He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were [our] faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
3. Not only did the Servant fail to attract his contemporaries ( Isa 53:2); there was that in his appearance which excited positive aversion. He is represented as one stricken with loathsome and disfiguring disease, probably leprosy (see on Isa 53:4), so that men instinctively recoiled from him in horror and disgust.
He is despised and rejected of men ] Better, Despised and man-forsaken, i.e. one with whom men refuse to associate, or, perhaps, one who renounces the hope of human fellowship. The corresponding verb is used by Job when he complains of the estrangement of his friends: “my kinsfolk have failed” (ch. Isa 19:14).
For sorrows grief, read pains sickness. Although both words may be used tropically of mental suffering, it is plain that in the figure of this verse and the following they are to be taken in their literal sense.
and we hid &c.] More literally, and as one from whom there is a hiding of the face; his appearance was such as to cause men involuntarily to cover their face from the sight of him. The expression is similar to another phrase of Job’s: “I am a spitting in the face” (Isa 17:6). For the idea cf. Job 19:19; Job 30:10. Leprosy is again suggested. The rendering of LXX. and Vulg. “and as one who hid his face from us” is grammatically defensible, but conveys a wrong idea; the Servant “hid not his face from shame and spitting” (ch. Isa 50:6).
esteemed him not ] (lit “reckoned him not”), held him of no account.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
He is despised – This requires no explanation; and it needs no comment to show that it was fulfilled. The Redeemer was eminently the object of contempt and scorn alike by the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Romans. In his life on earth it was so; in his death it was still so; and since then, his name and person have been extensively the object of contempt. Nothing is a more striking fulfillment of this than the conduct of the Jews at the present day. The very name of Jesus of Nazareth excites contempt; and they join with their fathers who rejected him in heaping on him every term indicative of scorn.
Rejected of men – This phrase is full of meaning, and in three words states the whole history of man in regard to his treatment of the Redeemer. The name The Rejected of Men, will express all the melancholy history; rejected by the Jews; by the rich; the great and the learned; by the mass of people of every grade, and age, and rank. No prophecy was ever more strikingly fulfilled; none could condense more significancy into few words. In regard to the exact sense of the phrase, interpreters have varied. Jerome renders it, Novissium virorum – The last of men; that is, the most abject and contemptible of mankind. The Septuagint, His appearance is dishonored ( atimon) and defective ( ekleipon) more than the sons of men. The Chaldee, He is indeed despised, but he shall take away the glory of all kings; they are infirm and sad, as if exposed to all calamities and sorrows. Some render it, Most abject of men, and they refer to Job 19:14, where the same word is used to denote those friends who forsake the unfortunate.
The word chadel used here, is derived from the verb chadal, which means to cease, to leave off, to desist; derived, says Gesenius (Lexicon), from the idea of becoming languid, flaccid; and thence transferred to the act of ceasing from labor. It means usually, to cease, to desist from, to leave, to let alone (see 1Ki 22:6-15; Job 7:15; Job 10:20; Isa 2:22). According to Gesenius, the word here means to be left, to be destitute, or forsaken; and the idea is, that be was forsaken by people. According to Hengstenberg (Christol.) it means the most abject of men, he who ceases from men, who ceases to belong to the number of men; that is, who is the most abject of men. Castellio renders it, Minus quash homo – Less than a man. Junius and Tremellius, Abjectissimus virorum – The most abject of men. Grotius, Rejected of men. Symmachus, Elachistos andron – the least of men. The idea is, undoubtedly, somehow that of ceasing from human beings, or from being regarded as belonging to mankind.
There was a ceasing, or a withdrawing of that which usually pertains to man, and which belongs to him. And the thought probably is, that he was not only despised, but that there was an advance on that – there was a ceasing to treat him as if he had human feelings, and was in any way entitled to human fellowship and sympathy. It does not refer, therefore, so much to the active means employed to reject him, as to the fact that he was regarded as cut off from man; and the idea is not essentially different from this, that he was the most abject and vile of mortals in the estimation of others; so vile as not to be deemed worthy of the treatment due to the lowest of men. This idea has been substantially expressed in the Syriac translation.
A man of sorrows – What a beautiful expression! A man who was so sad and sorrowful; whose life was so full of sufferings, that it might be said that that was the characteristic of the man. A similar phraseology occurs in Pro 29:1, He that being often reproved, in the margin, a man of reproofs; in the Hebrew, A man of chastisements, that is, a man who is often chastised. Compare Dan 10:11 : O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, Margin, as in Hebrew, A man of desires; that is, a man greatly desired. Here, the expression means that his life was characterized by sorrows. How remarkably this was fulfilled in the life of the Redeemer, it is not necessary to attempt to show.
And acquainted with grief – Hebrew, viydua choliy – And knowing grief. The word rendered grief means usually sickness, disease Deu 7:15; Deu 28:61; Isa 1:5; but it also means anxiety, affliction Ecc 5:16; and then any evil or calamity Ecc 6:2. Many of the old interpreters explain it as meaning, that he was known or distinguished by disease; that is, affected by it in a remarkable manner. So Symm. Gnostos noso. Jerome (the Vulgate) renders it, Scientem infirmitatem. The Septuagint renders the whole clause, A man in affliction ( en plege), and knowing to bear languor, or disease ( eidos pherein malakian). But if the word here means disease, it is only a figurative designation of severe sufferings both of body and of soul. Hengstenberg, Koppe, and Ammon, suppose that the figure is taken from the leprosy, which was not only one of the most severe of all diseases, but was in a special manner regarded as a divine judgment. They suppose that many of the expressions which follow may be explained with reference to this (compare Heb 4:15). The idea is, that he was familiar with sorrow and calamity. It does not mean, as it seems to me, that he was to be himself sick and diseased; but that he was to be subject to various kinds of calamity, and that it was to be a characteristic of his life that he was familiar with it. He was intimate with it. He knew it personally; he knew it in others. He lived in the midst of scenes of sorrow, and be became intimately acquainted with its various forms, and with its evils. There is no evidence that the Redeemer was himself sick at any time – which is remarkable – but there is evidence in abundance that he was familiar with all kinds of sorrow, and that his own life was a life of grief.
And we hid as it were our faces from him – There is here great variety of interpretation and of translation. The margin reads, As an hiding of faces from him, or from us, or, He hid as it were his face from us. The Hebrew is literally, And as the hiding of faces from him, or from it; and Hengstenberg explains it as meaning, He was as an hiding of the face before it. that is, as a thing or person before whom a man covers his face, because he cannot bear the disgusting sight. Jerome (the Vulgate) renders it, His face was as it were hidden and despised. The Septuagint, For his countenance was turned away ( apestraptai). The Chaldee, And when he took away his countenance of majesty from us, we were despised and reputed as nothing. Interpreters have explained it in various ways.
1. He was as one who hides his face before us; alluding, as they suppose, to the Mosaic law, which required lepers to cover their faces Lev 13:45, or to the custom of covering the face in mourning, or for shame.
2. Others explain it as meaning, as one before whom is the covering of the face, that is, before whom a man covers the face from shame or disgust. So Gesenius.
3. Others, He was as one causing to conceal the face, that is, he induced others to cover the face before him. His sufferings were so terrible as to induce them to turn away. So John H. Michaelis.
The idea seems to be, that he was as one from whom people hide their faces, or turn away. This might either arise from a sight of his sufferings, as being so offensive that they would turn away in pain – as in the case of a leper; or it might be, that he was so much an object of contempt, and so unlike what they expected, that they would hide their faces and turn away in scorn. This latter I suppose to be the meaning; and that the idea is, that he was so unlike what they had expected, that they hid their faces in affected or real contempt.
And we esteemed him not – That is, we esteemed him as nothing; we set no value on him. In order to give greater energy to a declaration, the Hebrews frequently express a thing positively and then negatively. The prophet had said that they held him in positive contempt; he here says that they did not regard him as worthy of their notice. He here speaks in the name of his nation – as one of the Jewish people. We, the Jews, the nation to whom he was sent, did not esteem him as the Messiah, or as worthy of our affection or regard.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Isa 53:3-7
He is despised and rejected of men
The mean appearance of the Redeemer foretold
I.
THE WISDOM AND GOODNESS OF GOD IN DETERMINING TO SEND HIS SON INTO THE WORLD IN A STATE OF POVERTY AND AFFLICTION.
1. With regard to His being a teacher, His sufferings set Him above the reach of suspicions. What ends could He have to serve by His doctrine, who met with nothing but misery and affliction, as the reward of His labour?
2. With regard to our Lords being an example of holiness and obedience set before us for our instruction and imitation. His sufferings render the pattern perfect, and show His virtues in their truest lustre, and at the same time silence the pleas which laziness or self-love would otherwise have suggested.
3. With regard to His Divine mission. His sufferings were an evident token that the hand of God was with Him. He only can produce strength out of weakness, and knows how to confound the mighty things of the world by things which are of no account. Add to this the evidence of prophecy, which is so much the stronger by how much the weaker Christ was: so admirably has the wisdom of God displayed itself in this mystery of faith.
II. THE EVIDENCE OF PROPHECY CONCERNING THE MEAN APPEARANCE OUR LORD WAS TO MAKE.
III. THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE WE HAVE FOR THE COMPLETION OF THESE PROPHECIES. (T. Sherlock, D.D.)
Christ despised and rejected of men
I. IN WHAT RESPECTS IT MAY STILL BE SAID THAT CHRIST IS DESPISED AND REJECTED OF MEN.
1. Men may be said to despise Christ when they do not receive Him as their alone Saviour, the true and only way to the Father.
2. When they practically deny His authority by breaking His Commandments.
3. When they do not give Him the chief room in their hearts, nor prefer Him in their choice to everything else.
4. When they do not publicly, confess Him before men.
II. THE CAUSES OF THIS CONTEMPT.
1. The main cause is a secret unbelief.
2. Love of this would.
3. Ignorance of their own condition.
4. An opinion that they may obtain His aid at what time soever they shall choose to ask it.
III. THE MALIGNITY OF THIS SIN.
1. To despise and reject such a Saviour, is the blackest ingratitude that can possibly be imagined.
2. Your ingratitude is heightened by the most insolent contempt both of the wisdom and goodness of God.
3. By despising and rejecting Christ, you openly proclaim war against the Most High, and bid Him defiance. (R. Walker.)
Designed and rejected
I. CHRIST WAS AN OBJECT OF SCORN AND CONTEMPT.
1. He was despised as an impostor.
2. Despised in His teachings.
3. In his work.
4. In His claims to a righteous judgment at the national tribunal.
II. NOT ONLY WAS JESUS AN OBJECT OF CONTEMPT AND SCORN BUT OF ABSOLUTE REJECTION. If the word had read neglected,–deserted, coldly passed by–this would have revealed an indifference that would have covered His nation and age with reproach, and would have stood out a lasting monument of their base ingratitude. But here is a word conveying the idea of the most inveterate and active hatred. But why this active hostility to Christ? (J. Higgins.)
Despised and rejected of men
In the Gospel we see this rejection in actual occurrence.
I. HE WAS DESPISED AND REJECTED BY THE WORLDLY-MINDED (Joh 6:1-71). Following Christ for the sake of bread may lead to much enthusiastic and self-denying exertion. Here, the very meanest view of Christ is preferred to those lofty and spiritual truths by which He tried to allure and save their souls. In his presence, before His face, while listening to His voice, and with the splendour of the miracle before them–all are passed by for the bread. Is not this the essence of worldly-mindedness? Christianity is the religion of many, not for the sake of the Lord Himself, nor His gracious words, nor even His miracles, but for the bread, for reputations sake, and social character and respectability.
II. HE WAS DESPISED AND REJECTED BY THE RATIONALIST (Mat 13:54-57). It was in His own country. There men thought they knew Him; His family had long dwelt there. Parents, brothers, sisters were all familiarly known–all, down to their very trade: Is not this the carpenter? The facts of the case, as the rationalist is so fond of saying, were all clearly apprehended, and stood forth in their true dimensions. Whence hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works? Is it real? is it not on the face of it absurd, this mere carpenters son? This is the inmost spirit of rationalism. It rejects everything above the level of visible and tangible fact, everything that cannot be weighed and measured, everything spiritual in Scripture doctrine and supernatural in Scripture history.
III. HE IS DESPISED AND REJECTED BY THE ECCLESIASTIC (Mat 21:15-23). The ecclesiastical temper is not found solely or chiefly amongst those who are ecclesiastics by profession. The religious spirit may be crushed–indeed, has often been; rigid and severe forms may take the place of the easy and graceful motions of vital Christianity. This is the rejection of Christ in the freedom by which His Holy Spirit distributes to every man severally as He will.
IV. HE IS DESPISED AND REJECTED BY MEN OF BRUTE FORCE (Luk 23:11). To some the tenderness of the Gospel religion is an offence. Humanity is a peculiarly Christian virtue, and meekness and resignation. The calm tranquillity of meditation, the tearful eye of compassion, the sublime courage of patience, the dating heroism of forgiveness, excite no sympathy or admiration in some breasts. Theirs is the rejection of Christ; through a false manliness.
V. CHRIST IS DESPISED AND REJECTED BY HIS OWN (Joh 1:11). Some, from a natural sweetness and amiability of disposition, seem in a certain degree adapted to be Christians. The restraining effects of home discipline and generous education have restrained them from open transgression. Yet their rejection of Christ as a Saviour from sin is often most decided and even disdainful. They think the charge of sin inappropriate, for they have no consciousness of it, and no felt need of a Saviour. The sinfulness of rejecting Christ is seen in its being a rejection of the Father (Luk 10:16). It is not possible to reject Christ, and be right with God. (S. H. Tindall.)
Failure
In a life that is lived with the thoughts of eternity, in one aspect failure is inevitable: in another aspect failure is impossible.
1. Failure is inevitable. If I accept for myself an ideal which is beyond the limits of here and now, then manifestly it is impossible that I can here and now realize it. There must be always with me, so long as I am faithful to that ideal, a sense of incompleteness, a ceaseless aspiration, an effort that only the grave can close. He knows if he is faithful that he has before him an eternal career, that the end to which he is moving is likeness to Jesus Christ; that he has to pass into the unveiled presence of God and hold communion with Him. If that be the end, can it be otherwise than that, in the meanwhile, there should be failure, humiliation, penitence, and ceaseless and unwearied discipline of self?
2. Failure, in another aspect, is impossible. Only be sure that deep down at the root of life there is loyalty to God, and then begin where we are placed–in the effort to find Him He will fulfil the search. The miracle of the failure of Calvary is our assurance of that truth. It is this living for the Eternal, as a venture of faith, which has always appealed to the eternal God, which His own nature is pledged to meet. Do we stumble? It is only that we may realize His readiness to help. Are we bewildered? It is only in order that we may find how sure He guides. Are we humiliated by our confessions? It is only that we may realize the readiness of His pardon. Are we conscious and stricken with the sense of our weakness? It is only that we may find His strength perfected within us. If we have only taken sides with Him in the great issues of human life, then He will justify our choice. (C. G. Lang.)
Failure may be welcomed
Our failure in the light of the Cross, our spiritual failures, are things to be welcomed; they prevent the torpor of dull assurance creeping over us like a poison; they prevent our falling under imperfect standards of life, they prove, so long as their are constant with us, that the energy of the Spirit of God has not left us to ourselves; they witness to us that we recognize the truth that our souls can find their rest and satisfaction only in God. (C. G. Lang.)
The despised Saviour
To all God grants some dim vision of what He intends man to be. The holiest men have had the clearest glimpses of that character. One nation was separated to keep the ideal before the world. The majority corrupted the representation, but some prophets saw it clearly.
I. GODS IDEAL FOR MAN, AND ITS REALIZATION IN CHRIST. The majority thought He would be another Solomon, Davids greater son. The prophet saw that He would be a Sinless Sufferer; what it had been intended that the nation should be, that the Suffering Servant would be. The voice of God, which set forth the ideal by the lips of prophets, now speaks through our own highest desires.
II. THE WORLDS RECEPTION OF THE REVEALED IDEAL. Pilate has brought Him forth that His suffering may excite their pity, but His pure and loving life has made them relentless in their hate. There is no beauty that they should desire Him. Barabbas, the bold and reckless, is the peoples choice. While boon companions crowd round him, cold looks and scornful smiles are reserved for Christ. Christ had headed no revolt against the powers that be, and therefore He was not popular. Political emancipation is more popular than spiritual. The path of righteousness ends on Calvary; its crown is one of thorns, its throne a cross.
III. THE MEANING OF THE REVELATION OF THIS IDEAL. The world says, Blessed are the wealthy, the powerful, the great, and the wise. Christ says, Blessed are the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the meek, the mourners, the persecuted. At first we pity Christ, and reserve our indignation for His persecutors. But He was the least pitiable of all that group. Pilate was a pitiable victim, the people were pitiable because carried away by passion, and the priests by desire for revenge. The greatness of apparent weakness is here revealed. Yet we despise weakness. Here is a dramatic representation of weighty decisions made every day in human hearts. When we choose ease and worldly glory in preference to holiness and self-denial, we despise and reject Christ. Here our choice is seen worked out to the bitter end. This is a revelation of the meaning of sin.
IV. THE EFFECT OF THIS REVELATION. The world can never forget that spiracle. In the dark ages, when the Bible was a hidden book, a representation of this scene was to be found in every church. Though obscured by superstition, the ideal was still held up, and was still moulding the minds and stimulating the holy endeavours of men. In an open Bible we have the ideal more truthfully set forth. The love there revealed has been the constraining motive which moved apostles to preach, martyrs to suffer, missionaries to forgo the joys of home, and humble men and women to labour in countless ways to advance the interests of Christ. His patience shames our murmuring: His burning love to us kindles our love to Him. (R. C. Ford, M.A.)
The worlds regard for the outward
The great cause assigned by the prophet for the astonishment of men at the Messiah and for their rejection of Him is, that His real glory is hidden beneath humiliation and sorrow. The world, that is, which always looks at the outward appearance of things, judges them according to their material splendours; having a carnal eye, it can but dimly discern moral beauty. It renders homage to thrones and crowns, and wealth and power, and does not care to see the moral iniquity and the spiritual repulsiveness there may be behind them; it feels pity and contempt for suffering and poverty and obloquy, and does not care to see the moral grandeur that these may cover or indicate. There are few of us so reverent to a poor, godly man, as to a rich godless one. We may not refuse to utter words commending the one and condemning the other, but we utter them very tenderly; the goodness of a rich man causes us to exhaust our expletives, and almost ourselves, in admiring praise; the wickedness of a poor man is denounced by us without mercy; but when the conditions are reversed we have a great deal more reserve. Our praise is a concession that we cannot withhold. We blame with bated breath, and whispering humbleness. The ragged garments of poverty have a wonderful transparency when vice lies behind them; while riches usurp the powers of charity, and hide the multitude of sins. (H. Allen, D.D.)
The art of seeing the spiritual
The Jews did not look for spiritual meaning in their dispensation, but simply at material and mechanical ordinances, and they became Pharisees–regarding religion as a thing of phylacteries and tithes and street prayers: they did not look for spiritual glory in their expected Messiah, or for spiritual blessings in His coming, and they became absorbed in the conception of a temporal prince, and were incapable of seeing anything else in Him; and, because He was not this, in their astonishment and anger, they rejected and crucified Him. The lesson is a universal one; it affects the spiritual education of every soul, our own daily habits of interpreting things. We may look at Gods world until we see nothing of Gods presence in it; nothing but mechanical forces. A scientific or philosophical eye may soon educate itself to see nothing but science and philosophy; a material eye, to see nothing but materialism. We may look upon creation, and see no Creator; upon providence, and see no Benefactor. So we may read the Bible, and see nothing but sacred history, or scientific philosophy–the letter and not the spirit. So we may look at Christian things on their material rather than their spiritual side. We may speculate upon a millennium coming of Christ, until we forget His spiritual presence–even upon heaven itself, until we forget the inward grace, and holiness and Divine communion that chiefly make it heaven. Let us carefully cultivate the Divine art of seeing spiritual aspects and meanings in all things, of judging of all things by their spiritual importance, of valuing them for their spiritual influence, of applying them to spiritual uses. The pure in heart see God; spiritual things are spiritually discerned. (H. Allon, D.D.)
Christ rejected
I. The first reason assigned for the rejection of the Messiah by the Jews was THE GRADUAL AND UNOSTENTATIOUS MANNER OF HIS MANIFESTATION. He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground, etc. The general reference is, no doubt, to His parentage, and His manner of entering the world–so contrasted with the probable expectations of the Jews. Not like a cedar of Lebanon did the world s Messiah appear; not as a scion of a noble and wealthy house; not as the son of a Herod or a Caiaphas–but as a tender plant, as a root, out of a dry ground. It is a repetition of the figure in the eleventh chapter, There shall come forth a Shoot out of the stem of Jesse; and a Scion shall spring forth from his roots. Just as the descendants of the Plantagenets are to be found amongst our English peasantry, the glory of the family had departed. Nothing could be farther from the thought of the carnal Jews than that Messiah the Prince should be a scion of such a forgotten house. How wonderful in its obscurity and helplessness was His childhood; not hastening towards His manifestation, not hastening even towards His ministry to the perishing, but waiting until the fulness of time was come; growing into the child, the youth, the man; for more than thirty years giving scarcely a sign that He was other than an ordinary son of humanity; at first helplessly dependent upon His parents for support and direction, then obediently subject to them, fulfilling all the conditions and duties of childhood, a child with children as well as a man with men; then a youth labouring as an artisan, fulfilling His great mission to the world in a carpenters shop. And then fulfilling His ministry, not amongst the rich, but amongst the poor; not in acts of rule and conquest, but in deeds of beneficence and words of spiritual life; and consummating it by a death on a cross.
II. The second reason for the rejection of the Messiah by the Jews, which the prophet assigns, is HIS UNATTRACTIVE APPEARANCE WHEN MANIFESTED. This he puts both negatively and positively.
1. Negatively, He was destitute of all attractions; He had no form nor comeliness; He was without beauty to make men desire Him.
2. But there were positive repulsions; everything to offend men who had such prepossessions as they had. A Messiah in the guise of a peasant babe–the Divine in the form of a servant and a sufferer. Chiefly, however, weare arrested by the phrase, which, because of its touching beauty, has almost become one of the personal designations of the Messiah–A Man of sorrows–literally, a Man of sufferings, or of many sufferings–One who possesses sufferings as other men possess intelligence, or physical faculty–One who was acquainted with grief, not in the casual, transient way in which most men are, but with an intimacy as of companionship; the utmost bodily and mental sorrow was endured by Him. The emphasis of the description lies not in the fact that one who came to be a Prophet and Reformer was subjected to martyr treatment, for such men have ever been rejected and persecuted by the ignorance, envy and madness of their generation. It is that He who was the Creator and Lord of all things should have submitted to this condition, borne this obloquy, endured this suffering; that the Lord of life and blessedness should appear in our world, not only as a Man, but as so suffering a Man, as that He should be known amongst other suffering men as pre-eminently a Man of sorrows–a Man whose sorrows were greater than other mens sorrows. Now, we cannot think that this designation is given to Him merely because of the bodily sufferings, or social provocations, that were inflicted upon Him. We shall touch but very distantly the true heart of the Redeemers sorrows, if we limit the cause of them to the mere stubbornness of His generation, or to the mere physical agonies of His death. It is doing no wrong to the pre-eminence of the Saviours agonies to say, that many teachers of truth have been opposed and persecuted more than He was, and that many martyrs have endured deaths of more terrible physical agony. If this were all, we should be compelled, I think, to admit that the prophetic description is somewhat exaggerated. How, then, is it to be accounted for? Only by the fact of His having also endured transcendent inward sorrow; sorrow of mind, sorrow of heart, of which ordinary men have no experience; only by His own strange expression in His agony, when no human hand touched Him–My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death. Then comes the mystery of such a pure and perfect soul experiencing such a sorrow. If He were only a prophet and martyr for the truth of God, why, as distinguished from all other prophets and martyrs, should He have endured so much inward anguish? Here we touch the great mystery of atonement, and we are bold to say that this alone interprets Christs peculiar sorrow. (H. Allon, D.D.)
