HIS SUFFERINGS

—HIS SUFFERINGS. Having thus shortly illustrated the two descriptive appellations here given to the illustrious Sufferer, let us now, in the second place, turn our attention to his sufferings. “Christ, the just One, suffered; being put to death in the flesh.” The exalted personage to whom these appellations belong, existed from before all ages in a state of the most perfect blessedness: “He was in the beginning with God,” “in the bosom of the Father,” enjoying glory with him before the foundation of the world, delighting in him, and delighted in by him. A state of suffering was not then his original condition. But when, in order to gain the great objects of his eternal appointment, he, in the fulness of the times, took on him the nature of men in its present humbled state, a state resulting from their violation of the Divine law, “the likeness of sinful flesh,” he, of course, became a sufferer: for “man born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he comes forth as a flower, and is cut down; he flees as a shadow, and continues not.” He is “born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.” It is obvious, however, that by Divine appointment, Christ, the just One, was a sufferer far beyond the ordinary lot of mankind. His sufferings commenced with his birth. Unfurnished with the accommodations which the humblest ordinarily enjoy in entering into life, his birth-place was a stable, his cradle a manger. While yet an infant, his life was endangered by the unprincipled and cruel jealousy of a tyrant, and he was exposed to the hazards and fatigues of a hurried flight into a foreign country. At an early age he felt the pressure of the “primal curse,” “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread,” and engaged in the toilsome labors of mechanical industry. We have no reason to believe that our Lord was ever affected by disease, but he experienced all the other sinless infirmities of our nature. He was hungry, and thirsty, and weary; felt the inconveniences of the extremes of cold and heat: and was no stranger to disappointment, vexation, and sorrow, and the pangs of unrequited kindness and violated friendship. Destitute of the conveniences and comforts, he was but scantily and precariously furnished with the necessaries, of life. He seems often to have been indebted for a supply of these to the hospitality of others; and while “the foxes had holes, and the birds of the air nests, he had not where to lay his head.” Though followed and admired by multitudes, he was the object of the contempt and hatred of by far the greater part of his countrymen of all classes. He was the butt of the great man's scorn, and the poor man's contumely. He was represented as a mover of sedition and a speaker of blasphemy, an impostor or a madman, a glutton and a drunkard, an emissary of Satan, a friend and companion of the basest of men. Nor were his sufferings limited to those inflicted by his fellowmen. He was exposed to temptations to sin from malignant spiritual beings, which to his holy mind must have been productive of the most poignant anguish. On one occasion, for forty successive days, in a desolate wilderness, he was subjected to these attacks; and we read that, when his infernal tormentor left him, he did so only “for a season” We know that, in the time of the deepest complication of the Saviour's sufferings, he returned. That was his hour when “the power of darkness” especially exerted itself. The degree of suffering occasioned to a being so holy and so benignant, by witnessing the empire of the evil one, in the depravity and wretchedness of mankind, can be very inadequately conceived of by even the holiest and most benevolent of imperfect men. The severest of all his sufferings, however, were those which came immediately from the hand of God as the manifestation of the divine righteous displeasure at the sins of those in whose room he stood. These sufferings of his soul were the soul of his sufferings. There is something in the inspired description of them, that excites amazement rather than communicates definite information: “A horror of great darkness” comes over his mind; “he begins to be sorrowful, to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy;” he “becomes suddenly possessed with fear, horror, and amazement; encompassed with grief and overwhelmed with sorrow; pressed down with consternation and dejection of mind; tormented with anxiety and disquietude of spirit.” Under his intolerable load of anguish, he pours out his heart in supplication to his Father, “And, being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” Again, and again, he, with strong crying and tears, repeats the same prayer, and an angel is sent to strengthen him. He was “poured out like water, his heart was like wax: it was melted in the midst of his bowels.” But the sufferings of Christ, the just One, were not yet completed. The awful solemnities of Gethsemane, its preternatural sufferings and consolations, were broken in on by a band of ruffians, led on by a traitor disciple. Deserted by his friends, who had lately assured him of inviolable fidelity, he was dragged as a felon before the tribunal of the high priest, and there accused of the foulest crimes, and subjected to the vilest indignities. He was reviled and insulted in all the forms which wanton, vulgar malignity could invent. They spat in his face, and buffeted him with the palms of their hands. And while thus abused by his enemies, he was basely denied with oaths and execrations by one of his followers, who had lately drawn his sword in his defence, and declared that, though he should die with him, he would never deny him. With an impious mockery of justice, under the form of law, he was condemned as worthy of death for imposture and blasphemy. Hurried before the judgment-seat of the Jewish procurator, he was there accused of the state-crimes of sedition and treason; and though declared innocent of them, his dastardly judge delivered him up to the will of his inveterate foes, sentencing him first to the scourge, and then to the cross. The barbarous soldiery, who were intrusted with carrying the unrighteous sentence into execution, robed him in the garments of mock royalty, and wreathed a garland of thorns round his temples, in savage mockery of his claims to be a king. On his lacerated, bleeding, enfeebled body, he bore the ponderous instrument of torture and death to the place of execution; and, stripped of his raiment, he was there affixed to the cross, amid the sarcasms of the chief priests and the shouts of the populace. To add to his ignominy, two notorious malefactors were crucified along with him, and the middle cross was assigned him as the vilest criminal of the three. While hanging on the cross in agony, his enemies continued to insult him by their contemptuous speeches; and, instead