OUR suffering is known unto the Lord our God, but not the suffering of Jesus unto us.
As the hairs of our head, so also are our tears counted by God. And when it says that God collects them in His bottle, the saying implies a Divine Compassion, which not merely fathoms the depth of our suffering, but shall once translate the distress, that has been endured for His sake, into brightness and glory.
God knows all the suffering of His children. Not alone their tears, but even their sighings are not hid from Him. No best friend on earth understands our sorrow, as He knows and values it. No trouble can be so secretly borne in the quiet places of the heart, but He has weighed it out in His balance. Yea, when we are not conscious of anything save an unspeakable feeling of heaviness of heart, even then He has known our path and all the secrets of our soul’s sorrow are naked and open before Him.
But in this way no man shall ever understand the suffering of the Son of God.
Truly, from the Cross goes out a heart-gripping, soul-stirring speech of bitter dissolution of soul and languishing of heart.
Though not able to say how or why, somehow our perception grasps, and our instinctive feeling divines, that in Gethsemane, on Gabbatha and on Golgotha, Jesus waded through depths of sorrow, such as has been witnessed nowhere else, such as no one else has ever endured. But we cannot fathom it. To us it remains an impenetrable mystery.
When such a petition falls from His lips: “Father, let this cup pass”; when we overhear the complaint: “Now is my soul exceeding sorrowful, even unto death”; when He falls forward and the sweat of anguish oozes from Him as great drops of blood; when He moans: “I thirst”; and presently He cries out His Lama Sabachthani before His God, then it is as though from every depth a voice sounds saying, that to have Jesus utter such moans and cryings as these, there never can have been suffering so full of bitterness and anguish as that which He suffered.
And therefore we are not able to analyze this dreadful suffering. You can give yourself no account of it, and say: it was this or it was that.
Terrible is death by crucifixion, but there is still more terrible martyrdom conceivable. When you read in the book of martyrs of men who had the skin stripped off from the face and breast, and then were exposed near nests of wasps, and so much more as this black book of horrors has to relate, you would be dishonest at the bar of your own conscience if you did not agree that physically, so far as bodily pain is concerned, there has been suffering more bitter than that on Golgotha.
Hence it was not this.
Certainly it counted, and was a bitter part of it. But yet, if there had been nothing else in that cup except to die, as the murderer on the cross by the side of Him died, the suffering of our Lord would never have been suffering par excellence, the totality of all suffering, including all anguish in itself and very far surpassing all forms of agony on earth.
Yet such it was.
Hear it in that cry in Psalm 42: “O, My God, all thy waves and all thy billows are gone over me”.
This was never so with any man.
This was not so with the Psalmist. What he sang, he truly sang of himself, but it deepened into the suffering of the Messiah. It was “the spirit of Christ which did signify in him and testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:11).
Two, three beats of the waves of the Lord upon our weary head would be enough for an ordinary child of man and more, too, to cause him to go under, so that he could no more raise himself above another wave-beat.
But all God’s billows and all the waves of the Lord, what child of man could have held up his head under them, and against them have nerved the breast?
All the waves and all the billows of the Almighty is something so dreadful, so indescribable, that it cannot be put into words.
All the doing of the Lord is infinite, and infinite also are the undulations of the waves and billows of His wrath. Infinite is the ever new rising of other waves, and infinite is the endless wave-beat wherewith in all their breadth and length they are driven forth.
There boils and burns in those foaming billows a glow, a fearsome glow of eternal indignations.
You do not observe the beginning of them and can discover no limit or end to them.
To the sea, that causes her waves to break upon our shores, the Lord God hath appointed a bound, which it can not pass (Jer. 5:22).
But this ocean knows no such bound.
Its depths roar down in the abyss of eternal death.
What then spatters against the head are foam-flakes and drops. But the beat, the roaring beat of those billows, and the violence wherewith those waves tear everything away and push out everything before them, no, by everything that is holy, this no child of man has ever undergone.
For to endure this, was the depth of Jesus’ sufferings.
The endless depth and infinite breadth in His languishing, was the impenetrable mystery of the sufferings, which have come upon the Man of sorrows.
He sank away in the abysses, and in these from afar He heard the roaring and the thundering of the violently moving waters. And He went on into the depths. And the waves and billows beat against the breast and upon the sacred head. It was wave upon wave; one billow had no sooner passed but the other was ready to follow.
Eternally deep, so that no man and no Angel could have further knowledge of it, or comprehend it, or in pity suffer with it.
So namelessly deep, that God alone could know it, and our Jesus Who endured it.
The whole burden of God’s wrath against the sin of the whole human race.
Against your sins also, and against mine, and against the sins of our children.
O, Depth of compassion, that from such wrath, under which we should have had to pine away eternally, by grace salvation came.
But also, O depth of unholinesses, that the Son of man should have had to be immersed so deeply in the stream of curse and sore anguish, that even one sinner might be enabled to stand before the face of our Holy God.
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