Jesus: The Carrier

Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

We've shared the message of Isaiah 53 with each recent communion service. Today we come to the fourth verse, and what a verse it is. It tells us that Jesus carried our griefs and sorrows, and that he was considered God-cursed. Let's delve into this together before we share the cup and the bread representing Him.

As we've considered our Lord in the previous verses of this chapter we've been almost shocked by the truth of not only His divinity, but yet more His humanity. He came as a Root out of dry ground, a divine character bearing the very flesh of a dry, twisted, fallen humanity. Never sinning (for we are plainly told that He was "in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" Hebrews 4:15), ever bearing in His body daily crucifixion of the nature He had taken, He walked through this world with one purpose: to glorify His Father by bringing the applied power of the gospel to the human race. His life offered, the benefits of the atonement applied, empowered God to be both just and Justifier in His redemption of man (Romans 3:26).

How deeply entwined in our salvation is the fact and nature of Jesus' incarnation for us? We are not left in doubt. We are told unequivocally, "The humanity of the Son of God is everything to us" Selected Messages, vol. 1, p. 244. Who having studied out this issue, can disagree with J. R. Zurcher's recently published work, Touched By His Feelings, from the Review and Herald Press, when he states: "The triumph of the plan of salvation depends entirely on the Incarnation, upon the Word becoming flesh, and upon the Son of God made into man" (Touched by His Feelings, p. 54)? I cannot. Did you ever read this, from the pen of Mrs. White: "The completeness of His humanity, the perfection of His divinity, form for us a strong ground upon which we may be brought into reconciliation with God" (Letter 35, 1894. Quoted also in SDABC vol. 7-A, p. 487).

Those are strong words, not necessarily politically-correct in some quarters of the church today. But they are, I believe, the words of inspiration. What then of these words of inspiration found in Isaiah 53:4?

Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs

When you delve into this verse, you find some very interesting material. The literal meaning is that it is a certainty that Jesus carried our sicknesses. "Griefs" here is a translation of the Hebrew word khol-ee, meaning to be sick, worn-down, diseased. It is the same word found in our last verse, Isaiah 53:3, where it says that Jesus is "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." That adds to our conception of our Savior, doesn't it? He was acquainted with grief, both as we tend to think of it, in terms of general emotional grief; but cutting yet more closely, He was acquainted with the inward frailties of humanity. The impacted flesh that was His own was our own.

Was He really bearing our sicknesses, or was He pretending to? Did He really experience our grief, or did He with measured knowledge of theatrical technique merely portray the idea that He experienced it? There is no real question when we look at the Scriptures. Jesus was not a Hollywood Savior; He was a suffering Savior. And He was a suffering Savior because He knew firsthand what His people knew. He knew the lot of man. He experienced temptation. He never sinned. But He was continually tempted.

The devil did not stop out there in the wilderness. He did not give up. After His temptation of Christ in the wilderness, the Scriptures tell us not that he went away never to return, but that "he departed for a season" (Luke 4:13). He never stopped going after Christ. Never. If Jesus couldn't be tempted, Satan wasted a lot of energy on the project.

For centuries brothers and sisters, Christianity has taught a very different Christ than the Bible-Christ. Protecting the theological point of Augustine, that man's very nature contained guilt, it has been taught that Jesus couldn't be human like us, because then He would have sin in Him. The divinity of Christ was focused upon; so much so that the Roman Catholic Church began to present a train of additional mediators between man and Jesus! But even they were not the first to strip away the humanity of the Savior.

Centuries before Augustine, the Jews looked for a conquering Messiah, a glorious flaming God ready to smite the Romans. Alfred Eidersheim makes a fascinating observation on this: "The messiah of Judaism is the Anti-Christ of the gospels," The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Book 3, p. 293. He is telling us that the way Jesus came, He appeared to many Jews to be the anti-messiah; He was the opposite of what they had been expecting. (That Edersheim does not fully grasp the issue of the humanity of Christ is evident in the surrounding pages of that volume.)

Friends, for you and for me, Jesus took a human body to the Cross. He "took" it "to" the Cross. That was a 33 year process—it was not done by Overnight Express. Some say that Jesus did bear our sicknesses, but only in the hours clustering about His death at the cross. Not so. Isaiah insists "surely He hath borne our sicknesses." Not for but a moment. Do not forget your second verse: Jesus grew up "as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground."

And Carried Our Sorrows

The parallel statement to His carrying our sicknesses is that He carried our "sorrows," from the Hebrew word makob, meaning "pain." Jesus carried our pains.