Lessons from the manner of Christs appearing
1. Great things may be found in very lowly forms. We judge of things by material magnitudes; the spiritual God judges them by moral qualities. The great forces that have ruled the world have mostly been born in lowly places; they have been moulded to greatness in the school of necessity; trained to greatness in the school of endurance. He who has not to endure can never be great. Let us cultivate the spiritual eye, that can recognize spiritual qualities, everywhere, and neither in others nor in ourselves disparage the day of small things, the germs of virtue and strength; for we know not what they may achieve. The acorn becomes an oak; the solitary monk shakes the world; the Babe of Bethlehem becomes the Christ of Christianity. Your solitary scholar may be the nucleus of a great system of education; your solitary convert may evangelize a nation (Mat 13:31-32).
2. The power of Divine patience. God waits, even in His great redeeming purpose, until the fulness of time is come, and then until the tender plant grows up before Him. We, in our impatience, wish to do all things at once, to convert the world in a day. Our zeal becomes fanaticism the more difficult to check because it takes so holy a form. (H. Allon, D.D.)
Aversion to Christ
The reason for this aversion to Christ may probably be found in the fact of–
1. His sorrowful face.
2. His serious manner.
3. His spiritual teaching.
4. His consecration to His Fathers business.
5. His single walk with God, His habits of retirement and prayer.
Men hate and reject Christ for these characteristics. The worlds spirit and all worldly religion resent these aspects of spiritual life. (G. F, Pentecost, D. D.)
Handels Messiah
Of Handel, it is said, that when composing his Messiah, and he came to these words, he was affected to tears; and well might he weep, for history furnishes no parallel to this case. (J. Higgins.)
A man of sorrows
The causes of Christs sorrows
I. THE DAILY CONTACT OF HIS PURE AND PIOUS SOUL WITH SINFUL AND SINNING MEN. And who may conceive the constancy and intensity of the anguish that would spring from this? There would be the sense of human relationship to a race that had sinned and fallen; they were men, and He was a Man too: He likewise took part of the same; they were His proper brothers; He was allied in blood to men so guilty and degraded. It was as if a vicious brother, a prodigal son, were guilty of nameless and constant crime. The sense of mens guilt, degradation, misery, ingratitude, would bow down His pure soul with unspeakable sorrow and shame. Then there was His daily practical contact with acts and hearts of sin; the touch on every side, and wherever He felt humanity, of what was unloving and unholy; the sight of their hate to His loving Father; of their rebelliousness against His holy law; a sinfulness and unspiritualness that led them to reject and hate Him; to turn away with dislike and determination from His holy words and deeds. His great human love, His perfect human holiness, would wonderfully combine to wring His soul with anguish. The apostle intimates how great this sorrow was, when he says that He endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself; that He resisted unto blood, striving against sin. And we can understand the mysterious agony of His soul in Gethsemane only by supposing that it was the sense of the worlds guilt that lay upon it: that made His soul so exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. We have only to think of His pure nature; that He was holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners; and to remember the men that He came into contact with; the world in which He lived; the treatment which His message of holiness and mercy received: to understand how sore the sorrow of His soul would be.
II. THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE DEVIL. He, the pure and perfect Son of the Father, was doomed to listen to polluting and hateful thoughts of distrust and sin: He who so loathed evil was plied with evil.
III. THE GREAT BUT INEXPLICABLE SORROW OF WHATEVER CONSTITUTED HIS ATONEMENT–of whatever is meant by its pleasing the Father to bruise Him–to put Him to grief–to make His soul an offering for sin–to lay upon Him the iniquity of us all–to forsake Him on His cross. These were the chief elements of His sorrow–a sorrow that has had no equal, and that, in many of its ingredients, has had no likeness. (H. Allon, D. D.)
Christ a Man of sorrows
I. IT IS HERE PREDICTED THAT CHRIST SHOULD BE A MAN OF SORROWS, and acquainted with grief. This prediction was literally fulfilled. It has been supposed that His sufferings were rather apparent than real; or, at least, that His abundant consolations, and His knowledge of the happy consequences which would result from His death, rendered His sorrows comparatively light, and almost converted them to joys. But never was supposition more erroneous. His sufferings were incomparably greater than they appeared to be. No finite mind can conceive of their extent. His sufferings began with his birth, and ended but with His life.
1. It must have been exceedingly painful to such a person as Christ to live in a world like this.
2. Another circumstance which contributed to render our Saviour a Man of sorrows was the reception He met with from those He came to save.
3. Another circumstance that threw a shade of gloom over our Saviour s life was His clear view and constant anticipation of the dreadful agonies in which it was to terminate. He was not ignorant, as we happily are, of the miseries which were before Him. How deeply the prospect affected Him is evident from His own language: I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!
II. We have in this prophetic passage AN ACCOUNT OF OUR SAVIOURS CONDUCT UNDER THE PRESSURE OF THESE SORROWS. He was oppressed, etc. He was brought as a Lamb, etc. Never was language more descriptive of the most perfect meekness and patience; never was prediction more fully justified by the event than in the case before us. If His lips were opened, it was but to express the most perfect submission to His Fathers will, and to breathe out prayers for His murderers. Christian, look at your Master, and learn how to suffer. Sinner, look at your Saviour, and learn to admire, to imitate, and to forgive. But why is this patient, innocent Sufferer thus afflicted? He was wounded for our transgressions, etc.
III. Our text describes THE MANNER IN WHICH CHRIST WAS TREATED when He thus came as a Man of sorrows to atone for our sins. Despised and rejected of men. We hid, as it were, our faces, etc. He has long since ascended to heaven, and therefore cannot be the immediate object of mens attacks. But His Gospel and His servants are still in the world; and the manner in which they are treated is sufficient evidence that the feelings of the natural heart toward Christ are not materially different from those of the Jews. His servants are hated, ridiculed and despised, His Gospel is rejected, and His institutions slighted. Every man who voluntarily neglects to confess Christ before men, and to commemorate His dying love, must say, either that He does not choose to do it, or that he is not prepared to do it. If a man says, I do not choose to confess Christ, he certainly rejects Him. (E. Payson, D. D.)
The human race typified by the Man of sorrows
I. THE LOT OF HUMANITY IN THIS WORLD. This is the portrait of the species–A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
II. THE TREATMENT WHICH DEPRESSED HUMANITY COMMONLY EXPERIENCE: We hid, as it were, our faces from Him. (F. W. Robertson, M.A.)
The Man of sorrows
I. A MAN. He who was God, and was in the beginning with God, was made flesh, and dwelt among us. Remembering that Jesus Christ is God, it behoves us to recollect that His manhood was none the less real and substantial It differed from our own humanity in the absence of sin, but in no other respect. This condescending participation in our nature brings the Lord Jesus very near to us in relationship. Inasmuch as He was man, though also God, He was, according to Hebrew law, our goel–our kinsman, next of kin. Now it was according to the law that if an inheritance had been lost, it was the right of the next kin to redeem it. Our Lord Jesus exercised His legal right, and seeing us sold into bondage and our inheritance taken from us, came forward to redeem both us and all our lost estate. Be thankful that you have not to go to God at the first, and as you are, but you are invited to come to Jesus Christ, and through Him to the Father. Then let me add, that every child of God ought also to be comforted by the fact that our Redeemer is one of our own race, seeing that He was made like unto His brethren that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest; and He was tempted in all points, like as we are, that He might be able to succour them that are tempted. The sympathy of Jesus is the next most precious thing to His sacrifice.
II. A MAN OF SORROWS. The expression is intended to be very emphatic; it is not a sorrowful man, but a Man of sorrows, as if He were made up of sorrows, and they were constituent elements of His being. Some are men of pleasure, others men of wealth, but He was a Man of sorrows. He and sorrow might have changed names. He who saw Him, saw sorrow, and he who would see sorrow, must look on Him. Behold, and see, saith He, if there was ever sorrow like unto My sorrow which was clone unto Me.
1. Our Lord is called the Man of sorrows for peculiarity, for this was His peculiar token and special mark. We might well call Him a man of holiness; for there was no fault in Him: or a man, of labours, for He did His Fathers business earnestly; or a man of eloquence, for never man spake like this man. We might right fittingly call Him The man of love, for never was there greater love than glowed in His heart. Still, conspicuous as all these and many other excellencies were, yet had we gazed upon Christ and been asked afterwards what was the most striking peculiarity in Him, we should have said His sorrow. Tears were His insignia, and the Cross His escutcheon.
2. Is not the title of Man of sorrows given to our Lord by way of eminence? He was not only sorrowful, but pre-eminent among the sorrowful. All men have a burden to bear, but His was heaviest of all. The reason for this superior sorrow may be found in the fact that with His sorrow there was no admixture of sin. Side by side with His painful sensitiveness of the evil of sin, was His gracious tenderness towards the sorrows of others. Besides this our Saviour had a peculiar relationship to sin. He was not merely afflicted with the sight of it, and saddened by perceiving its effects on others, but sin was actually laid upon Him, and He was himself numbered with the transgressors.
3. The title of Man of sorrows, was also given to our Lord to indicate the constancy of His afflictions. He changed His place of abode, but He always lodged with sorrow. Sorrow wove His swaddling bands, and sorrow spun His winding sheet.
4. He was also a Man of sorrows, for the variety of His woes; He was a man not of sorrow only, but of sorrows. As to His poverty. He knew the heart-rendings of bereavement. Perhaps the bitterest of His sorrows were those which were connected with His gracious work. He came as the Messiah sent of God, on an embassage of love, and men rejected His claims. Nor did they stay at cold rejection; they then proceeded to derision and ridicule. They charged Him with every crime which their malice could suggest. And all the while He was doing nothing but seeking their advantage in all ways, As He proceeded in His life His sorrows multiplied. He preached, and when mens hearts were hard, and they would not believe what He said, He was grieved for the hardness of their hearts. His sorrow was not that men injured Him, but that they destroyed themselves; this it was, that pulled up the sluices of His soul, and made His eyes oerflow with tears: O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! how often would I have gathered thy children together, etc. But surely He found some solace with the few companions whom He had gathered around Him? He did; but for all that He must have found as much sorrow as solace in their company. They were dull scholars; they were miserable comforters for the Man of sorrows. The Saviour, from the very dignity of His nature, must suffer alone. The mountain-side, with Christ upon it, seems to me a suggestive symbol of His earthly life. His soul lived in vast solitudes, sublime and terrible, and there, amid a midnight of trouble, His spirit communed with the Father, no one being able to accompany Him into the dark glens and gloomy ravines of His unique experience. In the last, crowning sorrows of
His life, there came upon Him the penal inflictions from God, the chastisement of our peace which was upon Him.
III. ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF.
1. With grief he had an intimate acquaintance. He did not know merely what it was in others, but it came home to Himself. We have read of grief, we have sympathized with grief, we have sometimes felt grief: but the.Lord felt it more intensely than other men in His innermost soul. He and grief were bosom friends.
2. It was a continuous acquaintance. He did not call at griefs house sometimes to take a tonic by the way, neither did He sip now and then of the wormwood and the gall, but the quassia cup was always His, and ashes were always mingled with His bread. Not only forty days in the wilderness did Jesus fast; the world was ever a wilderness to Him, and His life was one long Lent. I do not say that He was not, after all, a happy man, for down deep in His soul benevolence always supplied a living spring of joy to Him. There was a joy into which we are one day to enter–the joy of our Lord–the joy set before Him for which He endured the Cross, despising the shame; but that does not at all take away from the fact that His acquaintance with grief was continuous and intimate beyond that of any man who ever lived. It was indeed a growing acquaintance with grief, for each step took Him deeper down into the grim shades of sorrow.
3. It was a voluntary acquaintance for our sakes. He need never have known a grief at all, and at any moment He might have said to grief, farewell. But He remained to the end, out of love to us, griefs acquaintance. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Christ as a Sufferer
1. Jesus suffered from what may be called the ordinary privations of humanity. Born in a stable, etc. We may not be able to assert that none ever suffered so much physical agony as He, but this is at least probable; for the exquisiteness of His physical organism in all likelihood made Him much more sensitive than others to pain.
2. He suffered keenly from the pain of anticipating coming evil.
3. He suffered from the sense of being the cause of suffering to others. To persons of an unselfish disposition the keenest pang inflicted by their own weakness or misfortunes may sometimes be to see those whom they would like to make happy rendered miserable through connection with themselves. To the child Jesus how gruesome must have been the story of the babes of Bethlehem, whom the sword of Herod smote when it was seeking for Him! Or, if His mother spared Him this recital, He must at least have learned how she and Joseph had to flee with Him to Egypt to escape the jealousy of Herod. As His life drew near its close, this sense that connection with Himself might be fatal to His friends forced itself more and more upon His notice.
4. The element of shame was, all through, a large ingredient in His cup of suffering. To a sensitive mind there is nothing more intolerable; it is far harder to bear than bodily pain. But it assailed Jesus in nearly every form, pursuing Him all through His life. He was railed at for the humbleness of His birth. The high-born priests and the educated rabbis sneered at the carpenters son who had never learned, and the wealthy Pharisees derided Him. He was again and again called a madman. Evidently this was what Pilate took Him for. The Roman soldiers adopted an attitude of savage banter towards Him all through His trial and crucifixion, treating Him as boys torment one who is weak in the mind. He heard Barabbas preferred to Himself by the voice of His fellow-countrymen, and He was crucified between thieves, as if He were the worst of the worst. A hail of mockery kept falling on Him in His dying hours. Thus had He who was conscious of irresistible strength to submit to be treated as the weakest of weaklings, and He who was the Wisdom of the Highest to submit to be used as if He were less than a man.
5. But to Jesus it was more painful still, being the Holy One of God, to be regarded and treated as the chief of sinners. To one who loves God and goodness there can be nothing so odious as to be suspected of hypocrisy and to know that he is believed to be perpetrating crimes at the opposite extreme from his public profession. Yet this was what Jesus was accused of. Possibly there was not a single human being, when He died, who believed that He was what He claimed to be.
6. If to the holy soul of Jesus it was painful to be believed to be guilty of sins which He had not committed, it must have been still more painful to feel that He was being thrust into sin itself. This attempt was olden made. Satan tried it in the wilderness, and although only this one temptation of his is detailed, he no doubt often returned to the attack. Wicked men tried it; they resorted to every device to cause Him to lose His temper (Luk 11:53-54). Even friends, who did not understand the plan of His life, endeavoured to direct Him from the course prescribed to Him by the will of God–so much so that He had once to turn on one of them, as if he were temptation personified, with Get thee behind Me, Satan.
7. While the proximity of sin awoke such loathing in His holy soul, and the touch of it was to Him like the touch of fire on delicate flesh, He was brought into the closest contact with it, and hence arose His deepest suffering. It pressed its loathsome presence on Him from a hundred quarters. He who could not bear to look on it saw it in its worst forms close to His very eyes. His own presence in the world brought it out; for goodness stirs up the evil lying at the bottom of wicked hearts. It was as if all the sin of the race were rushing upon Him, and Jesus felt it as if it were all His own. (J. Stalker, D.D.)
The Man of sorrows
I. THE LANGUAGE DOES NOT DESCRIBE THE CASE OF ONE WHO ENCOUNTERED ONLY THE ORDINARY OR THE AVERAGE AMOUNT OF THE TRIALS WHICH BELONG TO HUMAN LIFE. There is implied in it a pre-eminence in sorrow, a peculiarly deep experience of grief.
II. OF ALL THE MANY GRIEFS OF THE DIVINE REDEEMER IN HIS HUMAN LIFE, THERE WAS NOT ONE WHICH HE HIMSELF EITHER NEEDED OR DESERVED TO BEAR. When the apostle tells us that He was made perfect through suffering, the meaning is that He was by this means made officially perfect as a Saviour, as the Captain of salvation, and the High-Priest of His redeemed, and not that He lacked any moral excellence, to acquire which suffering was needful. So again, when it is said that He learned obedience by the things which He suffered, the meaning obviously is, that by putting Himself in a state of humiliation, and in the condition of a servant under law, He came to know by experience what it was to render obedience to the law, and not at all that He was ever defective in the least, as to the spirit of obedience to the Fathers will. As He had no need of any improvement of His virtues, He had no faults, no sins, which called for chastisement.
III. ALL THE SUFFERINGS OF THE LORD JESUS WERE ENDURED WITH UNWAVERING FORTITUDE.
IV. IN ALL THE GRIEFS AND SORROWS WHICH THE BLESSED SAVIOUR SUFFERED, HIS MIND WAS CHIEFLY OCCUPIED WITH THE GOOD RESULTS IN WHICH HIS SUFFERINGS WERE TO ISSUE. He deliberately entered on His singular career of humiliation and self-sacrifice for the good of man and the glory of God. Practical lessons:
1. If even the Son of God, when on earth, was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, we certainly should not think it strange that days of trial are appointed unto us.
2. If our blessed Lord felt keenly what He suffered, and was even moved to tears, we need not reproach ourselves because we deeply feel our trials, and cannot but weep in the fulness of our grief.
3. If Christ was a willing sufferer, deliberately choosing to suffer for the good of others, we surely should consent to suffer for our own advantage.
4. If our blessed Lord and Saviour made less account of what He suffered than of the good results that were to follow, it is wise at least in us to do the same. (Ray Palmer, D.D.)
Christ the Man of sorrows
While on earth He was surrounded by many sources of pleasure. The earth teemed with every form of life, and the air was melodious with music. The sceneries of His native country suggested the sublimest imagery, and inspired poetry of the highest kind: and had He possessed none of these, He would have been perfectly happy; for He was the Infinite; His sorrows arose from–
I. THE FELT RELATION OF A LOVING BEING TO A RUINED RACE.
II. THE CRUSHING PRESSURE OF HIS MEDIATORIAL WORK.
III. HIS CERTAIN KNOWLEDGE THAT THE RESULT OF HIS MISSION WOULD NOT BE EQUAL TO THE BENEVOLENCE OF HIS WILL. (Evan Lewis, B.A.)
The mystery of sorrow
I. CONSIDER ITS RELATION TO MAN. There are facts which know no frontiers. In the inner life of thought and feeling such is sorrow. It is a universal language, it obliterates space, it annihilates time; it is the great leveller, it ignores rank, it stands head and shoulders above any dignity. Think again, it is too sacred to be only universal. It is also an intimate fact. None can comfort. There may be sweet help, deep and real sympathy, not comfort, no, for none can undo the tragic truth. Yes, there is One. One can come nearest to the feeling, mad, in our eternal life, in a sense He can undo. One, only One, has gathered up the representative experiences of all.
II. The thought gains precision when we remember that IT BEARS A WITNESS FOR GOD. Let Love meet death or trouble, and the result is sorrow. This noblest human sorrow so begotten is a witness to the Source of its being. Love, the love of the creature, is his highest endowment from the Love of God.
III. SORROW GAINS A CLEARER OUTLINE TO ITS FRAIL AND MISTY FORM AS SEEN IN ITS RELATION TO WHAT IS CALLED THE SCHEME OF REDEMPTION; seen, that is, in its place in the awakening and restoring of the human spirit, great though fallen. Sorrow here is a power. It takes varying tints.
1. At the darkest, it is a power of warning, of prophecy. It warns of a stern reality in this world–the dreadfulness of sin.
2. Better, it is a power to transfigure. Repentance is the one path to pardon, and it is a certain path. Whence comes true repentance? It comes from Gods love seen in fairest, saddest image in the Man of sorrows
3. It is a power to purify. Sorrow sends you in on self. Godless sorrow would make self more selfish, working death; not so sorrow from the Cross of Christ. A life searched out, repented of, is a spirit purified. (W. J. KnoxLittle, M.A.)
The suffering Christ
I. THE MATTER, what He suffered.
II. THE MANNER, how He came to suffer.
III. THE REASONS and ends why, for our good. Here are three chief lessons for a Christian to learn:–
1. Patience and comfort.
2. Humility.
3. In the end, love. All this was for you. What will you do for God again? (T. Manton, D..D.)
Sir Noel Patons Man of Sorrows
To the painter ere he sat down to produce this work of art many questions would suggest themselves. Among them, doubtless, would be these:–
1. What shall be the scene? Of course, the artist would naturally think of many scenes in our Lords life more or less appropriate for such a representation. The painter seems to have recognized the great truth which we all must have proved to some extent, that man tastes deepest of sorrow in loneliness, that the cross which weighs heaviest on any shoulder is not the cross which the world can see, but which is borne out of sight, when the heart, and no one else save God, knoweth its own bitterness. Thus Sir Noel Paton has represented The Man of Sorrows as isolated from His fellows, far away from the habitations of men and shut out of the world. The whole picture is one of desolation. In its centre and foreground is represented The Man of Sorrows sitting upon a jagged rock. And, oh, what sorrow is depicted there! Those large, full, liquid eyes brim over with tears; every expression of the countenance is charged with grief; the lips are wan, and a deep furrow crosses that young, manly brow. The swollen veins in the neck and temple, the powerful muscular action in the right hand, as with open fingers it rests heavily upon the rocks and in the left clenched tightly as it presses upon the thigh, and in the feet as they press the earth convulsively underneath–for the Man of Sorrows is represented with head uncovered and feet unsandalled–all these tell the story of an awful tension of a withering sorrow.
2. Closely and inseparably connected with the question of scene is that of the period in our Lord s life in which He can most appropriately be represented as the Man of sorrows. The artist chooses the eve of the Temptation, and thus selects the greatest transitional period of our Saviours life–that beginning with the Baptism and closing with the Temptation. The time of day chosen is the twilight of morning. There is something in the twilight that is consistent not only with solemn, but also with sad thoughts and feelings.
3. What can account for the sorrow! You look to the picture in vain for the solution. The painting is a problem, an enigma. It is purposely so. The painter presents to us the great fact, not its explanation. He goes to Inspired Writ for that, and thus refers the perplexed spectator to the words of Isaiah as supplying the key to the whole painting: He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows, etc. (verses 4-6). These are the words which Sir Noel Paton adopts, and practically says, There! that is what I mean. We did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. How shall this false estimate of Him be corrected? Look at the picture; that Man of sorrows looks up and holds communion with the skies; see the half-open mouth expressive of expectation, and those eyes so full of tears and yet so full of vision. Verily He is not alone–the Father is with Him; for from the heavens and from a source other than the sun there descends through a rift of the clouds a shaft of light that looks like the light of the Fathers countenance, and rests upon the face of this Sorrowing One. This human countenance thus lit up by the light of the Divine countenance is the painters sublime answer to the old-world estimate of the Man of sorrows. What need of any more! (D. Davies.)
Christs life a model for His people
The more deeply we enter into the meaning of Christ considered as the Divine Man, the more distinctly revealed it becomes to us that what His life was our life is intended to be. There are instincts and there are impulses and ambitions that shrink from coming under the sovereignty of a commitment so cordial and entire. That accounts for the disproportionate emphasis so customarily laid upon the commercial feature of the atonement. It is easier and it is lazier to believe in a Christ that is going to pay my debts for me, than it is to grow up in Christ into a Divine endowment, that shall be itself the cure for insolvency and the material of wealth Divine and inexhaustible. You have really done nothing for a poor man by paying his debts for him, unless in addition to squaring his old accounts you have in such manner dealt with him as to guarantee him against being similarly involved in the time to come. Emphasize as we may the merely ransoming work of Christ, we are not made free men by having our fetters broken off, and we are not made wealthy men by having our debts paid. It is not what Christ delivers us from, but what He translates us into that makes us saved men in Christ. (C. H.Parkhurst, D. D.)
