The Death of Jesus – Why Crucifixion?

Many ancient cultures practiced crucifixion, and some modern ones, including Japan, as recently as the 1800s. There were reports of the Islamic State (ISIS) practicing it even in the last 10-15 years. The Romans adopted crucifixion from the Carthaginians in North Africa during the Punic wars of the 200s BC. In Jesus’ time the Roman occupiers prohibited the Jewish leadership inflicting capital punishment. Roman crucifixion was the only option. The Jewish death penalty prescribed in the Law was stoning, which they illegally did to Stephen later.

What is crucifixion?

Crucifixion was a brutal, painful, and humiliating death, sometimes lasting for days. The Latin roots are crux, meaning “cross,” and figere, meaning “fasten”. Our word, “excruciating” in reference to extreme pain comes from the word “crucifixion”. Victims were on public display, in part to deter similar crimes. Medical experts list possible causes of death as heart failure, loss of blood, or asphyxiation.

Many wonder, why did God allow his Son to go through one of the worst forms of execution ever invented? Wouldn’t there have been an easier way to pay the penalty for our sins? The Scriptures give some hints about this.

Old Testament references

In Genesis 3 we read about the fall. Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s one command and ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God spoke to the tempter, the devil in the form of a serpent. He said in verse 15, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel’.

This was the first Messianic prophecy in the Bible, given by God himself. The offspring of Eve referred to would be Jesus, who would bruise Satan but also be bruised by him. Paul writes in Romans 16:20, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet”, referring to the first part of the prophecy.

In 1968, archeologists discovered the remains of a crucified victim from the 1st century. His heel bone had a nail driven through it, verification of a common crucifixion practice. Crucifixion, then, would fulfill the second part of the prophecy, that Satan would “bruise his heel”. God was already alluding to the kind of death the Messiah would die and what he would accomplish, destroying the work of the devil.

We see another striking type of the Messiah in Numbers 21.

The Lord had sent a plague of serpents among the people due to their complaining. They repented, and asked Moses to pray, which he did. In verses 8 and 9, we read what the Lord said to Moses. “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on a pole. And if a serpent bit anyone, he would look at the bronze serpent and live. This sounds very strange, even pagan, but it makes sense as a type of the Messiah’s atoning sacrifice for us.

New Testament

In fact, Jesus affirms the prophetic nature of this incident in John 3:14-15, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so the Son of Man must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life”. And Paul in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree'” (quoted from Deuteronomy 21:23). And Paul also wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.“

And Jesus quotes Psalm 22:1, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross, expressing the anguish of taking our sin. This Psalm describes in detail the effects of crucifixion, and even predicts the casting of lots for Jesus’ clothes.

So why crucifixion?

On the cross of shame, Jesus not only willingly bore our sins, but actually became sin and was cursed for us. And he suffered in public before the eyes of the world. Not only the Scriptures document this, but also secular sources of that time that acknowledged the crucifixion of Jesus.

In the end, it was God’s way of showing us the full extent of his love. His love is for all of his created beings, even those who reject Him. He loved us enough to willingly endure the pain, and pay the penalty of our sin in an unimaginable way.

John 3:16, “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.“

Like the Israelites in the wilderness who looked at the serpent, “we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)