One of the major, ‘minor’ characters of the Bible is a man by the name of Joseph, who hailed from the Jewish town of Arimathea. Truth be told, we do not know a great deal about this Joseph, nor about his home town. It is as though he walks in and out of the limelight in just a few seconds.
But the Holy Spirit, who caused the Bible to be written, has ensured that a brief paragraph is devoted to Joseph of Arimathea in all four Gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Spirit would have us know about and learn from Joseph, a man described as ‘a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews’(John 19:38).
In a nutshell, Joseph was to make his outstanding mark on world history as the one who provided his own new rock tomb, as the place in which the Lord Jesus was buried after his crucifixion.
We can learn at least three things from Joseph of Arimathea:
