It is necessary to distinguish between Christ’s sufferings from man and His sufferings from God. Christ did, we know, suffer from men. He was "despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." The world hated Him because He bore witness of it that its works were evil. Christ suffered for righteousness’ sake. The love which caused the Lord to minister to men in the world and to testify of their evil brought only more sorrow upon Him. For His love He received hatred in return.

He suffered also from the hand of God upon the cross. "It pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief." He was made sin for us who knew no sin, and then he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. There He suffered, the Just for the unjust; that is, He suffered not because He was righteous, but because we were sinners, and He was bearing our sins in His own body on the tree. As regards God’s forsaking Him, He could say, "Why hast Thou forsaken Me?" for in Him there was no cause. We can give the solemn answer. In grace He suffered, the Just for the unjust; He had been made sin for us. Thus, He suffered for righteousness, as a living Man, from men; as a dying Saviour, He suffered from the hand of God for sin.

Let us consider other types of suffering experienced by our blessed Lord. In the first place, His heart of love must have suffered greatly from the unbelief of unhappy man, and from His rejection by the people. He often sighed and groaned in spirit when He came in contact with the people. He wept and groaned within Himself at the tomb of Lazarus at seeing the power of death over the spirits of men and their incapacity to deliver themselves. And He wept also over Jerusalem when He saw the beloved city about to reject Him in the day of its visitation. All this was the suffering of perfect love, moving through a scene of ruin, in which self-will and heartlessness shut every avenue against this love which was so earnestly working in its midst.

A weight of another kind pressed upon the Lord often, I doubt not, through His life. This was the anticipation of His sufferings on the cross and their true and pressing character. On His path of life lay death. And for Him death was death-man’s utter weakness, Satan’s extreme power, and God’s just vengeance. In this death He would be alone, without one sympathy, forsaken of those whom He had cherished, and the object of enmity of the rest of the people. The Messiah was to be delivered to the Gentiles and cast down, the judge washing his hands of condemning innocence, the priests interceding against the guiltless instead of for the guilty. All was dark, without one ray of light even from God. Here perfect obedience was needed and (blessed be God!) was found. What sorrow this must have been for a soul who anticipated these things with the feelings of a Man made perfect in thought and apprehension by the divine light which was in Him. He could not fail to fear the forsaking of God and the cup of death He had to drink.

In Gethsemane, when the cross was yet nearer, and the prince of this world was come, and His soul was exceeding sorrowful unto death, this character of sorrow and trial, or temptation, reached its fullness. In Gethsemane all was closing in. The deep agony of the Lord told itself out in few (yet how mighty!) words and in sweat as it were drops of blood. Yet when the soldiers came to apprehend Him, He freely offered Himself to drink that cup which the Father had given Him to drink. Wondrous scene of love and obedience! Whatever the suffering may have been, it was the free moving of a Man in grace, but of a Man perfect in obedience to God.

Sin itself must have been a continual source of sorrow to the Lord’s mind. If Lot vexed his righteous soul with seeing and hearing the evil of Sodom when he was himself so far from God in his practical life, what must the Lord have suffered in passing through the world! He was distressed by sin. He looked on the Pharisees with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts. He was in a dry and thirsty land where no water was, and He felt it, even if His soul was filled with marrow and fatness. The holier and more loving He was, the more dreadful was the sin to Him.

The sorrows of mankind were also in His heart. He bore their sicknesses and carried their infirmities. There was not a sorrow nor an affliction He met that He did not bear on His heart as His own. "In all their afflictions He was afflicted." Our sins He bore too, and was made sin for us, but that, as we have seen, was on the cross_obedience, not sympathy. God made Him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us. All the rest was the sympathy of love, though it was sorrow. This is a blessed character of the Lord’s sorrow. Love brought Him to the cross, we well know; but His sorrow there had not the present joy of a ministration of love. He was not dealing with man, but suffering in his place, in obedience, from God and for man. Hence, it was unmingled, unmitigated suffering_the scene, not of active goodness, but of God forsaking. But all His sorrow in His ways with men was the direct fruit of love, sensibly acting on Him. He felt for others, about others. That feeling was (oh, how constantly!) sorrow in a world of sin; but that feeling was love. This is sweet to our thought. For His love He might have hatred, but the present exercise of love has a sweetness and character of its own which no form of sorrow it may impart ever takes away; and in Him it was perfect.

Another source of sorrow was the violation of every delicacy which a perfectly attuned mind could feel. They stood staring and looking upon Him. Insult, scorn, deceit, efforts to catch Him in His words, brutality, and cruel mocking fell upon a not insensible, though divinely patient, spirit. Reproach broke His heart. He was the song of the drunkards. No divine perfection saved Him from sorrow. He passed through it with divine perfection, and by means of it. But I do not believe there was a single human feeling (and every most delicate feeling of a perfect soul was there) that was not violated and trodden on in Christ. Doubtless, it was nothing compared with divine wrath. Men and their ways were forgotten when He was on the cross; but the suffering was not the less real when it was there. All was sorrow, but the exercise of love, and that must, at last, make way for obedience in death where the wrath of God closed over and obliterated the hatred and wickedness of men. Such was Christ. All sorrow concentrated in His death where the comfort of active love and the communion with His Father could put no alleviating sweetness with that dreadful cup of wrath. He gave up everything on the cross, but afterward He received glory anew from His Father’s hand_glory which He had ever had, but now would enter into as Man.