Sermon Notes
Pastor Jeff Stanfill

The Pain of the Cross
April 9, 2006

THE PAIN OF THE CROSS
TEXT: MATT 26:36-46
INTRO:
What a week!
· It begins Monday with a parade to the praises of the people; an enthronement by the common man.
· It continues to a cleansing of the Temple of God from the hucksters and opportunists.
· Then, a day with more verbal questioning from the religious leaders with great political power.
· One last occasion for teaching the disciples and followers just before the final meal with twelve closest associates.
· Soon comes betrayal, arrest, beatings, and crucifixion.

And we often complain of our weeks!

In the very middle of Jesus' last week, we are given an inside look at Him as a man who faced death for others, being the one and only God-man.

The Gethsemane experience is one of:
· Intense emotions (sorrow, trouble, overwhelming and dread, distress, anguish, betrayal, and abandonment - Mt. 26:38-43, Mk. 14:33, Lk. 22:44)
· Tension - Jesus is arrested by Temple soldiers and defended by awkward fishermen.
· Travail - as sweat like drops of blood fell from His forehead as He prayed. Peter, James, and John saw Jesus transfigured with glory, and now they see Him prostrate with travail.

We eagerly look at the resurrection of Jesus and draw hope, confidence, even faith from His triumph over death, the grave, satan and sin. But that sight is too narrow. It is as of one is watching a movie on full screen and not wide screen. The images are limited. The fullness of what is being told is not there when we only see the resurrection. So much more for God's glory and our benefit is shown when before we contemplate the glory of the resurrection we see the pain of the cross.

Jesus' pain of the cross was of four proportions. His pain intensified by the moment as the cross drew near.
Easily we see the proportion of the:
I. PHYSICAL PAIN.
1. If citizens of the ancient world we would immediately understand the four words of Mark, "And they crucified Him." (15:24). A criminal's crucifixion was designed to be a tortuous self-inflicted death. With one's arms outstretched and nailed to a cross, one's weight was mostly suspended on one's arms. This affected the chest cavity in such a way as to shorten one's breath. When the desire for air became so great, the crucified had no choice but to push up with feet nailed to the lower part of the cross and pull with the arms. One's beaten back scrapped against the wood. Each deep breath so drawn was as Seneca (1st century AD) described, "drawing the breathe of life amid long drawn out agony."

2. Under these conditions some crucified men would hang for days, nearly suffocating but not yet dead. Often the legs were broken to hurry the execution. It is not necessary that Jesus suffered more physical pain than any human being. The Bible does not claim that at all. So, why the physical proportion to Jesus' pain? We physically suffer from sin - disease, debilitations, disabilities are all part of life in a fallen world. And Jesus took upon Himself the pain of fallen man. But also, the other pains of the cross are not so readily real to us. So, in His crucifixion we have a visual, physical portrayal of what sin does, what redemption costs, and the value of suffering for the glory of God.

II. PSYCHOLOGICAL PAIN
1. Jesus endured the psychological pain of all the guilt of sin. Wayne Grudem captures well the experience of guilt believers know, "In our own experience as Christians we know something of the anguish we feel when we know we have sinned. The weight of guilt is heavy on our hearts, and there is a bitter sense of separation from all that is right in the universe, an awareness of something that in a deep sense ought not to be." (Grudem, Systematic Theo, pg. 573). That is guilt as an ordinary person may know it. The psychiatry industry has developed and become an economic force in addressing the psychological pain of guilt.

2. But what did Jesus endure of this psychological pain? We must remember that Jesus was perfectly holy and without any sin or blemish in His character. Being God, He hated sin. Sin contradicted everything about Him. Yet He obeyed His Father and submitted to having all that He found divinely repulsive being laid over on Him. The Bible tells us that the Father "laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Isa. 53:12). It says that God made Jesus Christ "to be sin" (2 Cor. 5:21) and that "He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree" (1 Pt. 2:24).

3. How could the Father put our sins on Jesus Christ? The way is described in a word called "impute." Impute means "to think of something as belonging to another, and therefore cause it to belong to that person." God thought of our sin as belonging to Jesus Christ; and since it is God, the ultimate definer of what really is in the Universe, who thinks it this way, it is that way. (Grudem, pg. 574). This doesn't mean that God thought of Jesus as the one who committed our sins but as the one to whom our guilty belonged.