Our Lords life lived in shadow
No fair reading of the narrative of Christs life will leave the impression that sorrow of heart was a grace that Christ cultivated. The pathetic was not a temper of spirit which He encouraged in Himself or in others. Heaviness of mind was not a thing to be sought in and for itself. There is no gain saying the fact that one great object of His mission was to make the world glad. Still for all that He was a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. It needs also to be said that for us to be heavy-hearted merely because Christ was, to be sorrowful by a sheer act of imitation, is distinctly repugnant to everything like Christian sense, and at the farthest possible remove from all that deserves to be called Christian sincerity. Neither can we leave out of the account all those passages, especially in the New Testament, where particular praise is accorded to gladness of heart.
The problems of life involve sorrow
Nevertheless, when all these caveats have been entered and gladness of heart eulogized to the fullest extent, authorized by multitudinous expressions occurring throughout the entire Scriptures, it still remains beyond dispute that our Lords life was lived in shadow, and that He died at last less because of the nails and the spear-wounds, than He did of a broken heart. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.)
The sorrow of strained powers
He came to interfere with the natural current of event. And it made Him tired. And a man, even a Divine man, is less apt to laugh when He is tired. A good deal of what we call our gladness of heart, if we will care to scrutinize it, is simply the congenial luxury of drifting down the current of event. If you are pulling your boat up-stream you will be sober while you are about it. Strained powers are serious. It is the farthest from our thought to disparage exuberance or even hilarity; nevertheless, it remains a fact that hilarity is feeling out at pasture and not feeling under the yoke. It is steam escaping at the throttle because it is not pushing at the piston. I venture to say that Christ could not shake His purpose off. He was here to stay the downward drift of event; the purpose was too vast to be easily flung aside, and His muscles were too solidly knotted to it to be easily unknotted and relaxed. And we shall have to go on and say that it was an inherent part of Christ to have a purpose and to be mightily bent to its achievement; and not only that, it was an inherent part of Christ as the Saviour of this world to seize upon the current of event and of history and to under take to reverse it. Exactly that was the genius of the Christ-mission. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.)
The Christ-life in the Christian
You cannot drift down the tide of event and be a Christ man or a Christ woman. The world is to be saved; the tide is to be reversed. Man inspired of God is to do it; and you cannot buckle yourself down to that problem in Christian whole-heartedness and not grow sober under it. Now you see the philosophy of the sober Christ. He flung Himself against forty centuries of bad event, and the Divine Man got bruised by the impact. He stood up and let forty centuries jump on Him; He held His own, but blood broke through His pores in perspiration, and about that there is nothing humorous. The edge of this truth is not broken by the fact that Christ took hold of the work of the worlds saving in a larger way than it is possible for us to do, and that therefore the burden of His undertaking came upon Him in a heavier, wider, and more crushing way than it can come upon us; and that therefore while it overwhelmed Him in sorrow, our smaller mission and lighter task can with entire propriety leave us buoyant and gladsome. All of that conception of the case lacks dignity and reach You cant take hold of a great matter in a small way. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.)
The sorrow of love
It is but a step now to go on and speak of the saddening effect necessarily flowing from the circumstances under which in this world Christian work has to be done. It was the love which Christ had for the world that made Him sad while doing His work in the world; and the infinitude of His love is what explains the unutterableness of His pain; for the world in which Christ fulfilled His mission was a suffering world. Now a man who is without love can be in the midst of suffering and, not suffer. A loveless spirit grieves over his own pain, but has no sense of anothers pain, and no feeling of being burdened by anothers pain. Love has this peculiar property, that it makes the person whom we love one with us, so that his experience becomes a part of our own life, his pain becomes painful to us, his burdens make us tired. The mother feels her childs pain as keenly as though it were her own pain, perhaps more so. In its Divine relations this is all expressed in those familiar words of Scripture, In all their affliction He was afflicted. Sympathy is the form which love takes in a suffering world. Love is the finest type of communism. (C. H.Parkhurst, D. D.)
Christs great capacity for suffering
The measure of our being is our capacity for sorrow or joy. Captain Conder speaks of the shadow cast by Mount Hermon being as much as seventy miles long at some periods. Was it not the very greatness of Christ that made His joys and His griefs equally unique? (H. O. Mackey.)
We hid as it were our faces from Him
A sad confession
In the margin of your Bibles this passage is rendered, He hid as it were His face from us. The literal translation of the Hebrew would be, He was as a hiding of faces from Him, or from us. Some critical readers think these words were intended to describe our Lord as having so humbled Himself, and brought Himself to such a deep degradation, that He was comparable to the leper who covered his face and cried, Unclean, unclean, hiding himself from the gaze of men. Abhorred and despised by men, He was like one put aside because of His disease and shunned by all mankind. Others suppose the meaning to be that on account of our Lord s terrible and protracted sorrow His face wore an expression so painful and grievous that men could scarcely bear to look upon Him. They hid as it were their faces from Him–amazed at that brow all carved with lines of anxious thought, those cheeks all ploughed with furrows of deep care, those eyes all sunk in shades of sadness, that soul bowed down, exceeding sorrowful, even unto death! It may be so; we cannot tell. I have a plain, practical purpose to pursue. Here is an indictment to which we must all plead guilty.
I. Sometimes men hide their faces from Jesus IN COOL CONTEMPT OF HIM. How astounding! how revolting! He ought surely to be esteemed by all mankind.
1. Some show their opposition by attempting to ignore or to tarnish the dignity of His person.
2. Are there not others who affect great admiration for Jesus of Nazareth as an example of virtue and benevolence, who nevertheless reject His mediatorial work as our Redeemer? As a substitutionary sacrifice they do not and cannot esteem Him.
3. Then they will pour contempt upon, the various doctrines of His Gospel.
4. And with what pitiful disdain the Lord s people are slighted! Do I address anybody who has despised the Lord Jesus Christ? Your wantonness can offer no excuse but your ignorance. And as for your ignorance, it is without excuse.
II. A far more common way in which men hide their faces from Christ is BY THEIR HEEDLESSNESS, THEIR INDIFFERENCE, THEIR NEGLECT.
III. We hid as it were our faces from Him BY PREFERRING ANY OTHER MODE OF SALVATION TO SALVATION BY FAITH IN CHRIST.
IV. After we were quite sure that we could not be saved other than by the one Mediator, do you remember how we continued to hide our face from Jesus BY PERSISTENT UNBELIEF IN HIM.
V. But there are some of us who must plead guilty to another charge; we have hidden as it were our faces from Him since He has saved us, and since we have known His love, BY OUR SILLY SHAME AND OUR BASE COWARDICE.
VI. Many, if not all, of us who are believers will penitently confess that we have sometimes hidden our faces from Christ BY NOT WALKING IN CONSTANT FELLOWSHIP WITH HIM. (C. H. Spurgeon.) We hid as it were our faces from Him. Literally, as one from whom there is hiding of face, as if shrinking from a horrible sight. (Canon Cook.) The impersonal form refers to the men just named, or all those of note and influence. Their faces were averted from Him, as a lunatic, beside Himself, or one possessed, as a deceiver and a blasphemer. (T.R. Birks.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 3. Acquainted with grief] For vidua, familiar with grief, eight MSS. and one edition have veyada, and knowing grief; the Septuagint, Syriac, and Vulgate read it veyodea.
We hid as it were our faces from him – “As one that hideth his face from us”] For uchemaster, four MSS. (two ancient) have uchemastir, one MS. umastir. For panim, two MSS. have panaiv; so likewise the Septuagint and Vulgate. Mourners covered up the lower part of their faces, and their heads, 2Sa 15:30; Eze 29:17; and lepers were commanded by the law, Le 13:45, to cover their upper lip. From which circumstance it seems that the Vulgate, Aquila, Symmachus, and the Jewish commentators have taken the word nagua, stricken, in the next verse, as meaning stricken with the leprosy: , Sym.; , Aq.; leprosum, Vulg. So my old MS. Bible. I will insert the whole passage as curious: –
There is not schap to him, ne fairnesse,
And we seegen him, and he was not of sigte,
And we desiriden him dispisid; and the last of men:
Man of souaris and witing infirmitie;
And he hid his cheer and despisid;
Wherfor ne we settiden bi him:
Verili our seeknesse he toke and our sorewis he bair,
And we helden him as leprous and smyten of God, and meekid;
He forsoth wounded is for our wickednesse,
Defoulid is for our hidous giltis
The discipline of our pese upon him,
And with his wanne wound we ben helid.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
He is despised and rejected of men; accounted as the scum of mankind, as one unworthy of the company and conversation of all men.
A man of sorrows; whose whole life was filled with, and in a manner made up of, an uninterrupted succession of sorrows and sufferings.
Acquainted with grief; who had constant experience of and familiar converse with grievous afflictions; for knowledge is oft taken practically, or for experience, as Gen 3:5; 2Co 5:21, and elsewhere.
We hid as it were our faces from him; we scorned and loathed to look upon him. Or, as others,
he hid as it were his face from us, as one ashamed to show his face, or to be seen by any men, as persons conscious to themselves of any great deformity do commonly shun the sight of men, as lepers did, Lev 13:45.
He was despised, and we esteemed him not: here are divers words expressing the same thing, to signify both the utmost degree of contempt, and how strange and wonderful a thing it was, that so excellent a person should be so despised.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
3. rejected“forsakenof men” [GESENIUS].”Most abject of men.” Literally, “He who ceasesfrom men,” that is, is no longer regarded as a man[HENGSTENBERG]. (See onIsa 52:14; Isa49:7).
man of sorrowsthat is,whose distinguishing characteristic was sorrows.
acquainted withfamiliarby constant contact with.
griefliterally,”disease”; figuratively for all kinds of calamity(Jer 6:14); leprosyespecially represented this, being a direct judgment from God. It isremarkable Jesus is not mentioned as having ever suffered undersickness.
and we hid . . .facesrather, as one who causes men to hidetheir faces from Him (in aversion) [MAURER].Or, “He was as an hiding of the face before it,” that is,as a thing before which a man covers his face in disgust[HENGSTENBERG]. Or, “asone before whom is the covering of the face”; before whom onecovers the face in disgust [GESENIUS].
wethe prophetidentifying himself with the Jews. See HORSLEY’Sview (see on Isa 53:1).
esteemed . . . notnegativecontempt; the previous words express positive.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
He is despised, and rejected of men,…. Or, “ceaseth from men” f; was not admitted into the company and conversation of men, especially of figure; or ceased from the class of men, in the opinion of others; he was not reckoned among men, was accounted a worm, and no man; or, if a man, yet not in his senses, a madman, nay, one that had a devil: or “deficient of men”; he had none about him of any rank or figure in life, only some few fishermen, and some women, and publicans, and harlots. The Vulgate Latin version renders it, “the last of men”, the most abject and contemptible of mankind; despised, because of the meanness of his birth, and parentage, and education, and of his outward appearance in public life; because of his apostles and audience; because of his doctrines, not agreeably to carnal reason, and his works, some of them being done on the sabbath day, and, as they maliciously suggested, by the help of Satan; and especially because of his ignominious sufferings and death:
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: or “known by grief” g; he was known by his troubles, notorious for them; these were his constant companions, his familiar acquaintance, with whom he was always conversant; his life was one continued series of sorrow, from the cradle to the cross; in his infancy his life was sought for by Herod, and he was obliged to be taken by his parents, and flee into Egypt; he ate his bread in sorrow, and with the sweat of his brow; he met with much sorrow from the hardness and unbelief of men’s hearts, and from the contradiction of sinners against himself, and even much from the frowardness of his own disciples; much from the temptations of Satan, and more from the wrath and justice of God, as the surety of his people; he was exceeding sorrowful in the garden, when his sweat was as it were great drops of blood; and when on the cross, under the hidings of his Father’s face, under a sense of divine displeasure for the sins of his people, and enduring the pains and agonies of a shameful and an accursed death; he was made up of sorrows, and grief was familiar to him. Some render it, “broken with infirmity”, or “grief” h:
and we hid as it were our faces from him; as one loathsome and abominable as having an aversion to him, and abhorrence of him, as scorning to look at him, being unworthy of any notice. Some render it, “he hid as it were his face from us” i; as conscious of his deformity and loathsomeness, and of his being a disagreeable object, as they said; but the former is best:
he was despised, and we esteemed him not; which is repeated to show the great contempt cast upon him, and the disesteem he was had in by all sorts of persons; professors and profane, high and low, rich poor, rulers and common people, priests, Scribes, and Pharisees; no set or order of men had any value for him; and all this disgrace and dishonour he was to undergo, to repair the loss of honour the Lord sustained by the sin of man, whose surety Christ became.
f “desiit viris”, Montanus, Heb.; “desitus virorum”, Piscator; “deficiens virorum”, Cocceius; “destitutus viris”, Vitringa. g “notus aegritudine”, Montanus; “notus infirmitate,” Cocceius. h “Attritus infirmitate”; so some in Vatablus, and R. Sol. Urbin. Ohel. Moed. fol. 96. 1. i “velut homo abscondens faciem a nobis”, Junius Tremellius “et tanquam aliquis qui obtegit faciem a nobis”, Piscator; “ut res tecta facie averanda prae nobis”, Cocceius.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
On the contrary, the impression produced by His appearance was rather repulsive, and, to those who measured the great and noble by a merely worldly standard, contemptible. “He was despised and forsaken by men; a man of griefs, and well acquainted with disease; and like one from whom men hide their face: despised, and we esteemed Him not.” All these different features are predicates of the erat that is latent in non species ei neque decor and non adspectus . Nibhzeh is introduced again palindromically at the close in Isaiah’s peculiar style; consequently Martini’s conjecture is to be rejected. This nibhzeh (cf., bazoh , Isa 49:7) is the keynote of the description which looks back in this plaintive tone. The predicate c hadal ‘shm is misunderstood by nearly all the commentators, inasmuch as they take as synonymous with , whereas it is rather used in the sense of (lords), as distinguished from b e ne ‘ adam , or people generally (see Isa 2:9, Isa 2:11, Isa 2:17). The only other passages in which it occurs are Pro 8:4 and Psa 141:4; and in both instances it signifies persons of rank. Hence Cocceius explains it thus: “wanting in men, i.e., having no respectable men with Him, to support Him with their authority.” It might also be understood as meaning the ending one among men, i.e., the one who takes the last place (S. , Jer. novissimus ); but in this case He Himself would be described as , whereas it is absolutely affirmed that He had not the appearance or distinction of such an one. But the rendering deficiens (wanting) is quite correct; compare Job 19:14, “my kinsfolk have failed” ( defecerunt , c had e lu , cognati mei ). The Arabic chadhalahu or chadhala anhu (also points to the true meaning; and from this we have the derivatives c hadhil , refusing assistance, leaving without help; and m achdhul , helpless, forsaken (see Lane’s Arabic Lexicon). In Hebrew, c hadal has not only the transitive meaning to discontinue or leave off a thing, but the intransitive, to case or be in want, so that c hadal ‘shm may mean one in want of men of rank, i.e., finding no sympathy from such men. The chief men of His nation who towered above the multitude, the great men of this world, withdrew their hands from Him, drew back from Him: He had none of the men of any distinction at His side. Moreover, He was , a man of sorrow of heart in all its forms, i.e., a man whose chief distinction was, that His life was one of constant painful endurance. And He was also , that is to say, not one known through His sickness (according to Deu 1:13, Deu 1:15), which is hardly sufficient to express the genitive construction; nor an acquaintance of disease (S. , familiaris morbo ), which would be expressed by or ; but scitus morbi , i.e., one who was placed in a state to make the acquaintance of disease. The deponent passive , acquainted (like batuach , confisus ; zakbur , mindful; peritus , pervaded, experienced), is supported by = ; Gr. . The meaning is not, that He had by nature a sickly body, falling out of one disease into another; but that the wrath instigated by sin, and the zeal of self-sacrifice (Psa 69:10), burnt like the fire of a fever in His soul and body, so that even if He had not died a violent death, He would have succumbed to the force of the powers of destruction that were innate in humanity in consequence of sin, and of His own self-consuming conflict with them. Moreover, He was k e master panm m immennu . This cannot mean, “like one hiding his face from us,” as Hengstenberg supposes (with an allusion to Lev 13:45); or, what is comparatively better, “like one causing the hiding of the face from him:” for although the feminine of the participle is written , and in the plural for is quite possible, we never meet with m aster for m astr , like haster for hastr in the infinitive (Isa 29:15, cf., Deu 26:12). Hence m aster must be a noun (of the form m arbets , m arbeq , m ashcheth ); and the words mean either “like the hiding of the face on our part,” or like one who met with this from us, or (what is more natural) like the hiding of the face before his presence (according to Isa 8:17; Isa 50:6; Isa 54:8; Isa 59:2, and many other passages), i.e., like one whose repulsive face it is impossible to endure, so that men turn away their face or cover it with their dress (compare Isa 50:6 with Job 30:10). And lastly, all the predicates are summed up in the expressive word nibhzeh : He was despised, and we did not think Him dear and worthy, but rather “esteemed Him not,” or rather did not estimate Him at all, or as Luther expresses it, “estimated Him at nothing” ( c hashabh , to reckon, value, esteem, as in Isa 13:17; Isa 33:8; Mal 3:16).
The second turn closes here. The preaching concerning His calling and His future was not believed; but the Man of sorrows was greatly despised among us.
Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament
3. Despised and rejected. This verse conveys the same statement as the preceding, namely, that Christ will be “rejected” by men, in consequence of their beholding in him nothing but grief and infirmity. These things needed to be often repeated to the Jews, that they might not form a false conception of Christ and his kingdom; for, in order to know his glory, we must proceed from his death to his resurrection. Many stumble at his death, as if he had been vanquished and overwhelmed by it; but we ought to contemplate his power and majesty in the resurrection; and if any one choose to begin with the resurrection, he will not follow the order laid down by the Prophet, nor comprehend the Lord’s strength and power.
We hid the face from him. Not without reason does he use the first person, we; for he declares that there will be a universal judgment; and no man will ever be able to comprehend it by his own understanding till the Lord correct and form him anew by his Spirit. Although he appears chiefly to censure the Jews, who ought not to have so haughtily rejected the Son of God promised and offered to them, and therefore reckons himself as one of the number, because he was an individual belonging to that nation; yet let us learn from this passage that all men are accursed and condemned for ingratitude in despising Christ, because they do not even consider him to be worthy of being looked at, but turn away their eyes as if from something detestable.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
THE DESPISED AND REJECTED SAVIOUR
Isa. 53:3. He is despised and rejected of men, &c.
This is a summary of the history of our Lord, as it is recorded by the four Evangelists. His very first hours on earth may be cited in proof of its correctness. No place could be found for Him even in an inn. His life was a life of poverty. Scorn and insult followed Him everywhere. His life closed amid circumstances of unspeakable ignominy. In these facts we have,
I. A reason for not being very strongly desirous of popularity. It is natural to desire the approval of our fellow-men; but no wise and good man will make this the end of his actions. He will seek to do right; if men applaud him for doing so, well; but if not, he will not be greatly grieved. He will not murmur because he is called to drink of the cup that Christ drank of. Shall the servant be above his Lord?
II. A consolation when fidelity to duty exposes us to unpopularity. To be reproached and ridiculed; to have our actions misjudged and our motives misrepresented; to be deserted by those whom we regarded as our friends, to be pursued by the enmity of foes whom we have not wronged, is a bitter trial. But if it should be ours, let us remember that Christ trod the same path of suffering, and sympathises with us.
III. An argument for entire consecration to the service of Christ.The shame and suffering of which the text speaks, Christ endured for us (2Co. 5:14-16).W. H. Sullivan, M.A.: Parish Sermons, pp. 206222).
THE MAN OF SORROWS
Isa. 53:3. A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.
The subject of the sorrows of the Saviour has proved to be more efficacious for comfort to mourners than any other theme in the compass of revelation, or out of it. Christ is in all attitudes the consolation of Israel, but He is most so as a man of sorrows. As Aarons rod swallowed up all the other rods, so the griefs of Jesus make our griefs disappear.
I. A MAN. We can never meditate too much upon Christs blessed person as God and as man. He who is here called a man was certainly very God of very God; a man, and a man of sorrows, and yet at the same time God over all, blessed for ever. His manhood was not the less real and substantial. It differed from our own humanity in the absence of sin, but it differed in no other respect. He was no phantasm, but a man of flesh and blood, even as ourselves; a man needing sleep, requiring food and subject to pain, and a man who, in the end, yielded up His life to death (Php. 2:7).
This condescending participation in our nature brings the Lord Jesus very near to us in relationship. Inasmuch as He was man, though also God, He was, according to Hebrew law, our goelour kinsman, next of kin. According to the law, if an inheritance had been lost, it was the right of the next of kin to redeem it. Our Lord Jesus exercised His legal right, and seeing us sold into bondage and our inheritance taken from us, came forward to redeem both us and all our lost estate. A blessed thing it was for us that we had such a kinsman!It would not have been consistent with Divine justice for any other substitution to have been accepted for us, except that of a man. Man sinned, and man must make reparation for the injury done to the Divine honour.
Sinner, thou mightest well tremble to approach Him whom thou hast so grievously offended; but there is a man ordained to mediate between thee and God (H. E. I. 889).
Every child of God ought also to be comforted by the fact that our Redeemer is one of our own race, tempted in all points like as we are, that He might be able to succour them that are tempted. The sympathy of Jesus is the next most precious thing to His sacrifice. [1617]
[1617] It has been to me, in seasons of great pain, superlatively comfortable to know that in every pang which racks His people the Lord Jesus has a fellow-feeling. How completely it takes the bitterness out of grief to know that it, once was suffered by Him! The Macedonian soldiers, it is said, made long forced marches which seemed to be beyond the power of mortal endurance, but the reason for their untiring energy lay in Alexanders presence. He was accustomed to walk with them, and bear the like fatigue. If the king himself had been carried like a Persian monarch in a palanquin, in the midst of easy, luxurious state, the soldiers would soon have grown tired; but, when they looked upon the king of men himself, hungering when they hungered, thirsting when they thirsted, often putting aside the cup of water offered to him, and passing it to a fellow-soldier who looked more faint than himself, they could not dream of repining. Every Macedonian felt that he could endure any fatigue if Alexander could. This day, assuredly, we can bear poverty, slander, contempt, or bodily pain, or death itself, because Jesus Christ our Lord has borne it.Spurgeon.
II. A MAN OF SORROWS. The expression is intended to be very emphatic, it is not a sorrowful man, but a man of sorrows, as if He were made up of sorrows, and they were constituent elements of His being. Some are men of pleasure, others men of wealth, but He was a man of sorrows.
Our Lord is called a man of sorrows,
(1.) For peculiarity, for this was His peculiar token and special mark. We might well call Him a man of holiness; for there was no fault in Him: or a man of labours, for He did His Fathers business earnestly; or a man of eloquence, for never man spake like this man. Yet had we gazed upon Christ and been asked afterwards what was the most striking peculiarity in Him, we should have said His sorrows. The various parts of His character were so singularly harmonious that no one quality predominated, so as to become a leading feature. But there was a peculiarity, and it lay in the fact that His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men, through the excessive griefs which continually passed over His spirit. Tears were His insignia, and the cross His escutcheon. He was the warrior in black armour, and not as now the rider upon the white horse. He was the lord of grief, the prince of pain, the emperor of anguish, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.
2. By way of eminence. He was not only sorrowful, but pre-eminent among the sorrowful. All men have a burden to bear, but His was heaviest of all. Common sufferers must give place, for none can match with Him in woe. He who was the most obedient Son smarted most under the rod when He was stricken of God and afflicted; no other of the smitten ones have sweat great drops of blood, or in the same bitterness of anguish cried, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?
