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8/2 Reading Portions: Judges 16; Acts 20; Jeremiah 29; Mark 15
Mark 15:21
And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry His cross.
COMPELLED
The prisoners were required to carry the patibulum out to the place where they were to be executed— in this case, that place was Golgotha (Mark 15:22). The patibulum was the horizontal crossbeam of the cross, the section of wood to which the Lord Jesus’ wrists would have been pinned to with six-inch iron nails. Historically and archeologically, the patibulum could have weighed up to seventy-five pounds. Simon was “compelled” to carry the Lord’s patibulum. In other words, Simon was pressed into service to carry it for the Lord Jesus. This was a Roman law that even Jesus referred to in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:41), whereas a Roman soldier could press a person into public service as a courier or a load-bearer for 1,000 paces.
That this service is also recorded by two other gospel authors (Matt 27:32; Luke 23:26) is significant, because it shows how physically weak the Lord Jesus was when He was pinned to that tree. To list all the Scripture references from the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures of our Lord’s physical sufferings would require too much space in this short devotional. Besides, as I’ve preached for some three decades now, it wasn’t His physical suffering that paid for our sins. Christ’s physical suffering demonstrated how wicked fallen men are in our sin— that we would beat and ravage the Son of God so brutally that He would be unrecognizable as a human being (Isa 52:14). More importantly, when the sinless, perfect, robust, and Father-pleasing incarnate Christ suffered the eternal, infinite, and unbridled wrath of God for sins He did not commit, Jesus was at His weakest point physically. Beaten with fists and rods, beard completely plucked from His face, sleepless since His arrest, scourged with the Roman multi-thonged whip until His body was reduced to rubble, dehydration from blood loss, joints pulled from their sockets as He was stretched out upon the Latin cross, so that when Jesus suffered God’s wrath for the sin-debt you and I owe but cannot possibly pay, no one could ever say, “It wasn’t enough.” Jesus drank down God’s wrath to the dregs of the keg to save wretches like you and me (Psa 75:8). Christ’s cross is sufficient! Hallelujah! What a Savior!