" BECAUSE JESUS CHRIST SUFFERED SO LONG AGO IS THE STING OUT OF OUR SUFFERING TODAY."

37. Q. What do you confess when you say that He suffered?
A. During all the time He lived on earth, but especially at the end, Christ bore in body and soul the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race.[1] Thus, by His suffering, as the only atoning sacrifice,[2] He has redeemed our body and soul from everlasting damnation,[3] and obtained for us the grace of God, righteousness, and eternal life.[4]
[1] Is. 53; I Tim. 2:6; I Pet. 2:24; 3:18. [2] Rom. 3:25; I Cor. 5:7; Eph. 5:2; Heb. 10:14; I John 2:2; 4:10. [3] Rom. 8:1-4; Gal. 3:13; Col. 1:13; Heb. 9:12; I Pet 1:18, 19. [4] John 3:16; Rom. 3:24-26; II Cor. 5:21; Heb. 9:15.

38. Q. Why did He suffer under Pontius Pilate as judge?
A. Though innocent, Christ was condemned by an earthly judge,[1] and so He freed us from the severe judgment of God that was to fall on us.[2] [1] Luke 23:13-24; John 19:4, 12-16. [2] Is. 53:4, 5; II Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13.

39. Q. Does it have a special meaning that Christ was crucified and did not die in a different way?
A. Yes. Thereby I am assured that He took upon Himself the curse which lay on me, for a crucified one was cursed by God.[1]
[1] Deut. 21:23; Gal. 3:13.

Scripture Reading:
Mark 15:1-32
Hebrews 12:1-13

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 9:1,5
Psalm 43:5
Psalm 23:2,3
Hymn 21:1,3,4
Hymn 56:1,2

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

Lord’s Day 15 concerns itself with suffering. That’s a very timely subject, if only because the world is so full of suffering. A virus hits us, and we feel sick, miserable. We break some bones, and suffer. We’re under pressure because of financial constraints, and that pressure makes us suffer. We loose a beloved family member through death or desertion, and we suffer. We feel shunned by our peer’s, not accepted by the class at school, and that means suffering. We look across our national boundaries to the agonies endured by the people of the Middle East today or the countless AIDS orphans of Africa or the people who tried so hard to flee the horrors of Afghanistan or Pakistan to come to our fair shores…. There’s so much suffering….

LD 15 is about suffering, about the suffering of Christ, and its consequences for us. The Lord’s Day would have us know that the sting is out of our suffering today because Christ suffered 2000 years ago in our place.

Why is there suffering in the world? Where does anguish, difficulty, pain, grief, come from? It is a question that has teased the minds of philosophers for centuries. But the answer is not so difficult.

The world God made was a world without suffering, without curse, without anguish. God’s creation was "very good," with as result that Paradise was a place of inner peace and happiness, a place of no grief, no suffering.

That changed with the fall into sin. God had said to Adam on the first day of his life that he could eat of every tree of the Garden, except that one in the middle. And if Adam should choose to eat despite what God said, he would surety die. Death: the whole concept involves suffering. So Adam could know that disobedience to God was the road to suffering; eating meant death, eating meant suffering.

Despite the warning God had given, Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree; they sinned. And in so doing, they died; spiritually straightaway, physically after a number of years. And with that dying came suffering; they were afraid and hid themselves at the sound of God’s coming. To the woman God announced suffering: "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing." Bringing children into the world, yes and also raising them, would be a painful, even a heart-rending experience. Motherhood implies suffering.

So also Adam. The Garden used to supply an abundance of food; Adam and Eve did not have to toil and sweat to eat. But now they’re exiled from the Garden, sent out to seek a living from a land cursed by God. For so spoke God: "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you." Such would be Adam’s life, would be the life of every person: toiling, struggling, suffering.

Then came the day when Adam’s and Eve’s two oldest boys did not return home from the field, the day when they went out looking, and found one dead and the other gone.... talk about suffering.... Suffering because of the fall into sin. That fall: that was the cause of their suffering, the cause of their hunger, their misery - SIN.

But what is the relationship between sin and suffering? Why is suffering the result of sin? That, congregation, is because of the wrath of God. Recall Lord’s Day 4: the justice of God requires that sin committed against the most high majesty of God be punished with extreme, that is, with everlasting punishment of body and soul. God’s wrath: that’s the link between sin and suffering!

