(2) Bare our sins. — The word rendered " bare " has a singular fulness of significance ; it is a sacrificial term, constantly used in the Septuagint for offering sacrifice : here it includes two meanings. Our Lord took up our sins, and in His own body which He offered on the cross He expiated them. It must also be noted that when He took up our sins, He took them away, enabling us to be rid of them.
*|[ If we examine Scripture from Genesis to Eevelation, we shall find four senses in which the words " bearing sin," are used : First, representation ; second, identification ; third, substitu- tion ; and fourth, satisfaction. If we take those four conceptions — representation — one standing as a representative before God ; identification — one being made identical with those he represents ; substitution — one substituted in the place or stead of others ; and satisfaction — the furnishing of a satisfying atonement in behalf of others, — we have the scope of the meaning of these words.^
(3) In His body. — That body so purely born, which must have been a fair casket for the holy jewel it contained ; which in the Jordan waters was first identified in outward seeming with the weight of human sin, though in itself without sin; which was the very shrine and home of God, who had prepared it for Him ; which was the vehicle for so many blessed words and deeds of ministry — that body was made a sin-offering, and, so to speak, was burnt in fire without the camp, as the bodies of the bulls and goats under the Levitical law.
^ The depth, the fulness, the perfection, of His Being and of His character endowed Him with capacities for suffering which
' James Wells, Bible Echoes, 138.
3 A. T. Pierson, The Hopes of the Gospel, 87.
I PETER II. 24 107
transcend all our most powerful imaginings. We can reach only imperfect, but still very significant, ideas of what He consciously realized in the Crucifixion. So weak are our powers that great injury stupefies the senses to the pain belonging to it. His perfection of mind would support the sense of pain and intensify it. And not only so, but every part of His Being would be quick, because of His fulness of life, to see and feel all that was contained within the act of men to Him. The pains of the flesh would not so absorb His mind that He could not see and feel also the meaning of all that He endured in His body on the tree. Clear before Him would stand out the hate, the malice, the wrong of His murderers. In the pain of the thorns He would be conscious of and would feel the cruel mockery of that shameful act. When His sensitive frame was pierced by the iron nails and racked with the anguish of hanging on the tree He would in this feel with equal reality the moral state of those who inflicted this upon His body. And as, with that penetrating vision which enabled Him to know what was in man, He looked through the present moral state of His murderers He would see the developments of sin which had built up their evil characters ; all the several acts of disobedience and wickedness which had gone to fashion men who would murder the Just One stood out with vivid distinctness. Back beyond the present generation He would see the sins of their fathers, sins whose force lived in their degenerate offspring. A long line of ages of human sin, rank beyond rank, stretching back even to the flood and beyond it to fair Eden's garden, where man first ate the forbidden fruit. All would be seen and felt in and under the nails which fixed Him to the tree. He would read and realize also in the acts of the immediate instruments of His death the moral state of the teeming millions of living sinners, east and west and north and south. And as all this sin would be seen in its past and present, so also would the latent possibilities in it for the future pass before Him. He would see in the sins of His crucifiers those sins, the very same sins, which still have existence after nineteen centuries of grace — our sins. And knowing, as He alone could know, the dire evils linked everlastingly to all departure from right, He would behold the destined end of sin, if left to work its way — death and misery, hell and anguish — scenes such that only infinite strength of soul could enable Him to look upon them. His all-powerful mind measured this mass of moral corruption; His infinitely pure and infinitely sensitive moral nature felt its terrible turpitude; His love, all-embracing, was pained by the wrong of it ; His soul filled with suffering pity at the prospect of its dark issues. That which to us is, at best, but a dim
io8 THE ETHICS OF THE ATONEMENT
conception in idea, was to Him a most terrible and real experience ; " Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree." ^
(4) Upon the tree. — The word for " tree " used here is also used twice in Acts (v. 30, x. 39) by St. Peter for the cross. Its use in Gal. iii. 13 is due to the Septuagint of Deut. xxi. 23. " Upon the tree " is a pregnant construction. He bore our sins ^lp to and upon the tree. Irenaeus speaks of Christ as " remedying the dis- obedience in the matter of the tree of knowledge by the obedience of the tree of Calvary." And we think of the " tree of life " of Eev. xxii. 2, whose leaves were for the healing of the nations.