Holding forth the Word of Life; that I may rejoice in the day of Christ
Philippians 2:16
Trinity Reformed Baptist Church
Topeka Kansas -
The Sufferings of Christ
This will grip your heart
Behold, we go up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes and they shall condemn Him to death and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He shall rise again.
Matthew 20:17
The first thing I found out was that when referring to Christ’ sufferings, using that word, it appears in the plural. For example, in 2 Corinthians 1:5 it means "the sufferings of Christ." In Philippians 3:10, the fellowship of His sufferings. First Peter 1:11, the sufferings. First Peter 4:13, the sufferings. Luke 24:26, suffered many things. Hebrews 2:10, the salvation was made perfect through sufferings.
In other words, I got the idea that it wasn't just one dimensional suffering. That the proportion of His suffering was beyond anything I'd ever thought about. I mean, I don't know how you've looked at it, but kind of growing up in the church, you sort of think of the suffering of Christ having to do with the nails, or the spear, or the crown of thorns. The body has a way to deal with that kind of thing. That is a suffering, there's little question about it.
But Josephus writes in one particular account of three men that were crucified. They were left there until such a time as they should have been dead and taken down. Two of them lived, one died. Which is to say that crucifixion in and of itself didn't necessarily kill everybody. In fact there's a record even beyond those three of many who lived through crucifixion. That is why they scourge those that they especially wanted to die because the tremendous loss of blood, exposure of the internal organs and all the pain involved in that would speed up and make secure the death reality in crucifixion.
But there was much more to the suffering of Christ than just the nails on the cross. I mean, the body shock system has a way to deal with that kind of trauma. And so I began to think about all of the facets of His suffering. And with that in mind, I want you to look at Isaiah 53 for just a brief moment and see if I can't show you how clearly this is revealed and yet perhaps you have not thought of it in these terms.
The proportion or the dimensions of Christ's suffering. Isaiah 53 obviously describes
the suffering of Christ. And it starts out in verse 2, for our benefit, that He has
no form or comeliness and when we see Him there's no beauty that we should desire
Him. And you have the suffering of being ugly. The suffering of being rejected. The
suffering of no form, no comeliness. People turning away. It says in verse 3, "We
hid-
And then you have the suffering in verse 4 of bearing others griefs, of carrying others sorrow. Sometimes we suffer as much when we carry the pain of someone else as we do with our own. And then the suffering of being stricken, smitten and afflicted by God Himself, having God smash His fist of wrath against you. Blows from God where you find Him crying out, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"
And then you have the suffering of being wounded and begin bruised. And here it's more physical. And having stripes against the body, the suffering of physical pain as well as inherent in that the wound of transgression, the bruise of iniquity and feeling the chastening of God to accomplish peace for someone else.
And then in verse 6 you have that lonely, lonely statement, "All we like sheep have gone astray, we've turned everyone to his own way and the Lord's laid on Him the iniquity of all of us." Here He is all alone, bearing all the sins of all the world, a cosmic kind of divine loneliness. And then in verse 7 you have the tremendous suffering of oppression, affliction and silence. He can't even speak. He can't even defend Himself. He can't push them away and say "Stop, I'm the Son of God. I will not have this." He has to suffer in absolute silence. He has to keep His mouth closed. The suffering of knowing you're right, knowing you're just and holy and pure and good and not being able to say it.
And then there's the suffering of prison, the suffering of a false judgment in verse 8, the suffering of death. That's what it means to be cut off from the land of the living. The suffering of being stricken by God to bear sin, the suffering of burial and being counted as a common criminal. And then the suffering of knowing that you hadn't done anything and you didn't deserve any of this, no violence, no deceit. And then the suffering of knowing it pleased God to do this to you, to put you to grief. And then the suffering of verse 11, the pain of the soul. And then in verse 12, the pouring out of the soul to death, being numbered or counted with transgressors, bearing the sins of many, and so forth. I mean, if you look at that that way, it's just overwhelming to conceive of the proportion of the suffering of our Lord. And I think that's what's in His heart this day as He goes up the hill to Jerusalem. I think this is what's in His heart, I really do.
