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1-1-14 “Father! into Your hands I commend My spirit.”
44 Anyone who died on the cross bowed forward, bowed his head. From the Gospels it can be assumed that the Lord first raised his head to the Father, and then nodded it, pointing to His people, giving them His spirit, giving to those who passed by in the no man's land between the crowd and the soldiers, who stood and openly showed loyalty to their King . However, the spirit of Christ is not so much the ability to perform miracles as His mind and behavior. The power to be like Him is given to us through the inspiration of His example on the cross. In a sense, the glorification of the Lord by His ascension on the cross enabled Him to impart His spirit to us (John 7:37-39). Please note that Christ gave up his last spirit according to His own desire, for the taking of the human spirit by God, like the taking away of spiritual gifts, should be considered, which follows from Gen. 6:3 (in the translation of the 70; see Church Slavonic), as condemnation God's.
We have already noted that with the last cry He gave up His spirit. He Himself gave His soul, His life. Nobody took it from Him. Because He was not supported by the footrest (see 53), He found it painfully difficult to breathe. It seems to me that He, in order to take a deep breath for the last time, despite the nails tearing the flesh of His body, threw back His head high, inhaled, and... felt His heart stop. But in these last few seconds He managed to exhale: “Father! into Your hands I commend My spirit,” thus giving
Your soul, Your life for us.
The centurion, who saw Him
die (modern translation), believed. His self-control, His self-sacrifice, His love were so great and obvious that they made this man believe in Him (perhaps it was Cornelius?)
Words spoken on the cross (7):
“Father! into Your hands I commend My spirit.”
“Father!”
These are the last words spoken by the Lord Jesus. It is very remarkable that in them He addresses God as “Father,” just as in the first of the seven phrases (“Father, forgive them”). In the same way, He turned to God when he experienced spiritual torment in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42; Matthew 26:39,42,44). These four descriptions bring to mind the image of a Man stretched out on the ground, constantly repeating: “Father... Father... Father... Father...” It is obvious that the Lord was pleased and comforted to think that God was His Father.
We have already noted in the chronology of Christ's crucifixion that His last seven phrases contained fewer and fewer words: 12-9-4-3-1-1-8. From which it was assumed that the reason for this was the difficulty of speaking on the cross. Therefore, the final cry must have required His maximum effort so that every word He uttered would be heard, so that we could reflect on the special importance of what was said by our Lord in the last painful moments on the cross.
“My Spirit”
There can be no doubt that the Lord Jesus wanted to say not only: “Well, that’s all, Father! I commend to You My soul, My life.”
We need to step back for a moment to find out exactly what we mean by the human spirit. It is true that spirit often means the life force or mind, while soul means the living being. However, this is not suitable for all cases. This issue has been discussed in detail elsewhere(1), to which I refer you. There we came to the conclusion that sometimes
the word “soul” means “you, me, that is, any personality, in all its manifestations.”
And in this sense, the soul is equivalent to the spirit. Therefore, the spirit that returns to God does not always
mean vitality, for it can also mean the mood of the mind and personal qualities. The same applies to the Spirit of God, which is not only a force, but also a force that expresses His Spirit, His mind. When the Lord Jesus gave up His spirit, He not only gave to God the vital energy inherent in all animals and plants, but also His personal qualities, the spiritual perfection He had achieved throughout His life.
Lord Jesus betrayed
Your spirit into the hands of the Father. This Greek word is also translated “entrust” in other places. The Lord Jesus was confident that His qualities would not be forgotten by the Father, and therefore He entrusted them to Him. It goes without saying that none of these thoughts support the idea of disembodied souls. Any existence can only exist in a living, bodily form. And yet from the Greek “I deliver” it is clear that Christ, in order to then literally ascend to the Father, in order to be accepted by Him and sit at His right hand, first entrusted His spirit to Him. The Father's hands undoubtedly signify His care, His protection (Mt 4:6). The thought that His endless spiritual efforts, His efforts to improve spiritually, were entrusted to the caring hands of the Father, served Him as a strong consolation.
“Everyone lives with Him”
It may be that we are overreacting to the apostate belief in the immortality of the soul. Despite the obvious falsity of this teaching, it must be admitted beyond any doubt that the Father remembers all His children whom He (through Christ) will raise up on the last day. This is why God looks upon Abraham as still living, calling “things that are not as if they were” (Rom 4:16,17). Even though Abraham is dead and unconscious, God is still the God of Abraham here and now, because “God is not [the God of] the dead, but of the living, for with Him all (of His people) live” (Luke 20,36,37). Because the dead are in an unconscious state, due to the fact that they are forgotten by us over time, we unconsciously tend to believe (which sometimes even slips into lectures on the state of the dead) that God has exactly the same attitude towards the dead saints. But “all are alive with Him.” The souls under the altar continue to cry out to Him, asking for vengeance. In other words, He remembers all their wonderful qualities, and this pushes Him to intervene in the affairs of this world even now (Rev 6:9; 20:4). The heavenly Jerusalem consists of the spirits (personal qualities) of “the righteous made perfect” in Christ (Heb. 12:23). When we try today to improve ourselves spiritually, our spirit strives to merge with the spirits that please God, to strive “for the spirits of the righteous who have achieved perfection” in the Spirit of God.