Pain doesn't happen in the broken finger or in the tooth numbed for the dentists' drill. Pain happens in the mind. Nerve-endings send their signals to the brain which translates them into the sensation of pain experienced in your conscious brain. We wonder how it could be that Jesus "carried our sorrows." How could the pain associated with our sin translate into pain in His brain and mind? Remember, He was "undefiled, separate from sinners" (Hebrews 7:26). And yet God "made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin [Jesus, that is]; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). He carried our sorrows. He carried what we carried. Jesus was a Carrier.

Although He was the sinless Son of God -- although His was a divine character, it was biologically and psychically participant in our humanity. The brain that His mind, His character (forgive the crude and imprecise illustration), the software of His personality and character functioned on, was a human brain impacted by the fall. It was a brain just like ours.

Just like ours but in one respect, and one respect only. He had never sinned. He never built-up a set of nerve-bundlings within His brain that make so easy the repetition of the sins that so easily beset us. Always He said no to that. We may rest assured that His own body sent its signals into His brain: its sensory reaction to pheremones, its built-in distorted, craving calling to fulfill all of its sensory-perceived "needs." And yet He responded by denying the subtle, snakelike-entwining sinful call. It wasn't His. He never let it own Him. He sought after His Father's will, He knew that will, and at every step, at every place where His nature urged Him to take a slight opportunistic, rationalized shuffle, He didn't. With His humanity slamming Him in the face again and again, He kept the channel open and was led by the Spirit. He overcame because He let the Spirit fill His degenerate human vine with its divine sap. He clung to the Father. He obeyed. And so as the Scripture says, "God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory!" (1 Timothy 3:16).

He carried the virus of sin because He was born into this world that way. But He carried the cure of the Spirit, because He was willing to let the inoculation take hold. He was willing to be "justified in the Spirit." And so we may ask ourselves, are we willing to be "justified in the Spirit?" Have you considered Galatians 5:16 in relation to this? "This I say then, walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." If we are willing to respond to the Spirit at every point, we'll know God's will, we'll receive His power, and we'll overcome in the same through the blood of Jesus. His sacrificed body and blood make available to us, through faith, "all the fullness" of His power.

By partaking of His "exceeding great and precious promises," we can be "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). We may receive largely of His power, i.e. largely of His grace. Receiving largely, we ask the Spirit to employ it in our need for victory. And in all this the power of Jesus is "believed on in the world!" Make no mistake: Jesus carried our sicknesses, infirmities identical with our own fallen nature, and conquered through the Spirit in the same. He was a Carrier, but through His carrying of the curse cure was wrought. A cure not locked altogether away on the other side of the second coming, but available now, that we may live for Him now, that we may overcome through Him now, that He might redeem us from this present wicked age, and send us shining out, into the darkness to bring the cure to others.

Ellen White says: "Christ's work was to reconcile man to God through His human nature, and God to man through His divine nature" (Confrontation, p. 38). We are repeatedly told that the matter of Christ's humanity has been "left open," that the church has never taken a stand on it. But what are we told here? That it is "Christ's work" to "reconcile man to God through His human nature." Now did I miss something, or is that like, extremely important? The matter, friends of whether we are indeed reconciled to God or not reconciled to God hinges on it! So what are we being told then really? That (supposedly) whether man has or has not been reconciled to God through human nature is an item that's been left hanging. Brothers and sisters, it's not so. It's not so. Through Christ we have received the atonement (Romans 5:10-11), because through His humanity, Christ has reconciled us with God. Through the life of Jesus, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19).

"Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted." Jesus carried our sicknesses. He experienced our pains. He took it all to the cross and crucified it on the tree, just as He crucified it in His life, condemning "sin in the flesh" (Romans 8:3). Let us not react as did the Hebrews, who thought that a Jesus like this wouldn't be the Savior they were after. He may not have been the savior we were after. But He is all the Savior we need. He carried sin away to the Cross in the crooked nature, and overcame. He came too close for us. He made us responsible. We are responsible because now there is an antidote for sin.

Now His people must take the antidote, the anti-venom.

Conclusion

Today we remember what He has done. In symbol we drink in what in flesh-and-blood Jesus wrought out. We continue our service this day in realization and thanksgiving that Jesus was and still is our Carrier. And that just as He carried sin to the Cross and put it away, so He opens His arms and urges us to roll-off the burden we are carrying, receive largely of His Spirit, and become His children. Sons and daughters of the King, today cast yourself at His feet in worship. He is coming back very soon, "without sin, unto salvation." May we all be there and rejoice that He came here and walked through the hell of our humanity opening wide to us the waiting gates of glory.