JESUS CAME TO GIVE HIMSELF

“Surely He took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered Him punished by God, stricken by Him, and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed.”  (Isaiah 53:4-5 NIV)

Jesus did not come merely to disclose God’s character. He came to make it possible to be remade in the likeness of that character. He came to redeem us from what we are and remake us in the likeness of what He is. He is not merely a teacher, a doer – He is a redeemer.

He came not merely to give His word, His example. He came to give Himself. He became like us that we might become like Him. He was baptized into the world’s toil for thirty years, baptized into our temptations for these years, and baptized into our sin at the end. He became sin for us at the cross. He died between two malefactors like one of them and cried the cry of dereliction that you and I cry when we sin: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” If “life is sensitivity,” then there was infinite life, for here was infinite sensitivity – every [person’s] hunger His hunger; every [person’s] bondage His bondage; and every [person’s] sin His sin. “He bore in His own body our sins upon a tree.” (1 Peter 2:24)

Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t explain it; I bow in humility and repentance at the cross, at the wonder of it, that God should give Himself for me. I bow and I am redeemed! 

-- E. Stanley Jones in “A Song of Ascents”

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