Blessing, not a curse

In His divine nature, Jesus Christ already existed before the world began. In His humanity, He was born through virgin Mary. His own people, the Jews, had long been expecting that God would send them a Messiah, a leader who could free them from Roman Imperialism that ruled them for many years.

But the man whom many of them thought of as their liberator turned out to be a different one. They regarded Jesus as an antithesis of what they were dreaming of, incapable to act as a leader to set them free from the bondage of foreign rule.

The Jewish people or the people of God have time and again been enslaved and ruled by foreigners: Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans.

Bear in mind that Palestine (Israel) at the time of Jesus was part of the Roman province of Syria governed by a Roman Procurator named Pontius Pilate. An indecisive Roman prefect, he sentenced Jesus to die on the cross even though he found it by himself that Jesus committed no crime against Jewish and Roman laws.

And we all know that Jesus bore the brunt of the capital punishment (death by hanging on the cross) under Roman Law. I repeat, the Lord Jesus died on the cross--a capital punishment for worst criminal under Roman Law. The capital punishment for criminals under Jewish Law was death by stoning.

“Cursed be the man hanged on a tree.” (Galatians 3:13) For the Jews, Jesus’s death on the cross was nothing but a curse, but for Christians and all believers, it was a blessing that freed all humankind from the slavery of sin.

God rightly put it through Saint Paul, “For without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Hebrew 9:22)-- Joselito S. Berdin of

Lapu-Lapu City