The King on the Cross

Matthew 27:27-44

How many times have we sung the beautiful, yet haunting words that George Bennard penned more than a hundred years ago?

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suff’ring and shame;
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.^[1]

As the hymn says, the cross is an emblem of suffering and shame—a strange thing to love so much that we sing about it and rejoice in it. The cross was the means of the one of the most brutal means of execution ever devised: crucifixion. Unlike modern methods of capital punishment that are designed to produce a quick, painless death, crucifixion was intended to guarantee that the condemned person would die a slow, agonizing death. Crucifixion was a common method of execution in the first century, used by the Romans on some 20,000 people in Judea and Galilee alone. Why do we remember the name of only one of those crucified men? Why do we lift our voices to sing about Him? More →