The wrath of God due to them fell upon Him!',
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"God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us." 2 Cor. 5:21
"Christ also has once suffered for sins, the just for the
unjust, that He might bring us to God." 1 Peter 3:18
If we would we see, feel, and realize the exceeding
sinfulness of sin, it is not by viewing the lightnings
and hearing the thunders of Sinai's fiery top—but in
seeing the agony and bloody sweat, and hearing the
groans and cries of the suffering Son of God, as made
sin for us—in the garden and upon the cross.
To look upon Him whom we have pierced will fill heart
and eyes with godly sorrow for sin, and a holy mourning
for and over a martyred, injured Lord. (Zech. 13:10.)
To see, by the eye of faith, as revealed to the soul by the
power of God—the darling Son of God bound, scourged,
buffeted, spit upon, mocked—and then, as the climax of
cruel scorn and infernal cruelty, crucified between two
thieves—this believing sight of the sufferings of Christ,
will melt the hardest heart into contrition and repentance.
But when we see, by the eye of faith, that this was the
smallest part of His sufferings—that there were depths of
soul trouble and of intolerable distress and agony from the
hand of God as a consuming fire, as the inflexible justice
and righteous indignation against sin, and that our blessed
Lord had to endure the wrath of God until He was poured
out like water, and His soft, tender heart in the flames of
indignation became like wax, and melted within Him—then
we can in some measure conceive what He undertook in
becoming a sin offering. For as all the sins of His people
were put upon Him—the wrath of God due to them fell
upon Him!
No less real, and far more severe, were the agonies of His
soul—for the wrath of God in the Redeemer's heart was
as real as the nails that pierced His hands and feet!
When the sins of the elect were found on Christ, justice
viewed Him and treated Him as the guilty criminal. Separation
from God, under a sense of His terrible displeasure on account
of sin—that abominable thing which His holy soul hates—is not
this hell? This, then, was the hell experienced by the suffering
Redeemer when the Lord laid on Him the iniquities of us all.
What heart can conceive or tongue express what must have
been the feelings of the Redeemer's soul when He, the beloved
Son of God, who who had lain in the bosom of the Father from
all eternity, was by imputation, made a sinner—the deep wounds
of suffering love felt by the Son of God when His Father, His own
Father, hid His face from Him?
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