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"Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief
priests, and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him
to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify Him, and the third day He shall
rise again" (Matt. 20: 18, 19).
At the first revelation in Matt. 16:, Peter objected. At the second the disciples "were
exceeding sorry"; at the third the mother of Zebedee's children came seeking favours for
her sons in the future kingdom! The enemies of the Lord remembered that "that deceiver
said while He was yet alive, After three days I will rise again" (Matt. 27: 63), but His
disciples seem never to have grasped the significance of His words, for the two disciples
with whom the Lord talked on the way to Emmaus could report how the chief priests and
the rulers had delivered Him to be condemned to death, and had crucified Him. They
could even add:
"And beside all this, today is the third day since these things were done"
(Luke 24: 20, 21).
They even recounted the report of the open tomb, the vision of angels and the
declaration that He had been seen alive, without being conscious of their ignorance and
lack of faith. What was Peter's attitude? "I go fishing." What was the response of the
other apostles? "They say unto him, we also go with thee" (John 21: 3). The attitude of
the followers of the Saviour can be summed up in the words:
"Then all the disciples forsook Him and fled" (Matt. 26: 56).
There can be no doubt that the disciples were a dispirited, disillusioned, timid and
disbanded set of ineffectual pessimists.
Then a miracle happened, for nothing short of a miracle is an adequate explanation of
the mighty change that came over them all. From being a scattered, timid, disheartened
crowd, they were united in their stand FOR the fact of the resurrection and AGAINST the
combined opposition, even unto death and imprisonment, of Rome, the Sanhedrin, Herod
and all vested interests. Into the midst of the gathering to whom those who had met the
Lord on the way to Emmaus gave their testimony, suddenly appeared the risen Lord
Himself. They were terrified and thought they saw a spirit, but "He showed Himself after
His passion by many infallible proofs", and in this case, He showed them His hands and
His feet, and ate a piece of broiled fish, and an honeycomb. Some rather crude
deductions have been made from the fact that the Lord did not say "flesh and blood" but
"flesh and bones" in this demonstration, but if "blood" was actually excluded, the idea of
eating food of any kind wants a deal of explaining, but more serious still, a precious truth
is veiled by this speculation. It is assumed that the normal phrase would have been
"Flesh and blood" but this is not so. The normal phrase in the O.T. is "flesh and bone".
Adam said of Eve "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Gen. 2: 23) but
Adam was not satisfying himself that Eve was not a "spirit". He meant something more:
"And Laban said to him (Jacob) Surely thou art my bone and my flesh . . . . . thou art
my brother" (Gen. 29: 14, 15).