That link is drawn out where Scripture speaks of God’s response on covenant disobedience. What that response is? God’s wrath becomes apparent through drought, war, sickness, death – in a word, through suffering (cf Lev 26:14ff). Think too of what Paul writes to the Romans: "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth." The chapter tells us that God expresses His wrath by darkening people’s minds, with as result that they give themselves up to more and more sin, which in turn results in sickness, hatred, jealousy, loneliness, grief. Suffering.

Where does suffering come from? Make no mistake, beloved: suffering comes from the fall into sin. And that fall into sin provoked the wrath of holy God, yes, and the sins people commit day by day provoke the wrath of God still. The wrath we bring upon ourselves is no gentle wrath, and that is why our Lord’s Day speaks of such things as "damnation," speaks of the "severe judgment of God that was to fall on us", speaks of "the curse which lay on me." Indeed, how terrible it is to fall into the hands of the living God!

But the LD we have in front of us does not accent our sufferings as such. Lord’s Day 15 focuses on Christ’s sufferings. So we shall do well to direct our attention for now not to our sufferings but to Christ’s.

Christ suffered, we confess, suffered "during all the time He lived on earth." That would mean that already in Bethlehem Jesus was suffering. And His sufferings as a baby were not just the sufferings that come with being colicky and possibly sick. Rather, He suffered in that He "took on Himself true human nature," becoming "like His brothers in every respect"; Jesus too suffered the consequences of sin. More, His suffering began even before He was born. For His mother, heavy with child, was told that there was no room for them in the inn in Bethlehem; here already, Jesus was rejected. Son of God from eternity enjoyed the glory that belonged to His Godhead, but now had to be born in a stable. Wise men came from the east to pay homage, but scarcely were they gone when Herod brooded out his satanic plan to murder every boy in Bethlehem age two years and under. For "the dragon stood before the woman… that he might devour her child when she brought it forth." Suffering.

At the age of 12 He went with His parents to Jerusalem, and when He stayed there and they found Him after three days, they chastised Him for the worry He had inflicted on them. But all of that included suffering for Jesus, for His parents did not understand Him, did not appreciate His exact identity and calling, did not realize that He had to be about His Father’s business.

He reached the age of 30, and began to reveal Himself to Israel. Immediately the Holy Spirit drove Him into the desert, where He received not so much as a crumb to eat for forty days and forty nights. As He suffered those hunger pains, Satan urged Him to turn those stones into bread…. How cruel, how painful the suffering….

After the temptations in the wilderness, "He came to His own people" with mighty words and signs and miracles, but "His own received Him not" (Jn 1:11). They followed Him by the thousands: they also deserted Him by the thousands again. Even His own disciples did not understand Him; despite what He said, they kept looking for Him to restore the political kingdom to Israel. The birds had nests, the foxes had holes, but the Son of Man did not even have a place to lay His head. And after three years of that, He was betrayed not by a lifelong enemy, but by an intimate friend, a companion, betrayed with a brotherly kiss (Ps 55). He was led to the Judgment seat of Pilate, and the people cried out with one voice in His hearing that He ought to be crucified. Rejected He was, by Israel the people of God, by the leaders of Israel, even by His own disciples. And all that abuse the Lord had to take. The soldiers thought to hail Him as king, and so they crowned Him with a wreath of prickly thorns – ouch! They spat on Him, slapped Him, mocked Him, laughed Him to scorn. Then led Him out to crucify Him, telling the exhausted Jesus to carry His own cross.... Suffering.

Our understanding of Christ’s life is somewhat sentimental and romantic. But His life, brothers and sisters, was anything but that! Thirty three year’s He lived amongst men on earth. Thirty three years He suffered. Holy God that He was, without sin, saw around Him only sin, lives broken by sin, people rejecting Him because of sin. And it hurt Him every time anew. Then it’s true that His suffering intensified acutely "at the end" of His life. But that does not take away from the fact that "during all the time He lived on earth" He was suffering.

And why? Why did Jesus suffer? Here too we have to go back to the cause of suffering. For Jesus, like we, suffered because of sin. So He suffered as we all do, could be sick and suffer in His sickness, stub His toe and suffer the pain that comes with that, etc. But that doesn’t get to the heart of Jesus’ suffering! Jesus’ suffering was much more than ours, for Jesus was Himself made sin! That is the secret of Jesus’ suffering during all His life, and especially at the end; Jesus was made sin! And on sin comes the wrath of God. That’s what made Jesus’ suffering so special, so unique; the God whose wrath He bore was none else "than His own Father".

