Multitudes of saints look at all the sufferings of Christ with an adoring feeling of their infinite value and believe that all are for themselves, undergone, in love to them, and the means of their blessing. I can only pray God that this feeling may be deepened in them and in myself too. We cannot feel it too deeply.
Suffering for Righteousness’ Sake
Christ did, we know, suffer from men. He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The world hated Him before it hated His disciples; it hated Him because He bore witness of it that its works were evil. He was “light,” and he that does evil hates the light, nor comes to the light, because his works are evil. In a word, Christ suffered for righteousness’ sake. The love which caused the Lord to minister to men in the world and testify of their evil brought only more sorrow upon Him. For His love He received hatred. This hatred of man against Him never slackened till His death. Christ suffered from man for righteousness’ sake. Suffering for righteousness may be your happy portion; suffering for sin is, as regards the Christian, Christ’s part alone.
Suffering in Gethsemane
A weight of another character pressed upon the Lord — the anticipation of His sufferings on the cross and their true and pressing character. On His path of life death lay. So it was in Gethsemane, when it was yet nearer, and the prince of this world came, and His soul was exceeding sorrowful unto death. There was no forsaking of God yet, though there was dealing with His Father about that cup which was characterized by His being forsaken of God. But in Gethsemane all was closing in. It was the power of darkness and the deeper agony of the Lord told itself out in few (yet how mighty) words, and sweat as it were drops of blood. The cup His Father has given Him to drink, shall He not drink it? Never can we meditate too much upon the path of Christ here. We may linger around the spot and learn what no other place nor scene can tell — a perfectness which is learnt from Him and from Him alone.
The Atoning Sufferings
We cannot have too deep a sense of the depth of the Lord’s suffering in His atoning work, of that which no human word is competent to express (for in human language we express but our own feelings)—what the Lord’s drinking the cup of divine wrath was to Him. With this nothing can be mingled and mixed up. Divine wrath against sin, really felt and truly felt in the soul of One who, by His perfect holiness and love to God and sense of God’s love in its infinite value, could know what divine wrath was, and what it was to be made sin before God, of One too who was, by virtue of His Person, able to sustain it, stands wholly apart and alone.
But God’s divine majesty, His holiness, His righteousness, His truth, all in their very nature bore against Christ as made sin for us. All that God was, was against sin, and Christ was made sin. No comfort of love enfeebled wrath there. Never was the obedient Christ so precious, but His soul was to be made an offering for sin and to bear it judicially before God. At the end of the three hours of darkness, this is expressed by the Lord in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Here the Lord suffered that not one drop of what He took might remain for us. It had been everlasting misery and ruin for us; His own divine perfection in love went through it without one ray of comfort from God or man.
Love brought Him to the cross, we well know, but His sorrow there had not the present joy of a ministration of love. He was not dealing with man, but suffering in his place, in obedience, from God, and for man. Hence it was unmingled, unmitigated suffering — the scene, not of active goodness, but of God’s forsaking.
He suffered from the hand of God upon the cross. There He suffered the just for the unjust; that is, He suffered, not because He was righteous, but because we were sinners, and He was bearing our sins in His own body on the tree. As regards God’s forsaking Him, He could say, Why hast Thou forsaken Me? for in Him there was no cause. We can give the solemn answer. In grace He suffered the just for the unjust; He had been made sin for us.
The Sufferings of Love
His heart of love must have suffered greatly from the unbelief of unhappy man and from His rejection by the people. We read of His sighing in opening the deaf ears and loosing the tied tongue (Mark 7:3434And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. (Mark 7:34)), and on the Pharisees asking a sign (ch. 8:12), of His sighing deeply in spirit. So, indeed, in John 11 at the tomb of Lazarus, He wept and groaned within Himself at seeing the power of death over the spirits of men, and their incapacity to deliver themselves, and as He wept also over Jerusalem, when He saw the beloved city just going to reject Him in the day of its visitation. All this was the suffering of perfect love, moving through a scene of ruin, in which self-will and heartlessness shut every avenue against this love which was so earnestly working in its midst. This sorrow (blessed be God) and the joy that brightens it we are allowed, in our little measure, to partake of. It is the sorrow of love itself.
Sin itself must have been a continual source of sorrow to the Lord’s mind. The holier and more loving He was, the more dreadful was the sin to Him.
Another source of sorrow was, perhaps, more human, but not less true — I mean the violation of every delicacy which a perfectly attuned mind could feel. They stand staring and looking upon me. Insult, scorn, deceit, efforts to catch Him in His words, brutality and cruel mocking fell upon no insensible, though a divinely patient, spirit. I say nothing of desertion, betrayal and denial — He looked for some to have pity on Him, and there was no one, and for comforters, but found none — but of what broke in upon every delicate feeling of His nature as a man. Reproach broke His heart. I do not believe there was a single human feeling (and every most delicate feeling of a perfect soul was there) that was not violated and trodden on in Christ.
The sorrows, too, of men were His in heart. He bore their sicknesses, and carried their infirmities. Not a sorrow nor an affliction He met that He did not bear on His heart as His own. In all their afflictions He was afflicted. That in all my sorrows and temptations and trials, even those which come through my faults and infirmities, I may know that He feels either with or for me is of infinite value. Christ has entered into the sufferings arising from active love in the world, and the sorrow arising from the sense of chastenings in respect of sin, and these mixed with the pressure of Satan’s power on the soul and the terror of foreseen wrath. We suffer for our folly and under God’s hand, but Christ has entered into it. He sympathizes with us.
J. N. Darby, from The Sufferings of Christ