Mocking God

Mark 15:16-20
Gerrit Buddingh’ | Sunday, August 08, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Gerrit Buddingh’

Introduction

At the point of this incident, Jesus has begun his journey to the cross of Calvary. Jesus has already spent the night in the garden of Gethsemane praying and sweating drops of blood at the very thought of what awaits him in the following twenty-four hours. He has been betrayed by Judas and arrested at night by the Jewish temple guards somewhere within the confines of the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus has already then been improperly tried and wrongfully convicted by the select members of the Sanhedrin. The Jewish temple guard used him then as a punching bag before bringing him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for trial.

Pilate first held a kind of preliminary hearing, and then tried to pass Jesus off on Herod, who quickly bounced Jesus back to Pilate again. Even though Pilate had sought to release Jesus, the Jewish authorities pressured Pilate to sentence Jesus to death. Capitulating to the mob, the spineless Pilate not only condemns Jesus to death by crucifixion, but also has him flogged (scourged) to probably within an inch of his life.

Mark spares us the gory details, but the brutality of this is beyond our comprehension. A Roman flogging was one of the worst punishments imaginable. The person to be flogged was stripped to the waist and tied to a post. The whip used was made of multiple straps of leather with pieces of bone or lead imbedded in it. The effect of the flogging was to remove large chunks of skin from the victim’s back, exposing the underlying muscles, tendons, blood vessels, and bones. The person being flogged would bleed profusely. The torture was so brutal that many who were sentenced to death died from the flogging before they ever made it to the cross.

But not satisfied with this, the entire Roman garrison, a cohort of at least 480 men, turns out in force to take it upon themselves to make sport of Jesus to jeer and deride his claim to kingship.

Why? Why did Jesus our King have to endure this indignity? It definitely was not a show or weakness or lack of power on his part. Jesus elsewhere makes it clear that he can in an instant call up twelve legions of angels. That is about seventy-two thousand angels that he had at his disposal—more than enough to prevent his arrest and certainly more than is needed to halt this humiliation that he was enduring. No, this is not weakness but mercy. Our King and Savior is on a mission to save his people.

According to the gospel narrative, Jesus had foretold on several occasions that he would be mocked, insulted, flogged, spit on, and crucified by the Gentiles. We see that in Matthew 20:19, Mark 10:34, and Luke 18:32.  The mocking of Christ takes place in three stages. First, immediately following his trial by the Jewish Sanhedrin; second, immediately following his condemnation by Pontius Pilate and his being mocked by these Gentile solders; and, third, while he was crucified but before dying on the hill called Golgotha. Today we will focus on the second incident.

This appalling event is considered part of Jesus’ passion, which culminates in his crucifixion. By human standards, Jesus is an unlikely king. Despite his deity and innocence, Jesus unjustly endures that just punishment for our sins in order to bring us salvation from sin and Satan, and to give us citizenship in his kingdom.

So we will examine, first, “The Assault and Battery: Jesus Being Mocked”; second, “The Awful Truth: There Is Something Rotten in Denmark”; third, “The Biblical Assertion: Man’s Only Hope”; and, fourth, “Some Concluding Observations.”

1. The Assault and Battery: Jesus Being Mocked

Each of the four New Testament gospels gives a parallel account of this event—the assault and battery of Jesus. In an act of physical violence, the term “assault” refers to the act which causes the victim to apprehend imminent physical harm. It doesn’t involve touching. “Battery” refers to the actual act causing physical harm.

Jesus has already been battered from the scourging he had just received upon Pilate’s orders. Now the callous Roman soldiers take it upon themselves to further assault and batter Jesus in an act of sheer derision and contempt. They decide to mock Jesus in front of the entire cohort of soldiers present in the Roman fortress. They strip off Jesus’ clothes and put a scarlet robe from one of the soldiers on him, simulating the purple robes of royalty. The purpose is to shame Jesus as a pretend king.

They also fashion a crown of thorns and then stage a mock coronation of this “King of the Jews,” pressing the thorns down into his scalp. They put a rod or a stick or a thick reed of some sort into his hand, mimicking a royal staff or scepter, the symbol of authority and power, to infer that this wretched specimen of a human being has no actual power of any kind.

The soldiers then lampoon Jesus as the Jewish king. They mockingly kneel before him and, in an act of ethnic hatred, deride Jesus, exclaiming, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Jesus’ face was probably already swollen from the hard slaps and beating he had endured from the Jewish temple police. But the Roman soldiers now add injury to insult by striking Jesus again and again and again about his head with his own fake scepter. From John 19:3 we learn that they slapped Jesus again and again with their hands.