The hands of God also mean the Angels, through whom He fulfills His will. We will talk about this in more detail elsewhere (2). The supported hands of Moses are an image of the supporting hands of the Lord by the Angels on the cross. According to the prophecy of Gen. 49.24, the strength of the muscles of the Messiah’s arms comes “from the hands of the mighty [God] of Jacob,” from His thoughts about the hands of God. Throughout the Scriptures, God's hands are directly related to His natural creation (eg Ps 8:7; 94:5; Heb 1:10), i.e. with everything that was created by the Angels. In the last painful minutes, the Lord was aware of the presence of Angels; He knew that if He only wanted, they would quickly ease His suffering (Matt. 26:53). But He also felt their absence when He complained that God (His Angels?), as it seemed to Him, had abandoned Him. It is possible that He then felt that His spirit, His mind was abandoned by them, that He was not then entrusted to the Father and His Angels.
All this should inspire us, in the midst of the pain of trials, to strive to recognize the presence of the Angels supporting us. From the last words of our Lord it is clear that He was aware of their presence. In the midst of suffering and torment, the Angels seemed so far away from Him, but He believed that they would eventually take care of Him.
Lay your soul
The death of a person can be viewed as the result of physical processes over which a person is unable to exert any influence. People are killed, often against their will, or they die of disease, eventually breathing their last in their beds. Cases have not yet been known when a person gave up his last breath of his own free will. Death comes either suddenly or in a semi-conscious state. But this was not the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. For it is too often said that He Himself gave His soul, His life.
“Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.” From this alone it is clear that Christ died according to His own desire (1 Cor 15:3).
Christ gave His flesh for us (John 6:51).
Moses and Elijah spoke of death on the cross as “his exodus, which he had to accomplish in Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31), as can be seen from the text, according to his will.
The breaking of bread (a deeply spiritual act) reminds us of how Christ gave His body for us (Luke 22:19).
The death of Christ was His submission to God “even to death, even the death of the cross” (Phil 2:8).
Christ deliberately “gave up (literally poured out) His soul to death” (Isaiah 53:12) for the sake of our salvation. In purely physical terms, this could mean that with each breath the Lord's wounded flesh came into contact with the unplaned wood, so that blood constantly flowed and flowed from His back. Sometimes loss of blood became the cause of death of a person crucified on the cross: a person died due to the fact that blood flowed out of the wounds when the position of the body changed when inhaling and exhaling. Thus He poured out His soul upon death. In addition, the cramped muscles also made it difficult to breathe - He could not breathe without suddenly moving his body upward, thereby causing Himself additional pain and without irritating the wounds.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
The Lord often spoke about this side of His death, wanting to convey its essence to his listeners as clearly as possible: “And I lay down My life for the sheep... Therefore the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life... No one takes it from Me, but I give it Myself … I have received this commandment from My Father” (John 10:15-18).
So it turns out that Christ consciously gave His life, His soul. Neither the Jewish nor the Roman soldiers were directly responsible for His death. No one took the life of Christ, He gave it Himself, according to His Own will. Therefore, it becomes obvious that Christ did not simply die from crucifixion, which is once again confirmed by His unusually quick death. that He
Having cried out, he gave up the ghost,” and realized that “This man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39).
This last exhalation, made of His own free will, was something surprisingly unusual. And this leads us to the conclusion that Christ Himself chose for Himself the moment when He should die. From the fact that He “gave up (poured out) His soul to death” (Isaiah 53:12) it follows that death occurred due to the internal, spiritual activity of the Lord Jesus. He was an obedient servant who offered His soul
as a propitiation (Isa. 53:10).
Physically, this can be explained by the fact that He quickly died from external and internal moral injuries - perhaps from some kind of heart problem. From His words in Gethsemane that “ soul
is sorrowful unto death” (Matthew 26:38), it can be assumed that His mental anguish was so strong that it almost killed the Lord Jesus. So He suffered for us. So strongly did He understand the necessity of our salvation from sins, as well as the greatness of the righteousness of God. He suffered from physical torment on the cross as long as He was alive, and He lived as long as He wanted to live, until He consciously gave His life, His soul for our sins, offering Himself in the heavenly sanctuary, being both victim and priest.
