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Wounded: hurt, injured.
Hebrew: halal [khaw-lal’]: Begin[52], profane[36], pollute[23], defile[9], break[4], wounded[3], slay[2], (chalah)]; properly to bore, i.e. (by implication) to wound, to dissolve; :- begin (× men began), defile, × break, defile, × eat (as common things), Strong's Talking Greek & Hebrew Dictionary. The most frequent use of this Hebrew root is in the sense of "to pollute, defile. Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old Testament and New Testament Words.
Wounded represents two of our scripture verses, NIV and NLT. The idea here is to realize that the lashing of a whip was planted on the Lord’s body 39 to 40 times and when the Roman soldier had finished, Jesus had bare bones showing and the blood was pouring out.
The cat of nine tails was leather straps that had little pieces of glass and steel attached to the ends. That impacted on the prisoners’ body in a much greater fashion and put some serious weight on the end of this thing. The pain must have been excruciating, and I want to remind you that the two prisoners on each side of Him also got the same kind of treatment. These men had been found guilty of some heinous crime that positioned them into this kind of treatment.
Punishment in those days was brutal, and can you even imagine the perspective the crime laden folks would have on the idea of this kind of treatment today. I don’t know if it is the absolute ignorance of man that allows a punishment that is not so restraining, or it is that lawmakers just do not have the stomach for such a punishment. The problem is that the vast majority of offenders continue to create these awful crimes and there seems to be very little to stop such an action. Instead, we just continue to build bigger and more relaxed places even for the criminally hard-core folks. The meals are great, the pleasures are in place and there seems to be little restrained to keep them from going back in, even after they are out.
When in the first couple of years of starting my business in 1974, I had an opportunity to build a house on a lot in my hometown as a ‘spec’ house. I hired a man who later told me that he had been in prison for killing a man and that the man was a leader of a ‘Hell’s Angels’ motorcycle gang. He had confronted him in a local bar where the motorcycle guy was harassing Paul’s wife who was tending bar in a local tavern. He claimed in was self-defense, but the judge put him in prison for 10 years. During his time of working with me, he gathered together with a couple of old prison mates and accompanied them to Columbus, Ohio and killed a judge who had put one of them in prison.
Obviously, I was discouraged as I spent a lot of time witnessing to him and felt I was making some real progress. However, this time this experience was not going to go quite so easy on him. It was life in prison with no parole and the same old cycle just keeps on rolling. There needs to be true punishment for crimes, and this is what Jesus was doing, hanging on that cross and as a result, we were protected.
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