Let me show you what He says here. First of all, I believe that when He talks about being handed over to the chief priests, He is suffering the pain of disloyalty. Now remember this, He suffered all of this in anticipation. Because He knew it was going to happen, He could suffer the pain even now. And the first pain I see here, the first area of suffering is the suffering of disloyalty. What the psalmist said in Psalm 41:9, "Mine own familiar friend has lifted up his heel against me, the one who ate bread with me." Here was one He loved, one that He walked with and talked with, one who affirmed to Him love and intimacy and care and trust and all of that and He was betrayed by Judas. And He was not only betrayed, He was betrayed with a kiss. The suffering of betrayal, the overwhelming suffering when someone close to you violates that intimacy and seeks to destroy you, the ugly sin, the deep pain of being betrayed by a friend.
And then I believe He suffered the suffering of rejection. He was turned over to the chief priests and the scribes and they condemned Him to death. John put it very simply. "He came unto His own and His own...what?...received Him not." And He sat over the city of Jerusalem, the Bible says, and He wept. He said, "How often I would have gathered thee as a hen gathers her brood and you would not." They just rejected Him. Isaiah said, you remember we just read it, He was despised and rejected of men. He was the stone the builders rejected. They didn't want a thing to do with Him.
And so, those He loved, His own people, those that He worked with and healed and taught, they rejected Him. The heartbreak is enough to crush you. Here He's been betrayed by a friend and rejected by His own people. And I believe in all of this He suffered a broken heart and that's why when the spear went in, out came a combination of blood and water. I think the anxiety had already crushed Him, burst Him. And then to add to that, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me," not only is He rejected by men, He's rejected by God...rejected by God. It says in Matthew 26:56 that all the disciples forsook Him and fled. He didn't have anybody...rejected by the people, rejected by the disciples, rejected by God. So disloyalty and rejection…
Thirdly, there was the suffering of humiliation...the suffering of humiliation. Notice it says they mocked Him. Once He got into the hands of the pagans, they mocked Him. They pulled at His beard, they crammed a crown of thorns on His head. They stuck a reed in His hand, put a robe on Him, said you're a king, you know. They'd spit on His face. They mocked Him. They scorned Him. They ridiculed Him. And then they nailed Him naked before the whole world. You see, that's emotional pain, that's pain for the soul not the body. The lovely, glorious, beautiful sinless Son of God is humiliated who should be exalted. He's embarrassed. He's ridiculed. And Peter says in 1 Peter 2:23, He never retaliated, took it in silence. I just can't imagine what it would have been like for Him to be spit on, but that's what they did. And so there's the pain of humiliation.
Then a fourth kind of pain that I see in this text, they scourged Him and crucified Him. But the reason they did that was because they had condemned Him. And I would call this the pain of unjust guilt, the pain of being held responsible for something you're not guilty of. I mean, you know, if we had been accused of something for which there was a severe penalty and weren't guilty, we'd be screaming all over the place. But in silence He had to accept the responsibility for sin that He never committed. And all the guilt of all the people that ever lived was put on Him. I can't imagine any pain or suffering more terrible than to be accused of a crime with a death penalty and you knew you didn't do it. And then they have been...put all the guilt, all the guilt put on you, just incredible.
Now you take those four things alone, the pain of betrayal and rejection and humiliation and unjust guilt, and that alone, if you never got nailed to anything, would be enough to kill you. And that's what I think was going on in the garden. I believe in the garden of Gethsamane that the suffering and anxiety of His soul over these things almost killed Him. And His body literally began to come apart at the seams and leak great drops of blood. The nails are not a big deal. It's the pain of bearing all the sins of all the people who ever lived when you're the spotless lamb of God. It's the pain of humiliation when you deserve exaltation. It's the pain of rejection, it's the pain of betrayal.
Well, you could add two more. There's the pain of injury and I think that's here, He points it up, the scourge. And there He's referring to the fact that He will suffer physically and scourging was a horrible thing. We'll see more about it future, but forty lashes was the Jewish thing and forty lashes basically the Romans. The Jews always stopped one short because they didn't want to break the law so they hit 39 and then stopped. The traditional way, the Romans did it with metal and bone in the end of these three leather thongs was 13 lashes across the chest and then 13 on each of the two shoulders. It usually took two men to do it because one wasn't strong enough to continue the whipping at the pace they wanted it. They would tie the hands to a post so the body slumped and they'd turn it around, take care of the chest, turn it around and take care of the back. And the organs would be exposed, the bleeding would be profuse and many people would die. And He suffered tremendous physical pain.
