Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Isaiah 53
Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they nailed him to the tree? Were you there when they pierced him in the side? Were you there when they laid him in the tomb? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
This old Negro spiritual can take anyone anywhere and make them feel as they were standing at the foot of the old rugged cross observing the suffering of our blessed Lord, the Son of God as he dies for the sin of the world. You feel His pain, you sense the abandonment of the Father toward His only begotten Son, and you cry aloud for deliverance as the spear is driven deep into His side. You hear him utter his last words, “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit” as the hopelessness of the hour has riveted your soul to the sealed death warrant issued from the foundation of the world. You watch closely how they remove him from the cross, pulling the nails out of harmless flesh, rolling him up in a shroud and carrying him to a new tomb wherein never a man has lain. All of your fears suddenly grips your soul as you hear the thud of the stone coming to a stop sealing the dark grave from the one who once said: “I am the resurrection and the life”! Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there as they mercilessly despised and rejected this man of sorrows who came to his own and his own banned him from society? He was prophesied to be the Lamb of God who came to sacrifice his life for you and me, he did this by taking upon himself the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men and became obedient to death, the death of a cross. He was that tender plant—but one who lived with grief and was hated with a passion. We hid as it were our faces from him, we saw no beauty in him to desire him, and we lifted up our heel against him. Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?
Were you there as he bore our griefs, as he carried our sorrows and was wounded for our transgressions? Were you there as he was bruised for our iniquities, punished for our peace and divinely smitten of God? Behold this man who as more than a man, he was that God-man, for no man could withstand this kind of satanic brutality. With his stripes we are forever forgiven and spiritually healed from a damming disease that has crippled all men. Because the Lord has laid on him all my sin removing them as far as the East is from the West, I have escape the judgment of God and the eternal lake of fire. Were you there when they pierced him in the side?
Were you there as they took him as a lamb to the slaughter, afflicted and oppressed? He said not a word as he came to fulfill the volume of the book written of him. He was ostracized from the beginning with a price on his head as a blasphemer, a revolutionary bigot, and one guilty of equating himself as God. He was cut off out the land of the living as if he were a leper and unclean. They laughed him to scorn, they mocked him, and nailed him to a tree. Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there as his soul revives and breath enters the corpse again? Were you there as he comes from the grave to justify many and now sitting on the right hand of God making intercession for transgressors? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
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