“With His Stripes We Are Healed”                   

Isaiah 53:5

            The Lord God treats our sin as a disease from which we must be healed, as well as a crime from which we must be pardoned. Here he sets before us the costly remedy he has provided for our healing - The stripes of sorrow and wrath endured by Christ as our Substitute. Meditate upon those stripes by which he was wounded for us.

            THE BLOODY SWEAT - In the beginning of his sorrows, when he tasted the first bitter drops of the cup he must drink as our Sin-Bearer, the Son of God sweat great drops of blood so profusely that they fell to the ground. He was in agony in body and in soul as he anticipated being made sin for us.

            THE BRUTAL SCOURGING - No sooner did he rise from the bloody sweat than Judas came to betray him. Arrested like a common criminal, he was hurried off to the high priest, then Pilate’s judgment hall. Pilate delivered him up to be scourged and crucified. The Roman soldiers seem to have taken great pleasure in brutality. They buffeted him with their fists, spit in his face, mocked him, and scourged him. Scourging by the Romans was one of the most terrible forms of torture imaginable. The scourge was made by tying knots with pieces of broken bone into strands of rawhide-like leather. With every lash of the scourge, the flesh of a man’s back was plowed to the bone.

            THE BARBARIC SLAUGHTER - After he was scourged, the Son of God was nailed to the cursed tree. There he hung for hours suspended between heaven and earth, bearing the sins of his people and enduring the wrath of God. In agony of mind, agony of soul, agony of heart, and agony of body, he suffered all the hell of God’s wrath. Slaughtered by the hands of men as a vile wretch of a man, but all by the hand of God for the atonement of sin!

            THE BLESSED SATISFACTION - Our Savior endured the painful, shameful, ignominious death of the cross for the satisfaction of justice, that God might be just in putting away the sins of his people. Enduring the stripes of God’s holy wrath as our Substitute, Christ both satisfied the justice of God and healed us of the curse and plague of sin. “With his stripes we are healed!”

Don Fortner