The reasons for this superior sorrow may be found in the fact that with His sorrow there was no admixture of sin. Sin deserves sorrow, but it also blunts the edge of grief by rendering the soul untender and unsympathetic. We do not start at sin as Jesus did, we do not tremble at the sinners doom as Jesus would. His was a perfect nature, which, because it knew no sin, was not in its element amid sorrow, but was like a land bird driven out to sea by the gale. To the robber the jail is his home, and the prison fare is the meat to which he is accustomed, but to an innocent man a prison is misery, and everything about it is strange and foreign. Our Lords pure nature was peculiarly sensitive of any contact with sin; we, alas! by the Fall, have lost much of that feeling. Our hands grow horny with toiling, and our hearts with sinning; but our Lord was, as it were, like a man whose flesh was all one quivering wound; He was delicately sensitive of every touch of sin. We go through thorn-brakes and briars of sin because we are clothed with indifference, but imagine a naked man, compelled to traverse a forest of briarsand such was the Saviour, as to His moral sensitiveness. He could see sin where we cannot see it, and feel its heinousness as we cannot feel it: there was therefore more to grieve Him, and He was more capable of being grieved.
Side by side with His painful sensitiveness of the evil of sin, was His gracious tenderness towards the sorrows of others. All mens sorrows were His sorrows. His heart was so large, that it was inevitable that He should become a man of sorrows.
Besides this, our Saviour had a peculiar relationship to sin. Sin was laid upon Him, and He was Himself numbered with the transgressors; and therefore He was called to bear the terrible blows of Divine justice, and suffered unknown, immeasurable agonies. It pleased the Father to bruise Him, He hath put Him to grief. behold the man, and mark how vain it would be to seek His equal sorrow.
3. To indicate the constancy of His afflictions. Born in a stable, sorrow received Him, and only on the cross at His last breath did sorrow part with Him. His disciples might forsake Him, but His sorrows would not leave Him. He was often alone without a man, but never alone without a grief.
4. Because of the variety of His woes; He was a man not of sorrow only, but of sorrows. All the sufferings of the body and of the soul were known to Him. Affliction emptied its quiver upon Him, making His heart the target for all conceivable woes.
(1.) Our Lord was a man of sorrows as to His poverty. Oh, you who are in want, your want is not so abject as His: He had not where to lay His head, but you have at least some humble roof to shelter you.
(2.) Our Saviour knew the heart-rendings of bereavement. Jesus wept, as He stood at the tomb of Lazarus.
(3.) Perhaps the bitterest of His sorrows were those which were connected with His gracious work. He came as the Messiah sent of God, on an embassage of love, and men rejected His claims. There was no name of contempt which they did not pour upon Him; nay, it was not merely contempt, but they proceeded to falsehood, slander, and blasphemy. There was not a word He spoke but they would wrest it; not a doctrine but what they would misrepresent it: He could not speak but what they would find in His words some occasion against Him. Was there ever man so full of goodwill to others, who received such disgraceful treatment from those He longed to serve?
(4.) His was a lonely life; even when He was with His followers, He was alone. [1620]
(5.) In the last crowning sorrows of His life, there came upon Him the penal inflictions from God, the chastisement of our peace, which was upon Him. The sharpest scourging and severest griefs were all within; while the hand of God bruised Him, and the iron rod of justice broke Him, as it were, upon the wheel.
[1620] Even if they sympathised with Him to the utmost of their capacity, they could not enter into such griefs as His. A father in a house with many little children about him, cannot tell his babes his griefs; if he did they would not comprehend him. What know they of his anxious business transactions, or his crushing losses? Poor little things, their father does not wish they should be able to sympathise with him; he looks down upon them, and rejoices that their toys will comfort them, and that their little prattle will not be broken in upon by his great griefs. The Saviour, from the very dignity of His nature, must suffer alone. The mountain-side, with Christ upon it, seems to me to be a suggestive symbol of His earthly life. His great soul lived in vast solitudes, sublime and terrible, and there amid a midnight of trouble, His spirit communed with the Father, no one being able to accompany Him into the dark glens and gloomy ravines of His unique experience. Of all His lifes warfare He might have said in some senses, of the people there was none with me; and at the last it became literally true, for they all forsook Himone denied Him and another betrayed Him, so that He trod the wine-press alone.Spurgeon.
III. ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF.
1. With grief He had an intimate acquaintance. He did not know merely what it was in others, but it came home to Himself. We have read of grief, sympathised with grief, sometimes felt grief: but the Lord felt it more intensely than other men in His innermost soul; He, beyond us all, was conversant with this black-letter lore.
2. It was a continuous acquaintance. It was indeed a growing acquaintance with grief, for each step took Him deeper down into the grim shades of sorrow. As there is a progress in the teaching of Christ and in the life of Christ, so is there also in the griefs of Christ. The tempest lowered darker, and darker, and darker. His sun rose in a cloud, but it set in congregated horrors of heaped-up night, till, in a moment, the clouds were suddenly rent in sunder, and, as a loud voice proclaimed, It is finished! glorious morning dawned where all expected an eternal night.
3. This acquaintance of Christ with grief was a voluntary acquaintance for our sakes. He need never have known a grief at all, and at any moment He might have said to grief, Farewell. But He remained to the end, out of love to us, griefs acquaintance.
What shall I say in conclusion, but just this: let us admire the superlative love of Jesus. O love, what hast thou done! Thou art omnipotent in suffering. Few of us can bear pain, perhaps fewer still of us can bear misrepresentation, slander, and ingratitude. These are horrible hornets which sting as with fire: men have been driven to madness by cruel scandals which have distilled from venomous tongues. Christ, throughout life, bore these and other sufferings. Let us love Him, as we think of how much He must have loved us.C. H. Spurgeon: Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, No. 1099.
Behold the man! There is a fascination in His human sympathies, tears, words, that is irresistible. As we toil on our way amid sorrow and distress, we remember Who it is that has power to succour the tempted (Heb. 4:15). The Redeemer was emphatically a man of sorrows. In the Gospel narrative this is more frequently implied than expressed, although there are not wanting passages in which it is definitely stated (Mar. 3:5; Joh. 11:35; Mat. 26:37-38).
There are various causes for sorrow:
I. ISOLATION OF SPIRIT.It is no mere conceit, in which the poet tells us that
Not een the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh.
A wiser than he had said: The heart knoweth its own bitterness, &c. This solitariness of spirit was the heritage of Christ.
1. There was no spirit on earth that could claim perfect kindred with His spirit. No sympathyin the true use of the wordcould be between Him and sinful souls. The best and holiest could not look upon life from His standpoint, nor enter into His feelings, nor share His aspirations.
2. He was love personified; they were selfish. The affections of His heart were perpetually welling up like an inexhaustible fountain; they were wrapped up in self, and knew no higher delight than self-gratificationno higher principle than love of self.
3. His heart yearned after companionship, and found it not. It called to its fellows, but they understood not its language. Hence He was alone (Isa. 63:3).
II. THE CONTEMPLATION OF SORROW IN OTHERS. This was pre-eminently the case with Jesus Christ. When the news of the Baptists death was brought to Him, He went into the wilderness, but at the cry of human need He soon came forth again; and as soon as He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion toward them, and healed their sick. As He journeyed from place to place there were always appeals to His tenderest feelings. Not often was He called to the house of mirth; but He was frequently sought to go to the house of mourning. We find Him once at a marriage feast; once at the table of Simon; twice eating with publicans and sinners, and sharing the modest hospitalities of Bethany; but sorrowing hearts were always seeking His comfort and His help.
III. BEREAVEMENT. The world has never heard a more touching story than that at Bethany. For Himself He shed no tears, and gently reproved those who wept for Him but; the sight of misery in others drew floods of tears from His eyes.
IV. DISAPPOINTMENT. Of this Jesus tasted to the full. He went about doing good; surely from all the seed He sowed He had a right to expect a bountiful harvest! Yet the seed fell for the most part on unproductive soil (Mat. 13:1-9). The nine lepers who returned not to give thanks for their cleansing were but typical of multitudes who selfishly received all and gave nothing in return (Psa. 106:13). Thousands followed Him, because they did eat of the loaves and were filled; Those who attached themselves to Him were but few, while even these left Him at the last. Was there not something of disappointment in the compassion that moved Him to say, O Jerusalem, &c.? (Mat. 23:37.) Said not Isaiah truly, He was a man of sorrows? Tears were His meat day and night, and He could say: Reproach hath broken My beart, &c. (Psa. 69:20).Frederick Wagstaff: Study and Pulpit, New Series (1876), pp. 237239.
I. The sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ. A sanctuary we should enter with reverence, &c.
1. His were chiefly agonies of the soul.
2. The magnitude and intensity of any souls sufferings are in proportion to the souls greatness. The greater the soul, the greater its capacity for suffering.
3. How the agonies of His soul and body reacted upon each other. The agony of His soul, acting upon the body, produced utter prostration. His physical suffering reacted again upon His soul.
4. We must also take into account their propitiatory character.
II. The relation of His sufferings to those of whom it is here said that they despise and reject Him.
1. The object for which He came was to save them.
2. To despise and reject Him is a poor return for all His love.
3. We may well be ashamed that the Lord of life and glory should receive such treatment in our world. He is despised and rejected still. He that despiseth Christ wrongeth his own souldeprives it of its highest and only true and enduring bliss. You cannot do without Christ.L. H. Byrnes, B.A.: The Christian World, June 8, 1866.
How pathetic is the designation here applied to the Messiah, and how truly was it verified in JesusA Man of Sorrows!
I. The fact that the Lord Jesus was, in His humiliation, a Man of Sorrows. There are minds that resent this description, that deem it incredible that it should apply to a Divine Being, or regard such a picture as marred by an unwholesome sentiment. In fact, the true and full impression of the picture can only be received by those who acknowledge both the Deity and the Humanity of Christ. We recognise several elements in this sorrow.
1. There was personal sorrow when He wept tears of grief, when there escaped Him groans of disappointment.
2. The sorrow of sympathy and compassion, when He grieved for His friends, for His nation, for the disobedient and rebellious, for the sin stricken race of man.
3. Christs was progressive sorrow. It gathered thick as a cloud above His head as His ministry advanced. It culminated with lifes close in Gethsemane and on Calvary.
II. How it came to pass that the Lord Jesus was a Man of Sorrows.
1. It was through His contact with sin and with sinners,to a nature like His how specially painful and distressing.
2. It was also through His conscious bearing of sin; the sins of the whole world having been laid upon Him and assumed by Him.
3. He suffered through His conflict with sin, He endured the contradiction of sinners. Wounds and scars were inflicted upon His sensitive nature in this appalling battle.
III. With what intent the Lord Jesus deigned to become a Man of Sorrows.
1. That He might be the representative man, the Head of an afflicted humanity.
2. That He might be the Saviourperfect through sufferings, as the Captain of our salvation.
3. That He might be a sympathising High Priest, touched with a feeling of our infirmities. His sorrows were to avert our woes and to procure our bliss.The Homiletical Library, vol. ii. p. 78.
I. The language of our text does not describe the case of one who encountered only the ordinary or the average amount of the trials which belong to human life. There is implied in it a pre-eminence in sorrow, a peculiarly deep experience of grief.
II. Of all the many griefs of the Divine Redeemer in His human life, there was not one which He Himself either needed or deserved to bear.
III. All the sufferings of the Lord Jesus, so painful, and so entirely unnecessary and undeserved on His own account, were endured with unwavering fortitude, [1623]
[1623] He was to the last moment of His life a willing sufferer. He was moved, deeply moved by sorrow; and He weptwept often, it is probable. Tears are the innocent, and many times the sweet relief of the distressed. He dreaded suffering, too, like others, when He saw its near approach, and felt the instinctive desire to be saved from its bitter pangs; but, notwithstanding this, His fortitude was steady and unyielding; so that He met the hour of anguish, at all times, with a noble constancy of soul. When human nature, almost overborne by the weight of anguish, prompted the petition, Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, the unbending strength of moral purpose, the enduring energy of perfect self-devotion, at once dictated the addition: Father, Thy will be done. Even His last mournful exclamation under the hidings of the Fathers face, in the last affecting scene on Calvary, is no exception to the truth of these remarks; for that was only a testimony to the world of the extremity of the anguish which its Redeemer consented to endure, and not at all the utterance of faltering or failing resolution.Ray Palmer.
IV. In all the griefs and sorrows which the blessed Saviour suffered, His mind was chiefly occupied with the good results in which His sufferings were to issue (Heb. 12:2).
PRACTICAL LESSONS.
1. If even the Son of God, when on earth, was a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief, we certainly should not think it strange that days of trial are appointed unto us.
2. If our blessed Lord felt keenly what He suffered, and was even moved to tears, we need not reproach ourselves because we deeply feel our trials, and cannot but weep in the fulness of our grief (P. D. 3287).
3. If Christ was a willing sufferer, deliberately choosing to suffer for the good of others, we surely should consent to suffer for our own advantage (H. E. I. 158; P. D. 3239, 3246).
4. If our blessed Lord made less account of what He suffered than of the good results which were to follow, it is wise at least in us to do the same (H. E. I. 22042221, 36783704).Bay Palmer, D.D.: The National Preacher, vol. xxxviii. pp. 2534.)
THE SUFFERING SAVIOUR
Isa. 53:3-5. He is despised and rejected of men. &c.
A deliverer was expected. The desire of all nations. What sort of personage was He? He was a disappointment, and was treated as one. For He was a suffering Saviour. Yet this is His glory.
I. A SUFFERING SAVIOUR IN PROPHECY.
The text predicts this. Picture out the kind of career indicated in the text. Men admire grandeur, despise poverty and suffering. But He was a man of sorrows; and it is quite possible that He carried in His countenance the marks of inward suffering. Prophecy required that He should be a sufferer: this chapter, and many other passages. There are in fact two classes of propheciesthe one represents Him as a sufferer, the other as a reigning King. If He had not suffered, the proof of His Messiahship would have been fatally defective (Luk. 18:31-34; Luk. 24:26-27; Luk. 24:44-46; Act. 3:18).
II. A SUFFERING SAVIOUR IN HISTORY.
Behold the man, said Pilate. Was He not rejected, despised, a man of sorrows? Fine natures feel such a position as that in which He was placed, coarse natures do not. And there were deeper causes of sorrow than man could fathom. The prospect immediately before Him was sorrowful enough. He had said, Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour. My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. He had agonised in the garden. He had sweat, as it were, great drops of blood. He had cried out for the cup to pass away. He had felt the bitterness of betrayal. He had been tried by the Jewish court. He had been crowned and scourged by the Roman soldiery. Ere many hours had passed He felt the shame, the pain, the fever of crucifixion. He was forsaken of God. His heart broke. His sufferings ended only with His life.
Such were the facts of history. Such were the requirements of prophecy. Thus
1. Scripture was fulfilled.
2. His Messiahship was proved.
3. Satisfaction was made for sin. Repentance by itself is no satisfaction for past sin (H. E.
1. 42254228). Nor is reformation. Nor is there any force within mans depraved nature that would impel to repentance. Therefore atonement is needed by another: Himself suitable as being Divine, human, sinless (Isa. 53:4).
Such is the Saviour. Thus He suffered. Measuring love by the labour it is willing to undergo, the suffering it is willing to endure, the sacrifices it is willing to make, does the love of Christ burn in our hearts with intensity such as might be expected from our obligations to Him?
Have we indeed all received Him? Do not some, like the Jews, despise and reject Him? Reflect on this.
1. Its ingratitude.
2. Its presumption. In effect it says that God hath done an unnecessary thing in giving His Son: because the end could have been gained without it. Or, that the personal acceptance of Christ, though required in the Gospel, is an unnecessary requirement: because the salvation will be given without it.
3. Its rebelliousness. It is determined love of sin and resistance of God.J. Rawlinson.
The sufferings of Christ must always be the main subject of the believers thought, for no other can compare with this either in the intensity, the universality, or the duration of its interests. Strangers may think the Cross repulsive, for it is to the Greeks foolishness; but to believers it is a revelation of the power and the goodness of God. We preach Christ crucified, says St. Paul, and from his day unto our own Christ crucified is the only foundation of hope, the only rock of faith, and the only bulwark against death. No wonder, then, that the absorbing enthusiasm of Christianity has been proved able to break mighty empires in pieces, and to subdue to itself the fiercest of human passions! Neither is this a subject of merely local interest. Moses might be compared to one of those desert chiefs whose very name is unheard in civilised lands, but Christ rather resembles those majestic conquerors who have aspired after a universal and enduring kingdom. Not Jerusalem, or Rome, but all the races of mankind, are ransomed by His death. Of this theme the Church will never weary, for, so long as there is a sorrow to heal, a temptation to conquer, or a sin to pardonso long, in fact, as man continues to be man, so long will there be need of Jesus and the Resurrection. No advancement of knowledge or civilisation can atone for the want of a Saviour. Now that same Saviour on whom we trust was also the hope of the ancient prophets. We look back on an accomplished fact, and they looked forward to a glorious promise.
I. THE SUFFERINGS OF THE LORDS LIFE. The sorrows of our Saviours life are in some respects more completely above our sympathy than those of His death; for, while we can understand the pang of the nail or the thorn, we cannot so easily realise His mental or moral sorrows. Yet these latter are not to be overlooked. There was,
1. Our Lords loneliness. Loneliness is the inevitable penalty of greatness. Our Lords loneliness may seem unimportant if we look only at His divinity, but He was as perfectly man as He was truly God. Whatever, therefore, is painful to sinless man was equally painful to Christ. Now no proof is needed that man hates to be alone. How lonely was His life! A few friends gathered round Him for a time, but forsook Him in His utmost need. Burdened with the worlds redemption, He was too great and high for human sympathy. The source of all kindness, and the Creator of all families, yet of Him we are compelled to say, He hath trodden the winepress alone. (See p. 478.)
2. His uninterrupted self-denial. No doubt an accomplished act of self-denial always produces satisfaction. The very nature of self-denial requires that the painful feelings predominate, otherwise the act would be self-indulgence. What life, then, can compare with the life of Christ? Whatever is pleasant He put far from Him, and whatever is painful He took as His own. Christ lived in sorrow because sorrow was His own free choice. Yet we may gladly remember the suffering Saviour. A Redeemer who lived in pomp and honour, amid the palaces of the state and the triumphs of nations, would be too grand for ordinary men; but when we see Him walking in weariness and in pain, or bitterly mourning at the tomb of a friend, or forsaken by the chosen twelve, then we remember that He was bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.
3. Our Lords purity and compassion. It may not at first be obvious that the purity of our Lords nature should produce sorrow; and yet, when we consider that He gave Himself up to the battle against impurity, we may conceive how He would shrink from contact with it. Contrast the splendid purity of that palace which He forsook, with that foul and loathsome dungeon of pollution which He entered, Gods holiness with our corruption, and then judge whether it was a small thing for Christ to live among men. Sin troubles only the pure, but sorrow appeals to all. Such an emotion always filled our Saviours breast. He saw all men, of every race and age, involved in one common ruin, &c. At last the burden of compassion became too heavy even for Him to bear, and He longed for the relief of the shame and agony of the cross (Luk. 12:50).
4. The ingratitude and opposition of the Jews. Though no comparison can fully illustrate this subject, yet suppose that, when Satans host was cast down from heaven, a blessed spirit compassionated the awful ruin; suppose that, from the sacred light above, he journeys to the guilty darkness below, and there, by his own keen sorrow, he expiates the sin of the lost; yet suppose also that, while this strong spirit was kindling hope even in hell, all the spirits of the lost should agree to curse and torment their benefactor. Impossible, you cry; impossible even in hell! Alas! it was possible on earth. Count up the miracles of mercy, and then consider how soon indifference became ingratitude, and ingratitude ripened into opposition. We may blush for our humanity. Those who yesterday ate the sacred bread, to-day cry, Crucify Him! &c.
II. THE SUFFERINGS OF OUR LORDS DEATH. We may not press too closely into that mysterious scene of woe. It is rather a topic for thought than speech.
1. Our Lords death was bitter and painful. They pierced, says the prophet, my hands and my feet; and, adds Isaiah, He was smitten of God and afflicted. For six hours He hung upon the cross. Yet doubtless His sorest sufferings were mental, for He bore all the sins of all the world. In some mysterious manner, the debt which we could never pay through all eternity, He paid in a moment of time. Yet surely He was supported by Divine consolation? Alas, no! He who stands in my place stands beneath offended justice; and hence, perhaps, that strange, mysterious cry, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? Yet, as these sufferings were extreme, so the result of them was excellent. By them He purchased everlasting redemption for man; and equally by them He inspires us with a holy horror of sin.
2. Our Lords death was apparently that of a criminal. He was numbered with the transgressors. We did esteem Him judicially smitten, says Isaiah, and, adds the Evangelist, He was crucified between two thieves. The vilest wretch who dies to-day, amid the horrors of a public execution, is kindlier treated, meets with more sympathy and less contempt than did the Lord of glory. Consider, then, the innocence of His character, and the apparent guilt of His death. How great the contrast!
3. Thus our Lord died amid ignominy and contempt. The Romans considered crucifixion to be a doom too base for any but the vilest slaves, &c.
There is no need to add that these sorrows were the revelation of eternal love. Herein is love, herein and nowhere else is it so affectingly, so unequivocally proved, Not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.Bamford Burrows: The Methodist Recorder, March 29, 1877.
SYMPATHY WITH THE SUFFERING
(A Hospital Sunday Sermon.)
Isa. 53:4. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
This Scripture is quoted in 1Pe. 2:24, as expressing the Saviours substitutionary suffering on the cross. It is quoted in Mat. 8:17, as fulfilled by the Saviours healing miracles. It thus at first sight presents a considerable difficulty, which, however, disappears when you remember three things. First, that the scope of this chapter is to exhibit the suffering Saviour. Second, that the thing in the mind of Matthew was the Saviours intense sympathy, which took up into Himself the sorrows and sufferings of our fallen nature. Third, that some Scriptures are capable of many fulfilments. A passage may have one main meaning, yet that meaning may contain others within itself, as a tube may contain several tubes, or as a rose may contain many leaves overlapping each other. There is thus in the whole work of Jesus a twofold fulfilment of this important prophecy.
I. THAT WHICH CONSISTED IN HIS ATONING DEATH FOR SIN.
In this sense He took the infirmities and sicknesses of our souls. In the phraseology of the Old Testament the bearing of sin is equivalent to the consequences of its guilt. The Lord Jesus Christ was the great sin-bearer. He took upon Him our nature, not only that He might adequately represent humanity and be an example, but especially that He might bear the sin of man in His death on the cross (1Pe. 2:24; 2Co. 5:21). When you look for a reason why the Son of God became a man and was crucified, you cannot find it in any breach of law by Him, nor in the circumstance that He had provoked the authorities, and fallen under their power. You can only find it in the fact that His death was the atoning satisfaction for sin, on the ground of which its penal consequences can be removed from the sinner; and in the further fact that it is the fullest condemnation of sin, and the most powerful motive to abandon it. Thousands have believed this, and found peace to their consciences; and not only so, they find that faith in Him crucifies sin, and inspires them with the ardent desire to be free from its power. So that our text contains the three ideas essential to the Saviours work: viz.,
1. Suffering.
2. Substitution.
3. Salvation.
But this is not the only fulfilment of this prophecy. There is
II. THAT WHICH CONSISTED IN HIS FEELING FOR, AND HELP IN, MENS BODILY SUFFERINGS.
We must bear in mind the close connection between the body and the soul. Sin has affected both. While the seat of sin is the soul, the body, as its instrument, participates in the sin. It suffers in consequence of sin. In Scripture all bodily infirmity, suffering, death in man, is traced to sin. The disease of leprosy was selected by Moses as the representation of this truth. The exclusion of the leper from the congregation, and the ceremonies connected with his re-admission, marked and kept this great truth in memory.
