Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 834
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Morning, October 4, 1868, by C. H. SPURGEON, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington..
“With His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5.
I RECEIVED, one day this week, a short communication worded on this wise: “Wanted, a cure for a weak and doubting faith, especially when Satan disinclines to pray.” Anxiously desirous to prescribe cures for such maladies, and for any others which may vex the Lord’s people, I began to turn over in my mind what were the sacred remedies for such a case, and I could only remember one, “The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Our Lord Jesus is to us a Tree of Life, and by the leaves, I suppose, the Holy Spirit means the acts, words, promises, and lesser griefs of Jesus— all of which are for the healing of His people. Then my mind reverted to this kindred text: “With His stripes we are healed.” Not merely His bleeding wounds, but even those blue bruises of His flesh help to heal us. Not alone the work of the nails and the spear, but the cruel handiwork of the rod and the scourge.
Out of all this throng of Believers, there are none quite free from spiritual diseases—one may be saying, “Mine is a weak faith.” Another may confess, “Mine is distracted thoughts.” Another may exclaim, “Mine is coldness of love!” And a fourth may have to lament his powerlessness in prayer. One remedy in natural things will not suffice for all diseases, and the moment that the quack begins to cry up his medicine as healing all, you shrewdly surmise that it heals none. But in spiritual things it is not so—there is a catholicon, a universal remedy provided in the Word of God for all spiritual sicknesses to which man can be subject to—and that remedy is contained in the few words of my text—“With His stripes we are healed.”
I. I shall invite you, then, first of all, this morning, to consider THE MEDICINE ITSELF WHICH IS HERE PRESCRIBED—the stripes of our Savior. Not stripes laid upon our own backs, nor tortures inflicted upon our own minds—but the grief which Jesus has endured for those who trust in Him. By the term “stripes,” no doubt the Prophet understood here, first, literally, those actual stripes which fell upon our Lord’s shoulders when He was beaten by the Jews, and afterwards scourged by the Roman soldiers.
But the words intend far more than this. No doubt with his prophetic eye Isaiah saw the stripes from that unseen scourge held in the Father’s hand which fell not upon the flesh of Jesus, but upon His nobler inner nature when His soul was scourged for sin—when eternal justice was the plower and made deep furrows upon His Soul—when the lash fell with awful force again and again, and again upon the blessed Soul of Him who was made a curse for us that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.
I take the term, “stripes,” to comprehend all the physical and spiritual sufferings of our Lord, with special reference to those chastisements of our peace which preceded, rather than actually caused, His sin-atoning death. It is by these that our souls are healed. “But why?” you ask. First, then, because our Lord, as a Sufferer, was not a private person, but suffered as a public individual, and an appointed Representative. Your sins, in a certain sense, end with yourself. But the sins of Adam could not do so, for Adam stood before God as the representative of the human race—and everything that he did brought its dire effects upon all his descendants.
Now, our Savior is the second Adam, the second federal Head and Representative of men. And all that He did, and all that He suffered goes to the benefit of all those whom He represented. His holy life is the inheritance of His people, and His suffering death, with all its pangs and griefs, belongs to those whom He represented. They did, in effect, suffer in Him and offer in Him a vindication to Divine Justice. Our Lord was appointed of God to stand in the place of His people. A Divine decree had gone forth sanctioning His substitution so that when He stood forward as the Representative of guilty men, God accepted Him, having foreordained Him to that very end.
So then, Beloved, let us never forget that all which Jesus endured came upon Him not at all as a private individual, but fell upon Him as the great public Representative of those who believe in Him. Hence the effects of His griefs are applied to us, and with His stripes we are healed. His blood, His passions and His death make atonement for us, and deliver us from the curse. And His bruises, smarts, and stripes, make up a matchless medicine to allay our sicknesses—
“Behold how every wound of His
A precious balm distils,
Which heals the scars that sin had made,
And cures all mortal ills.’”
Be it never forgotten, too, that our Lord was not merely Man, or else His sufferings could not have availed for the multitude who now are healed by them. He was God as well as Man and it is the most mysterious and marvelous of all facts that God should be manifest in the flesh, and seen of angels, and that in the flesh the Son of God should most really and certainly die, and be buried, and lie for three days in the tomb.