4. And for the first time in all of eternity, the holy took upon it the defiled, the pure took on the impure, the truly innocent received to guilt of us all. Your guilt, my guilt, our parent's guilt, Adam's guilt. And phantom of you can the psychological pain of all the guilt of all the world.

III. PATERNAL ABANDONMENT PAIN.
1. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus' disciples wearied in the sorrow of that moment and fell asleep leaving Jesus to His sorrow. While Jesus was being interrogated under arrest those same disciples deserted Him. Rejection and abandonment is something we can grasp to a degree. But when a spouse leaves us we have a sense that there was something we could have done differently. When rejected a friend, a parent, an organization, or a child we have to consider what our part may have been to cause it. But there was nothing Jesus did to cause the disciples or those who just two or three days before sang out His praises, to now run from Him and claim to never have an association with Him. "He loved His own to the end."

2. But more painful is the pain of the paternal abandonment He experienced from His heavenly Father. Jesus had lived a life of difficulty, sorrow, and challenges. But in it all He had the deepest most satisfying fellowship with His Father that filled Him with joy. And for the first time, He was alone without His heavenly Father with whom He shared eternal counsel, with whom He enjoyed eternal glory, with whom He communed as we will never understand. And He understandably cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt. 27:46).

IV. PENALIZING PAIN.
1. This is the most severe proportion of the pain of the cross that Jesus endured. With the guilt of the world's sin now upon Him, Jesus was the brunt of all the fury and wrath of a holy, righteous God. There are some that object to the fact that God is wrathful since God is love. But how is it that I a human can be what God cannot be? I love my sons with abandon. But they have known my displeasure as their father when they have failed to measure up to the required standard. If a parent can be both totally loving of his or her children, yet when they are deserving of displeasure bring upon them the punishment due, how is it that God cannot do so?

2. Perhaps we need to define God's wrath. It is His intense hatred of sin. Both the OT and NT attest to God's wrath (Ex. 32:9-10; Jn. 3:36[the same chapter that tells of how God shows His love]; Rm. 1:18). And Jesus becomes Ground Zero for the wrath of God, experiencing penalizing pain.

3. Sin has to be paid for or there is no justice in the universe. Before God could be turned toward us in reconciliation, something had to be changed. It could not simply be forgiven and forgotten. That something was that the wrath of God was fully and completely laid to rest upon Jesus, the atoning sacrifice for sin.

4. Now we can better understand Jesus cry on the cross over being abandoned by God, the Father. This cry is from Psalm 22:1-2. The psalmist is struggling with waiting for God to act on his behalf. Eventually, God's answer arrives and the psalmist rejoices in God's faithful rescue. And so Jesus calls out in His pain wondering how long will this be before our plan is complete. He went to the cross knowing the pain He faced but the depth of our sins were so great and the wrath of God so greater yet that Jesus endured hours of the cross.

5. Then as God's anger subsided in satisfaction and sin's full penalty was paid and the guilt place upon Jesus was removed He shouted, "It is finished!" (Jn. 19:30). Then He cries, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Lk. 23:46).

CONCL:
1. The pain of the cross reveals God to us. We see so much of His wrath in the crucifixion. But we see much more His love in going to the cross for us; in being our substitute. God is more known not through His displays of power, might, and miracle, but through His sacrifice and willingness to suffer for us. By Jesus' suffering He has transformed pain and suffering!

2. Our best reflection of God's character is in suffering for another.

3. Be encouraged that the pain of the cross provides a means for us to fellowship with Jesus. He suffered for us. We suffer with Him. ILLU: During one of the campaigns in the American Civil War, when the winter weather was very severe, some of Stonewall Jackson's men having crawled out in the morning from their snow-laden blankets, half frozen, began to curse him as the cause of their sufferings. He lay close by under a tree, also snowed under, and heard all this: but, without noticing it, presently crawled out too, and, shaking off the snow, made some jocular remark to the nearest men, who had no idea he had ridden up in the night and lain down amongst them! The incident ran through the army in a few hours, and reconciled his followers to all the hardships of the expedition, and fully reestablished his popularity.

CONTEMPLATION THIS WEEK