Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2499
“With His stripes we are healed.” Isaiah 53:5.
Brothers and Sisters, whenever we come to talk about the passion of our Lord—and that subject is clearly brought before us, here, by the two words, “His stripes”—our feelings should be deeply solemn and our attention intensely earnest. Take off your shoes when you draw near to this burning bush, for God is in it! If ever the spirit should be deeply penitential and yet humbly confident, it ought to be when we hear the lash falling upon the Divine and human Person of our blessed Master and see Him wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.
Stand still, then, and see your Lord and Master fastened to the Roman column and cruelly scourged! Hear the terrible strokes. Mark the bleeding wounds and see how He becomes a mass of pain even as to His blessed body! Then note how His soul, also, is flagellated. Hark how the whips fall upon His spirit till His inmost heart is wounded with the tortures, all but unbearable, which He endures for us! I charge my own heart to meditate upon this solemn theme without a single wandering thought—and I pray that you and I may be able to think together upon the matchless sufferings of Incarnate Love until our hearts melt within us in grateful love to Him.
Remember, Brothers and Sisters, that we were practically there when Jesus suffered those terrible stripes—
“‘Twas you, my sins, my cruel sins, His chief tormentors were! Each of my crimes became a nail, And unbelief the spear.”
We certainly had a share in His sorrows. Oh, that we were equally certain that “with His stripes we are healed.” You smote Him, dear Friend, and you wounded Him—therefore do not rest until you can say, “with His stripes I am healed.” We must have a personal interest in this suffering One if we are to be healed by His stripes. We must lay our own hands upon this great Sacrifice and so accept it as being made on our behalf, for it would be a wretched thing to know that Christ was stricken, but not to know that, “with His stripes we are healed.” I would to God that no one should go out from this service without being able to say to himself as he retired, “Yes, blessed be His name, ‘with His stripes I am healed.’ The disease of sin is put away by the sacred balsam which drops from the side of the Crucified. From that mortal disease which otherwise would surely have destroyed me, I am restored by His sufferings, His grief, His death.” And then, all together, may we be able to say, “with His stripes we are healed.”
I. Observe, dear Friends, first of all, that GOD HERE TREATS SIN AS A DISEASE.
There would be no need to talk about healingif sin had not been regarded by God as a disease. It is a great deal more than a disease—it is a willful crime—but it is still a disease. It is often very difficult to separate the part in a crime which disease of the mind may have and that portion which is distinctly willful. We need not make this separation ourselves. If we were to do so in order to excuse ourselves, that would only be increasing the evil! And if we do it for any other reason, we are so apt to be partial that I am afraid we should ultimately make some kind of excuse for our sin which would not bear the test of the Day of Judgment. It is only because of God’s Sovereignty, His Infinite Grace and His strong resolve to have mercy upon men that, in this instance, He wills to look upon sin as a disease. He does not conceal from Himself, or from us, that it is a great and grievous fault. He calls it a trespass, a transgression, iniquity and other terms that set forth its true character. Never in Scripture do we find any excuse for sin, or lessening of its heinousness, but in order that He might have mercy upon us and deal graciously with us, the Lord is pleased to regard it as a disease—and then to come and treat us as a physician treats his patients, that He may cure us of the evil.
Sin is a disease, first, because it is not an essential part of man as he was created. It is something abnormal. It was not in human nature at the first. “God made man upright.” Our first parent, as he came fresh from the hand of his Maker, was without taint or speck of sin—he had a healthy body inhabited by a healthy soul. There was about him no tendency to evil. He was created pure and perfect—and sin does not enter into the constitution of man, per se, as God made it. It is a something which has come into us from outside. Satan came with his temptation and sin entered into us, and death by sin. Therefore, let no man, in any sense whatever, attribute sin to God as the Creator. Let him look upon sin as being a something extraneous to a man, something which ought never to have a locus standi within our nature at all, a something that is disturbing and destructive, a poisoned dart that is sticking in our flesh, abiding in our nature—and that has to be extracted by Divine and Sovereign Grace.