And this means that Christ did not simply hang on the cross, awaiting the death that His Father hastened for Him. Every moment was used by Him to improve Himself, to accomplish through suffering, and when He realized that He had achieved this spiritual perfection, He gave His life, consciously doing this for the sake of love for us and for the sake of sacrifice to the Father. And the fact that He gave his soul at the time determined by Him is truly worthy of surprise. However, sometimes His self-sacrifice is also visible in His ministry, when He moved away from people who wanted to kill Him (Luke 4:30; John 8:59; 10:39), charming His pursuers with willpower and His visible inner qualities, not allowing “ no one to follow Him” (Mark 5:37).
The Lord Jesus “committed” His spirit to the Father. The Greek word “paratiq hmi” literally means “to entrust,” “to place near, to place before.” The word “tiq hmi” is translated as “lay down, lay down” where it is said that Christ lays down His life for us. The same word is used in the description of the case of the paralytic, when “they tried to carry him [into the house] and put him
before Jesus” (Luke 5:18), also about the foundation laid (1 Cor 3:11).
This word is also translated as “bow.” So Christ, when he gave up His spirit to the Father, laid down His life by bowing before Him. When Christ “ gave up
the spirit” (Matthew 27:50), He gave up His spirit to God, gave His life for us.
Reconstruction based on archaeological finds of death on the cross outside the walls of Jerusalem:
Example for us
The idea that Christ gave Himself for us also applies to the last moments of His life, when He laid it down, betrayed it, and gave up His last breath for us. It is obvious that it touched Paul very much, for he lived for Christ “who gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20), where he uses the same Greek word that appears in John 19:30, where it speaks of the giving up of the spirit by Christ . The same feelings of reverence are available to us, as Paul says in Eph 5:2: “Live in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself
for us as an offering and sacrifice to God, for a sweet aroma.” Therefore, Paul continues that fornication, all uncleanness, covetousness, foul language, etc. “It should not even be named among you... but, on the contrary, thanksgiving” (Eph 5:3,4). This amazing moment, when Christ reached the understanding that He was already able, by giving up His spirit, to lay down His life for us, was obviously deeply imprinted in the consciousness of Paul. This is why we can find suitable inspiration to “live in love” among ourselves, to live filled with gratitude for this to such an extent that we may not even waste time talking about the sins to which our human nature is so prone. These truly highly spiritual thoughts also came to the old, sin-stricken man Paul. And this means that they can come to us, enter into our lives, so that we can more deeply understand the meaning of how the Lord Jesus gave up His spirit, laying down His life for us, giving His soul for us, so that we too could live truly loving each other.
The same word appears again in the same chapter: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself
for her” (Eph 5:25). And this is truly a sublime, mountainous thought. Husbands need to reflect on that moment when Christ, having gained control over Himself, gave His life for us, and of His own will gave up His spirit. And the Spirit, through Paul, commands husbands to live exactly the same life every day, day after day. Therefore, it is not surprising that Paul asks wives to show their husbands due respect, seeing as they try to live according to the spirit commanded to them (Eph 5:33). Therefore, thoughtful reflection on all these truly highly spiritual things will benefit the spouses more than any human advice received in marriage and family counseling, or read in magazines.
One more thought inspired by Eph 5:25,26. Christ gave Himself for us by giving up His spirit, “ so that
sanctify it (the church), cleansing it with the washing of water (followed by baptism) through the word.” The same baptism and spiritual renewal is spoken of in Titus 3:5. It is probably not too pretentious to think that the Lord, in the last minutes before His death, saw the baptism of His people into His triumphant death, renewed by this baptism for the sake of their salvation by His spirit, His word.
The Father loved the Son because
that this is how He gave His life. The love of Almighty God was stirred in His soul as He beheld the death of His Son (John 10:17). And the same should happen to everyone who tries to live, laying down their life in the same way as our Lord laid it down in the last minutes. However, even before the crucifixion, the Lord said: “I lay down My life” (John 10:17), for His whole life, day after day, was Self-surrender, leading to the last breath on the cross. He looked upon His death on the cross as our baptism, by which we must be baptized (cf. Lk 12:50 with Rom 6:3,4; Col 2:10-12). But He also spoke about the same baptism as a continuous process (Matt. 20:22). Just as the prophecy in Ps 68:9,10, which is quoted elsewhere in connection with his ministry, speaks of the Lord’s suffering on the cross. The words “those who hate me without cause” (Ps. 68:5) apply not only to the entire period of His ministry (John 15:25), but also to death. The Lord spoke about manna, the image of which was His body, given by Him on the cross. However, He also spoke about this bread, about this image of His sacrifice, as about the bread that came down from heaven throughout His life (John 6:50,51).
