Isaiah 53:3 “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
Our Beloved Savior was “acquainted with grief” through physical abuse, through rejection, through unjust legal actions, and through the shame of our sin that He bore within Himself. Through His Psalmist, our Lord expressed it this way: “Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.” (Psalms 69:20). He is God; but, for our sins He suffered a “broken … heart” and He felt the heavy weight of His sufferings in His body. This is written to emphasize to us that, though He is God, He experienced more painful “grief” in His mind and in His body than any human being could possibly endure. When asked, “What are these wounds in thine hands?”; He answered, “Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.” (Zechariah 13:6). The greatest pain in “grief” of all, is the pain of a “broken heart” when someone that you dearly love forsakes you. Our Lord’s greatest “grief” was the indescribable pain He experienced when He “who knew no sin” was “made … to be sin for us”; He suffered it so “that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (II Corinthians 5:21). We all “have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6). When His people learned that it was them that had brought the pain of this great “grief” upon Him; they pitifully cried, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37)! “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2:38). An unknown Hymnist wrote, “O, give me, Lord, my sins to mourn, My sins which have Thy body torn; Give me with broken heart to see Thy last tremendous agony.”; the point is, as we experience the painful shame and “grief” of our own sin, then we have some understanding of just how grievously our Beloved Lord suffered when He was “made … to be sin for us” as He was bearing our sin away from us. Our Baptism declares that we believe that our Lord fully and finally redeemed us from the penalty of our sin; and, it declares our faithful commitment to Him and His worshipful service. The benefit, in this life, of our Baptismal Commitment to Him, is “the gift of the Holy Ghost”; that is we experience “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23 Meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22-23); which “is in all goodness and righteousness and truth” (Ephesians 5:9)! Knowing of His Suffering “grief”; “let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name” (Hebrews 13:15).