The Jewish temple guard had earlier spit on Jesus, and the Roman soldiers now do so too. The Greek in the imperfect tense, probably meaning that they kept on spitting on Jesus in an act of total humiliation. Perhaps a substantial part of the cohort paraded by to spit on him. It was all as if to say, “Your claim to being a king is a joke. Look how easily we stripped you of your dignity and trampled upon your authority. We beat you with your own scepter. Where is your power to defend yourself and your kingdom? You are nothing! You are a worthless piece of scum!”

Unquestionably, Jesus was despised and rejected by men, both Jews and Gentiles alike. Truly, he was a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. Truly, he was scorned, and we esteemed him not (Isa. 53:3–4).

Finally, a squad of Roman soldiers leads Jesus away to be crucified, where he would be pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, in order that the punishment that brings us peace would be upon him (Isa. 53:5).

This was all part of God’s plan in eternity past, long before it was in the minds of the Jewish high priests and the Romans. It was for this very purpose that the Son of God had come to earth to become a man.

All these men fulfilled their evil and destructive purposes. But God was fulfilling his most gracious and redemptive plan for the salvation of his people. So it follows that the scarlet robe is an important symbol for us. In Isaiah 1:18 we read, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”

Since scarlet is associated with sin, it is right to think that the robe pictures my sins, your sins, being placed on Jesus so that God’s robe of righteousness might be placed on each of us (2 Cor. 5:21). Just as the soldiers clothed Jesus in scarlet, so Jesus willingly clothes himself in the scarlet sins of his elect people so that those who truly entrust themselves to him as Savior and Lord might be freed from their sin and the divine penalty due them.

Jesus is also made to wear the crown of thorns so that we might wear a crown of glory. Thorns came into the world with the sin of Adam. They are a part of the curse that is the consequence of Adam’s sin. Jesus is now made to feel the pain of these thorns of our sins. Thus, Jesus, being made a curse for us, will die on the cross to remove the curse from us. Christ is crowned with thorns to show that his kingdom is not of this world.

It was the custom of some pagan priests then to bring their sacrifices to their altars crowned with wreathes of flowers. This crown of thorns is the wreath with which Jesus, our godly high priest, is crowned.

The soldiers, as we said, put a reed, a pretend scepter, in Jesus’ right hand, symbolizing and mocking his supposed power as king. What the soldiers did not realize was that the hand that holds the reed is the hand that rules the world, that the soon-to-be-nail-scarred right hand of Jesus is now the hand that holds the scepter of universal dominance and dominion as Jesus sits on the throne of heaven as Christ Pantokrator.

When the Hebrew Bible was translated in the third century BC into Greek as the Septuagint, Pantokrator was used both in God’s title, YHWH Sabaoth, “The Lord of Hosts,” and as part of El Shaddai, “God Almighty.” In the New Testament, it is used as Christ’s title: Kurie ho Theos ho Pantokrator (“The Lord God Almighty”).

Oblivious to this, these soldiers pretend to pay homage to Jesus in order to ridicule what they perceive to be his make-believe, his pretend act to be the Son of God. Our text reveals that they bend their knees in disrespect to Jesus and derisively acclaim him King of the Jews.

Then they escalate this disrespect. In those days, when homage was paid to a king, the subject would kiss the king as a token of his allegiance.  But here, they instead spit on the face of the only perfect man who ever lived, and then take the reed and strike Jesus again and again on his head, thus driving the crown of thorns deeper into his scalp before taking him away to be crucified.

But that is not the end of the story. Soon after this, Jesus will rise from the dead and will ascend into heaven, where he now seated on the throne of heaven, at the right hand of God the Father. There he has been given the name that is above every name.

Additionally, on the last day, the great day of final judgment, Jesus is going to come again in great glory, and at his name, “every knee should bow . . . and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9–11).

But in the following verses, we see Jesus humiliated, wounded, and crucified. We see him being “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5, KJV). In 1 Peter 2:24 we read, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.” This, in part, is why Jesus took the bread at the Last Supper and said, “This is my body, which is broken for you.”

2. The Awful Truth: There Is Something Rotten in Denmark

Well, to be fair, it isn’t just in Denmark, but, as we shall see, there is a problem with people everywhere.  For those of us who have entrusted our lives to Jesus as Lord, our hearts break with each outburst of these people’s vicious hostility and animosity being expressed toward Jesus. To make a man about to die the subject of such scorn requires hearts abounding in cruelty and wickedness. You would think that men might be ashamed of engaging in such mad mockery as this, but no.

