Here we are directed to Christ’s earthly path. Suffering was to be distinctively His portion. Our sin and our misery but furnished the opportunity to divine love, and this is only shown and learned in Christ, in Him who suffered infinitely here below—and Christ alone from the mystery of His person was capable of such suffering. Thus has He glorified, and thus reached hearts opened by grace to feel in our measure the wonders of His love.

In the days of His flesh we behold the surface and hear the sound of His sorrows which God alone was able to fathom. For this, as for other reasons essential to the purpose of God and the blessing of man, the Word was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and He obeyed unto death, even the death of the cross. And if ever prayers and supplications, if ever strong crying and tears were realities for the heart before God, His were. For His divine nature did not screen Him from pain, grief, humiliation, or suffering, but rather gave Him competency of person to endure perfectly, while all was accepted in absolute dependence on, and subjection to His Father.

It was no small thing for His love to have hatred, and to be despised and rejected of men; not only not to be honored by the people of God—by His people—but to be esteemed stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. More yet, He was deserted by all His disciples, denied by one, betrayed by another; and, by far the most terrible of all and wholly different from all, He was forsaken of God just when He most needed His consolation and support. But so it must have been if sin was to be duly judged in His sacrifice, if our sins were to be completely borne away, and God to be glorified as to evil adequately and forever.