August 2
August 2
Jesus willingly bore the penalty that we deserve, so that we can live forever in a reconciled relationship with God.
Familiarity with biblical passages is a good thing. By grace and through his Spirit, God works in us so that we will know and remember his word. But there can be a downside to familiarity. When we have read something many times, we might stop taking time to examine, consider, and be grateful.
You might be familiar with the following passage, but I ask you to slow down and take another look with me:
Who has believed what he has heard from us?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. (Isa. 53:1–6)
If this passage doesn’t shock you, I think you’ve missed its power. This passage is in the Bible so that you can understand Jesus’s radical willingness to go through radical suffering in order that we could experience the radical intervention of God’s grace. Jesus was willing to be “crushed for our iniquities” in order to secure our salvation. None us would have accepted this job. But the King of kings was willing to be pierced, chastised, crushed, and wounded for us. He willingly carried the collected weight of all our sin to the cross. The eternal one was willing to die so that we could live forever.
Here’s why remembering all of this is so important. If you forget or minimize the extent to which Jesus had to suffer in order to deal with your sin, then you will forget or minimize the gravity of your sin. If you want to know how serious, powerful, dark, and destructive sin is, then read Isaiah 53. Jesus had to endure all that he endured, including death, because that is how serious sin is. It requires a perfectly righteous substitute, one willing to face the temptations of life in this fallen world, suffer for crimes he did not commit, and die as a sacrifice for our sins.
Our hope in this life and the one to come hinges on the willingness of Jesus to endure what none of us would be willing to endure. He was willing. What grace!