This is Jesus, the Lord over the entire universe, who is being abused. Satan hates him, and sinful, unregenerated people hate him. This Jesus, our Lord and Savior, who is being brutalized, astounds us by his mercy. It compels us to ask, “How can ordinary people do such cruel things?”

The truth is, people are rotten in their inner beings. All persons descending from Adam, with the exception of Jesus, are born sinners. (GJB) This is called original sin. Adam sinned in the garden of Eden, and we have inherited his sin nature, passed down to us. Original sin has marred our nature. We are depraved beings in the sight of God. The idea is that we are not sinners because we sinned, but we sin because we are sinners.

The bleak analysis of the Bible is that every single man and woman without exception is totally depraved. There is a compulsive predisposition to sin which is innate in every human being except Jesus. We are each born with evil permeating throughout our hearts and minds. This means we are born of our spiritual father, the devil. He is a liar, and we are born liars. He is a rebel towards God, and we are born rebels towards God. He is a destroyer, and we are destroyers in our hearts. This condition is called total depravity, or radical depravity. It is one of the neglected truths of Christianity, misunderstood, opposed, and distorted by many, perhaps even most preachers. And yet it is indispensable to understanding Jesus’ role as our Savior.

Evangelist Paul Washer noted, ‘It is only against the pitch blackness of man’s radical depravity that we can begin to see the glories of the gospel” in the light of Christ. The word “radical” has its root in the Latin word “radix,” which can be translated as “root” or “core.” So radical depravity speaks of sin that is not tangential or superficial, lying on the surface. Rather, sin penetrates into the core of every person—man, woman, and child. People are not basically good. Babies are not innocent before God, and we get worse as we grow older. Outside of Christ, we are morally rotten throughout our entire being. Our nature is twisted, perverted, and vile.

This does not necessarily mean that we always behave in the worst possible way at all times. The idea of total depravity does not mean that you are utterly depraved, that you are as bad as you could possibly could be. Not even Adolf Hitler or Che Guevara or Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy were that bad. I suspect they each had some affection for someone or something, perhaps each for his mother or his dog. And as wicked as they were, it is possible to imagine someone who is even more wicked than they.

No, total depravity does not mean you are utterly depraved, but it does mean an absence of holiness and a prevailing presence of sin which permeates all that you are and do and think. It means that you are always behaving without any real love for God or consideration for his honor. Without God’s intervention, your mind and your will are in bondage to sin. In John 8:34 Jesus declares, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin.”

Moreover, this means that you are dead in sin. Until God the Holy Spirit regenerates and changes you, you have a heart of stone and can only sin. You always act according to your sinful nature. You walk according to Satan’s motivations and indulge in the lusts of the flesh, whether they be the lust of your eyes or the boasting of what you have or do (1 John 2:16).

You may be well-trained to conceal it outwardly, but inwardly the craving of your sinful inner man lurks there nonetheless. This means that you cannot stop yourselves from sinning, whether in thought or deed. In 1 John 3:12 we read, “Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.”

So ever since Adam’s fall into sin, this indwelling, systemic sin in every human being manifests itself in hatred toward God and God’s people. You may be tempted to think that if only these Roman soldiers knew who this pitiful wretch of a man really is, they might have behaved differently. What if these soldiers had known that it is God the Son they were clothing with purple, that it is their Creator they were crowning with thorns, that it is the Sustainer of the universe they were mocking as King of the Jews, that it is the Lord of life and glory that they were striking on the head, that it is the Prince of Peace that they were spitting on, that it is the King of kings and Lord of lords that they were mockingly bending their knees to. “If only they had known!” you think.

But such is people’s innate hatred for God that it would not have mattered. People still do all this today, even though they know better. For they suppress the truth by their wickedness. Romans 1:21, 24, 28–32 reads, “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . . Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to [all sorts of wickedness]. . . . Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”

So I ask, what can be done for the throngs of defiant men and women who believe that their humanistic view of life is all-sufficient and that subjugation to Christ as King is bad? The answer is, nothing, other than warning them, and then declaring the gospel to them and praying that God will awaken them within them a new heart, that God will awaken them to eternal life in Jesus.

They believe that they are masters of their own fate and captains of their own souls. The sad fact is that they are presently joining in the same age-old rejection of Jesus Christ, as was done by the Jewish religious authorities and these Roman soldiers. “We don’t want this man to be our king,” to rule over us (Luke 19:14).

However, one day Jesus will return, wielding a true scepter, a rod of iron with which he will rule the world, including judging his defeated and subdued enemies (Rev. 19:15). Then the tables will be turned, and the mocking and derision will then be done by God of the ungodly who will be forced to appear and bow before him. As the psalmist says, “The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them” (Ps. 2:4).