of water to quench his thirst, they offered him vinegar mixed with gall. To crown his sufferings a dark cloud was interposed between him and his Father; the comforts of sensible intercourse with Him, the source of his happiness, were withdrawn; and those words so big with anguish, came forth from a breaking heart, “My God, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?” Such were the sufferings of Christ, the just One. The sufferings were sufferings to death. When he suffered he was “put to death in the flesh.” After hanging on the cross for a number of hours, “he bowed the head, and gave up the ghost.” His death was a violent death; and of all violent deaths that probably which inflicted most pain on the sufferer. During these tedious hours he suffered every moment more than the agonies of an ordinary death. It was of all modes of punishment, too, the most ignominious. No Roman citizen, however foul his crime, could be legally crucified. It was the punishment appropriated to felonious slaves. In being nailed to the cross, our Lord was exhibited as an outcast from society, a man who had no rights, a person unworthy of being treated as an ordinary human criminal; “a worm, and no man.” It was also a death, in consequence of a Jewish law which required the dead bodies of criminals who had suffered capital punishment to be hung on a tree, as a token of their having suffered the vengeance of the law, which marked the peculiar penal character of his sufferings. It intimated that he died accursed, condemned of God as the victim of human transgression; “As it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” Surely, well then may we, with all the emphasis that can be given to the term, pronounce, that “even Christ, the just One, suffered.” What his sufferings were, none knew, none can ever know, but he who endured, and he who inflicted them. We know he endured the adequate penalty of sin; but what that is who can tell? We know it is the displeasure of God; but “who knoweth the power of His anger? According to his fear, so is his wrath.” The most dreadful apprehension comes infinitely short of the more dreadful reality. Never was there a sufferer like Christ, the just One. He was, in a far higher sense than the weeping prophet, “the man who saw affliction by the rod of God's wrath.” He was “the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;” “Behold, and see all ye that go by, if there be any sorrow like unto the sorrow wherewith the Lord afflicted him in the day of his fierce anger.” To borrow the words of an old divine, “If hunger and thirst, if revilings and contempt, if sorrows and agonies, if stripes and buffetings, if condemnation and crucifixion be suffering, Jesus suffered. If the infirmities of our nature, if the weight of our sins, if the malice of man, if the machinations of Satan, if the hand of God, could make him suffer, our Saviour suffered.” And of this wonderful fact we have the most abundant evidence: “If the annals of the times, if the writings of his apostles, if the death of his martyrs, if the confessions of the Gentiles, if the scoffs of the Jews, be testimonies, Jesus suffered.” Such views of the Saviour as have now been presented to you, are intended and calculated to have an important practical influence on our hearts and lives. If he is the divinely appointed, qualified, commissioned, accredited revealer of the will of God, let us “hear him,” him alone, as the authoritative teacher of religious truth. His word is the word of Him that sent him. Let us not disregard it, let us not reject it, let us not mutilate it, let us not adulterate it. Let us believe and obey his word, and humbly submit our minds to the teaching of his Spirit. If he is the divinely appointed, qualified, commissioned, accredited expiator of human guilt, let us rely with unsuspecting confidence on the great sacrifice which, through the Eternal Spirit, he offered, without spot and blemish, to the Supreme Judge, and on the all-prevalent intercession which, on the ground of that sacrifice, he ever lives to make for all coming to God by him. If he is the divinely appointed, qualified, commissioned, accredited King over God's holy hill of Zion, let us seek to know his laws and ordinances, and, knowing them, let us walk in them all blameless, confiding in his power to protect us amid, and to save us from, all our enemies. If he is the righteous one, let us receive him as “of God, made to us righteousness.” Let us, instead of going about to “establish our own righteousness,” seek to “be made the righteousness of God in him;” seek to “win him, and to be found in him;” and, deeply feeling that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags,” let us gladly and gratefully say, “Surely in the Lord have I righteousness: in the Lord I am justified, and in the Lord I glory.” And let us not forget that, as the righteous One, he is not only the ground of our acceptance, but the pattern for our imitation. Let us seek to be “righteous even as he was righteous.” Let it be our desire to be “in the world as he was in the world,” having his mind in us, and having “his life manifested in our mortal flesh.” Did Christ, the righteous One, suffer; and so suffer, for us? How inconceivably malignant must sin be, which made such sufferings, of such a glorious person, necessary to its expiation and pardon; and how inconceivably strong must his love be, which made him willingly undergo such sufferings, rather than that we should be exposed to the tremendous consequences of unexpiated, unforgiven iniquity! O, how should we hate sin! O, how should we love the Saviour! Nothing is better fitted to animate and strengthen these two master principles of Christian holiness, the hatred of sin, and the love of the Saviour, than the believing contemplation of His sufferings for sin, in the room of sinners. Under the influence of the truth now stated, let each of us say in his heart, “Herein is love, not that I loved him, but that he loved me, and gave himself to be a propitiation for my sin.” I would put that to death in my flesh, which put him to death in the flesh. I would mortify my members which are on the earth, I would crucify the flesh, with its affections and lusts; and forasmuch as He has suffered for me in the flesh, borne my sin in his own body to the tree, that I, being dead to sin, might live unto righteousness, I will arm myself with the same mind, that I no longer live the rest of my time in the flesh, to the lusts of men, but to the will of God; and taught by the grace of God, in Christ his Son, the righteous One suffering” for my sins, in my stead, I will “deny ungodliness and worldly lusts, and live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present world; looking for the blessed hope, the glorious appearance of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.”