Old Paths in Portrait

“In all His faintness, through bleeding and fasting, they made Him carry His cross until another was forced by the forethought of their cruelty to bear it, lest their victim should die on the road. They stripped Him, threw Him down, and nailed Him to the wood. The pierced His hands and feet. They lifted up the tree with Him upon it, and then dashed it down into its place in the ground, so that all His limbs were dislocated according to the lament of the Psalmist, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint” (Psalm 22:14a).

He hung on the cross in the burning sun until the fever dissolved His strength, and He said, “My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and My tongue cleaveth to My jaws; and Thou has brought me into the dust of death” (Psalm 22:14b-15). There He hung, a spectacle to God and men.

The weight of His body was first sustained by His feet, until the nails tore through the tender nerves. Then the painful load began to drag upon His hands and rend those sensitive parts of His frame. How small a wound in the hand has brought on lockjaw! How awful must have been the torment caused by that dragging iron tearing through the delicate parts of the hands and feet!

Now were all manner of bodily pains centered in his tortured frame. All the while His enemies stood around, pointing at Him in scorn, thrusting out their tongues in mockery, jesting at his prayers, and gloating over His sufferings. He cried, “I thirst (John 19:28), and then they gave Him vinegar mingled with gall. After a while He said, “It is finished” (John 19:30). He had endued the utmost of appointed grief and had made full vindication to divine justice. Then, and not until then, He gave up the ghost.

Holy men of old have enlarged most lovingly upon the bodily sufferings of our Lord, and I have no hesitation in doing the same, trusting that trembling sinners may see salvation in these painful “stripes” of the Redeemer. To describe the outward sufferings of our Lord is not easy. I acknowledge that I have failed.

Christ’s soul-sufferings, which were the soul of His sufferings, who can even conceive, much less express what they were? At the very first I told you that he sweat great drops of blood. That was His heart driving out its life-floods to the surface through the terrible depression of spirit which was upon Him. He said, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death” (Matthew 26:38). The betrayal by Judas and the desertion of the twelve grieved our Lord, but the weight of our sin was the real pressure on His heart. Our guilt was the olive-press which forced from him the moisture of His life. No language can ever tell His agony in prospect of His passion. How little then can we conceive the passion itself?”

-C.H. Spurgeon  British Preacher  1834–1892

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