Now, God instituted government to encourage good conduct and to restrain vice. But without proper checks and balances, government led by wicked people can go bad. In today’s text, we see people in authority, from the Jewish chief priest down to the newest recruit in the temple guard, and from Pilate the Roman governor down to the lowliest, buck private in the Roman army, each abusing their authority in order to do evil.

The Jewish hierarchy abused its authority in wrongfully arresting Jesus on false charges, then in framing him in court, and, lastly, in allowing the temple guard to physically rough him up while he was a prisoner in their custody. In our text, we find secular Roman authority doing the same thing, for there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile when it comes to sin or abuse of authority.

Every non-Christian is under Satan’s rule. Every non-Christian is governed by his own innate, deep-rooted depravity and is capable of committing atrocities. We want to believe that cruelty is limited to a select few. But every person is capable of:

• Being in a group like Nazi Germany’s Einsatzgruppen and its Ordnungspolizei that perpetrated the mass murder of Europe’s Jewry and others in the Holocaust;
• Or joining the Soviet Union’s brutal NKVD, which conducted the greater part of Joseph Stalin’s purges of people he believed to be disloyal or a threat to him, and which ran the camps of the Gulag Archipelago;
• Or being a part of Japan’s Kempeitai, the military police arm of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II, that savagely beat and murdered hundreds of thousands of prisoners, both military and civilian alike, and which made sex slaves out of Korean women. It also ran Japan’s special camps—places like Unit 731, where the most horrific medical and other experiments were performed on thousands of American Chinese, European, and Korean prisoners;
• Or participating in the Khmer Rouge and cooperating with its Santebal, its secret police who were in charge of Cambodia’s death camps and of forcing city dwellers out in the countryside to work as slave laborers in Pol Pot’s killing fields. All in all, over one quarter of Cambodia’s population was murdered in various ways by very ordinary people;
• Or of hijacking and crashing passenger planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, killing 2,753 people.

“But surely not I,” you are thinking. “I would never do such things.” However, the Bible says, “If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall” (1 Cor. 10:12). Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his book The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, observed, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

But is there no hope for us? This leads us to point three.

3. The Bible’s Assertion: Christ Is Man’s Only Hope

The lawyer answer to this question, “Is there no hope for us?” is both “Yes” and “No.” A. W. Pink put the question this way: “If man is a totally depraved being, can he possibly take the first step in the matter of his return to God?”

The short answer is “No.” We are each morally incapable of helping ourselves in this matter. We can never save ourselves from our sin and our sin nature. Pink also wrote, “To declare that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is to repudiate one of the most precious truths taught in the Bible, and in the Bible alone; namely, that God helps those who cannot help themselves, who have tried again and again only to fail.”

Because the non-Christian is spiritually dead to God, he or she is dead to the Bible, dead to truth, and dead even to godly preaching. People can do nothing of themselves to obtain God’s salvation. Unless God changes our hearts, we may reform for a season only to fall backwards into sin. The first steps must be all his. God, and God only, can save us. “You must be born again from above.”

This means that legalism, of trying to keep God’s moral law perfectly in our own strength, is a misguided, self-atonement. It simply cannot be done. And the so-called seeker who tries to make himself acceptable to God by some act of restitution, or by self-punishment, or by feeling regret, is guaranteed to fail as well.

While the desire to be pleasing to God is certainly commendable, the effort to please God by self-effort is not praiseworthy, for it assumes that sin once done can be undone, an assumption that is completely false. What is done is done and cannot be erased except by God. Until we are saved by Christ, our sins are ever before God, and we must face his just judgment.

Furthermore, while sinful people outside of Christ are capable of doing some extremely good deeds from other people’s perspectives, no one can do any true good or be pleasing in God’s sight unless and until he or she is regenerated by the Holy Spirit. As Joel Beeke has noted, “From God’s standpoint, which is the only true standpoint, natural man is incapable of goodness in thought, word, or deed, and thus cannot contribute anything to his salvation. He is in total rebellion against God.” He does nothing for God’s glory.

This is why Christianity hangs upon the atoning work of Jesus Christ alone on behalf of his people. The very heart of the gospel is that the Second Person of the Godhead became a human being, lived a perfectly sinless life, and then gave his life as a substitute for certain wicked, sinful people whom God in eternity past had determined to save. In Romans 5:6–8 we read, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

In Mark 15:31 we learn, “In the same way the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked [Jesus] among themselves. ‘He saved others,’ they said, ‘but he cannot save himself!’” Because the Lord Jesus came into this world to save his people from their sins, he refused to save himself from the humiliation of the beatings and the mockery, and of his crucifixion. Instead, he took our sins and the righteous wrath of God that was due us upon himself.