It was therefore fitting that He who came to destroy death and sin should take into His view and into His heart, not only the spiritual, but the physical aspects of the case He had undertaken. Mans completed redemption will be the redemption of the body at the resurrection. The final state of the glorified is one in which there shall be no more sorrow, nor sickness, nor pain, nor death. How then could He who came to accomplish that redemption be indifferent to the sufferings in which He saw a part of the misery He came to remove?
In this view, what a splendid career was His life on earth! There have been philanthropists, like Howard, and Wilberforce, and Clarkson, who have had compassion on the prisoner and the slave. But who has devoted Himself with such fulness of consecration and such forgetfulness of self? Whoever, in so short a time, accomplished so much, left such a mark behind Him in the grateful memories of those whom He had relieved and cured, and whose dark lives He had made bright by His healing touch? He could not see suffering without compassion, and He could not feel compassion without stretching out His hand to help.
In those works of beneficence He furnished a pre-intimation of the spirit that would characterise His religion. We have heard something about the religion of humanity. Men are to live for man rather than for God. Its practical effect will be nothing, because it takes away the motive power that would impel man to live for man. Nothing but the love of God creates the love of man. The idea is as old as Christianity; it is a part of Christianity, it is essential to it, it is borrowed from it. One of the first principles of practical Christianity is that none of us liveth to himself. We live unto the Lord, and our life to Him is manifested in living and working for our fellow-men. Christianity inspires its votaries with the desire to communicate it to others. But that is not all. In keeping with the idea that Christ has redeemed the human body as well as the human soul, it interests itself in everything that concerns the wellbeing of man. Wherever it is extended, it improves his material condition. The savage becomes civilised. Slavery has been abolished. Even war has yielded to its influence. There is greater reluctance to engage in it; restrictions are imposed on its conduct; benevolent ministers attend friend and foe alike on the battlefield. Christianity leads men to use their material opportunities to the best advantage; yet it does not encourage its votaries to turn coldly from those who have been unsuccessful in the race of life. The numberless institutions of the present day for the improvement of the material condition of the people, as a rule owe their origination and perpetuation to the humanising influence of Christianity.
And in these works of beneficence the Lord Jesus Christ furnished an example to His followers in all ages. Individually and personally they are called upon. They are to interest themselves in the spiritual and temporal wellbeing of man, as He did. They cannot work miracles. But they can perform the daily duties of life. Husbands, wives, parents, children, masters, servants, can imitate His consideration for others. There can be the visit to the sick and the troubled. The poor cannot perhaps be lifted out of their poverty; but they can be helped in it. It is of advantage to do such work personally as far as possible. But much of it can only, at least can best, be done by means of public institutions and societies. Thus the sending the gospel to the heathen. Thus ministration to the sick and wounded is most effectual by means of hospitals. Catch the spirit of Jesus.
The example is enforced by the unparalleled sacrifices He made to gain His end. Think of the number and variety of diseases and sufferings, and do what you can, like Jesus, to heal.J. Rawlinson.
THE MYSTERY OF OUR LORDS SUFFERINGS
Isa. 53:4-5. We did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, &c.
No man, free from bias and prejudice, can fail to see that in this chapter the Messiahthe suffering Messiahis referred to. As little can any open-minded man fail to see, that in it the vicarious nature of Messiahs sufferings is declared. He is the sinless One who bears on His own heart and life the burden of the sins of others. He is the sent One who bears that burden as God, and for Him.
The pathway of shame which the humbled Saviour trod comes into our view. We see the thick clouds gathering over Him. We hear men reviling the seemingly helpless sufferer. We read the stricken heart that for a moment even fears the Divine forsaking. We catch the dying cry, It is finished! and the last heart-breaking sigh. And through the blinding, sympathising tears we read, He was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities.
The mystery of Christs sufferings! It may be profitable for us to meditate upon them, asking, What is mans explanation of them and what is Gods?
I. THE MYSTERY OF CHRISTS SUFFERINGS,MANS EXPLANATION OF IT.
We did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. And it is impossible to say that this is other than a fair view to take from mans position and with mans knowledge.
1. Try and realise the process of thought in a man who was told of Christs sufferings and death, but had no knowledge of His personal innocence. To such a man it would be plain that God has established an immediate connection between sin and suffering. Throughout His wide domain God by no means clears the guilty. The suffering often comes openly, so that men may see it; sometimes it comes only to the mans spirit; but it always comes. Upon the basis of this constant union between sin and suffering, the man might fairly argue that there must be a connection between suffering and sin, so that wherever he saw suffering he would suspect that sin was its cause (H. E. I. 4490, 46034610).
The discipline of chastisement through which the Christian passes may seem opposed to this view; it is only, however, lifting it up into a higher plane, and treating it with qualifying considerations. All discipline carries the idea of punishment; it is the recognition of some evil in the person on whom it rests. Since then the man is prepared to find sin wherever he finds suffering, he will be ready to explain the mystery of Christs sufferings by saying, Christ had sinned. and such a man, looking upon Christ as condemned by law, would further recognise Gods hand in His sufferings. For if human laws are to gain the respect of men, they must be regarded as the expression of Gods law. It was perhaps thus that the Jewish bigots thought of the Nazarene malefactor. Yet we know, we feel, that this explanation of the mystery of our Lords sufferings is insufficient and incorrect. Worthlessnay, wholly wrongif He be the spotless Lamb of God.
2. Try to realise the process of thought in a man who has some knowledge of Christs life, and especially of His personal innocence. Such a man might say, Christs sufferings were a special and extraordinary Divine judgment. He was smitten of God; His death was a sad calamity. Calamity, that is, suffering of which the sufferers sin is not the immediate cause, is no such uncommon thing in the world. The tower of Siloam fell. The sin was Pilates; it did not belong to those whose blood was poured forth. They were smitten of God. The world has known many instances in which the innocent has been treated as the guilty. Such cases are mysteries; man can only say of the sufferersSmitten of God. In the case of Christ, this, too, is insufficient; it is but the beginning of an explanation. A calamity! Yes, but only a seeming calamity, seeing that by dying He conquered death. Man cannot of himself explain the mystery of Christs sufferings.
II. THE MYSTERY OF CHRISTS SUFFERINGSGODS EXPLANATION OF IT. Notice
1. That God sustains mans view, that the sufferings of Christ were His appointment; but He further declares that they were an unusual, and altogether singular appointment. They were the voluntary fulfilment of a Divine decree; the carrying out to its completion, whatever that might involve, of a Divine mission (Joh. 8:42; Joh. 4:34; Joh. 6:38). God the Father gave extraordinary witness to Him as His Son and Messenger (Mar. 9:7); ancient prophecy represented Christ as saying, Lo, I come, &c. (Psa. 40:7-8); and apostles firmly declare, We have seen, and do testify, &c. (1Jn. 4:14). The direct connection of the life-work and the sufferings of Jesus with the redeeming plan and purpose of God, must be anxiously and watchfully maintained. The question of surpassing interest to us is, What does God think of it all? How does it all stand related to His purposes of grace?
2. Gods explanation declares that Christs sufferings bore no relation whatever to His own guilt. The text gives an explanation which excludes all others. If He had sinned, it is plain that He must have come under the condemnation of the Divine law, and must have been occupied with bearing the penalties of His own sin. But Christ suffered as the representative or substitute for others; His sufferings were wholly vicarious; borne in carrying out the great work He had undertaken, of delivering us from the penalty and the power of sin, and securing for us eternal peace with God. This is Gods wonderful solution of the question, How shall man be just with God?
CONCLUSION.In the restoration of man to the Divine favour we can recognise three stages.
1. A loving purpose towards man cherished in the deep heart of the Holy Father.
2. That Divine and loving purpose effectually wrought out by Gods well-beloved and only begotten Song of Solomon 3. The voluntary and hearty acceptance, by the long-sought children, of the redemption thus gloriously wrought for them. The third stage is yet incomplete. For the love of God does notperhaps we should say cannotsave you against your will. But is it so, can it be so, that you have no will to be saved? Put out the hand of faith. For all we like sheep have gone astray, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.Rev. Robert Tuck, B.A.: Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv. pp. 810.
(Sunday School Address.)
Compare the progress and the unfolding clearness of the Old Testament prophecies of Messiah, to a picture which takes many hands and long years to paint. Picture one man beginning by putting in the bare outline; then another and another comes, and makes the outline more and more complete and clear. Then others come and paint in the figure, form, and dress; and yet others the features and expression of the face. When the picture is complete, behold, it is Jesus of Nazareth: the suffering Saviour.
I. The suffering Saviour. Dwell on the terms in which His sufferings are detailed (see pp. 477483). Carefully point out that He suffered more in His mind and heart than in His body.
II. The suffering Saviour misunderstood. By those who only look on the surface. By all who have no personal conviction of sin.
III. The mystery of the suffering Saviour revealed. It was vicarious suffering, borne according to the will of God, and borne for us.
IV. The glorious results won by a suffering Saviour. Mans redemption. His own eternal joy. The triumph of Gods love over mans sin.Sunday School Addresses, New Series, p. 157.
THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST
Isa. 53:5. But He was wounded for our transgressions, &c.
To any one who seriously contemplates the death and sufferings of Jesus Christ, three things suggest themselves as requiring explanation.
1. An innocent man suffers. All testimonies agree as to the purity and perfectness of the life of Jesus. There is a certain violence done to our sense of justice, when we see Him who boldly demanded, Which of you convinceth me of sin? and to whose character the Roman judge bears unqualified witness, undergoing the double agonies of an iniquitous trial and a shameful death.
2. The death of Jesus is the apparent defeat and destruction of one who possessed extraordinary and supernatural powers. For Him, whose word could still a tempest, eject a devil, raise the dead, to have escaped the power of the Sanhedrim and of the soldiery would surely have been easy (Mat. 26:53). In the suffering of a person so mighty, there is an intellectual inconsistency quite as remarkable as the moral inconsistency already noted.
3. This apparent defeat and ruin, instead of hindering the progress of His work, became at once, and in all the history of the progress of His doctrine has been emphatically, the instrument whereby a world is conquered. The death of Jesus has not been mourned by His followers, has never been concealed, but rather exulted in and prominently set forward as that to which all men must chiefly look, if they would regard Christ and His mission aright. Here, again, is a difficulty for rationalism to overcome. The innocent suffers as if guilty, the mighty is seized as if in helpless weakness, the shame and the failure result in glory and completest success. What is the philosophy of this? We ask impatiently for the explanation of the wonder. Has any ever been given which approaches the Divinely-revealed meaning supplied to us by our text, He was wounded, &c.?
We learn here,
I. That the sufferings of Jesus Christ resulted from our sins. Whether absolutely and universally suffering is the result of sin, we need not now inquire. Two things, at least, are certain: a large amount of suffering is the direct consequence of sin, and it is the habit of men to associate the suffering which comes before them, either directly or indirectly, with sin. Broken law everywhere brings unhappiness, pain, and death.Now, the sufferings of Jesus could not result from His sin, for He was sinless. What He endured was not in accordance with His deserts. He became the passive recipient of what was laid upon Him.Much of this we may see: the sin of the people who refused Him, of the leaders who conspired against Him, of the judges who condemned Him. And inasmuch as these represent mankind, inasmuch as there is a corporate unity among all men, inasmuch as the sin of each is itself only an expression and even an outcome of the sin of all the individual specific wrongs against Jesus, and finally, inasmuch as these sins are being repeated by every manwherever we find refusal of the good, blind and wilful rejection of truth, unfaithfulness to duty and right, ingratitude, craven fear, selfishness and pridethere is a profound meaning, even upon the plane of a merely human interpretation, in the words of the prophet, He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. It was sin, human sin, our sin, which slew Jesus (P. D. 459).
II. That the sufferings of Jesus were related to the Divine law. Such an analysis of the sufferings of Christ as we have already indicated may be accepted by the inquirer, but it would suggest the further question, Does not this suffering of the innocent reflect upon the law and power of God? The presence of evil and sin everywhere around us is itself a great and awful mystery; but that the most terrible manifestation of evil should be found in the sufferings of the highest being ever revealed to manthis only adds to the horror of the mystery, and envelops our moral nature, the government of God, and God Himself, in a thicker darkness. Ought such a scene to be possible in a world where goodness is supreme? Either God is careless of the right, or indifferent to suffering, or powerless to prevent either the wrong or the result of it. Such must be the conclusion, if the foregoing analysis be final.
But there is an alternative. God may have permitted, nay, even ordained, the sufferings of His Son. In the sacred unity of their nature, the suffering and death of Jesus may be a part of the will and purpose of the Godhead. That it is so, man can never know unless God reveals it. But what if God has revealed it? What if there be a still deeper meaning in the cross and the grave of Jesus, and that thereby God re-enacts His broken law, reveals the exceeding and awful wickedness of sin, and sets up a vindication of law as against wilfulness and sin more splendid than of nature, more powerful than that of conscience, more persuasive than that which thundered from Sinai? What are the facts? Divine law broken by human sin. Divine mercy willing to pardon, but not by a mere remissiona letting off. The sin of man would have been repeated in such a forgiveness by a God as careless of His law as man was disobedient to it. But behold the Son of God cometh. He meets and overcomes it, obeys law completely, perfectly, sets up a life of surpassing beauty and sweetness, nobler than law itself, and yet suffers and diesat once the fulfiller of law and the victim of sinin His obedience illustrating the former, and in His death condemning the latter. Now mercy is free. Mercy herself through Jesus Christ is highest justice. Forgiveness by His grace is not the suspension, the destruction of law, but it is the union of law and loveit is love arrayed in garments more awful than those of law, it is law sweetened and beautified by the lineaments of love. Pardon is declared, mercy is extended, forgiveness spoken, and we know not what words can better set forth the blessed truth than the expression of the prophet, The chastisement making for our peace was upon Him.
III. That the sufferings of Jesus became remedial of human sinfulness. A consideration of our Lords death which placed it only in its historic relation, as one of the facts of the sad history of human wretchedness, and in its objective relation to the re-establishment of Divine law and the procuring of a free course for mercy, is wholly insufficient. In the death of Jesus there is a moral significance in respect of human character and life altogther unique. Its influence upon mans heart and conduct is incalculableindeed so great that many regard only these sides of it and neglect the Divine aspect altogether, and refer to this as a result and outcome of the former.
The elevation of our Lords nature, especially as it comes out in the midst of His sufferings, would of itself have been a mighty force for the amelioration of all who contemplated it. All greatness ennobles, and when it is the greatness of the good and the gentle, the heroism of love and the power of self-sacrifice, the soul of man not only admires, but is inspired, emulates the example and joins in a holy fellowship. But Christs death was the death of one who loved men, and whose love is revealed to us by that wisdom which alone could fathom it, as being personal and individual. Christ was not a mere philanthropist, but before His infinite intelligence every man stood separate and alone; in His infinite heart every man had a place. Hence His sufferings were sufferings for me, for you; His death was in my place, in yours (P. D. 456).
We find that in Him there gathers not only goodness, patience, all the virtues of which man is capable, there exhibited through hostility and even unto death, but there is lovea personal, direct, and individual lovesuch as would have been equal to all the claim made upon it, to all the burden which it had to bear even if there were only one soul in the world to be redeemed, and that mine or yours. Let this be realised by each man, and see how his spirit will be affected by that love of Christ. What a price for righteousness! What a hindrance to sin! What a discipline, a culture, is here! How life will be inspired, action directed, victory assured for him who lives with the ever-present thought of the love of Christ! Thus will the sinful character be changed, the wounds be healed, a new heart given, and by the grace of the Holy Spirit who applies these things of Christ, the soul is regenerated, sanctified, and at last glorified in the perfect blessedness and holiness of heaven. This is what we need within ourselvesthis healing grace; and this is what the prophet declares Messiah will bestow, for with His stripes we are healed.
With these thoughts, let us surround the holy table of the Lord. Here is the broken body and the shed blood. Here are we reminded of the sufferings which yet glorified law and obtained forgiveness, and are evermore the power of the love which heals and strengthens and at last completely saves.Ll. D. Bevan, D.D.
These sufferings constituted the price which the incarnate Son of God had voluntarily engaged to pay for human redemption: they were the atonement due for the accumulated sins of a guilty world, and were required by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.
I. THEIR NATURE.
To form an adequate conception of our Redeemers sufferings, we must contemplate Him as forsaken and unsupported, save only by the consciousness of perfect innocence; surrounded by a whole nation of implacable enemies; betrayed by His own treacherous companion; insulted and beaten by a ferocious multitude; dragged, on a perjured accusation, before the judgment-seat; affixed to the accursed tree, where, for six tedious hours of mortal agony, He hangs suspended from His own quivering flesh. Bitter, however, as were the physical sufferings of our Lord, the peculiar agony of His passion did not result solely from that cause. It was the mental anguish that He endured during that awful period; the overwhelming consciousness of Gods anger; the total absence of all aid or consolation from above; the feeling of utter desertion both by God and man, when He approached the tremendous conflict with all the powers of darkness;it was the pressure of that enormous mass of transferred sin which, as the representative of mankind, He had undertaken to bear. Physically, His sufferings did not differ materially from those of that noble army of Christian heroes who followed His steps to martyrdom and glory; but they had no desertion of the Divine grace and favour to lamentno load of imputed corruption to weigh them down. The Prince of Martyrs felt the unnatural load of His polluted burden; He tottered under its enormous weight, but no assisting hand stretched out to help; alone He had to undergo the tremendous ordeal, without support from His Father, without the comfort and companionship of the Holy Spirit.
Thus was the Messiah cut off, but not for Himself. He owed no submission to death, having never fallen under the dominion of sin. The punishment which He underwent was due to us; they were our iniquities for which He was wounded and slain; for our sakes He became as it were the paschal lamb, sprinkling His blood for our salvation; for us He consented to be treated like the scapegoat in the wilderness, and to bear in His own person the iniquities of us all. How bitter the ingredients of the cup of which He drank! The annals of mankind can furnish no parallel to the immensity of His sufferings.
II. THEIR OBJECT.
Mankind had been created perfect, but had fallen from their original uprightness into a state of degradation most offensive to the holiness of God. He could not behold His creation, once so happy and sinless, thus corrupted and depraved, without just indignation. Yet in the midst of His wrath He remembered mercy; and, because mankind were too widely alienated from Himself ever to be rescued from the lamentable consequences of the Fall by any exertions of their own, He devised the wonderful expedient of vicarious atonement, by which, through the personal intervention of some friendly mediator, full and perfect satisfaction might be offered, in mans behalf, to the offended holiness and plighted truth of Heaven. No one could be found sufficient for this purpose but His only SON, who assumed the nature and liabilities of those whom He desired to rescue from destruction. The object for which He came into the world was to redeem mankindby undergoing the full amount of punishment that had been incurred; by rescuing all that might believe on Him from the dominion of sin and Satan; and by opening a fountain for sin and uncleanness, capable of removing pollution from the entire human race.
These merciful purposes had long been intimated by Divine revelation, and the expectation kept alive by a series of prophecies. The necessity of a real expiation was prefigured by the early institution of blood offerings, in which an innocent victim became an atonement for the sins of the sacrificer, and was supposed to draw down the divine wrath upon itself, and to avert it from the offender. Corresponding intimations were made in all the other types and ordinances of the law, especially in the driving forth of the sin-laden scapegoat into the wilderness, and in the entrance into the holy of holies of the priestly intercessor bearing the blood of sacrifice (Heb. 9:7; Heb. 9:11-12).
III. THEIR SUFFICIENCY.
The entire value of our Redeemers mediation, the whole efficacy of His atonement, depended on His total freedom from sin. The smallest deviation from the perfection of righteousness would have entirely disqualified Him for the office of a Saviour, by degrading Him to the very condition of those whom He purposed to save. He would have become in His own person a debtor to Divine justice, and thus would have required a surety for Himself, instead of becoming a surety for others. But the spotless holiness of the expiation was secured by His inseparable relation to the Deity; and, for the same reason, a redundancy of merit accrued to Him which rendered the atonement He made abundantly efficacious for the redemption of the world (1Pe. 2:22-24; H. E. I. 377381).
The surest proof of the entire sufficiency of our Lords sufferings and death as an offering for sin consists in His resurrection from the dead. This was the sign to which He had previously referred the Jews as an evidence of His divine power (Joh. 2:19-21); and it was, doubtless, essential that He who claimed a victory over death should exhibit in His own instance the first fruits of that victory by raising Himself from the dead. Had He failed in rescuing Himself, His ability to save others might reasonably have been questioned; but having exercised that power in His own case, much more is He able to raise others from the death of sin to the new life of righteousness and glory. The sufficiency of our Lords atonement is still further evident in His public and triumphant ascension into heaven, and in His subsequent fulfilment of the promise that after His departure He would send the Holy Spirit unto them.George Pellew, D.D.: Sermons, vol. i. pp. 107124.
Consider I. THE NATURE OF THE REDEEMERS SUFFERINGS. Physical, but not chiefly so. The physical sufferings of many of the martyrs were greater than His. Mental, and these are harder to endure than physical sufferings. Minds differ in their capacity for suffering; the more capacious and sensitive they are, the greater that capacity (H. E. I. 915). II. THEIR SOURCE: our sins, which He had taken upon Himself. III. THEIR ENDS.
1. That a way of salvation might be opened for all who believe.
2. That a complete triumph over the powers of darkness might be achieved, by the setting up of a kingdom that will never be destroyed (see outlines on Isa. 53:10-12).C. B. Woodman: The British Pulpit, vol. iv. pp. 384393.
I. In His body and in His soul. Heartache is worse than headache. The sufferings of His soul were the soul of His sufferings. II. In His earlier and in His later years. Of the babeboyman. III. In personal endurance and by sympathy. Sympathy with all the ills of humanity, and with the woes of individual sufferers. IV. From all orders of being. Menfriends, foes, neutrals; devils; GODwithdrawal, infliction of penalty.
CONCLUSION.Can the sufferings of Christ be explained apart from the doctrine of the atonement? Ought not the sufferings of Christ for us to draw forth our faith and love? Should not the sufferings of Christ lead us as believers to confide in His sympathy?G. Brooks: Outlines, p. 79.
(Sacramental Sermon.)
There is nothing else which ought so to affect our hearts as the ordinance of the Lords Supper. It brings to mind all our misery, all our salvation. It places before us the august emblems of our crucified Master, and calls us to pronounce over His broken body and shed blood the sacramental vow. It is, therefore, one of the most affecting solemnities in which we shall ever be engaged till we get to heaven. Let us endeavour to prepare our hearts for it, while we attend to the two great ideas of the text
I. It is proper to enter fully into the consideration of our sins, for unless we come to this sacrament as sinnerspenitent, emptied of selfwe shall fail of entering into the meaning of our ordinance, or holding communion with our Saviour.
1. The number of our sins. Go back to the years of your childhood and youth. Let busy memory call up from forgotten years the thousand sins which time has almost worn from the brain. As we look back on our life, recollection fails us, and well may we say with the Psalmist, Who can understand his errors? Surely our hearts should be affected with the number of our sins. Had we sinned but once, the law of God would have condemned us, and we could not have justified ourselves. But we have sinned times without number! eternity alone can calculate their amount!
2. Their enormity. The undisturbed sinner, moving on in his career of carelessness, does not realise the great evil of the sins he commits. He thinks of transgression against God as a trifle, &c. We should measure the enormity of our sin by the evil of it; and the evil of it by the majesty of the Deity we have offended, and by the eternity of punishment which God pronounces over it (H. E. I. 44774490).
