What's Jesus Doing on the Cross? He's Suffering.

What's Jesus Doing on the Cross? He's Suffering.

The more I study the gospels, the more I recognize that all points come to a screeching halt at the cross. The gospels race through the life of Christ. Three chapters cover the thirty years of His life from birth to manhood. Twenty-two chapters cover the three years of ministry. Then incredibly, a single week takes three lengthy chapters and two of those are devoted to three hours around the cross. It's as if everything goes into slow to a grueling pace as Scripture halts its progress to highlight just this: the cross of Jesus Christ.

"When they had crucified him" (v. 35). Who can come close to detailing all that this phrase means. Isaiah 52:13 tells us that Christ… "so marred was His form that His appearance was not that of a man." These historical realities are more firmly fixed in our mind's eye since Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, which is actually a toned-down version of Christ's suffering. As brutal as it was to watch, it doesn't come close to capturing the excruciating suffering He endured. To fully appreciate the significance of the cross of Christ you have to grasp the extent to which He suffered for our sin.

More than the Physical Pain
As much as it is often our focus, the physical suffering was the lesser point of Jesus' suffering. Notice this in Matthew 27:45-50: "Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land (darkness was the symbol of God turning away) until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

In those words we hear the deeper suffering of the cross. Scholars debate the number of statements Jesus made from the crossbeams but this much is clear, only one even slightly referred to His physical suffering. He said simply, "I thirst." What Christ said beyond that reveals to us that His greater suffering by far was the separation from His Father.

Through endless countless eons of time that stretched from infinity, Jesus had known only perfect unity with His Father. Now as He hung on the cross He experienced total separation from that perfect unity. What finite mind can comprehend separating the inseparable? Forsaken by the Father? A love that was infinitely deep, eternal, and everlasting was lost for that moment.

Now it would be one thing if Jesus was simply separated from the dark-hearted, pagan people screaming insults at Him and headed for Hell themselves. Abandoned by pagans meant nothing. It's still another thing for Jesus to be abandoned by the weak-willed disciples who were following at a distance. Certainly there was pain in that, but He had a realistic understanding of their weakness. But nothing could compare to the pain to have done nothing wrong yet be abandoned by God the Father. That is the true suffering of the Cross.

Now the all-important question: Why did Jesus have to suffer? Why couldn't God have just let Him die to pay for our sins?

First John 4:10 says, "And this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the payment for our sin." The key word here is payment. The Bible explains this payment in many different ways:

He died to give us life. (1 John 5:11)
He died to bring us to God. (1 Peter 3:18)
He died the just for the unjust. (1 Peter 3:18)
He died for our sins. (Hebrews 9:26)
He died to save us. (Romans 10:9)
He died to give us eternal life. (John 3:16)

The bottom line is payment. It wasn't enough for Him to die. Jesus had to pay a debt. Some would still ask, "What debt? What payment was owed?" He paid to satisfy the demands of God's anger.

Peace with God is the absence of anger. As much as God loves you, He hates your sin with a holy, burning hatred that you cannot comprehend. But He does love you, and the only way that He could embrace you was to take His hatred for your sin and make someone else pay for it. (See Romans 5:1) And it couldn't be just anyone--it had to be someone perfect. Since we're all sinners, He came Himself.

Hear it again for the first time: You can be forgiven and washed clean. James 3:2 says we all fall in various ways. But you don't have to carry that sin around. You can be forgiven. But God would not do that lightly. God wouldn't say, "Oh, I see your sin, but I love you so much I'll just overlook it." Someone had to pay for those sins that we chose for ourselves.