Pastor Joe Focht Teaching: Hereafter—Matthew 26:66-68
Video teaching by CC Philadelphia
In this devotion, Joe Focht, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Philadelphia, PA, highlights the beating of Jesus Christ before His crucifixion and its importance for us now. All Scriptures are from the King James Version.
What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death. Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands, saying, Prophesy unto us, thou Christ, who is he that smote thee? Matthew 26:66-68
Isaiah 50:6-7 says, I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair; I hid not my face from their shame and their spitting. Isaiah 52:14 will tell us, As many as were astonished at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. He was beaten beyond human recognition. Then Isaiah 53:6 says, All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. Caiaphas asked Jesus, “Don’t you have anything to say?”
They’re beating Jesus, blindfolding Him, punching Him with their fists. No doubt they’re hitting Him with walking sticks or with rods, spitting on Him all the time. And then they start to mock Him, and say, “Hey, prophesy: Who hit you?” He knew all the names and their wives’ and children’s names. He knew the name of their fathers, what house they were from in Israel. Jesus knew it all—as He knows our names, our lives, who we are, our families, our situations.
But He was taking this beating for us. There was never a greater injustice demonstrated, and there was never greater love demonstrated. Because in an instant, He could have just blown up the world and stopped all of it. Instead, the One Who made salivary glands, the One Who created—nothing was made without Him—the ability to have saliva now is sitting on the other end of it. They’re spitting on the One Who created them.
They’re punching in the face the One Who made the human hand with all its multiple bones within it. And as He’s being punched, we’re told in Colossians 1:15 that through Him all things are held together. He’s sustaining the knuckles that are coming toward His face as it’s taking place.
The Creator had come into the midst of His own fallen creation—rather than discarding it and starting over—to take the brunt of it, to take the responsibility for His own fallen creation, which He knew before the foundation of the world when the Lamb was slain. He comes down into the middle of it and lets all of its venom come down on Him.
He does that as an example for you and me. He does that in many ways in our place. And I think He does it, as I read this, to give us a “nevertheless hereafter”. We are told to set our affections on things above, not on things on earth, where Christ sits at the right hand of God.
You and I have an amazing hereafter.
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