If we have some dear one gone before, who “suffered many things,” there is neither comfort nor help to be had by dwelling on them. It would be a poor comforter who reminded you of them, and brought them back in detail to your scarred memory. One would rather do one’s utmost to turn your thoughts away from them, leading you to dwell only on the present bliss, and one would fain blot out your painful remembrance of a past which it does no good to recall.
Not so does our Divine Comforter work. When He takes of the things of Christ and shows them to us, we feel that the things which He suffered are precious exceedingly, and the Spirit-wrought remembrance of them powerful beyond all else.
These “things” are only past in act, not in effect. For He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities of this day; the chastisement of the peace of this hour was upon Him; and though the whole head may be sick and the whole heart faint, the stripes that fell on Him are full of fresh power to heal at this moment.
“Thy sin of this day
In its shadow lay
Between My face and
One turned away.”
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends; yet that was only one of the things which He suffered, only the full stop at the close of the great charter of suffering love.
This pathetic plural is full of suggestion. How much suffering is dimly hinted in the one intimation that He bare our sicknesses! How much may be hidden under the supposition of the Jews that He was nearly fifty years of age, when so little beyond thirty! How sharp must have been the experiences which graved such lines upon the visage so marred more than any man! Think of all that must have gone on under the surface of His home life, where neither did His brethren believe in Him. Consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself. Think what temptation must have been to the Holy One, and what the concentration of malice and great rage when the prince of darkness went forth to do his worst against the lonely Son of Man, whom he knew to be the Son of God. Think of Jesus alone with Satan! Oh, what things He suffered before He came to the agony and bloody sweat, the cross and passion, which filled up the cup which His Father gave Him to drink for us men and for our salvation!
All this true! all this real! all this for us!
All this, that He might be made a perfect Saviour, having learned by personal experience the suffering from which He saves as well as the suffering in which He supports and with which He sympathizes; having learned by personal experience the obedience by which “many shall be made righteous,” and which is at once our justification and our example.
All this, that He might be a perfect Captain of our salvation, knowing all and far more than all the hardships of the rank and file.
All this, that He might be the Author of eternal salvation to them that obey Him, to you and me!
The things which He suffered.
The remembrance must touch our gratitude and love, if anything will. If when we looked back on some terrible suffering unto death of one who loved us dearly, suppose an elder brother, I really do not know how any heart could bear it, if we distinctly knew that all that prolonged agony was borne instead of us, and borne for nothing in the world but for love of us. But if to this were added the knowledge that we had behaved abominably to that dying brother, done all sorts of things, now beyond recall, to grieve and vex him, not cared one bit about his love or made him any return of even natural affection, held aloof from him and sided with those who were against him; and then the terrible details of his slow agony were told, nay shown to us, well, imagine our remorse if you can, I cannot! The burden of grief and gratitude would be crushing, and if there were still any possible way in which we could show that poor, late gratitude, we should take it at any cost, or rather, we should count nothing at any cost if we might but prove our tardy love. Only I think we should never know another hour’s rest. But it is part of the strange power of the remembrance of our Lord’s sufferings that it brings strength and solace and peace; for, as Bunyan says, “He hath given us rest by His sorrow.” The bitterness of death to Him is the very fountain of the sweetness of life to us. Do the words after all seem to fall without power or reality on you heart? Is it nothing, or very little more than nothing to you? Not that you do not know it is all true, but your heart seems cold, and your apprehension mechanical, and your faith paralyzed; does this describe you? Thank God that feelings do not alter facts! He suffered for this sinful coldness as well as for all other sins. He suffered, the Just for the unjust; and are we not emphatically unjust when we requite His tremendous love this way? Still you don’t feel it, though you own it. You see it all, but it is through a transparent wall of ice. What is to be done? Ask, and ask at once, for the Holy Spirit, that He may melt the ice and take of these things of Christ, showing them to you, not in the light of natural understanding and mere mental reception of undeniable facts, but revealing them with His own Divine power and bowing your whole soul under the weight of the exceeding great love of our Master and only Saviour Jesus Christ, as manifested in “the things which He suffered.” “For every one that asketh receiveth.”