Luke 18:31

And he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all the things that are written through the prophets shall be accomplished unto the Son of man. For he shall be delivered up unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked, and shamefully treated, and spit upon: and they shall scourge and kill him: and on the third day he shall rise again. And they understood none of these things; and this saying was hid from them, and they perceived not the things that were said.

ANOTHER PREDICTION OF HIS PASSION

All the things that were written ... Some 333 prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled in Christ, and these included many prophecies of his sufferings, rejection, and death, as well as of his resurrection.

That are written through the prophets ... Jesus kept the distinction ever in view that it was not the prophets who wrote the Holy Scriptures, but God who wrote them "through the prophets." We believe the same thing is true of the words of the sacred authors of the New Testament; and this writer, in a lifetime of reading, has found nothing whatever in the insinuations of those who abuse the sacred New Testament, in their assumption that it was written by fallible MEN, that justifies any relaxing of this confidence. In Matthew 1:22; 2:5; 2:17, etc., throughout the Gospel, there are many texts in which this same concept of God's writing "through the prophets" is emphatically stated.

For a list of things Jesus prophesied of himself, see under Luke 9:22,45; 13:33, and parallels, in Matthew and Mark. Geldenhuys saw this passage as the FOURTH announcement of Jesus' Passion. "For the fourth time now the Saviour announces that he will be delivered to suffer and to die"[33] (this verse, plus the three cited above). This makes it certain that one of the four Passion predictions recorded by Luke is peculiar to this Gospel, since Matthew and Mark each have three.

The third day ... See the article in my Commentary on Mark on "What Day Was Jesus Crucified?" for a full discussion of the meaning of this expression.

Summers was surely right in perceiving this passage as an identification of Jesus with "the Suffering Servant section of Isaiah."[34] He also denied any necessity of supposing that the details in view here were retrospectively included in Luke after the events occurred. We are face to face here with genuine prophecy.

This saying was hidden from them ... "It was not hidden in that Jesus did not want them to understand. It was hidden because of their reluctance to accept it."[35]

[33] Norval Geldenhuys, op. cit., p. 463.

[34] Ray Summers, op. cit., p. 219.

[35] Ibid., p. 220.