the world in reality for evermore. In Moses Law and Sacrifice,
and in Elijah the prophetic function, met by the side of Christ,
'and spake of His decease.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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