FOR US God’s dear Son has suffered. He has not merely suffered something for us, that we might go out free. But He has suffered what we should have had to suffer. So He suffered in our stead.
And this makes all the difference.
When you say: “The Lord Jesus Christ endured suffering, to redeem millions of people from eternal corruption”—then it is your heart that thinks, and correctly so: “There is really nothing wondrous in this; for what noble-minded man would not be willing to suffer, if thereby he could save millions of people!”
So you find the dying of your Savior truly heroic, truly beautiful, truly self-sacrificing; but … and herein lurks the danger … upon careful consideration, you do not find it greater than many other instances of self-sacrifice that have often been achieved, even to save one single person!
This should not be held back, but expressed. For by nothing so much as by this untrue preaching of the cross, is the value of that divine cross underestimated and brought to nought.
No, to understand Golgotha, you together with all God’s elect, of the past, of the present and those that shall come after, must take your stand in thought at the foot of the cross, and ask yourself: “What should I have had to suffer eternally, if I should have had to bear myself the righteous retribution for all my sins and my godlessness.” And when you have carefully thought this out and in your soul have realized something of what giving way eternally under the dreadful wrath of God means, and then look round about you, upon these other children of God, one by one, and ask what this one, and that one and the other, eternally should have had to drink of the wine of God’s wrath, if there had no atonement been found. And if then in your thought, to your perception, in a measure even in your imagination you put, if you can, all that eternal nameless suffering together to form an unmeasured ocean of awful depression of soul and death anguish,—then perhaps you will be able to understand something, one drop in the bucket, of the unspeakably deep suffering of death, in which Jesus went under, when He was laid into the dust of death.
For that suffering He bore.
Of that ocean of nameless sorrow no drop has been spared Him.
That was the cup, about which in Gethsemane He supplicated: “Father! might it pass, except I drink it!”
All that would have been poured out upon us eternally, is poured out upon Him.
So alone you understand Golgotha!
The Holy Spirit uses a touching figure of speech, to make us sense this in some measure, when He speaks of Christ in the strength of His life as being dried up like a potsherd.
What does this image imply?
You stand before an oven, in which by great heat from soft clay hard pottery is burned.
To this end that oven is heated to the scorching point, till at length everything that comes into it scorches and shrinks and expels its latest particle of moisture.
And now the clay pitcher is brought, which artistically formed, in its grey clay tint, is moist and therefore soft. And now it goes into the oven. There singeing heat attacks that clay pitcher, draws every particle of moisture from it, scorches it grey and red, and burns it, till it is hard like granite.
Till at length the heat finishes its task, and the clay pitcher becomes a stone pitcher, and then it must be taken out, lest it should burst.
But see, sometimes there springs and slivers a sherd from such a vessel, and that potsherd falls on the hot flooring of the oven, and remains lying there.
When the pitcher has become hard, it is taken from the oven, but not the potsherd.
No, about that potsherd no one cares. It remains lying there. And when to-morrow the oven is put to use again, that potsherd must again pass through the heat. And the day that follows after it undergoes another heating. Yea, as often as a clay vessel must be hardened, the neglected potsherd always glows and burns too.
And therefore says the Holy Ghost, that the suffering of Messiah was as the burning of a potsherd; for in that one suffering of Christ was the heat of the burning of God’s wrath against all His elect.
O, Cross of Golgotha, into what depth of self-mortification dost thou cast down even the best of God’s children.
The wrath of God at one single sin we can hardly imagine; at some point we stop, because we can not think further into the fermenting and the seething of that anger in our own breast.
What then must be “the eternal punishment both in soul and body”?
Eternal misery, it can not be thought into, let alone, lived into.
A fire that is never quenched. A worm that never dies. Outermost darkness, in which the dreary silence is broken by nothing save the weeping of the lost and the gnashing of teeth on the part of unconverted godlessness.
O, one wills no more hear of a hell. And for long years that dreadful word has been fenced with far too thoughtlessly. But that hell is still there. And it is so dreadful, so indescribably terrible. Doomed for an eternity. And no single drop of water even, which a compassionate heart might bring us at the tip of one’s fingers, to cool our tongue.
And now, that eternal death, that eternal doom, that hell our Surety and Mediator has drunk to the dregs. Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani! was the cry from His tortured soul, and there was no compassion, and no compassion was permitted.
Had the Mediator then been taken compassion upon, compassion could never have been taken upon us.
People of God, do you live at that cross?
Do you let that cross enter deeply into your soul, deep into your reins and inner parts, to make you sense the dreadfulness of an unrighteous existence, upon which such wrath went forth, and which by such an offering alone could be atoned?
We go again through the passion weeks.
Easter again is approaching.
Oh, that you might be convinced again more deeply than before of your doomworthiness and guilt before the Holy One of Israel.
Then, then alone, you come again to conversion; then alone you come in your own person to your Surety; then alone is there a Golgotha, is there a Cross for you!
A Cross, and at the foot of that Cross a Fountain which is opened also for your unrighteousness and for your sin!
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