Finally, the proportion of His suffering extended to death, He died. You say, "How'd He die?" I don't think He died by the nails in His hands. He didn't die by the spear, it didn't go in till He was already dead. I don't think the thorn...the crown of thorns killed Him. It's possible that the suffocating of His organs is the physiological reason that He died, but I think it was the cumulative grief, anxiety, pain and suffering that all of that stuff brought upon Him that killed Him. And the greatest suffering is not physical, the greatest suffering is the suffering of the soul. And the proportions of Christ's suffering as I think Isaiah 53 is trying to tell us by almost to a point of being criticized from the literary standpoint, repeating over and over and over and over and over different words to say the same thing is an act on Isaiah's part by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to give us a little bit of an understanding of how wide and broad and vast the degree of His suffering was.
He's telling them this. And these blockheads...it goes right on by. And in the next breath they're asking which of them can sit on the right and the left hand in His Kingdom. So utterly insensitive...and that's, if you want to add one more, the suffering of unsympathetic friends. The suffering that comes when you need somebody and they aren't there...when you need somebody and they're not responsive, when they could care less about your pain because they're so involved in their own glory.
Well, we've seen the plan, the prediction, the proportion and we're right where I want to be, I want you to see the power of sufferings at the end of verse 19. "The third day He shall rise again." Suffering's not the end. Listen, those people that say Jesus' whole revolution ended in a grave are wrong. He rose out of that grave three days later. And as it said in Psalm 16:10, God would never leave HIs soul in the grave, He would never let His holy one see corruption, Jesus burst out of that grave and is alive to this very day and that is the power over His sufferings. Bless God for that. What a promise. He would conquer death.
How could they miss that? I mean, how could they miss...how could they not want to ask about that? I mean, they must have thought about death. They must have thought about dying and the future. Well, what would keep them from asking about that? He told them He had the power over His sufferings.
A last point, the perception of sufferings. What was their reaction? How did they perceive this? They're off on the side of the road, He's giving them this. How did they react?
"Then came to Him," verse 20, "the mother of Zebedee's children with her sons, worshiping Him, desiring a certain thing of Him and He said unto her, What wilt thou? She said unto Him, Grant that these my two sons may sit the one on Thy right hand and the other on the left in Thy Kingdom. And Jesus answered and said, You don't even know what you're asking." That's how they reacted. They didn't come and say, "Lord, tell us more about the suffering, tell us more about the redemption, tell us more about the ransom, tell us more about the fact that You're the lamb, tell us about Your resurrection, tell us what..." No, they come with their mother. "Hey, we want to be on the right and we want to be on the left." And they didn't even get the message. They wanted a king, they kept missing the fact they needed a savior.
And they're no more thick than people today. They don't mind Jesus… I always think of that at Christmas. They don't mind Him a little baby in a manger. They don't mind Him a nice little guy with little children around His lap. They don't even mind Him too much as a king, it's the savior they can't handle. And Israel today is in the same situation...the same situation. It's the suffering that they won't accept.
Well, the good news is good news but it's got bad news in it and that's that there's
a suffering Messiah. But if you understand 1 Peter 3:18, He suffered...why?...the
just to the unjust that He might bring us to God. We couldn't get there any other
way, you see. Why? Back to Genesis. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were separated.
What reconciled them? Sacrifice. And when God ordained the elaborate sacrificial
system in the Israel He was saying you don't come to Me unless you come by means
of a sacrifice. And so, Jesus had to be offered, the just-
Well, the dawn of all of this came like thunder on the Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came and finally unscrambled the minds of those disciples and Peter stood up and preached a tremendous sermon on the meaning of the death of Christ and His resurrection. I'm glad they finally got the message. I hope you do too.
Read and listen to the full message
http://www.gty.org/Resources/Print/Sermons/2346
http://www.gty.org/AudioPlayer/Sermons/2346