It is necessary to distinguish Christ’s sufferings from man from 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 Me, 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, too, of men were in His heart. He bore their sicknesses and carried their
infirmities. 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.