That God the Father was indeed angry with Jesus and so made Him to suffer is pointed up by what happened in the palace of Pontius Pilate.

Pilate. He was governor in the time of Jesus’ ministry on earth. But when the Catechism reminds us that Jesus suffered "under Pontius Pilate", we are not told simply what time in history it was that Christ suffered the ultimate anguish of the cross. Rather, the reference to Pontius Pilate points up that Jesus suffered at the hands of God. For who was Pilate? Like any other government official, he was appointed by God, represented God. When Jesus, then, was brought by the chief priests and the elders and the scribes to the judgment seat of Pontius Pilate, Jesus was brought before God’s tribunal. Pilate rules, and Pilate judges, and Pilate passes sentences, in the name of God. That the unbelieving Pilate didn’t acknowledge that his position came from God did not alter the fact one bit. As Jesus Himself said to Pilate: "You would have no power over Me unless it had been given you from above" (Jn 18:11).

Pilate judges Jesus to be guilty, condemns Him to death. In truth, he ought not to have done that; Jesus had broken not a single law in all the land. And the fact that he did so nevertheless was sin on Pilate’s part, for which he will have to give account to God. But none of that takes away from the fact that Pilate did condemn Jesus to death. And because of his position as representative of God did God stand behind that judgment. In other words, through Pilate God condemned Jesus to death. Why God did so? Because God saw Jesus as guilty. And God saw Jesus as guilty because God saw Jesus as sinful, as full of sin. And on sin comes wrath; sin is the cause of suffering.

Yet Jesus had not sinned, and so should receive no wrath. But here is the point: Jesus had taken the sins of His people from off their shoulders and placed these sins upon Himself. Because Jesus had taken these sins upon Himself was Jesus, in God’s holy eyes, guilty, worthy of wrath. Sin. And that’s why Jesus had to suffer; He suffered because of our sins.

We come to our second point:

What was the nature of the suffering Jesus should receive? Ought it to be a gentle, easy-to-take suffering? A tick on the fingers indicating God’s displeasure with sin? No, beloved, not at all. In fact, in Jesus Christ all suffering comes to a climax. For Jesus was sentenced by Pontius Pilate, that representative of God, to hang on a cross.

What’s so bad about a cross? One could argue that Jesus was sentenced to death on a cross simply because crucifixion happened to be the way Romans put criminals to death. And it’s true, that’s how the Romans did it. But even this did not happen by chance; sovereign God Himself ordained that Jesus should be crucified. And Jesus had to be crucified because of the special significance of hanging.

We are to recall that God in the Old Testament had made stipulation that a criminal offender be stoned to death, and after death his body be strung up on a tree. That hanging symbolized that this particular criminal was too gross a sinner to live on earth; with that hanging, men committed the offender to God for further punishment. So we read in Dt 21 that a hanged man was accursed by God (vs 23; cf Gat 3:13).

Because of the cruelty of crucifixion, the Romans would crucify only traitors and runaway slaves. In His providence God saw to it that in the time of Jesus’ sojourn on earth Rome was the ruling power in Palestine – and so death on a cross possible for the Son of God. Why would God want His Son to die on a cross, as opposing to dying from an accident or illness or even stoning? The reason is simply this: Jesus must be cursed and experience that curse in the fullest way possible on earth.

What does that mean: to be cursed? Why did Jesus have to be cursed? Cursed: that is to be rejected by God, it is to be shunned, excommunicated from the presence of the Father in heaven. Jesus was sin, was, in the eyes of God, one mass of sin. The reality of that total sin meant that wrath had to come on Jesus, total wrath. And that intense wrath found expression in the fact that Jesus had to suffer that most bitter anguish of body and soul on the tree of the cross. So Jesus on the cross suffered like no person has ever suffered before. Not just the horrible anguish of crucifixion itself caused Jesus to suffer on the cross, but added to that was the curse of God that led to His rejection – a rejection symbolized by the fact that God turned the sun off so that Jesus was enveloped in total darkness. In that darkness, Jesus was alone, alone with the demons of hell attacking Him in whatever way they wished. So He suffered, in body and soul, the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race, suffered the damnation we deserved, took on Himself the curse which lay on us.

But see: precisely in the midst of all that suffering Jesus paid for sin. For He carried the burden of God’s awful wrath on sin, carried that burden and did not collapse under the weight of it!

