Suffered…
“Suffered…”
Terry Dashner (www.ffcba.com) The Bible is clear on this
point–Jesus suffered and died. He took nothing to numb His
body, nothing to alter His mental anguish, and nothing to cover
His wounded spirit. He suffered for our sakes and felt the
excruciating pain. Why was it necessary for Jesus to experience
pain? Why didn’t God allow His Son to die a natural death
without a cross? These are questions that are answered in the
Bible. Jesus didn’t merely die. He was tortured and murdered by
His own creation. This truth is beyond comprehension.
Nevertheless, it is true for all generations.
The Bible says in Isaiah 53 that Jesus was a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief. Plato and the rest of the Greeks
worshipped truth, goodness, and beauty. Long before Christ came,
they said man’s sin derived merely from his ignorance. They
declared that if only they could see a perfect example of
ethics, morality, purity, and piety, they would, no doubt, fall
down and adore it and follow it breathlessly. But when He
came–the very incarnation of goodness and purity, with a
sinless and spotless life, the perfect Christ, the Crystal
Christ, the peerless One–man in all of his depravity took Him
and nailed Him to a cross. And buried Him out of sight!
The world in which we live is a suffering body, and it needed a
suffering head that could empathize with its pain and agonies.
So He came, the suffering Savior to His passion. We read that he
was exceeding sorrowful unto death. We read of His loneliness,
His agonizing prayers, His disappointment with His disciples,
His bloody sweat, the traitor’s kiss, the binding with cords,
the blows to the face, the plucking of His beard, the spitting,
the buffeting, the mocking, the scourging, the crown of thorns,
the heavy cross, the Via Dolorosa, the exhaustion, the collapse,
the stripping, the nakedness, the impaling, the jeers of His
foes and the flight of His friends, the thirst, the darkness,
the blackness of death. Indeed, He was a man acquainted with
grief. He suffered.
Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate we are told. This one
statement brings the Creed from religious dogma to historic
fact. With these words we have no finely conceived fable or
cunningly devised myth, but rather we have hard, cold history.
This fact of history is also found in the secular history of
Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote his works
during the first century. Tacitus, the principal historian of
the Romans of the first century, said, as attested: “Christ was
put to death as a malefactor by Pontius Pilate in the reign of
Tiberius.”
Now let me tackle the question: Why did Christ die? For one, He
died because of sin. If Adam and Eve had never taken the advice
of Satan and fallen, Jesus never would have come to die as a
man. If men were really good, as many people suppose themselves
to be, then Jesus Christ need never have died. If we could get
to heaven on our own merit, by our own good deeds, then why did
Jesus die? If merely following the Ten Commandments or living by
the Golden Rule we could ever enter into paradise, then to what
purpose did He suffer on the Cross? Secondly, there are the
justice and holiness of God to consider. In the early days of
our nation’s history, men who lived on the plains feared prairie
fires the most. There was no place to run, no tree to climb. He
was stuck in the path of the raging fire. Men eventually
discovered what to do, though. They would start a fire to burn a
large area ahead of the coming conflagration. When the prairie
fire came to them, it would not destroy them because the fire
would not burn where it had already burned. Man can only escape
the righteous justice of God by standing where His judgment
fires have already burned. Calvary’s Cross is where the judgment
of God was poured out for all mankind. Once His judgment was
poured out on Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb, His glorious Holy
Spirit raised Jesus from the dead and now through the atoning
work of Jesus Christ, we may live holy lives before God. When
God looks at the believer, He sees the willing and obedient Son
of God who died to set us free.
In conclusion, let me give you the third and most important
reason that Jesus suffered and died for man. He did it for this
reason: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish
but have everlasting life.” Jesus died to save you because He
loves you. Keep the faith!
