“WITH HIS STRIPES WE ARE HEALED.” ―Isaiah 53:5
WHAT a chapter! A Bible in miniature. The Gospel in its essence. When our subject brings us near to the passion of our Lord, our feelings should be deeply solemn, our attention intensely earnest.
Hark, the scourge is falling! Forget everything but “his stripes.”
We have each one a part in the flagellation: we wounded him, for certain; is it as certain that “with his stripes we are healed?”
Observe with deep attention—
I. That God Here Treats Sin as a Disease
Sin is a great deal more than a disease, it is a willful crime; but the mercy of our God leads him to consider it under that aspect, in order that he may deal with it in grace.
1. It is not an essential part of man as he was created: it is abnormal, disturbing, and destructive.
2. It puts the faculties out of gear, and breaks the equilibrium of the life-forces, just as disease disturbs the bodily functions.
3. It weakens the moral energy, as disease weakens the body.
4. It either causes pain, or deadens sensibility, as the case may be.
5. It frequently produces visible pollution. Some sins are as defiling as the leprosy of old.
6. It tends to increase in the man, and it will prove fatal before long.
Sin is a disease which is hereditary, universal, contagious, defiling, incurable, mortal. No human physician can deal with it. Death, which ends all bodily pain, cannot cure this disease: it displays its utmost power in eternity, after the seal of perpetuity has been set upon it by the mandate: “He that is filthy, let him be filthy still.”
II. That God Here Declares the Remedy Which He Has Provided
Jesus is his Son, whom he freely delivered up for as all.
1. Behold the heavenly medicine: the stripes of Jesus in body and in soul. Singular surgery, the Healer is himself wounded, and this is the means of our cure!
2. Remember that these stripes were vicarious: he suffered in our stead.
3. Accept this atonement, and you are saved by it.
Prayer begs for the divine surgery.
Belief is the linen cloth which hinds on the plaster.
Trust is the hand which secures it to the wound.
Repentance is the first symptom of healing.
4. Let nothing of your own interfere with the one medicine. You see the proper places of prayer, faith, and repentance; do not misuse them, and make them rivals of the “stripes.” By the stripes of Jesus we are healed, and by these alone.
One remedy, and only one, is set forth by God. Why seek another?
III. That This Divine Remedy Is Immediately Effective
To the carnal mind it does not appear to touch the case.
But those of us who have believed in the stripes of Jesus are witnesses to the instant and perfect efficacy of the medicine, for we can speak from experience, since “We are healed.”
1. Our conscience is healed of its smart: eased but not deadened.
2. Our heart is healed of its love of sin. We hate the evil which scourged our Well Beloved.
3. Our life is healed of its rebellion. We are zealous of good works.
4. Our consciousness assures us that we are healed. We know it, and rejoice in it. None can dispute us out of it.
IV. Application
1. Friend, you are by nature in need of healing.
You do not think so: this disease affects the mind, and breeds delusions.
You ridicule such teaching: your disease leads to madness.
You oppose it. Thus do the sick refuse medicine, and the insane hate their friends.
2. Friend, you are either healed or sick.
Do you not know which is your condition?
You ought to know. You may know.
3. Why are you not healed?
There is power in the remedy, for you, for you now.
4. IF you are healed, behave accordingly.
Quit diseased company.
Do a healthy man’s work.
Praise the Physician, and his singular surgery.
Publish abroad his praises.
Suggestive Paragraphs
The Balsam tree sheds its balm to heal the wounds of those that cut it; and did not our blessed Saviour do the like? They mock him, and he prays for them; they shed his blood, and he makes it a medicine for their healing; they pierce his heart, and he opens therein a fountain for their sin and uncleanness. Was it ever heard, before or since, that a physician should bleed, and thus heal his patient or that an offended prince should die to expiate the treasons of his rebellious subjects?