3. The motives which induced us to sin. Surely the small motives there are to sin, contrasted with the immense motives to holiness, manifest a guilt of the heart which ought to fill our souls with the deepest contrition.
4. The effect our sins have had on others. Sin is a contagious evil; one sinner destroyeth much good. We are so situated in human society that we cannot avoid holding an influence over one another. Had we destroyed ourselves only, the evil would not have been so lamentable. But we have dragged others into the same gulf wherein we have so thoughtlessly precipitated ourselves! (H. E. I. 4565).
II. Penitently consider the sufferings of Jesus Christ to atone for men. But He was wounded for our transgressions. Jesus Christ helped us when we could not help ourselves.
1. In the sacrifice of Christ the pardon of sin is secured.
2. The justice of God is satisfied.
3. An everlasting righteousness is procured for the sinner.
4. That grace which subdues the heart has been obtained.Ichabod S. Spencer, D.D.: Discourses on Sacramental Occasions, pp. 178196.
VICARIOUS SACRIFICE
Isa. 53:5. But He was wounded for our transgressions, &c.
It is generally admitted that this prophecy refers to Christ, and if so, the vicarious nature of His sufferings and death cannot admit of reasonable dispute. If language has meaning in the text, this must be acknowledged. But there is a previous question started by scepticism, to which it is proper to reply. We maintain then
I. That the principle of vicarious sacrifice is consistent with the Divine perfections. It has been urged that the sufferings of the innocent for the benefit of the guilty, is utterly inconsistent with perfect justice. This we deny. In doing so we are under no obligation to satisfy human scruples, for our ideas of what Divine justice really is must necessarily be very partial and imperfect, so that dogmatically to affirm what may or may not be harmonised with it, beyond what we learn expressly from Divine revelation upon the subject, is impudent presumption. It would be sufficient to know, as a matter of fact, that the law of vicarious suffering is recognised, not only in Scripture, but is also everywhere manifest in the universe.
1. The vicarious principle is a law of physical being.
(1.) The mineral kingdom suffers for the sake of the vegetable; for the vegetable eats upon the mineral, and lives upon its destruction and conversion.
(2.) The vegetable kingdom, in its turn, suffers for the sustentation of the animal.
(3.) Herb-feeding races of animals die to support the life of carnivora. And geological researches show the laws of prey and death were in commission among animals before sin was introduced by our first parents.
(4.) Again, vegetables and animals alike labour and suffer, and die for the benefit of their offspring.
(5.) How beautifully is the vicarious principle evinced in the voluntary cheerful sufferings of the human mother for the sake of her child (H. E. I. 393396).
2. The vicarious principle is a law of intellectual being.
(1.) The enjoyment experienced by a reader of a masterly treatise, as its profound and brilliant thoughts successively rise, as by enchantment, is the purchase of the wearisome vigilance, and sustained and often painful effort of the authors mind.
(2.) The repasts upon which many a Christian congregation are Sabbath after Sabbath delighted, are the sweat of the preachers brain.
(3.) The civilisation we inherit with our birth, is the result of an incalculable amount of anxious, laborious, and distressing thought on the part of millions now sleeping in the dust.
(4.) What privations do parents voluntarily suffer in order to secure the education of their children!
3. The vicarious principle is a law of moral being.
(1.) It is the very soul of sympathy. Without sympathy society would lose its charma community of stoics.
(2.) The philanthropist facing the horrors of disease and wretchedness, &c. The missionary!
(3.) It is virtue which gives value to sacrifice.
A principle thus universally obtaining cannot but harmonize with the justice of the Universal Ruler. The vicarious sacrifice of Christ is the most marvellous and stupendous exemplification of a law everywhere exemplified.
II. A vicarious sacrifice of infinite merit is indispensable to human salvation.
1. Man is found in the attitude of rebellion against God.
2. Divine justice cannot be sacrificed to mercy (H. E. I. 376).
3. Man has no means by which to commend himself to the mercy of God.
(1.) Repentance of no value without an atonement (H. E. I. 42254228).
(2.) Man is too depraved of himself to repent (H. E. I. 4250).
4. The only remaining source is in the vicarious principle.
(1.) The vicarious person must be able to suffer the penalty of human sin.
(2.) He must have sufficient merit to procure the enlightening and sanctifying agency of a Divine worker.
III. The requirements of the vicarious principle are met in the sacrifice of Christ.
1. His merits fully realize the Divine ideal.
(1.) He was pure through the miracle of His birth.
(2.) He was righteous in the fulfilment of every requirement of law.
(3.) In His official capacity He was approved by celestial voices, at His baptism and transfiguration, and with reference to His sufferings at Gethsemane and Calvary.
(4.) Hence His exaltation (Joh. 17:1-5; Php. 2:9-11).
2. Those merits were devoted to our redemption and salvation.
(1.) This is the great doctrine of the text.
(2.) The marrow of the Gospel.
(3.) They have made provision for the renewal of our natureGod cannot change, and therefore we must be changed. The Holy Spirit helps us to repent and believe the Gospel, &c.
CONCLUSION.
1. Learn the absurdity of seeking salvation by works
2. Learn the obligation to aim at Christian perfection.
(3.) Learn the necessity of the vicarious principle to the Christian life (Mat. 16:24-26; 1Jn. 3:16-17).James Alex. Macdonald: Pulpit Analyst, vol. i. pp. 702705.
HEALED BY HIS STRIPES
Isa. 53:5. With His stripes we are healed.
The two great things which the Spirit of Christ in the ancient prophets testified beforehand, were the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow (1Pe. 1:11-12). And when Jesus, after His resurrection, expounded to His disciples, in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself, He showed the scope and purport of them all to be that Christ ought to have suffered, and then to enter into His glory. But in no part of the Old Testament are these two things so fully exhibited as in this chapter, from which many passages are quoted and applied to Christ in the New Testament.
I. THE SUFFERINGS OF THE MESSIAH.
II. THE CAUSE AND DESIGN OF THOSE SUFFERINGS.
III. THE BENEFIT WE OBTAIN BY THEM, AND HOW WE OBTAIN IT. With His stripes we are healed. We are healed,
1. Of our inattention and unconcern about divine things. The dignity of our Lords person, the intensity of His sufferings, and the end for which He endured them, discover that things of a spiritual and divine nature are of infinite moment. Our ignorance and unbelief respecting these things. His sufferings confirm and seal His doctrine, and show the certain truth and unspeakable importance of it, and the reasonableness of a serious study of it, of laying it to heart, and receiving it in faith.
2. Of the disease of self-righteousness and self-confidence. For, if our own righteousness could have saved us, and if we could safely have trusted therein, Christ needed not to have died.
3. Of our love to sin and the commission of it. For how can we love Him and continue the willing servants of the betrayer and murderer of the Son of God, our Saviour? How can we willingly commit sin, which is so great an evil in its own nature, that it could not be pardoned, unless expiated by the sufferings and death of the Son of God, and Lord of glory? (H. E. I., 4589, 4590).
4. Of our love of the riches, honours, and pleasures of this world. For how can we reasonably desire any of these in a world, where our Lord and Master had not where to lay His head, where He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief?
5. Of our self-indulgence and self-seeking. Since His sufferings and death show that He did not seek Himself, and He died for us, that we might not live to ourselves (2Co. 5:14-15).
6. Of our lukewarmness and sloth. For shall we be indifferent about, and slothful in the pursuit of what cost Him His blood?
7. Of our cowardice and fear of suffering (1Pe. 4:1).
8. Of our diffidence and distrust with respect to the mercy of God, and His pardoning and accepting the penitent.
9. Of an accusing conscience and slavish fear of God, and death and hell (Heb. 9:13-14).
10. Of our general depravity and corruption of nature (Tit. 2:14; Eph. 5:25-27).
11. Of our weakness and inability. His sufferings have purchased the spirit of might.
12. Of our distress and misery, both present and future. For His sufferings bear away our griefs and sorrows; they are an astonishing proof of Gods infinite love to all for whom He undertook; they lay the most solid foundation for the firmest confidence and most lively hope in Him. They show that
No man too largely from Gods love can hope,
If what he hopes, he labours to secure.
Joseph Benson: Sermons, vol. i pp. 232236.
Ever since the fall, healing has been the chief necessity of manhood. It is a great mercy for us who have to preach, as well as for you who have to hear, that the Gospel healing is so very simple. Our text describes it. These six words contain the marrow of the Gospel.
I. These are sad words. They are part of the mournful piece of music which might be called the Requiem of the Messiah,
1. Because they imply disease. This we comprehends all the saints, and hence it is clear that all the saints need healing. Those who are to-day before the throne of God, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, were once defiled as the lepers who were shut out of the camp of Israel. Our fathers were fallen men, and so are we, and so will our children be.
(1.) The disease of sin is of the most loathsome character, and it will lead to the most deadly result in due season. It is none the better because we do not feel it. It is all the worse.
(2.) Sin is also a very painful disease when it is known and felt. Those black days of conviction! A man needs no worse hell than his own sin and an awakened conscience.
2. Because it speaks of suffering. With His stripes. find that the word here used is in the singular, and not as the translation would lead you to suppose. I hardly know how to translate the word fully. It is read by some as weal, bruise, or wound, meaning the mark or print of blows upon the skin; but Alexander says the word denotes the tumour raised in flesh by scourging. It is elsewhere translated blueness, hurt, and spots, and evidently refers to the black and blue marks of the scourge. The use of a singular noun may have been intended to set forth that our Lord was as it were reduced to a mass of bruising, and was made one great bruise. [1626] By the suffering which that condition indicated we are saved. Our text alludes partly to the sufferings of His body, but much more to the agonies of His soul. He was smitten in His heart each day of His life. He had to suffer the ills of Providence. He had to run the gauntlet of all mankind. Satan, too, struck at Him. Put these things all together as best you can, for I lack words with which fitly to describe these bruises.
[1626] Pilate delivered our Lord to the lictors to be scourged. The Roman scourge was a most dreadful instrument of torture. It was made of the sinews of oxen, and sharp bones were intertwisted here and there among the sinews; so that every time the lash came down these inflicted fearful laceration, and tore off the flesh from the bone. The Saviour was, no doubt, bound to the column, and thus beaten. He had been beaten before; but this of the Roman lictors was probably the most severe of His flagellations. My soul, stand here, and weep over His poor stricken body. Believer in Jesus, can you gaze upon Him without tears, as He stands before you the mirror of agonising love. He is at once fair as the lily for innocence, and red as the rose with the crimson of His own blood. As we feel the sure and blessed healing which His stripes have wrought in us, does not our heart melt at once with love and grief. If we have ever loved our Lord Jesus, surely we must feel that affection glowing now within our bosoms.Spurgeon.
II. These are glad words.
1. Because they speak of the healing we need. Understand these words. Of that virtual healing which was given you in the day when Jesus Christ died upon the cross. But there is an actual application of the great expiation to us when by faith we receive it individually. To as many as have believed in Jesus, His stripes have given the healing of forgiveness, and it has conquered the deadly power of sin. Men have tried to overcome their passions by the contemplation of death, but they have failed to bury sin in the grave; they have striven to subdue the rage of lust within their nature by meditating upon hell, but that has only rendered the heart hard and callous to loves appeals. He who once believingly beholds the mystery of Christ suffering for him shakes off the viper of sin into the fire which consumed the great sacrifice. Where falls the blood of the atonement, sins hand is palsied, its grasp is relaxed, its sceptre falls, it vacates the throne of the heart; and the spirit of grace, and truth, and love, and righteousness, occupies the royal seat. Behold Christ smarting in your stead, and you will never despair again. It is a universal medicine. There is no disease by which your soul can be afflicted, but an application of the blue bruises of your Lord will take out the deadly virus from your soul.
2. Because of the honour which the healing brings to Christ. Child of God, if thou wouldst give glory to God, declare that thou art healed. Be not always saying, I hope I am saved. A crucified Saviour is the sole and only hope of a sinful world.
III. These are very suggestive words. Whenever a man is healed through the stripes of Christ, the instincts of his nature should make him say, I will spend the strength I have, as a healed man, for Him who healed me. If you know that Jesus has healed you, serve Him, by telling others about the healing medicine. Tell it to your children; tell it to your servants; leave none around you ignorant of it. Hang it up everywhere in letters of boldest type. With His stripes we are healed.C. H. Spurgeon: Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, No. 1068.
I. A LAMENTABLE DISEASE ASSUMED
1. The baneful result of transgression.
2. Universal in its prevalency.
3. Hereditary in its descent.
4. Incurable by human agency.
II. AN INFALLIBLE PHYSICIAN SPECIFIED.
1. Infinite in Wisdom
2. Impartial in attendance.
3. Ever easy of access.
4. Gratuitous in His practice.
III. THE REMEDY HE EMPLOYS. His stripes, i.e. the atonement.
1. Divine in its appointment.
2. Easy in its application.
3. Universal in its adaptation.
4. Infallible in its efficacy.
IV. THE CURE EFFECTED BY IT.
1. Is now no novelty.
2. Is radical in its nature.
3. Is happy in its influences.
CONCLUSION.This subject tends,
1. To promote humility.
2. To produce self-examination.
3. To encourage the desponding penitent.
4. To excite fervent gratitude.Four Hundred Sketches, vol. ii. p. 93.
I. THE MEDICINE WHICH IS HERE PRESCRIBEDthe stripes of our Saviour. I take the term stripes to comprehend all the physical and spiritual sufferings of our Lord, with especial reference to those chastisements of our peace which preceded rather than actually caused His sin-atoning death: it is by these that our souls are healed.
But why? say you.
1. Because our Lord, as a sufferer, was not a private person, but suffered as a public individual, and an appointed representative. Hence the effects of His grief are applied to us, and with His stripes we are healed.
2. Our Lord was not merely man, or else His sufferings could not have availed for the multitude who now are healed thereby.
But healing is a work that is carried on within, and the text rather leads me to speak of the effect of the stripes of Christ upon our characters and natures than upon the result produced in our position before God.
II. THE MATCHLESS CURES WROUGHT BY THIS REMARKABLE MEDICINE. Look at two pictures. Look at man without the stricken Saviour; and then behold man with the Saviour, healed by His stripes.
III. THE MALADIES WHICH THIS WONDROUS MEDICINE REMOVES. The great root of all this mischief, the curse which fell on man through Adams sin, is already effectually removed. But I am now to speak of diseases which we have felt and bemoaned, and which still trouble the family of God.
1. The mania of despair.
2. The stony heart.
3. The paralysis of doubt.
4. Stiffness of the knee-joint of prayer.
5. Numbness of soul.
6. The fever of pride.
7. The leprosy of selfishness.
8. The fretting consumption of worldliness. (See also p. 494.)
IV. THE CURATIVE PROPERTIES OF THIS MEDICINE. All manner of good this divine remedy works in our spiritual constitution. The stripes of Jesus when well considered,
1. Arrest spiritual disorder.
2. Quicken all the powers of the spiritual man to resist the disease.
3. They restore to the man that which he lost in strength by sin.
4. They soothe the agony of conviction.
5. They eradicate the power of sin; they pull it up by the root; destroy the beasts in their lair; put to death the power of sin in our members.
V. THE MODES OF THE WORKING OF THIS MEDICINE. How does it work? Briefly, its effect upon the mind is this. The sinner hearing of the death of the incarnate God is led by the force of truth and the power of the Holy Spirit to believe in the mcarnate God. After faith come gratitude, love, obedience, &c. [1629]
[1629] Looking upon the stripes of Jesus, one may be led, 1. To think of the awfully malignant nature of sin, which would require for its expiation so great a sacrifice as that of the Son of God, and of the great depravity of his own heart in having been so destitute of love towards one so full of grace and goodness toward him. He is thus brought to tremble for his sin, and to mourn for it with deep contrition. And here is true repentance. 2. The inestimable value of the sacrifice, and the boundless love of God manifested in it, show him also that an atonement of most amply sufficient value has been offered for his sin; that the gracious God must be most mercifully disposed and willing to pardon and save him. Thus a comfortable and satisfying faith is generated in his heart. 3. The apprehension of the favouring mind in God towards him, with all the love manifested in the sufferings of Christ, disposes his heart to the love of God. 4. Seeing also that he owes his renewed being and hopes to his God and Saviour, he is ready to give himself wholly to His service. For he feels the force of the apostles words (Rom. 12:1; 1Co. 14:15). 5. When in the service of Christ he meets with great difficulties and trials, he remembers that Christ bore for him his eternal sufferings, and thinks little of anything he can endure for Him in his short life upon earth. 6. From the contemplation of the humiliation and death of Christ flow endless streams of benevolence, readiness to give, or to do, or endure anything for our neighbour (2Co. 8:9; 1Jn. 3:16). 7. While that contemplation urges him to devote himself to the service of God and the promotion of his neighbours good, it also keeps him humble in his greatest zeal, both by the example of his crucified Saviour, and also by the remembrance that his only hope of mercy rests in his coming as a worthless creature for salvation to Christ, in reliance upon His merits alone. 8. Every one who has been brought to such views of sin as the sufferings of Jesus set forth, feels himself strongly repelled, by those sufferings, from all sin. Shall he add another sin to those by which he has pierced his beloved Saviour with sorrow and pain? Here is a most cogent motive to the resistance of temptation in the true believer. And if he finds difficulty in such resistance, he remembers that his Saviour suffered crucifixion for him, and feels that he must therefore think little of crucifying the flesh, with its affections and lusts, or His sake (1Pe. 4:1-2).
Thus the due effect of the sufferings of Christ upon man is the entire renovation of his heart. It tends to purify him from all sin, to fashion his soul in the frame of perfect holiness, to urge him to devoted zeal in all ways of piety and charity. The wisdom of God in appointing those sufferings as the means of our salvation, is justified in the beauty of holiness to which those who duly look upon them are thus brought. As the Israelites looked upon the brazen serpent till they were healed, so let us look upon our suffering Saviour till all the disorders of our souls are remedied, and we are restored to the spirit of love and of a sound mind.R. L. Cotton, M.A.: The Way of Salvation, pp. 9599.
VI. ITS REMARKABLY EASY APPLICATION. There are some materia medica which would be curative, but they are so difficult in administration and attended with so much risk in their operation, that they are rarely if ever employed; but the medicine prescribed in the text is very simple in itself, and very simply received; so simple is its reception that, if there be a willing mind here to receive it, it may be received by any of you at this very instant, for Gods Holy Spirit is present to help you. How, then, does a man get the stripes to heal him?
1. He hears about them.
2. Faith cometh by hearing; that is, the hearer believes that Jesus is the Son of God, and he trusts in Him to save his soul.
3. Having believed, whenever the power of his faith begins to relax, he goes to hearing again, or else to what is even better, after once having heard to benefit, he resorts to contemplation; he resorts to the Lords table that he may be helped by the outward signs; he reads the Bible that the letter of the word may refresh his memory as to its spirit, and he often seeks a season of quiet, &c.Poor sinner, simply trust and thou art healed; backsliding saint, contemplate and believe again.
Since the medicine is so efficacious, since it is already prepared and freely presented, I do beseech you take it.C. H. Spurgeon: Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, No. 834.
Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell
(3) He is despised and rejected.Better, for the last word, forsaken. This had been the crowning sorrow of the righteous sufferer of the Old Testament (Job. 17:15; Job. 19:14). It was to complete the trial of the perfect sufferer of the New (Mat. 26:56).
A man of sorrows . . .The words sorrow and grief in the Heb. imply the thought of bodily pain or disease. (Comp. Exo. 3:7; Lam. 1:12; Lam. 1:18.) Men have sometimes raised the rather idle question whether the body of our Lord was subject to disease, and have decided on priori grounds that it was not. The prophets words point to the true view, that this was an essential condition of His fellowship with humanity. If we do not read of any actual disease in the Gospel, we at least have evidence of an organisation every nerve of which thrilled with its sensitiveness to pain, and was quickly exhausted (Luk. 8:46; Joh. 4:6; Mar. 4:36). The intensity of His sympathy made Him feel the pain of others as His own (Mat. 8:17), the blood and water from the pierced heart, the physical results of the agony in Gethsemane (Luk. 22:44; Joh. 19:34), indicate a nature subject to the conditions of our humanity.
We hid as it were . . .Literally, As the hiding of the face from us, or, on our part. The words start from the picture of the leper covering his face from men, or their covering their own faces, that they might not look upon him (Lev. 13:45). In Lam. 4:15, we have a like figurative application. (Comp. also Job. 19:13-19; Job. 30:10.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
‘He was despised and rejected by men,
A man of sorrows, and humiliated by grief,
And as one from whom men hide their face,
He was despised and we esteemed him not.’
He will not only be unattractive humanly speaking, but also despised and rejected. When He reveals Himself men will laugh and deride (compare the use of the root of ‘despised’ in Isa 37:22), they will sneer at Him, they will dismiss His words and His claims. He will be written off by ‘those who know’ as a charlatan.
‘Rejected by men.’ The verb translated ‘rejected’ means transient, fleeting, lacking, and therefore not up to standard in men’s eyes.
‘A man of sorrows, and humiliated by grief.’ He will walk sorrowfully and in grief. For He bears in Himself the knowledge that men are rejecting His Father, and the means of their own salvation. He will grieve at the hardness of men’s hearts (Mar 3:5). He will carry the burden of the world (Mar 8:12). The verb yatha‘ (‘to know’) can also mean ‘to be humiliated’ as witnessed at Ugarit.
The reference is not to a gloomy person by nature, but to One Who faces a world of gloom. It is intended to be in contrast with the idea of royalty as pleasure seekers and hedonists. Not so this One, for He has come to deal with the needs of the world and He sees them as they are, and bears their burden on His shoulders.
‘And as one from whom men hide their face, He was despised and we esteemed Him not.’ Literally ‘there was as it were a hiding of face from Him’. Men will be ashamed to be aligned with Him, they will keep away from His company for fear of what the world might say (Joh 6:66; Joh 7:13; Joh 12:42. Even Nicodemus came by night – Joh 3:2). Thus was He despised and not given the esteem that was His due. And besides He did not fit the expected pattern (Joh 7:12; Joh 7:27; Joh 7:35).
So He will come from a poor background, He will not be striking to look at, He will not wear clothes of majesty, He will not be highly esteemed, He will not be a pleasure seeker but serious minded, He will not fit into men’s preconceptions. All this is a condemnation of how men think, and illustrates their false sense of values. For those who knew Him and gave Him a fair hearing recognised His worth, and listened, and humbled themselves before Him. And that was how God saw Him. Man looks at the outward appearance, God looks at the heart (1Sa 16:7).
It was from this that Satan would tempt Him to free Himself (Mat 4:1-11). If He were but to say the word He could be lifted out from it in a moment. He could instead receive the kingdoms of the world. Had he not come to receive a Kingdom? Yes, but it was to be received through humiliation.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
As his person was without attraction, so the treatment he received corresponded to it. So very ungracious was the general abuse and contempt of him, that he said himself, I am a worm, and no man; a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the people; Psa 22:6 . And they who should have countenanced him, blushed to own him for a time, and hid their faces from him. W hat a subject of wonder and astonishment is all this!
Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Isa 53:3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were [our] faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Ver. 3. He is despised and rejected of men. ] Heb., Desitus virorum, one at whom the nature and name of man endeth; as we would say, the very lift and fag end of mankind, nullificamen hominis, a a worm and no man, not held so good as wicked Barabbas, but crucified between two thieves, as worse than either of them, and made nothing of. Mar 9:12 This is so plainly here set forth that some of the Jewish doctors, Aben Ezra for one, whenas they cannot rightly distinguish between the two comings of Christ, the one in humility and the other in glory, duos construunt Christos, they make us up two Christs, the one the son of Joseph, to whom agree those things which the Scriptures speak of concerning Christ’s meanness and sufferings; the other, the son of David, to whom they apply those things that are written concerning the glory, majesty, and triumphs of Christ. b
A man of sorrows,
And acquainted with grief.
