3. Laid on Him the iniquity. — "The Lord hath made to light on Him the iniquity of us all." In the compass of three verses of this chapter, there are seven distinct, emphatic, and harmonious utterances, all bearing on the one thought of the vicarious suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ. (1) "He hath borne our griefs"; (2) "And carried our sorrows"; (3) "He was wounded for our transgressions " ; (4) " He was bruised for our iniquities " ; (5) " The chastisement of our peace was upon Him " ; (6) " And with His stripes we are healed." And they are all gathered together in the final word of this text — " The Lord hath made to light on Him the iniquity of us all." I venture to say that if these words, in the variety of their metaphor and the fulness of their description, do not teach the
^ G. Mathesou, Searchings in the Silence, p. 146.
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Gospel that Jesus Christ bore in His sufferings the sins of the whole world, and bore them away, language has no meaning. Nothing could be more emphatic, nothing more reiterated, full, and confident than this sevenfold presentation of the great truth that He lived and suffered and died for us because He suffered and died instead of us.^
Whether we examine the first resurrection announcements of Christ, or His words at one of the fundamental institutes of His religion, or His admonitory appeals to His hearers, or His state- ment as to His mission, together with the dual proclamation of the Baptist and the prediction of the angel, the same fact is presented to us : the sinless Christ is invariably associated with sin. In the Epistles, not only is this fact conserved ; there is an amazing advance upon it. To cite the passages in these early and inspired documents which bear upon the mysterious relationship between Christ and sin, would be to transcribe many sections of St. Paul's letters. Suffice it to say that there are twelve passages in the Epistles which speak of Him as dying for sin. There are three which describe Him as bearing our sins. There are two which say He was "made sin" and " made a curse for us." Twelve passages ascribe to the death of Christ the removal and remission of sins, together with deliver- ance from their penal consequences. He is said to be the cause of our justification in three ; of our redemption in nine ; of our reconciliation to God in five ; as a propitiation in four ; as a priest, six ; as a representative, four ; while the Scriptures which represent the sufferings of Christ as sacrificial appear in the Epistles to the Komans, the Ephesians, the Hebrews, and in the Apocalypse.
^ I was once talking to a poor dying woman about the Cruci- fixion of our Blessed Lord. She was very ignorant and had led a bad life, and it was only now during her last sickness that she seemed to realise that Christ had indeed died for sinners — had indeed died for her ! She said to me : "I am trying to under- stand it, but it seems so dreadful, that though I know it must be true, still one half hopes it is not, for oh, how could we have done such a thing ! " ^
1. There are two fundamental reahties, marking the sacrificial
' A. Maclaren. ^ j)_ Baillie.
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ritual of the Old Testament, which indicate two fundamental doctrines, marking the sacrifice of Christ in the New Testament. These are, first, the position which the object sacrificed occupied with regard to the worshipper ; and, secondly, the effects, limited but prospective, of the sacrifice thus offered.
(1) The position which the object sacrificed occupied with regard to him who offered it may be gathered from a series of rigid and suggestive regulations. These have to do with the nature and condition of the sacrifice. It was to be offered willingly, but when selected from herd or flock, as the best of its kind, being vigorous in life and without blemish, it was brought to the door of the tabernacle, and thenceforward the completion of the ceremonial was the work of the priest. Before the sacerdotal office was exercised, there was one rite common to all the bleeding sacrifices. God required of the worshipper that "He shall put his hand upon the head of his offering." Now, throughout Holy Scripture, manual imposition is associated with the idea of transfer or communication. The latter explains its use in blessing, in office, in the miracles of Christ and of His followers. The former implies the conveyance of something from him whose hands are imposed to the object beneath the pressure. The ritual of the great Day of Atonement tells us what that something is : " And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat." And as the need of the worshipper, whether individual or corporate, was expiation — implying the sense of sin, of guilt, of estrangement from God, and of penal liability — that need was in a measure supplied by the animal sacrificed. To that animal was transferred, symboli- cally, the sin and the guilt of the worshipper. The death of the animal declared the liability of him who offered it, while the imposition of hands declared the symbolical transfer of that to which death was due. In a word, the worship of the Hebrew economy typifies the doctrine of expiation by sacrificial substitution.