IT is with no thought of adding to the many critical expositions of this precious portion of Scripture that the following simple exposition has been written. For such a task the writer has neither the necessary scholarship nor ability. The aim has been, rather, to present the reader with a simple and devotional exposition, free from critical questions, trusting that it may prove a spiritual help by promoting prayerful meditation on the Lord’s last words.
The title, “The Last Words,” has been chosen as being wide enough to include the last prayer as well as the last discourses. In these last words we hear, as one has said, “The voice of Jesus prolonged through all ages, as fresh today... as it was then in the upper room in Jerusalem. It has a voice intensely human in its tones of sympathy and affection; yet in revelation and authority no less distinctly divine.”
If, by this exposition, any child of God is drawn nearer to the One whose voice we hear in the last words, it will not be in vain that it has been written.