And we hid as it were our faces from him.
He was despised.
And we esteemed him not,
a Jun., Tertul.
b Genebrard.
c Ex doloribus conflatus , caused from his sorrows.
d Sanhedrin.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
despised and rejected. Fulfilled in Joh 1:10, Joh 1:11; Joh 8:48; Joh 10:20.
men. Hebrew, plural of ‘ish. App-14. = the chief men. Compare Joh 7:48, Joh 7:49.
man. Hebrew. ‘ish. App-14.
we hid. Compare Isa 50:6. Psa 22:6, Psa 22:7; and Joh 8:48; Mar 3:21, Mar 3:30. Joh 18:40.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
A Man of Sorrows
He was despised and rejected of 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 notIsa 53:3.
There is not a verse of this chapter of Isaiah at which one might not very well begin, as S. Philip the Evangelist once did to the eunuch, and preach the whole doctrine of Christ crucified. As it was in the counsels of Almighty God, that His Blessed Son should endure for our behalf all the various afflictions which we have deserved, so this famous prophecy touches, one after another, the several sorrows which He endured. It speaks of His intense bodily pain. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. It speaks again of the grievous oppression, the wrong, injustice, undeserved ill-usage, which He had to sustain. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He openeth not His mouth; He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth. And here, in the beginning of the prophecy, mention is particularly made of that which was the root of all the rest, and which many persons would feel as the bitterest of allHis being despised and scorned. He shall grow up before God as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
What this verse and this chapter prophetically anticipate the Gospel record of His life shows to have been historically fulfilled. He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. No other impression admits of being left upon us by the perusal of the New Testament story. It is tragedy pure and solid; wrought out, to be sure, with certain touches of light and beauty, but touches added in such a way as to bring out in only stronger relief the tragic features of earnestness and pathos.
The verse probably contains but one topicthe contempt, or rather aversion, with which men regarded the Servant of the Lord. But the English translation contains the classical phrase a man of sorrows. And from that, it has generally been held, that its chief topic is the sorrows of the Redeemer. We have, therefore, (1) Christ despised and rejected, and (2) Christ a man of sorrows. The two ideas are not far apart. Keble even says, He was to be a man of sorrows, and because of His sorrows, He was to be despised. Such is the pride and bitterness of our sinful nature, ever since the fall of our first parents; which began with the lust of the eyes, Eve indulging herself with the sight of the forbidden fruit; and which has gone on ever since, men refusing in general so much as to look at the afflicted, hiding, as it were, their faces from them, because such sights interrupt their enjoyment and satisfaction.
I
Christ Despised and Rejected
i. Why He was despised
The root of it all is Unbelief. This is fully discussed and explained by St. Paul in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which should be read in this connection. His reference to the unbelief of the Jews he ends with the statement: God hath concluded them all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all. To this unbelief the prophet refers in the first verse thus: Who hath believed our report? The announcements made by Isaiah and the other prophets, as Jeremiah, Zechariah, and others, had been discredited and disregarded. Piecing the different prophecies of the Old Testament together, the Jews had a clear outline of His whole life from His birth to His ascension, from the earliest prophecy in Gen 3:15, in which He is called the Seed of the woman, to the latest in Mal 4:2, where He is spoken of as the Sun of Righteousness. They had His biography in their own Scriptures, but they believed them not. And when John the Baptist and Jesus Himself and His apostles came preaching the Kingdom of God, the mass of the people still refused to believe.
Sigismund Goetze, in his picture Despised and Rejected, has placed upon the canvas a striking illustration of this text. In the centre of the picture is the suffering Christ, bound upon a Roman altar, overshadowed by an angel with the Gethsemane cup, and surrounded by all sorts and conditions of men. Yet He and His sufferings are not in all their thoughts. The political agitator has his crowd, the workman his beer, the artist his cigarette, the broken down his care. Under the very shadow of the great Sufferer, the sporting man is engrossed in his pink edition, and the scientist in his test-tube. The newsboy is vigorously pushing the sale of his paper containing the latest winners and society scandals. The flower-girl offers her wares unnoticed to the society doll, whose frivolous vanity is flattered by the attentions of a fashionable young man. The world-power militarism ignores the suffering Prince of Peace. At the very feet of the Victim are the outcast woman and her babe, while afar off stands the widow with her lonely burden of grief; yet even she does not look to Him for sympathy and help. Churchmen, of whom more might be expected, dispute the text of Scripture, but forget the spirit of the Gospel. Of all that throng, no eye is turned towards the Sufferer, save that of a nurse, well accustomed to scenes of pain and anguish. Her face is expressive of wonder, horror, and sympathy, and suggests Lam 1:12, Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow. The great world, engrossed in its own pursuits, its business and its pleasures, its selfishness, and its gain, its frivolity, its griefall purely questions of time, has no eye for, and no thought of, Christ, who is still the despised and rejected of men.
1. They were disappointed in His birth and parentage. They expected Him to come as heir of the Royal Family of David, and to be openly known as born and educated at Bethlehem. But He, though of royal descent, was the son of a poor unnoticed virgin and the reputed son of a carpenter, who were not generally known or recognised as descended from David. He grew up and lived a long time in obscurity, probably working at His fathers trade. He appeared a poor man who had no home of His own, no attendants but a few poor fishermen going about as an itinerant teacher and preacher, having no ecclesiastical authority from the chief priests and scribes. Thus, instead of being a plant of renown, He appeared as a root out of a dry ground, never likely to come to anything.
2. And as they were disappointed in regard to His birth, so they were in regard to His manner of life. There was no splendid pomp or lordly retinue. But, coming as He did, a poor man, of humble rank and lowly surroundings, notwithstanding the wisdom and grace of His words, the power of His miracles, and the unapproachable beauty of His character, the Jews found in Him no form or comeliness. They were ashamed to own Him, and even the disciples, at the last, all forsook Him and fled. Thus He was an object of contempt and scorn to the proud Pharisee, the sceptical Sadducee, and haughty, Imperial Roman. He lived a suffering life, constantly subject to evil-speaking, lying, and slander, and He was finally rejected and crucified as an impostor and deceiver.
It seems odd to us, because we read centuries of experience into the story of the past, and confound the Ideal Christ with the Historic Jesus. We think of Jesus as going about with a halo of glory about His head, as they represent Him in the pictures: and, of course, that is all a mistaken notion from beginning to end. A halo of glory about His head! Why, He hadnt even a roof to cover it. But still, it does seem odd that He was despised. I can understand that a great many people hated Jesus. He was so pure and so true that impure and untrue and hypocritical natures naturally would hate Him. And then those ecclesiastics at Jerusalem, with their idea that religion consisted in formal outward observance: washing the hands, and cleansing platters, and saying formal prayersof course they would hate a teacher who said that all that kind of thing was worthless, and that religion consisted merely in being one with the Father and loving ones fellow-men. Oh, I can understand their hating Him. But despising Himlooking down on Him with contemptthat is the strange thing.1 [Note: R. C. Fillingham.]
There is a well-known short story by Anatole France where Pontius Pilate is represented in retirement near the end of his life talking over old times with a pleasure-loving friend who had known him in Juda. During supper the talk falls upon the qualities of the Jewish women, and the friend speaks of Mary of Magdala whom he had known during her unrepentant days in Jerusalem. He recounts the manner of his parting from Mary, who left him to join the band of a young miracle-worker from Galilee. His name was Jesus; He came from Nazareth, and was crucified at last for some crime or other. Pontius, do you remember the man? The old procurator frowned and raised a hand to his forehead as one who searches through his memory. Then, after some moments of silence, Jesus, he muttered, Jesus of Nazareth? No, I dont remember Him.1 [Note: H. Sturt, The Idea of a Free Church, 224.]
ii. How He is rejected still
He is despised and rejected of men still, both Jews and Gentiles, and the words of that hymn are no less plain than sadly true, which says
Our Lord is now rejected, and by the world disowned;
By the many still neglected, but by the few enthroned.
But soon Hell come in glory, the hour is drawing nigh;
Oh, the crowning day is coming by and by.
1. We reject Christ when we fear unpopularity.
It is a lesson sorely needed in these days, that unpopularity is not the worst evil, nor popularity the chief aim in life. As we look about us, we see that mens habits and behaviour and ideals are constantly governed by the mere desire to stand high in the good opinion of others. There is the statesman who never dares adopt a policy, however just, which he fancies may put him out of favour with the multitude. There is the author or the artist who works with his eye upon the public purse, and sells his soul for the reputation of an hour. There is the lover of society who is perfectly happy so long as other men think well of him. There is the teacher or the preacher who cuts his message to suit the taste of his hearers; who will never ruffle their complacency or disturb their peace; who, if they are rich, will never speak to them of the dangers of wealth, and, if they are needy, never of the temptations of the poor; who is ready to barter his birthright of truth for the pottage of the worlds worship and applause. These are the men who, by their very presence, lower the standard of life for us all.2 [Note: S. A. Alexander, The Mind of Christ, p. 47.]
I heard a sermon a short time ago preached in a seaside church which deeply moved me; a sermon I was thankful to have heard, and the like of which I would walk a long way to hear again. As I stood outside the building waiting for a friend the congregation came out, and I heard the usual interchange of verbal nothings. The only reference I did hear to the service was from a well-dressed young man to a girl by his side, and this is what he said, A long-winded fellow, that; let us go on the parade. The remark did not unduly surprise me. I wonder, said a man to me lately, why some people go to a place of worship at all; they appear to be as indifferent to what is said, sung, or prayed, as the dog that barks is indifferent about the dog-star.1 [Note: A. Shepherd, Men in the Making, p. 193.]
2. We reject Christ when we refuse to suffer.
We hide our faces from the Man of Sorrows when we wish to make this world a paradise of rest, when we neglect the duty of knowing and acquainting ourselves with the burdens which are borne by men, and begin to plan for this world as if it were a place for happiness and repose. There is no rest here; woe to the man who attempts to make it a place of rest. Oh! there is a false view of things which we get when we try to shut out the thought of suffering. Think of the young man and the young woman who make gaiety their home day after day and night after night, and think of Christ with the sick and maimed around Him; think of one who surrounds himself with the entertainment of this world, and think of one whose day is spent in passing from one sick chamber to another.
The more deeply we enter into the meaning of Christ considered as the Divine Man, the more distinctly revealed it becomes to us that what His life was our life is intended to be. I believe that in our best and truest Christian moments nothing less meets the demands of our own minds and hearts, than that we should become inwardly in our animating spirit, and outwardly in our relations with the world in which we live, reduplications in small of Him whom we call Master. That we try to satisfy ourselves with less than this we should all be prepared to admit. There are instincts and there are impulses and ambitions that shrink from coming under the sovereignty of a commitment so cordial and entire. That accounts for the disproportionate emphasis so customarily laid upon the commercial feature of the atonement. It is pleasant, it fits our languid and criminal tastes to believe that Christs work was accomplished by His sacrifice upon the cross, in such sense that we are saved by the sheer transaction of crucifixion. It passes as the orthodox view of redemption. It is easier and it is lazier to believe in a Christ that is going to pay my debts for me than it is to grow up in Christ into a Divine endowment, that shall be itself the cure for insolvency and the material of wealth Divine and inexhaustible. You have really done nothing for a poor man by paying his debts for him, unless in addition to squaring his old accounts you have dealt with him in such manner as to guarantee him against being similarly involved in the time to come. Emphasise as we may the merely ransoming work of Christ, we are not made free men by having our fetters broken off, and we are not made wealthy men by having our debts paid. It is not what Christ delivers us from, but what He translates us into that makes us saved men in Christ. That brings us on to the clear ground of the positive feature of Christian character; and there is no more distinct or comprehensive way of stating that positive feature than to say that it involves being in our limited capacity exactly what He was in His infinite capacity. Christ as we know Him in history is nothing more or less than the ideal man actualised. The essential features of Christ we are therefore to look upon as prescriptive. Christs being, His experience, His relations to men, the attitude in which He stood towards what concerned His contemporaries, the feelings which their concerns excited in Himall of that becomes practically just so much direct ordinance binding itself upon us closely and authoritatively. What He was in His Divine way we are bound to become in our human way.
You cannot drift down the tide of event and be a Christ man or a Christ woman. The world is to be saved; the tide is to be reversed. Man inspired of God is to do it; and you cannot buckle yourself down to that problem in Christian wholeheartedness and not grow sober under it. A thousand torchlights and ten thousand brass bands will not convert the world-tragedy into a world-comedy, or crinkle the fixed lines of your seriousness into merriment. Now you see the philosophy of the sober Christ. He flung Himself against forty centuries of bad event, and the Divine Man was bruised by the impact. He stood up and let forty centuries jump on Him; He held His own, but blood brake through His pores in perspiration, and about that there is nothing humorous.1 [Note: C. H.]
3. We reject Christ when we refuse to relieve suffering.
There is an evil which is done in this world by the want of thought; that is the sin of those who go through life, not suspecting, and not caring to inquire, how much there is of human desolation. And there is an evil which is done in this world by the want of heart; that is the sin of those who are familiar with all that you can tell them of misery, and still go on feasting, and dressing, and amusing themselves, and doling out with a grudge the driblets of their income in the sacred cause of benevolence.
If ever you feel disposed in this manner to turn away from the afflicted, you will do well to check yourself with the question, Am I not, in fact, behaving as the Jews did when they turned away from our Saviour? He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and, therefore, they hid as it were their faces from Him. Surely if we hide our face, peevishly or contemptuously, from any one of His afflicted and poor people; if we are impatient and displeased with everything, except what encourages our mirth or what helps us in our days work; we have every reason to think that we too should have hidden our faces from our Saviour, had we known Him in the flesh: we should have been impatient and displeased at being called on to look off our business or our diversion towards a person so lowly and little esteemed, so very full of infirmities and sufferings. The history of our Lords life and death is full of instances of this sort of temper; but none perhaps so remarkable as in the case of the two thieves who were crucified by His side. Even in the very agony of their own death, and that the most painful and shameful of deaths, both of them at first, and one as it would seem to the end, could find it in their hearts to revile our Lord for His sufferings. If Thou be Christ, they tauntingly said, save Thyself and us. They cast in His teeth the same reproach as the haughty Roman soldiers and self-satisfied Pharisees did: He saved others, Himself He cannot save. Those dying and blaspheming malefactors were the very type of the worlds proud and cruel nature, rejecting and disdaining all fellowship with the poor and afflicted, and refusing to be saved by sufferings, even the sufferings of Jesus Christ.
I question if there is more than one heresy that is bad enough to keep a man out of the kingdom of heaventhat is, the heresy of trying to be in heaven to-day, at the same time that the world is full of men who by their sins and burdens and distresses are already in hell to-day.1 [Note: C. H. Parkhurst.]
II
Christ a Man of Sorrows
i. The Occasion of His Sorrow
1. His own life was sorrowful.He was away from home; from His Fathers presence. He was a strangerand made continually to feel itin a strange land. From His childhood He was full of thoughts which He could not utter; because, if uttered, they were not understood.
He was a lonely man. Those who loved Him knew Him not. They were constantly misreading His intentions, thwarting His purposes, and suggesting a line of action which was not His own. While they were faithful to Him, they could not understand Him. It was a constant struggle for Him to convey spiritual thoughts to the carnal, and heavenly ideas to the earthly-minded. At last they deserted Him; all forsook Him and fled.
2. His care for others made Him sorrowful.Christs first acquaintance with sorrow was by sympathy. To sympathise is simply this, to feel with those who suffer. It is the instinct of a kindly heart. It is the obedience to that law of Christian duty which bids us rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. It is the rising, the almost spontaneous rising, of the emotion of pity in the bosom. You do not bid the feeling come. It comes. That is passive knowledge of misery. When we have thrilled over the anguish that we see, there is a sense in which we are acquainted with grief. In this knowledge, our Redeemers heart was rich. We will take but two cases which belong to our present purpose, the case of poverty, and the case of corporeal maladies. It was a most distinguishing feature of the life of Jesus, the compassion which He felt for the degraded, neglected, unbefriended poor. And He sympathised with bodily anguish. He was walking almost all His life through the wards of a vast hospital. The hospital was the world; the sick, the dying, and the mad were lying on their beds, on both sides of Him. At evening they brought unto Him many that were sick; and, it is written again and again, He was moved with compassion.
It was the love which Christ had for the world that made Him sad while doing His work in the world; and the infinitude of His love is what explains the unutterableness of His pain; for the world in which Christ fulfilled His mission was a suffering world. Now a man who is without love can be in the midst of suffering and not suffer. A loveless spirit grieves over its own pain, but has no sense of anothers pain, and no feeling of being burdened by anothers pain. Love has this peculiar property, that it makes the person whom we love one with us, so that his experience becomes a part of our own life, his pain becomes painful to us, his burdens make us tired. The mother feels her childs pain as keenly as though it were her own pain, perhaps more so. In its Divine relations this is all expressed in those familiar words of Scripture, In all their afflictions He was afflicted. He was not simply sorry for their suffering, He felt their suffering as His suffering, which is what we mean by sympathy. Sympathy is the form which love takes in a suffering world.
There is a remarkable Talmudic legend (Sanhedrin 98 a) which tells how a certain Rabbi one day meets Elijah the Prophet, and asks him when Messiah will come. Go, replies Elijah, and ask Messiah himself. You will find him at the city gate; and by this token you will know him, that he sits among the poor and the sick. A man of sorrows himself, he ministers lovingly to those who suffer, and binds up their wounds. The Rabbi finds Messiah, and asks his question, When wilt thou come, Master? To-day, is the reply. Meeting Elijah again, the Rabbi cries, Messiah has deceived me; he says he will come to-day, but he has not come. Nay, answers Elijah, he is no deceiver; in truth will he come to-dayyes, to-day, as the Psalmist says, if you will hearken unto Gods voice. 1 [Note: M. Joseph, The Ideal in Judaism, p. 132.]
(1) His care for bodily suffering caused Him sorrow. This is the first element of our Lords sorrow. I have often observed that while in churches we take offerings for hospitals, very few people ever visit them. They refer to them in their family devotions, but very few go to them, and some of us do not care to see the woeful sights of suffering; but Christ, if He were to come to London to-night, would not come to church, He would go to the hospital, where they most need His help, His power, and the attestation of His miracles. He is moved to action in the presence of suffering.2 [Note: S. P. Cadman.]
What a blessing it is that the medical profession has inherited so much of this high-minded reserve! The delicacy, the consecration and heroism of the doctors of both England and America have always most deeply impressed me. What a day was the advent of this suffering Man for all the sufferings of menthat He who suffered in all things like unto His brethren should so completely and deeply identify Himself with them that suffered everywhere! And so did Christ heal diseases, for as many as touched Him were made whole.
How beautiful, in this connection, becomes the miracle, recorded by St. Mark only, of the healing of the deaf and stammering man by the Sea of Galilee; when He, who had the power, and knew that He had the power, to remove the malady, yet, in the very act of doing so, looked up to heaven and sighed, as He said the all-powerful Ephphatha which bade the deaf ear be opened! That sigh fulfilled the sign given in prophecy of Him that should come. It showed Him, not only as the Almighty One, in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; but also as that All-pitying One, in whom dwelt all the fulness of humanity too; as the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief.
There are two epochs in the career of medical life. There is a period in the surgeons existence when he occupies the position of a student, and belongs to a class of men proverbially reckless. And there is another period in his life when he belongs to a class which all experience forces us to place among the most devoted, the most tender, the most sympathetic of his species. How comes it that the young experimentalist is so marvellously transformed into the benevolent physician? The secret lies in this. In the outset of the profession a man has to look on suffering as a bystander. The recoil and the faintness of human sensitiveness pass off. He becomes familiar with human anguish. He looks upon the contortions of agony with the cold eye of a theorist. The human frame into which the sharp knife is passing is nothing to him but the material for a lecture. Emotion has dulled itself by repetition. This is the passive acquaintance with sorrow. It would be a miracle indeed if all this did not blunt sensibility. For if by Gods wise law it did not blunt it, and if the emotion remained as keen as ever, how could the human heart bear perpetual laceration? That is the first stage. But as medical life goes on it becomes a duty not to look on but to relieve. And then he begins to feel the blessedness of benevolence, and once more his heart expands when he sets about doing good. And year by year the habit deepens: the shudder of inexperience, and the mere emotional useless sickening of the heart, which come from witnessing an operationall that is gone. It was worth nothing after all; and in its place there has come something nobler, something that can be made use of in this work-day world, something even in its way Christ-likethat habit of prompt love which will enable a man to put up with much that is disgusting, and much that would shock the false delicacy of mere feeling, in order to do good.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]
(2) Mental suffering caused Him sorrow. When He met that funeral procession coming forth from the gate of Nain, with the widowed and now orphaned mother following behind, it was not that He hailed this as an opportunity of manifesting forth His glory; it was not that He coldly or roughly restored the breath to the closed lips, or the warmth to the frozen limbs, or the colour to the pallid cheek and brow of death, as One who would say, Receive the credentials of My Messiahship, and accept Me by this sign as your Lord and King; no, a human compassion wrought with the Divine power, and marked the Redeemer not only as the mighty God, but also as the Man of Sorrows, bearing our griefs. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her; and when He had bidden the young man to arise, it was to his mother that He delivered him.
And so it was in the more detailed narrative of the raising of Lazarus. Although He thought it needful for Gods glory that the death should not be prevented but suffered, and allowed therefore the sisters to think for two days that He was wanting in His care for them, yet how tender was the feeling shown at each step of that wonderful history; from the first mention of the sleep of His friend to His disciples at a distance, to the grief shown in the meeting and the tears shed at the grave! That briefest of all sentences, Jesus wept, how does it carry with it, to all mourners, the assurance of His tender concern for them, who is Himself the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief!
3. He was a Man of Sorrows because of His contact with sin.(1) The daily sins of ordinary life. Many vices were doubtless practised there, in the Holy Land; making homes wretched, and doing dishonour to God. The common sins of a fallen nature were daily committed, no doubt, if not in His sight, yet at least in the full view of His omniscient intuition. These things caused Him sorrow.
We know what positive pain it is to a man or a woman of refined and cultivated tastes, to listen to coarse, bad, vulgar language. Apart altogether from any sin in the thing, the polished educated nature recoils from it, shudders at it. Shut up any one of high mental culture and refinement with the vile, the abandoned, the coarse, and every moment of such an association will be a very hell to that person. The words, the acts, the gestures of the vile will positively torture his spirit. Yet all this gives us only the faintest idea of how deeply Christs soul was pained by mans sin. From morning till night, and from night till morning, everywhere, always, throughout the whole period of His sojourn upon earth, the holy nature of Jesus must have writhed in torture under what He saw and heard. Lot, as his character is drawn for us in the Old Testament, was by no means a perfect man; yet imperfect though he was, St. Peter says of him that in Sodom he was vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked; (for that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds)2Pe 2:8. If this was so with an imperfect and sinful man, what must have been the agonised recoil of Christs soul from sin, as it met Him, on every side, working, speaking, and acting in men, when He was here on earth?
(2) There was also the special sin of hypocrisy. He saw religion itself with its very heart eaten out of it in those who professed to be its disciples and even its teachers. It is quite plain that the formalism, the false sanctimoniousness, the utter and absolute hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees, was the thing which caused our Saviour on earth the greatest concern as well as the greatest displeasure. It met Him everywhere. He could not go into the Temple without seeing some sign of it. Perhaps there was a Pharisee saying his prayers; for a pretence making long prayers, full of boasting and self-parade; and then going away to devour a widows substance. Perhaps there was a Scribe teaching the people; laying down the law, professing (unhappily) to lay down Gods law, to the ignorant but respectful knot of men, women, and children around him; and in all that he taught them there was not one word of truth, not one word of reality, not one idea communicated by which the soul could be nourished. Perhaps, when Christ was teaching, or when He was in the very act of healing, He saw before Himit happened constantlysome suspicious countenance, some evil eye watching His work and lying in wait to accuse. Often the same spirit broke out in open blasphemy. This man is in concert with the devil. The devil lets Him cast out, that he may be the gainer. The finished work of such men was His betrayal and murder: but the work, in its beginning and in its progress, was harder still for Him to bear; thwarting His gracious designs, and giving at each turn that most painful impression of being in a hostile presence and watched by a hostile eye.
