He Has No Bones Broken

After six hours hanging on the cross suffering intense agonies, the time had come when Jesus Christ must die. He died a terrible death. He had finished His work and accomplished perfectly what His Father had commanded Him then when Jesus said, “it is finished.”

It was on a Friday afternoon when the Lord Jesus Christ finished His work of Salvation. Since then, every believer in Him has direct access to the Father. Jesus Christ is the Mediator of man and for this reason He came to this world to accomplish what God the Father had planned for His people. Because Friday was a day of preparation for the Sabbath, the soldiers must remove the body of Christ from the cross. And when they saw Jesus had died they did not break His legs whereas the two persons crucified together with Him had their legs broken by the soldiers (John 19:32-33,36). The explanation is that if the person has not died yet, his legs must be broken to ensure death so that they could bury him before the Sabbath comes. It was the custom of the Jews that nobody can do works, including burial on the Sabbath.

Why didn’t the soldiers break the legs of Jesus Christ? The answer was that God the Father kept His word. The prophecy that says, “He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken” (Ps. 34:20) must be fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. The intense agonies that He suffered were much worse than the two criminals hung together with Him. Nevertheless what was written in the Scriptures must be fulfilled. As Lockyer said, "While it is true that onlookers saw His bones protruding from His naked and emaciated body- “I may tell all my bones; they look and stare upon me”- yet in a miraculous way not a bone of the suffering Messiah was broken, even although some were out of joint. God kept His word, no bone of His Son was broken. But His bones waxed old through His roaring all the day long. It was a miracle of divine providence that Jesus was already dead when the soldiers came to club Him and thus hasten His death and the sooner remove His body from the cross."