The spirit of self-giving that He showed in His death was also revealed in His life.
That the Lord did not die simply because it happened, not because circumstances were stronger than Him, is perhaps the theme of Romans 6, where Paul so often refers to the death that Christ died and the life that He lives. He died a death. He died himself. But it is also true that He is alive now. He didn't just submit to circumstances. His life was not ruled by human lusts and selfish desires. In this sense He was pure from all this. When the Lord said that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20), it seems that He meant that peace could come for Him only after He had completed the work entrusted to Him. Only then did He “bow his head and give up his spirit” (John 19:30). The Lord lived an amazingly selfless life, and also died selflessly.
The fact that we are called by such a high calling to imitate the Lord in everything should evoke sublime feelings in us. This is strongly stated in 1 John 3:16: “By this we know love that He has laid
His life for us: and we must
lay down
our lives for the brothers.”
Here we are talking about the love of God, and therefore it turns out that God so merged with Christ on the cross that, in a sense, He gave Himself up for us, bowed down before us, laying Himself down in exactly the same way as they laid down the paralytic before Jesus. From this final cry on the cross we learn how much God loves us. Let us recognize His humility, His amazing long-suffering. It is not surprising that we should lay down our souls and lives for each other. No wonder we should
truly humbly serve one another.
Christ (and God in Him) laid down His soul for us when we were still sinners, which means we should not shy away from laying down our souls for our brothers just because we know their spiritual weakness. And this is the very essence of how we lay down our souls for each other, for we thereby imitate Christ, Who laid down His life for us even when we were
spiritually weak.
It is very difficult to express all this in simple human words. We must, we must
actually show this love in life. But what is most surprising is that in these last minutes the Lord also revealed Himself to lost Israel, about whom Jeremiah prophesied: “he gives up his breath; Even during the day her sun set (Jerusalem = Israel), she was ashamed and disgraced” (Jeremiah 15:9 - everything here reminds of the crucifixion).
It is very possible that Peter was present at the crucifixion, and that is why his Epistles are full of memories of him. What he saw there left a deep imprint on his entire life (3). He makes at least two references to the words spoken by Christ on the cross, inviting us to be imbued with their spirit. “For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, so that we would follow in His steps... He did not slander each other; suffering, did not threaten, but betrayed
(
Himself
- modern translation) Judge the Righteous" (1 Peter 2:21-23) - just as He gave His spirit to God.
We are indeed commanded to follow His example, to follow in His footsteps
.
Christ overcame the temptation to accept His suffering in a human way, but instead
gave Himself to God. The thought that He was laying down Himself for us helped Him not to become bitter. So for us, the cure for bitterness is the spirit of self-sacrifice, the spirit of devoting our souls to others.
In the same way, 1 Peter 4:13-19 invites us to share in the last sufferings of Christ: “But as you share in Christ’s sufferings, rejoice... Just so that none of you suffers as a murderer, or a thief, or a villain (a reference to the two villains who were crucified with Christ)... if you are a Christian (like Christ), then do not be ashamed (as Christ also despised shame - Heb 12:2)... So those who suffer according to the will of God (as Christ also suffered - Acts 2:23; Isa 53:10; Luke 22.22) may they betray
Him as a faithful Creator.”
So, we are truly commanded to follow His example, to follow in His footsteps
. I emphasize this again. The suffering of Christ is so deep and important that we unconsciously try not to notice them, each time when reading, running only our eyes over the lines to which we are commanded to attach our hearts.
Because the last words of the Lord were, “Father! “into Thy hands I commend My spirit,” it is supposed that His first words, after the resurrection, were words continuing this quotation from Ps. 30:6: “Thou hast delivered me, O Lord God of truth.” And this verse was usually read by Jews during evening prayer in the first century. So, most likely, the Lord uttered these words during his life every evening, falling asleep and waking up. And in this again it is clear that everything He experienced on the cross was a continuation of what He had already experienced during his life. However, it should be noted that David did not utter these words on his deathbed, for for him this Psalm was a way of expressing his desire to surrender his soul to the Father as a sign of thanksgiving and praise, which, however, Jesus also felt at His death.
Notes
(1) See 'The Problem of Soul and Spirit' in James And Other Studies
.
(2) See 'The Language of Angels' in Angels
.
(3) See ADNorris, Peter: Fisher of Men
and H. A. Whittaker
Studies in the Gospels
. Peter was “a witness of the sufferings of Christ” (1 Pet. 5:1).
We need to constantly meditate on this lifeless Body. “For where there is a testament (= testament), it is necessary that the death of the testator follow... it is of no force while the testator is alive” (Heb. 9:17). In this Body the everlasting covenant (Gen. 17:7) with each of us has become a living reality.
