On this day, I will be speaking at a Good Friday service at my church. Here is what I will say.
Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last.
In Psalm 31, David wrote, “In you, Lord, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame; deliver me in your righteousness. … Into your hands I commit my spirit; deliver me, Lord, my faithful God.”
One might wonder why Jesus chose to echo these words of David. After all, David said, “let me never be put to shame,” but Jesus, on that Cross, was being shamed. Crucifixion was the ultimate shameful way to die.
David also called for deliverance. Yet, one might be excused from thinking that Jesus wasn’t delivered. After saying that He was committing His spirit to the Father, he breathed His last.
To a modern secular person, this sounds ludicrous. As we heard earlier, Jesus even said that He had been forsaken by the Father. What kind of deliverance is that?
But I have a few minutes to correct that viewpoint.
Jesus, throughout eternity past, has always been of one mind and heart with the Father. When the plan of salvation was birthed, He already had committed His spirit to the Father when He willingly chose to be the sacrifice for the sins of the world.
Then He made another commitment when He willingly came to this earth as a human baby. He left all the glory of heaven to join mankind in a pilgrimage through a sinful culture.
The famous passage in Philippians, chapter 2, reminds us of this.
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
By choosing to come down to earth, Jesus was committing His spirit to the Father.
On His way to that Cross, He experienced everything that we experience. As the writer of the book of Hebrews tells us:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For this reason, he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.
Let’s focus in on a few of those words. “He Himself suffered when He was tempted.” He “has been tempted in every way, just as we are.”
I’m going to take those words at face value. It seems to me that the temptations were real, and that Jesus had to make the right decision every time to turn away from all temptations. Every time He did so, He was committing His spirit to the Father.
Then there was a moment of ultimate commitment just prior to the Cross. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He had to decide once more whether He was going through with this.
Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, “Pray that you will not fall into temptation.” He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.
Did He really have to do this? Did we deserve to receive God’s mercy and forgiveness? In His three years of ministry, He saw the depths of human depravity. He saw how unworthy the mass of mankind was. Yet, He loved those the Father had given Him and He looked ahead to the establishment of His church, which was to be where the love of God would be manifested to a sinful world.
In that garden, He committed His spirit to the Father once more.
Everything that you’ve heard about today: His forgiveness for those who nailed Him to that Cross; His promise of paradise to the thief dying beside Him; His concern for His mother even while He was undergoing the most severe suffering imaginable; the knowledge that the Father had to turn away from Him so that He might know to the fullest what we would know if we experienced separation from God—all of this was a commitment to the Father as the plan of salvation came to its climax.
So, what about His deliverance? Where did that occur? It was at the moment of His death. That’s what the world doesn’t understand. To the world, physical death is the end of all things. For Jesus, on that awful Cross, death was the deliverance.
For us, Jesus’s death on the Cross is our deliverance. On the third day, He rose from the grave. Because He rose, we will rise also. Good Friday was an awful day, but Easter was coming.
Someday, we will go through the portal of death, but on the other side of that physical death is our Easter day. Therefore, today is the day that we should say along with Jesus, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”