My enemies surround me like a pack of dogs; an evil gang closes in on me. They have pierced my hands and feet.
I can count all my bones. My enemies stare at me and gloat.
They divide my garments among themselves and throw dice for my clothing.
Psalm 22:16-18
Did you notice in the last Nugget that this Psalm contains a series of specific references to the crucifixion of Christ. This second portion of the verses from Psalm 22 which I have emboldened also refers to crucifixion. After crucifixion, the general practice was to break the shin bones to hasten death. The Roman soldiers did a circuit of the victims hanging on the crosses sometime after they had hung there in order to break the shin bones. They used a hardwood Roman lance to shatter the shin bones of each victim to prevent them from pushing up with their legs in order to take a breath. The immense pressure on the lungs when hung on the cross made every breath tortuous. Allowing the victim to press up in order to breathe prolonged the process and enabled them to hang there on the cross for hours. Once the legs were broken the victim couldn’t push up any more to breathe. It was humane to hasten the victim’s death and besides it prevented the Roman soldiers from having to hang around too long to ensure each victim had died. It was not that the victims were then quickly taken down. They were left hanging there for days as a reminder to the inhabitants not to get involved in sedition against the Roman Empire. However, the soldiers could not leave prematurely or else the victim’s family and friends might come and take them down from the cross and revive them. Hence the legs were broken to hasten death and enable the soldiers to leave earlier.
How many victims’ legs were not broken? There are a very small proportion of all people who have ever lived who have been crucified. There is a considerably lesser chance that from that finite population of victims of crucifixion, that any others would have survived with their legs intact, i.e. unbroken. As stated above it was the customary practice to break the legs of each victim. The Psalmist specifically states that Jesus’ legs would remain unbroken. That statement was recorded centuries before the crucifixion of Christ. If you did not die as a result of blood loss from a severe beating, the normal cause of death from crucifixion was death by suffocation. Therefore, since we assigned a probability factor of 1:100,000 for being numbered among the crucified, the odds would be even more astronomical to have been one who was indeed crucified and yet whose legs were not broken. It would be akin to being numbered among the crucified and to have survived. Unheard of! Not possible. Likewise to have been crucified and not to have had your legs broken. Very unlikely! You have got my point I am sure.
But once again I wish to be conservative with the estimate of the probability. Where we should assign a probability factor of one in a million or even one in a billion among all the inhabitants who have lived that there would be one who having been crucified would not have had their legs broken, I want to opt for an extremely conservative approach. I don’t want anyone to be able to claim that I inflate the estimates to prove my point. So I am taking the opposite approach. I indicate to you how appropriate it would be to inflate the unlikelihood of each prophetic event, but then make my estimate as conservative as possible. For this particular prophetic statement we will assign a probability factor of 1:10,000.