They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
Centuries before the crucifixion the treatment the suffering Redeemer would receive was foretold, and it was fulfilled in His sufferings on the cross. The foretelling belongs to a prophecy of bitter indignity and treatment in which, while fulfilling the divine purpose, He receives no pity or comfort. These details describe His treatment in suffering as part of His bearing the consequences of sin as humanity's substitute.
The gall for food and vinegar for thirst was the bitter, stupefying potion permitted to those dying by crucifixion to deaden the sense of pain. The fulfillment came near the end of His long hours of suffering, at the ninth hour when darkness lifted from the people and from His oppressed spirit and He revived to a sense of physical suffering and, parched, declared His thirst. One of His persecutors ran to fill a sponge with vinegar and gall and put it on a reed to give Him to drink, while mocking that Elijah might come to take Him down. He tasted it and refused it, just before He cried aloud that His work was finished and died.
He refused it because He would receive nothing that could cloud His mind. His faith had to keep fast hold upon God as His only strength, and to cloud His senses would give Satan an advantage. This was a last opportunity for His persecutors to sympathize with and relieve Him, but when the gloom was removed their terror abated and the old dread returned that He might yet escape them, so they answered His thirst with insult instead of mercy.
At that time angels veiled their faces, the sun refused to look, great darkness lay upon the earth, the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom, and the earth shook and the rocks rent. These events swept away the last hope of the disciples and filled His followers with sorrow. The bitter cup was not bodily anguish or dread of death, which martyrs have faced with joy and which would place Him beneath them, but the sense of sin bringing the Father's wrath upon Him as man's substitute and surety, breaking the heart of the Son of God. As the Lord of life and glory dying a ransom for the race, the guilt of every descendant of Adam in every age pressed upon His heart, with God's wrath and displeasure against iniquity and the hiding of the Father's face, revealing the malignity of sin, its deep root in the human heart, and man's blindness to its enormity.
Death is not an angel of mercy but a dissolution recoiled from by nature as the consequence of sin. Christ as prince of sufferers and sin-bearer, counted a transgressor to redeem from the curse of the law, endured judicial punishment and became sin itself. He gave His blood from head, hands, and feet and His anguish of soul to spoil death and open Paradise and immortal life.
Centuries before the crucifixion the treatment the suffering Redeemer would receive was foretold, and it was fulfilled in His sufferings on the cross. The foretelling belongs to a prophecy of bitter indignity and treatment in which, while fulfilling the divine purpose, He receives no pity or comfort. These details describe His treatment in suffering as part of His bearing the consequences of sin as humanity's substitute.
The gall for food and vinegar for thirst was the bitter, stupefying potion permitted to those dying by crucifixion to deaden the sense of pain. The fulfillment came near the end of His long hours of suffering, at the ninth hour when darkness lifted from the people and from His oppressed spirit and He revived to a sense of physical suffering and, parched, declared His thirst. One of His persecutors ran to fill a sponge with vinegar and gall and put it on a reed to give Him to drink, while mocking that Elijah might come to take Him down. He tasted it and refused it, just before He cried aloud that His work was finished and died.
He refused it because He would receive nothing that could cloud His mind. His faith had to keep fast hold upon God as His only strength, and to cloud His senses would give Satan an advantage. This was a last opportunity for His persecutors to sympathize with and relieve Him, but when the gloom was removed their terror abated and the old dread returned that He might yet escape them, so they answered His thirst with insult instead of mercy.
At that time angels veiled their faces, the sun refused to look, great darkness lay upon the earth, the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom, and the earth shook and the rocks rent. These events swept away the last hope of the disciples and filled His followers with sorrow. The bitter cup was not bodily anguish or dread of death, which martyrs have faced with joy and which would place Him beneath them, but the sense of sin bringing the Father's wrath upon Him as man's substitute and surety, breaking the heart of the Son of God. As the Lord of life and glory dying a ransom for the race, the guilt of every descendant of Adam in every age pressed upon His heart, with God's wrath and displeasure against iniquity and the hiding of the Father's face, revealing the malignity of sin, its deep root in the human heart, and man's blindness to its enormity.
Death is not an angel of mercy but a dissolution recoiled from by nature as the consequence of sin. Christ as prince of sufferers and sin-bearer, counted a transgressor to redeem from the curse of the law, endured judicial punishment and became sin itself. He gave His blood from head, hands, and feet and His anguish of soul to spoil death and open Paradise and immortal life.