To be Delivered Up
Last week I was attending the Shepherd's Institute and thus was not home with my family for our normal morning Bible study and the words of Jesus in Mark 10:33-34 stood out to me; “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.” Actually, it was the word "delivered" that really caught my attention that morning. Why delivered? The basic meaning of the original word means "to hand over, to give into the charge of another". We know that Judas betrayed Jesus into the temple's hands, but is this what Jesus was referring to? Did Jesus feel that Judas had "possession" of Him? Could it be that Jesus felt that it was His own Father that would hand Him over to a cruel humanity for His mutilation and death? As