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Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

Why The Lamb Goes Quietly

Jesus' Silence Before Pilate

Good Friday Looks Like Defeat

Buried With Criminals And A Rich Man

Temporary Tomb And Resurrection Hope

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Alright, guys, back at it. All week we've been doing a deep dive into Isaiah 53. Yesterday we did verses four through six, which provide really the entire logic of the cross. And today we're looking at verses seven through nine. I'll read them here. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shears is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people, and they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death. Although he had done no violence, there was no deceit in his mouth. So guys, this is just such a powerful image, and I know that most of us don't have any experience with slaughtering lambs, but let's talk about that just a little bit. A lamb doesn't try to get away. A lamb doesn't try to negotiate with its captors, a lamb will go wherever it is led. And this is how Jesus, I mean, part of the Trinity, part of the Godhead, acted before his accusers. I mean, it's just so incredibly powerful. And again, Isaiah wrote this 700 years before Jesus was led to his own slaughter. He was a participant in trials that were held in the middle of the night, right? Sham trials, really. And we see as recorded in Matthew 26 that at his trial before the Sanhedrin, Jesus remained silent. Then when he was before the Roman prefect Pilate, after the chief priests and the elders made their accusations toward him, Jesus gave no answer. We see in Matthew 27 that Pilate was caught off guard and really greatly amazed by this, as you can imagine. And in Mark's account of this interaction in Mark 15, Pilate kept asking Jesus, like, have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you? And amazingly, Jesus still remained silent. So was this just some form of passivity brought on by internal weakness? I mean, of course not. I mean, Jesus was actually exercising his will, total power. And remember in the garden that Jesus said that he could call down twelve legions of angels to his defense at any moment. But he didn't choose to call on those legions of angels here, did he? He chose silence. He could have dismantled everything with a snap of a finger. He could have dismantled the entire legal system. He could have dismantled the Sanhedrin, Rome, he could have dismantled everything that everyone even thought, but he said nothing. And look, the fact that Jesus was silent is one of the most historically verifiable details of his trial, really. So Roman and Jewish legal proceedings expected that defendants would actually answer for themselves because the defendant essentially always did that, right? So his silence here was so absolutely remarkable that even the independent accounts, the ones from outside the Bible, note that Jesus of Nazareth said nothing at his trials. And even more incredibly, Isaiah predicted that it would happen that way 700 years before it actually did. Then we see in verse 8 that he was taken away by oppression and judgment. And everyone at this point just considered him to be a dead man, right? Just another failed prophet that was about to be executed like a common criminal. And that is how everyone felt on Good Friday. The disciples had fled, the same people that were proclaiming Hosanna at the beginning of the week were now yelling, crucify him. The religious leaders and Satan had to have been celebrating, you're right, popping bottles, clinking glasses together. And from every possible vantage point, the story of Jesus of Nazareth was a wrap. But it gets really interesting in verse 9 of Isaiah 53. It gives us a detail that Isaiah only could have known with the divine inspiration from God. He said that this man's grave would be with the wicked and with a rich man. So let's talk about the wicked. Jesus was crucified between two criminals, right? So if you look at the types of crimes that these men would have, you know, been convicted of, they were more like terrorists, right? Not just like common thieves. And these terrorists were likely the buddies of Barabbas, you know, who the crown, the crowd wanted to have released so that Jesus could be crucified, right? So we've already got these guys up there wondering where their buddy Barabbas is, right? And who's this Jesus fella? But now let's talk about the rich man. After Jesus died on the cross, he was taken down from that cross and placed into the private tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. So he was a wealthy member of the council, and we see this described in Matthew 27. And then in Luke's gospel, it tells us that this was a new tomb that no one had ever been laid in before. So this would have been possible for a rich man and only possible for a rich man. And it was donated by this man to the condemned and now executed prisoner. And this is remarkable for a lot of reasons, because in that day, criminals that were condemned, crucified, and executed under the Romans were almost never afforded a proper burial. So a lot of times the bodies would be just left on the crosses to rot for several days, and you know, scavengers like birds and dogs would just, you know, eat pieces of them, and then eventually they would just chuck the remains into an unmarked mass grave. But that's not the story of Jesus, is it? Isaiah prophesied that he would be with a rich man in his death. Joseph of Arimathea was risking his place in the council and his good standing in the community by donating from his financial largesse a tomb to a man that was convicted in the Sanhedrin for blaspheming God. But luckily for all of humanity, the tomb wasn't the final resting place for Jesus. As it turns out, Joseph of Arimathea was only donating the tomb to Jesus temporarily because on Resurrection Sunday, Jesus walked out of that grave very much alive, with sin and death being very much dead.

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