Our heavenly Balsam is a cure for all diseases. If you complain that no sins are like yours, remember that there is no salvation like Christ’s. If you have run the complete round of sin, remember that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all. No man ever perished for being a great sinner, unless he was also an unbelieving sinner. Never did a patient fail of a cure who accepted from the great Physician the balm of his atoning blood.
See how Christ, whose death was so bitter to himself, becomes sweetness itself to us. Rejection was his, but acceptance is ours; the wounding was his, but the healing is ours; the blood was his, but the balm is ours; the thorns were his, but the crown is ours; the death was his, but the life is ours; the price was his, but the purchase is ours. There is more power in Christ’s blood to save than in your sin to destroy. Do but believe in the Lord Jesus, and thy cure is wrought.—Modernized from Spurstow’s “Spiritual Chymist.”
The Hebrew word here, and the Greek word thy Apostle Peter uses in his quotation of this passage which we render “stripes” (1 Peter 2:2424Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. (1 Peter 2:24)), denote properly the marks which stripes or wounds leave upon the body, or as we say, scars. The scars in his hands, feet, and side, and perhaps other marks of his many wounds, remained after his resurrection. And John saw him in vision before the throne, as “a Lamb as it had been slain.” All these expressions and representations, I apprehend, are designed to intimate to us that, though the death of the Messiah is an event long since past, yet the effects and benefits are ever new, and to the eye of faith are ever present. How admirable is this expedient, that the wounds of one, yea of millions, should be healed by beholding the wounds of another! Yet this is the language of the gospel― “Look, and live!” “Look unto me, and be ye saved!” Three great wounds are ours, guilt, sin, and sorrow; but by contemplating his weals, or scars, with an enlightened eye, and by rightly understanding who was thus wounded, and why, all these wounds are healed.
You who live by this medicine, speak well of it. Tell to others, as you have opportunity, what a Saviour you have found. It is usual for those who have been relieved, in dangerous and complicated diseases, by a skillful physician, to commend him to others, who are laboring under the like maladies, We often see public acknowledgments to this purpose. If all the persons who have felt the efficacy of a dying Saviour’s wounds, apprehended by faith, were to publish their cases, how greatly would his power and grace be displayed!—John Newton.
He cures the mind of its blindness, the heart of its hardness, the nature of its perverseness, the will of its backwardness, the memory of its slipperiness, the conscience of its benumbness, and the affections of their disorder, all according to his gracious promises: Ezek. 36:26, 2726A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. 27And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. (Ezekiel 36:26‑27).― John Willison.
Trajan, it is said, rent his clothes to bind up his soldiers’ wounds. Christ poured out his blood to heal his saints’ wounds, and tears his flesh to bind them up. ―Gurnall.
Dr. Cheyne was an eminent as well as a pious physician; but he was supposed to be severe in his regimen. When he had prescribed, and the patient began to object to the treatment, he would say, “I see you are not bad enough for me yet.” Some are not bled enough for Christ yet—we mean in their own apprehension; but when they find and feel that they are entirely lost, and have no other help or hope, they will cordially acquiesce in his recommendations, however mysterious, however humbling, however trying.—Jay.
Four travelers, not very well acquainted with the crossroad over which they were journeying, began to look out for a fingerpost. Soon after this, one of them cried out, “I think I can see one yonder in the distance;” and “I believe that I can see it too, about half a mile off,” rejoined another; and “I am almost certain that I can see it,” added a third, “it stands up higher than the hedges.” “Well, well,” said the fourth, “you may be right, or you may be wrong; but we had better make the best of our way to it, for while we keep at such a distance, whether it be a fingerpost or not, it will be of little use to us.”
Now I want you all to draw near to the Saviour of sinners, and not be satisfied with “thinking,” or “believing,” or “being almost certain,” that he is your Redeemer; I want you to see him as your Saviour, as distinctly as you can see the sun in the skies, and to break out with all the conviction and fervency of Thomas, the Apostle, “My Lord, and my God!” ―George Mogridge.