And here is the gospel: exactly because Jesus carried the burden of God’s wrath, because He paid for sin, is God’s wrath for him gone. And because God’s wrath was satisfied could there come an end to Jesus’ suffering. That’s why the light returned after three hours of darkness. That was also why Jesus could cry out that all was finished, and why Jesus could commit His spirit into the hands of His Father in heaven and die in peace. Sins were paid for, and therefore could there come an end to the extreme suffering that Jesus underwent on the cursed cross.

This is a gospel that touches every child of God so delightfully. By His sufferings and death, Jesus Christ atoned for the sins of all God’s people. The result of that atoning sacrifice is that the sins of those who embrace Jesus Christ with a true faith are forgiven, washed away. And the implication of receiving forgiveness is that there is no wrath from God on our sins anymore; the wrath we deserved has been poured out on Jesus Christ instead.

But, beloved, if there is no wrath left on us, there can be no damnation left either, not in this life, nor in the life to come. Instead of wrath, there is grace; instead of death, there is life. And that means nothing else than that the punishments and the sufferings we deserve on our sins do not come over us; we go free from the wrath of God! Talk about gospel: there is no wrath for God’s people anymore, and therefore no suffering under the burden of God’s wrath on our sins either. It’s all so neatly stated in the Lord’s Supper Form: "He bore for us the wrath of God under which we should have perished eternally," with as blessed result that "He has taken our curse upon Himself that He might fill us with His blessing." How delightful, how gloriously delightful!

It’s a wonderful reality, beloved. But it’s not one we can claim willy-nilly. For Christ’s death does not satisfy for the sins of every person on earth; it satisfies instead only for those who believe in Him. That means concretely: those who are sorry for sin, who turn from sin, who seek their salvation and well-being only in Jesus Christ. The gospel of Jesus’ suffering is rich, so gloriously rich, and precisely for that reason is the need so great that each one of us time and again engages in that self-examination mentioned in the Lord’s Supper form: do I believe that the work of Jesus Christ on the cross was done also for me? Blessed are those who can answer that question with a positive Yes; for such there is no wrath from God at all anymore, neither in this life or the life to come. But those who do not believe remain under the wrath of God still, and shall experience it day by day in the sufferings of this life.

It’s a glorious gospel, yes. But it also presents new questions. So sins are forgiven, and therefore there is no condemnation for us anymore, no wrath. So: there ought to be no suffering either anymore, is it not? If the wrath of God is stilled, the link between sin and suffering is gone. Yet we know so well that suffering is very much part of our lives. How are we to explain that now? That’s our third point:

Yes, brothers and sisters, suffering remains a daily reality, be it suffering because of illness, or suffering because of rejection by friends or workmates, or suffering because of death, etc. But for the child of God the reason for that suffering is no longer due to God’s wrath on our sins; in Lord’s Day l5 we confess that those sins are gone, that Christ suffered the wrath we deserve.

So: why is there still suffering in our lives? Yes, we can say that we are to bear the consequences of our sins. A theft can land one in jail, and the experience is not pleasant - suffering. But even here we are not to confuse God’s wrath with the consequences that flow out of sins. For the child of God that wrath is gone, forgiven is forgiven. Yet God would have us suffer –why?- in order to teach us. It is through suffering (amongst other things) that the God who for Jesus’ sake became our Father, trains and moulds His children so that we might share His holiness the more.

That’s the concrete instruction of Hebrews l2. The addressees suffered, were possibly being persecuted (though they did not yet have to shed their blood). To encourage these despairing Hebrews, the apostle tells them not only to took to the example of Jesus Christ who also suffered and yet persisted; the apostle also instructs the Hebrews to recall God’s word in Prov 3, where reference is made to God’s discipline. For, says the apostle, God is such a Father for His children that He disciplines, chastises, punishes. But it’s not a disciplining and a chastening in wrath, a punishing according to what we deserve; it’s rather a disciplining, a punishing according to what we need – and that’s a whole different thing. As an earthly parent will discipline his child out of love –though the child might not appreciate what his parent gives!- so the Lord disciplines those who fear Him. So: "shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?" If Father in heaven in wisdom gives suffering, it’s not for us to despair in the thought that God is angry with us; it’s instead for us to bear it patiently in the conviction that the God who gave His Son to pay for our sins wants to teach us something. So the child of God says with David: "even in the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil, for You are with me, Your rod and Your staff (though they may hurt so much!), they comfort me." Amen.