My friends, this is the very essence of the gospel. The holy Lord God will not and cannot save any sinner apart from the full satisfaction of his law and righteous justice through the singular obedience and death of his own dear Son as our only God-sanctioned and qualified substitute.

God does not have to save anyone. But by having chosen to save some, he cannot save any except in a manner that upholds his law and his justice. If righteousness could be obtained in some other way, then Christ died in vain. Romans 3:23–26 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. . . . He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

So the initiation and the work of salvation is God’s from start to finish. Augustine was one of the principal architects in the idea that is expressed in one of the solas, the idea of sola gratia, by grace alone. He said that the fall of Adam was so profound and the power of sin is so strong in the human heart that only God, acting on his own divine initiative and by his grace, could save us, and by his grace alone.

Before anyone comes to saving faith in Christ, God must first work unilaterally, independently, and sovereignly in changing the soul of the sinner, who is by nature dead in sin and trespasses. In that state of spiritual death, each person is completely unable to reconstitute himself. God has to come and breathe new spiritual life and power into the soul of that person before he or she is able to turn to Christ and trust in him.

Thus, transformed by the Holy Spirit, though, people do, in fact, come to Jesus and submit to him as Lord of their lives. They come willingly and cheerfully, but not until God has done this sovereign work of grace in bringing those people from spiritual death to spiritual life. This is called monergistic rebirth or monergistic regeneration. It is God’s work alone. There is nothing you or I can do to earn it, to deserve it, to merit it, or to provoke it. We must rest our case ultimately on the grace of God alone to save us.

Conclusion

The sad fact is that God came to his people Israel in the person of Jesus to be their Messiah and save them from their sins. But they rejected him. Instead, they desired to be rescued as a nation from Rome, and desired to become a world power with a Davidic king ruling from Jerusalem. They wanted a political kingdom, and they wanted it right then and there, not recognizing that the kingdom Jesus came to bring was not of this world. When Jesus did not do their bidding, they rejected and despised him. They mocked him for having raised their hopes so high and then disappointing them so deeply.

And the Gentiles were no better. They too rejected Jesus as their king and despised his person. Both Jews and Gentiles at that time mocked God’s offer of salvation in the person of Jesus, and most people do so now as well. Without God-opened eyes of faith, the Bible remains a closed book, no matter how well you know it or how many times you have read it, regardless of whether you are a Jew or Gentile, man or woman.

Given our fallen nature inherited from Adam, we must first be born again by God the Holy Spirit’s drawing and renewing us so that we can respond to the gospel and surrender our lives to Christ alone to be our Savior and King. Only then will we each own up to our own sinfulness and total inability to save ourselves. And only then will we submit to Jesus as Savior and Lord over every aspect of our lives.

But if you think you are already pretty good and right in God’s sight, if you think that you fully obey the moral law of God as the average Jew of Jesus’ day thought (and just as many of our contemporaries think, both Jews and Gentiles), then Jesus will have no appeal to you. You will treat him and his ministers with disrespect and even mock him and them in your mind and among your friends. On the other hand, if you see Jesus as God’s promised Redeemer, unjustly sentenced to death, beaten, flogged, mocked, spit upon, and finally brutally crucified on your behalf, then I exhort you to humble yourself and call out to him, “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”

In Jesus, the infinite love of God for redeemed sinners is majestically, magnificently displayed. In him, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). “This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16).

The hymn says, “What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of bliss, to bear the dreadful curse for our souls.” Second Corinthians 5:21 says, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The Bible says it is appointed for people once to die and then comes the judgment (Heb. 9:27). One day you will have to stand before Christ. If you have entrusted yourself to his person as Savior and live for him as your Lord, then you will have nothing to fear. But if in your heart you still reject his rule over you, then be aware that “God cannot be mocked” (Gal. 6:7). At that time, the roles will be reversed, and God will have the last laugh. There is a final judgment and eternal death in hell awaiting every unrepentant sinner.

So I exhort you to surrender to Jesus today and entrust your life to him as Savior and King, and all will be well. Though your sins are as scarlet, he will make them white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they will be white as wool (Isa. 1:18).

Heavenly Father, we praise you for these wonderfully rich promises. We are shocked by our condition. We are in despair by our hopelessness before you. But we thank you that you made a way, one way, in Christ. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and all who trust in him will never perish. Lord, may some here entrust themselves to your loving care even this day. In Jesus’ name. Amen.