Psalm 4:2

An instructive writer has made a mournful list of the honors that the blinded people of Israel awarded to their long-expected King.

1. They gave him a procession of honor, in which Roman legionaries, Jewish priests, men, and women took part, he himself bearing his cross. This is the triumph the world awards to him who comes to overthrow humanity's direst foes. Derisive shouts are his only acclamations, and cruel taunts his only paeans of praise.

2. They presented him with the wine of honor. Instead of a golden cup of generous wine, they offered him the criminal’s stupefying death-draught. He refused this, because he was determined to preserve an uninjured taste with which to taste death. Afterwards, when he cried, I thirst, they gave him vinegar mixed with gall, thrust to his mouth on a sponge. Oh! wretched, detestable inhospitality to the King’s Son.

3. He was provided with a guard of honor, who showed their esteem for him by gambling over his garments, which they had seized as their booty. Such was the bodyguard of the adored of heaven; a quaternion of brutal gamblers.

4. A throne of honor was found for him on the bloody tree; rebel men would yield no easier place of rest to their liege Lord. The cross was, in fact, the full expression of the world’s feeling towards him; “There,” they seemed to say, “you Son of God, this is the manner in which God himself should be treated, could we reach him.”

5. The title of honor was nominally “King of the Jews,” but the blinded nation distinctly repudiated it, and really called him “King of thieves” by preferring Barabbas and by placing Jesus in the place of highest shame between two thieves. His glory was thus in all things turned into shame by the sons of men, but it shall yet gladden the eyes of saints and angels, world without end.