January 19
Mornings With JesusFor Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God. - 1 Peter 3:18.
THE righteous Lord loveth righteousness. He has united sin and sorrow by an adamantine chain. “The soul,” says he, “that sinneth shall die.” When I look at the holy Son of God, I see “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;” I hear him saying, “Behold and see if ever there was sorrow like unto my sorrow, wherewith the Lord afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.” Other sufferers suffered only in some part, he suffered in every part capable of pain; others suffered occasionally, he continually, from the manger to the cross; other sufferers know not beforehand what they have to endure, he saw the end from the beginning, all was spread before him; others have some to sympathise with them and to soothe their sorrows if they cannot remove them, but he looked for this in vain. He “looked for some to take pity, but there was none, and for comforters, but he found none.” With others, suffering is the offspring of sin; in him was no sin; “he did no evil, neither was guile found in his mouth.” He was the Holy One of God. He said to the multitude, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” Judas said, “I have betrayed innocent blood.”
Is there unrighteousness with God? Does he punish the righteous with the wicked, and as the wicked, and more than the wicked? Here is a mystery. Here is a combination of the greatest innocence and the greatest suffering. Here is a mystery which would indeed be a contradiction and a blasphemy unless we could add another mystery to it, namely, that of substitution, that which arises from his interposition in our behalf, and saying, “Deliver him from going down into the pit, I have found a ransom.”
Oh, he snatched us away from the stroke and placed himself in our room, and “bore our sins in his own body upon the three.” Thus he suffered for our sins, the just for the unjust, to bring us unto God. “He was made sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”