He was despised and rejected of men. The word translated men is a very striking one. It does not occur elsewhere in the prophecy of Isaiah in this exact form; it occurs only twice in all the Old Testament. There is another familiar word referring to man as man that is repeatedly used; but this word is exceptional, and refers to men in high places, men of distinction and of influence, men who have the forming of public opinion, and who give the lead to fashion and to sentiment. They are the men spoken of here. The prophet, therefore, in these words describes our Lords relationship to the polite society of His day. So far it is not His relationship with humanitywe have that later onbut with men who occupied the seats of Moses and of the prophets, who were proud of their distinctions but thoughtless of Him who had exalted them, and unmindful of the duty which such distinctions involved. Was it not so? Who were the men who despised Christ? Who were those who rejected or boycotted Him? For if that word were classical, it would be the most forcible and effective translation. In what hearts did Christ first of all find contempt? Who were those who excluded Him from their tables as the poor unlettered peasant of Galilee? Oh, men in high places, who belonged to the polite society of the day, that had its rules, its etiquette, its conditions of entrance into its privileged circle, men who were proud because high, who lacked insight, but sought to compensate for that by an assurance which only conceit begot.1 [Note: D. Davies.]
(3) There was also the special sin of treachery. And Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor. Most wonderful indeed is the record of that Divine forbearance, which treated the traitor apostle, through three long years, on terms of friendship, confidence, and sympathy. All the miracles were wrought, all the discourses of Christ were uttered, with Judas Iscariot standing in the inner circle. And Jesus knew from the beginning who should betray Him. Can we think of a trial, of a sorrow, heavier than this: to have in your own household, at your own table, admitted to your confidence, possessed of your secrets, one who is hardening more and more into hostility, and whom you know to be marked out as your eventual betrayer? This sorrow was Christs all along. He had a traitor in His camp, an enemy in His bosom.
(4) But His sorrows crown of sorrow was this, that He was Himself made sin for others. To see sin was sorrow to the Holy One. To see sin ruining mens lives, teaching in Gods name, present daily with Him in disguise, was enough to sadden Him. But He was to come closer even than this to it. He bare, this chapter says, the sin of many. It is probably in reference to this, that Christ is called a Man of Sorrows. If we wish to see Him in His sorrow, we must go to Gethsemane and Calvary. It was in Gethsemane that the confession fell from Him, My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death. It was on Calvary that the cry was wrung from His lips, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Surely it was neither the fear of death, nor the presence of death, which constituted the point and sting of that grief. It was no mere remembrance of what He had seen of sin upon earth, no mere anticipation of what sin might yet be in its misery and in its consequences, which expressed itself in those bitter words of anguish. Sin was nearer to Him even than the memory or the foreknowledge. It was then lying upon Him: He was bearing itbearing it for ustasting death, not for Himself, but (by the grace of God) for every man. The crowning point of the sorrows was the conscious incorporation with the sin.
ii. The Reason of His Sorrow
1. He was a Man of Sorrows in order to be one of us. Sorrow is a universal fact. It is a fact which is both prominent and arrestive. There is no door at which it does not knock, no portal through which it does not enter, no roof beneath which it does not tarry. Christ Himself trod the Via Dolorosathe name given to the road which leads from Olivet to Calvary. And for all of us the pathway of life is the pathway of sorrow
The path of sorrow, and that path alone,
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.
The task which the master painters of the middle ages for centuries proposed to themselves as the highest aim of art, was to realise on canvas the conception of the Anointed One of God. It was their grand work to paint a Christ. And what they made their business was not to turn off a portrait, but to embody the highest idea which genius could conceive of glorious humanity. If the Italian painter, or if the Spanish painter, produced a form which bore the peculiar national lineaments worn by the humanity in his own climate, so far he had failed. He might have idealised the grandeur of the Italian form, or the grandeur of the Spanish form, but he had not given to mens eyes that grandeur of the human species which belonged to a conception of the Son of Man. He had got a portrait for which a nobly formed individual of one nation might have sat, but an individual of no other. He had got the perfection of the Italian or of the Spanish type, but not the perfection of manhood. Now that which the painter aimed at in the outward form, that Christ was in inward character. He was the essence, the sublimation, of humanity. It was a noble endeavour of the Apostle Paul to be all things to all men. To the Gentile he became as a Gentile, that he might gain the Gentiles; to the Jew as a Jew. But in all this he was acting a single part for a time. He made it his business while the Jew was with him to try to realise the feelings and enter into the difficulties of a Jew. He laid it upon himself as a Christian duty while he was reasoning with a Gentile to throw himself into the Gentiles position, to try to look at things from his point of view, and even to fancy himself perplexed with his prejudices. But directly he had done with the man he wished to win, he laid aside his part. He was neither Jew nor Gentile, but he was Paul again, with all Pauls personality, with all Pauls peculiarities. That which Paul was for a time, Christ is for ever. That which Paul was by effort and constraint, Christ is by the very law of His nature. He is all things to all men. He is the countryman of the world. He is the Mediator, not between God and a nation, but between God and man. He was the Jew and the Gentile, and the Greek and the Roman, all in one. He can sympathise with every man, because He had, as it were, been every man. There is not a natural throb which ever agitated the bosom of humanity that Christ has not felt. The aspirations of loftiest genius and the failure of humblest mediocrity, the bitterness of disappointment and the triumph of success, the privations of the poor man, and the feebleness of corporeal agonyChrist knew them all. He came into this world the Son and Heir of the whole race of Man 1:1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]
2. He was mana man, therefore a man of sorrows. In this time-world those two things shall not be severed. Bodily and mentally, the constitution of a son of man is such that escape is impossible. Look at that surface of the human frame which is exposed to outward injury. There runs beneath it, crossed and recrossed in windings inconceivable, a network of nerves, every fibre of which may become the home of pain. There is no interstice large enough to admit between them, in a space that does not feel, the finest needles-point. Beneath all that there is a marvellous machinery. Man anatomised is like an instrument of music. The combined action of ten hundred thousand strings, each moving in its moment and in its place, is the melody and the harmony of health; but if one chord vibrate out of tune you have then the discord of the harp, the derangement of disease. Our bodies are strung to suffering. That we suffer is no marvel, that we want the repair of the physician is no wonder; the marvel is thisthat a harp of so many strings should keep in tune so long.
Look next at our mental machinery. These incomprehensible hearts of ours are liable to a derangement more terrible than bodily disorganisation. The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity, but a wounded spirit who can bear? The inner mind, wrapped up as it seems by impenetrable defences, is yet more exposed to shocks and wounds than the outward skin tissue, and the sensitive network which encompasses that mind is a thousandfold more alive to agony than the nerves that quiver when they are cut. There is such a thing as disappointment in this world. There is such a thing as affection thrown back upon itself. There are such things as slight and injury and insult. There is such a thing as an industrious man finding all his efforts to procure an honest livelihood in vain, and looking upon his pale children with a heart crushed, to feel that there is nothing for them but the poorhouse. There is such a thing as a man going down the hill that leads into the sepulchre, and acknowledging as the shadows darken around him that life has been a failure. All this is sorrow; and just because of the constitution with which he is born. In some form or other this is the portion of the son of man.
And we may remark this alsothe susceptibility of suffering is the lot of the highest manhood. Just in proportion as man is exquisitely man, he is alive to endurance. There is a languid, relaxed frame of body in which pain is not keenly felt. The more complete the organisation the severer the endurance. Strong and able manhood suffers more the division of the nerve than softened debilitated frames. So it is with the spirit. The more emphatically you are the son of man, with human nature in its perfection in you, the more exquisitely can your feelings bleed. That which a base and a craven spirit smiles at, is torture to the noblest and the best. It was for this reason that Christ was in a peculiar sense the Man of Sorrows. Things which rough and scornful men would have shaken from them without feeling, went home sharp and deep into His gentle and loving heart. The perfection of His humanity ensured for Him the perfection of endurance, Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow.
3. He was a Man of Sorrows in order to save us. For one man entirely at ease, in mind, body, and estate, how many, shall we say, are in a condition of discomfort, of conscious disquietude, in one of these respects, or in all? Who is there without some definite drawback to entire satisfaction? The health, or the incomethe business, or the familythe affections, or the consciencethe past, or the futurehow many could honestly say that in all these things they are entirely and absolutely happy? Now just in proportion as there is a drawback to happiness, there is what we may call a natural affinity and attraction to Christ. Slow as we are to turn to Him in affliction, we are slower still to turn to Him in prosperity. They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. Not until the lights of earth are dimmed, do men commonly look out for the great, central, all-quickening light of heaven. When He slew them, they sought Him. And then the thing which most touches them is the thought that the Saviour was a suffering man below; that He tasted not of human joy, but drank to the dregs the cup of human grief; that He was despised and rejected of men, bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, was Himself (in every sense) a Man of Sorrows, and profoundly acquainted with grief. It is this that makes Him a Saviour for all men and for the whole of life: for the sad as well as the joyful, for hours of gloom as well as for moments of gladness.
When I feel myself in my heart of hearts a sinner, I once heard Dr. Parker say, a trespasser against Gods law and Gods love; when I feel that a thought may overwhelm me in destruction, that a secret, unexpressed desire may shut me out of heaven and make me glad to go to hell to be away from the face of Him that sitteth upon the thronethen when I am told that Jesus Christ was wounded for my transgressions, that upon Him was laid the chastisement of my peace, I press my way through all the difficulties and say: If I perish I will pray and perish at the Cross; for if this be not sufficient, it hath not entered into the heart of man to solve the problem of human depravity, and the human consciousness of sin.1 [Note: A. Shepherd, Men in the Making, p. 205.]
iii. The Way He bore His Sorrows
1. He spoke very little about them. Though we are constantly meeting with events in His life which might have caused Him much sorrow, yet only two instances are recorded of His speaking of His sorrow. Now is My soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. The other instance is when He exclaimed, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.
Dr. Arnold had a sister who suffered for twenty years from a disease which prevented her from ever changing her position. He said of her, I never saw a more perfect instance of the power of love and of a sound mind. For twenty years she adhered to her early formed resolution of never talking about herself. She bore her painful indisposition without ever talking about it. The biographer of the late Lady Georgina Fullerton alludes to this great virtue in that saintly ladys character. The gaiety and serenity of her countenance told little of the suffering she underwent from time to time; for her disease was rather hidden than inactive. But she never complained or spoke of her health.2 [Note: H. G. Youard.]
2. Sorrow did not rob His life of its joys. Sorrow often causes people to take a gloomy view of life; to indulge in the utterance of morbid sentiments; to speak of life as a vale of tears; to regard everything as vanity, as though God had withdrawn all brightness, and joy, and beauty from the world, and had left nothing in it but dismal shadows to fall upon the path of man. Our Saviours sorrow had not this effect. None can discern a spirit of morbidness in Him. We see in Him no disposition to take a dismal view of life. Whatever sorrows reigned within, He never allowed them to impart their sombre colouring to the world without.
After the Man of Sorrows, perhaps no one had so much sorrow as St. Paul; and yet we fail to recognise a morbid spirit in any of his writings. You search in vain for dismal views of life in any of his epistles. In one of those epistles, that to the Corinthians, we find him saying, I am exceeding joyful in all our tribulation. There may be solemn and stern views of life and duty set forth in his writings; there may be much that he says which gives us the impression that St. Paul was a distinctly serious man; but there is nothing which conveys the impression that he took gloomy views of life. He was an apostle of hope, joy, and brightness, notwithstanding that he was ever passing through the deepest currents of troubled waters.
Bishop Jeremy Taylor had this rare virtue of refusing to take a gloomy view of life when passing through trouble. Alluding to one of the great troubles of his life, he wrote, They have taken all from me. What now? They have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me; and I can still discourse, and, unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they still have left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too; and still I eat and drink, I sleep and digest, I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbours pleasant fields, and delight in all that in which God delights.1 [Note: H. G. Youard.]
3. He was not impatient to be rid of them. Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. Even in Gethsemane, when His sorrows reached their climax, and assumed the form of an agony inconceivable to us, He added to His supplication for deliverance a nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done; which showed that, though wishful to be delivered, if possible, He was not impatient to be delivered.
4. As sorrow abounded so prayer abounded. St. Luke tells us, And being in an agony, He prayed more earnestly. It was an agony of sorrow to which these words allude. We learn from them what we learn from other parts of the Gospels, that our Lord prayed when He sorrowed. But we learn something more. He not only prayed, but He prayed more earnestly. His prayer was proportioned to His sorrow. The more intense His sorrow, the more earnest His prayer.
5. His sorrows did not keep Him from His work. Even when His sorrows were reaching their greatest intensity, piercing Him through and through, He did not omit His duty to Malchus, to the weeping women on the way to Calvary, to the dying thief, to His crucifiers, to His mother.
A lady of rank, a singularly saintly character, whose life has recently been published, alluding to the death of her only child, wrote: The eve of St. Philips Day! the eve of the day when I saw my boy for the last time! It seems as if I had no leisure for grief now. Her time was so occupied with her duties that she had no leisure for grief; and so sorrow in her case was singularly blessed by Heaven, and became a great hallowing power in her life.1 [Note: H. G. Youard.]
It was a feature in Queen Victorias character that she did not allow her sorrows to interfere with her duties. Referring to this, on one occasion, the Duke of Argyle said, I think it a circumstance worthy of observation, and one which ought to be known to all the people of this country, that during all the years of the Queens affliction, during which she has lived in comparative retirement, she has omitted no part of that public duty which concerns her as sovereign of this country; that on no occasion has she struck work, so to speak, in those public duties which belong to her exalted position.2 [Note: Ibid.]
iv. The Fellowship of His Sufferings
Christs battle and victory did not set aside, but rather established, the great law, that the evil of the world is to be cured by suffering. The wonderful power and virtue of suffering, so awfully, yet so triumphantly, wielded by the Son of God, was bequeathed by Him to His Church. Not, indeed, in all its efficacies. One result of it, atonement for sin, He alone could attain, and He attained it to the full for all mankind. By His one oblation of Himself once offered upon the Cross, He made a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. And to that perfect atonement, as there needs nothing to be added, so it is not in the power of sinful man to add.
On the other hand, there is a work to be done by suffering, in the bodies and souls of the members of Christs body, in which the Head of that body could personally have no part or share. That work is personal, individual purification from sin. In that He could not partake, who was eternally and infinitely pure. So that of these two works of healing by sorrow, to one Christ could not come by reason of His purity; to the other man could not attain by reason of his sin.
One work remains common to both, first, without flaw or stint to Christ; secondly, though imperfect and in measure, to us in Christ. This is the drawing, attracting, winning of souls to Christ by suffering; the advancing upon earth of the glorious Kingdom of God.
It was on this account, because of their deep belief in this doctrine, that the Apostles gave utterance to such earnest yearnings to be allowed to be partakers of the sufferings of Christ. What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ, says St. Paul, that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death. And again: I, Paul, who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His bodys sake, which is the church. And again: Therefore I endure all things for the elects sakes, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. And so St. Peter speaks: Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: but rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christs sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.
I cannot believe that you can have this view of Christian suffering presented to you without your hearts being affected by it. If you regard the sorrows of life that come upon you as chastisement alone you may be tempted to murmur and repine. If you look upon them too exclusively as means of personal cleansing, there will be in this an encouragement to pride. But if you receive them as the tokens of the fellowship of Christs sufferings, as the writing within your soul of the wounded Foot, the torn Hand, the pierced Side, the bleeding Brow, as the embrace of the Man of Sorrows, drawing you to Him, and making you so one with Himself, that the virtue of His Passion passes through you for a far higher benefit and blessing to others than your own active zeal and labours could ever accomplish; this is a consideration than which I can conceive nothing more powerful to still all rebellious and repining thoughts, nothing that could elevate more, and yet make more lowly.
There is a fable of the ancient heathen (perhaps another of their beautiful allegories) that the nightingale rested its breast upon a thorn when it poured out those melodiously melancholy tones which pierce and ravish the soul.
It is thus with the Christian who sits upon the Cross. Then will his tones be like unto the songs of Davids harp, now pealing in the Heavens above, in high accord with Angel, and Archangel, and all the glorious company of Heaven; now bringing down the Heavenly strains to sad, sweet sympathy with the sorrows of the Church below, to dispel the fear, to restore the faith, to brighten the hope, to calm the troubled mind, to heal the broken heart of many sufferers with the song of the Redeemed. Such marvellous power is given, not to those who would serve God in their own way, by pleasing themselves, or according to the wisdom of the world, but to those only who suffer the will of God patiently and gladly, who glory not, save in the Cross of their Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto them, and they unto the world.1 [Note: 1 J. R. Alsop.]
A Man of Sorrows
Literature
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Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 1.
Sanderson (T.), Unfulfilled Designs, 45.
Selby (T. G.), The God of the Patriarchs, 273.
Shepherd (A.), Men in the Making, 190.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xix. No. 1099.
Vaughan (C. J.), Family Prayer and Sermon Book, i. 271.
Christian World Pulpit, xxvii. 53 (Davies); xxxv. 109 (Rogers); lv. 394 (Lang); lx. 180 (Cadman); lxxi. 145 (Campbell).
Church of England Pulpit, xl. 29 (Reid).
Churchmans Pulpit, Good Friday, 13 (Alsop).
Clergymans Magazine, new Ser., vii. (Youard).
Expository Times, vi. 377 (Ford).
Homiletic Review, xxv. 230 (Parkhurst).
Preachers Magazine, i. 126 (Vaughan); vi. 237 (Brewin); xii. 142 (Brewin).
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
despised: Isa 49:7, Isa 50:6, Psa 22:6-8, Psa 69:10-12, Psa 69:19, Psa 69:20, Mic 5:1, Zec 11:8, Zec 11:12, Zec 11:13, Mat 26:67, Mat 27:39-44, Mat 27:63, Mar 9:12, Mar 15:19, Luk 8:53, Luk 9:22, Luk 16:14, Luk 23:18-25, Joh 8:48, Heb 12:2, Heb 12:3
a man: Isa 53:4, Isa 53:10, Psa 69:29, Mat 26:37, Mat 26:38, Mar 14:34, Luk 19:41, Joh 11:35, Heb 2:15-18, Heb 4:15, Heb 5:7
we hid as it were our faces from him: or, he hid as it were, his face from us. Heb. as a hiding of faces from him or from us. we esteemed. Deu 32:15, Zec 11:13, Mat 27:9, Mat 27:10, Joh 1:10, Joh 1:11, Act 3:13-15
Reciprocal: Gen 3:15 – thou 2Sa 6:16 – despised 2Sa 6:20 – glorious Job 30:28 – General Psa 18:4 – sorrows Psa 38:17 – sorrow Psa 69:7 – shame Psa 88:3 – soul Psa 88:15 – afflicted Psa 109:22 – and my Psa 116:3 – I found Psa 119:141 – small Psa 123:3 – for we are Ecc 7:4 – heart Son 5:2 – my head Lam 3:1 – the man Zec 12:8 – feeble Mat 8:20 – the Son Mat 9:24 – And Mat 11:28 – Come Mat 13:55 – the carpenter’s Mat 13:57 – they Mat 17:12 – Likewise Mat 20:19 – to mock Mat 26:61 – This Mat 27:22 – What Mat 27:29 – platted Mat 27:30 – General Mar 6:3 – carpenter Mar 7:34 – he sighed Mar 8:12 – he sighed Mar 8:31 – rejected Mar 10:34 – mock Mar 14:65 – General Mar 15:14 – And Luk 2:7 – and wrapped Luk 9:26 – whosoever Luk 17:25 – rejected Luk 18:32 – mocked Luk 22:63 – mocked Luk 23:11 – set Luk 23:35 – derided Joh 3:30 – must increase Joh 4:12 – General Joh 9:29 – we know not Joh 12:27 – is Joh 12:48 – rejecteth Joh 15:18 – General Joh 19:2 – the soldiers Act 4:27 – the people 1Co 4:10 – but we Gal 4:14 – ye Phi 2:7 – made 2Ti 3:3 – despisers Jam 2:6 – ye
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
THE MAN OF SORROWS
A Man of sorrows.
Isa 53:3
I. His own personal life was a sorrowful one.He was away from home, from His Fathers presence. He was a Stranger in a strange land. From His childhood He was full of thoughts which He could not utter, because, if uttered, they were not understood. He was a lonely Man. His sympathy with others by no means implied their sympathy with Him.
II. But His sorrows, like His labours, were for others.(1) Jesus Christ sorrowed over bodily suffering; (2) He sorrowed over mental suffering; (3) He sorrowed over spiritual suffering.
III. He was a Man of sorrows also, and chiefly, in relation to sin.(1) He had to see sin; (2) He had to bear sin.
IV. The subject teaches (1) that if it is as a Man of sorrows that Jesus Christ comes to us, it must be, first of all, as a memento of the fitness of sorrow to our condition as sinful men. (2) Again, only a Man of sorrows could be a Saviour for all men, and for the whole of life. (3) Sorrow, however deep, has its solaces and its compensations. (a) Whatever it be, it is of the nature of sorrow to bring a man nearer to truth, nearer to the reality, nearer therefore to hope. (b) Sorrow makes a man more useful. It gives him a new experience and a new sympathy.
Dean Vaughan.
Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary
53:3 He is despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with {e} grief: and we hid as it were [our] faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
(e) Which was by God’s singular providence for the comfort of sinners, Heb 4:15 .
Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes
The English word "despised" carries strong emotional overtones, but its Hebrew source means to be considered worthless and unworthy of attention. The Servant would not be the object of scorn, Isaiah meant, though He was that (Mar 10:33-34; Luk 18:31-33), as much as He would be hastily dismissed. One writer believed the primary meaning is that the Servant would provoke abhorrence.
"No person in the history of the Jews has provoked such deep-seated abhorrence as He who came only to bless them, and who even on the cross prayed, ’Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ . . . And all through the centuries no name has provoked such intense abhorrence among the Jews as the name of Jesus." [Note: Baron, p. 74.]
People would reject Him because they would not see Him as having any significance for them (Isa 6:10; Joh 1:10-11; Joh 12:37-41). They would not give Him a second look.
"The chief men of His nation who towered above the multitude, the great men of this world, withdrew their hands from Him, drew back from Him: He had none of the men of any distinction at His side." [Note: Delitzsch, 2:314.]
People would also avoid the Servant because He would appear to them as one who had His own problems. Since He knew pain and grief, others would conclude that He was not in a position to help them. He would appear to them as a loser, and who goes to a loser for help or looks to one for leadership? This description does not mean that the Servant would always be sickly and morose (cf. Isa 1:5-6). It means that the way He presented Himself would not lead people to look to Him for strength.
"When all that the human eye saw and the human mind apprehended was added up the result was zero." [Note: Motyer, p. 429.]
"Thus the revelation of the arm of the Lord that will deliver the Lord’s people is met with shock, astonishment, distaste, dismissal, and avoidance. Such a one as this can hardly be the one who can set us free from that most pervasive of all human bondages: sin, and all its consequences. To a world blinded by selfishness and power, he does not even merit a second thought." [Note: Oswalt, The Book . . . 40-66, p. 384.]
People typically disregard those who suffer as they serve the Lord, as they continue to despise and reject the Servant.