Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Cross Was Anything BUT Defeat | The Gospels | Luke 23:44–49

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Why did Jesus’s crucifixion seem like just another failed messianic movement? What did the people standing at the cross fail to understand? And what do the darkness and torn curtain reveal about who he truly is? In today’s episode, Patrick shares how Luke 23:44–49 reveals the cosmic significance of Jesus’s death and why the cross was never a defeat, but the beginning of salvation. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: Luke 23:44–49

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Jesus was an abject failure. Or at least he must have seemed like that on the day of his death. The regions of Galilee and Judea, they were famous for having failed messias. He wasn't the first failed Messiah, and everybody assumed he wouldn't be the last. He wasn't even the first person crucified named Jesus. And the story with all of the first. of these failed messias was always the same. There was a charismatic leader who rose up from the populace and he gathered a grassroots following from the people. Then he came to Jerusalem. He took on Rome

only to be crushed under Roman boots, nailed to a Roman cross, and then hung outside the city gates on a major road so that everybody who passed by would hear the message. Anyone who stood up against Rome would die on a cross. So when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem mounted as an Israel, Israel-like king on a donkey. The script repeats with one small hitch. Jesus never takes on Rome. And ironically, this infuriates people so much that they give him to Rome. They say that he's a king threatening Caesar's throne. And so the Roman governor does what many before him did. He spills torrents of would-be Messiah blood. After his death, Luke records how the people respond. In Luke 2348, we read, when all the people who had gathered to witness this sight, Jesus's crucifixion,

when they saw what took place, they beat their breasts and went away. But all those who knew him, including the woman who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things. No one looking at the cross declares, Victory, this is it! No one looks at the cross and sees anything but a failure. Even his own disciples can do little more but watch in horror as all their hopes and dreams come crashing down.

they thought Jesus would be different. They thought Jesus would be the one who would finally take up a crown, not a cross. And yet, they were wrong. Before them hung the bloody, sweaty, drenched body, shred to bits by flails,

suffocating on a cross of another would be savior. If he couldn't save himself, how would he ever save them? If we shift to a modern historical perspective, it's quite possible for people to draw similar conclusions today. No informed person claims that Jesus didn't exist or that he wasn't crucified. This is a

universally recognized fact agreed upon by Christians and non-Christian scholars alike. So perhaps it's no surprise that many of them equate Jesus with those other failed messias before him. They say, look, he wasn't the king of the world. He was just another guy that died young who couldn't dodge the Roman boot. What set him apart was the simple fact that his disciples, somewhat inexplicably, managed to convince themselves and others that he rose from the dead. And they built an entire movement that turned the world's values completely upside down. But that was them, the disciples, not Jesus. Jesus was, in the end, in reality, in history, a failure. Of course, we know the end of Jesus' story. That he did actually historically rise and ascend. That the only explanation

for the world transforming power of Christianity is not that a bunch of fishermen convinced the world to change, it's that a dead man walked out of his grave three days after dying. So we know, in retrospect, he was no failure. He was the Lamb of God, sacrificed for the sins of the world to remake and renew all things in his likeness. But Luke will not wait for the resurrection to prove his point, because at the very moment of Jesus' death, there were already clear signs that this was no ordinary death, that his crucifixion was not an event like every other crucifixion that came before it, that when Jesus died, something cosmic, something global, something world-shattering took place. Let's read Luke's brief account of his death. It was now about noon, and the darkness came over

the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining, and the curtain of the temple was torn into. Jesus called out with a loud voice, Father, into your hands, I command. I commit my spirit. When he said this, he breathed his last. The centurion, seeing what happened, praised God and said, surely this man was a righteous man. Three things happened here that speak to the cosmic importance of Jesus' death. The first is quite literally Cottle. Luke says that darkness came over the land for three hours. The sun doesn't shine. We have no idea what sort of darkness it was, but it was obviously something more remarkable than cloud cover. A few years ago, there was a total eclipse that passed over my part of the world. And to be honest, I wasn't super pumped about it,

but I did all the things anyway. I bought the special glasses and waited outside. And the eclipse was one of the most eerie and awful and awe-inspiring things I think I've ever witnessed. For what felt like minutes, all but the sun's corona was blotted out. The day didn't become night, but he did become strangely dark. The wildest thing was the air and the sounds. All of the animals just stopped chirping. They stopped worrying. The wind seemed to slow down. It was deeply unnerving. Like all around me, everyone had agreed to stop and sit in awful awe of this strange convergence of moon and sun. No one knows exactly how the world went dark for three hours, but I've often thought it must be something like that, something eerie, something quiet,

something still, as if all of creation is holding its breath in a terrible, trembling terror. And of course, it was because Creation's maker was dying in its own arms. The one who made all things was being unmade. How is that even possible? How can the source of all life die? So the light he made disappears. And everything is in the cosmic darkness that existed before he said let there be light. The second thing that happens is that the curtain in the temple is torn into. Now this was a beautiful curtain and was embroidered with cherubim and garden trees and it weighed roughly 60,000 pounds and it was 60 feet tall. It took 300 priests just to move it. And that curtain, This massive curtain, it separated the holy place of the temple from the most holy place.

And the most holy place was the place where God himself dwelt. In other words, this massive curtain, it protected sinners from a holy God whose holiness would destroy them. But it also represented the separation that exists between us and God because of our sin. When Jesus died, the impossible happened, the massive curtain, it rips in half, symbolizing that by his death for sins, God no longer needed to remain in the most holy place. he would make his dwelling inside of sinful human hearts. The third thing that happens is the Roman centurion confesses that Jesus is a righteous man, the son of God. Now that's a shocking confession for one reason because the centurion serves Caesar and Caesar was the only human who could ever be

called the son of God. When the centurion calls him to son of God, he commits treason. But he can't help it because he sees that Jesus commands everything even in the moment of his death. He is the one who commends his spirit to God and then dies. Thus, we see that even in his final moments, there were signs that this death is no normal death, that his death is the hinge upon which history would turn. Creation holds its breath and descends into darkness. The Jews find their temple ripped open and God's presence poured forth. The Romans declare their own king of fake and the crucified king authentic.

Jesus was not a failure. He was God made flesh. God choosing to suffer and die. God sacrificing himself in our place for our sins, and nothing has been the same.