His healing stripes…

Seven hundred years before Jesus endured his final hour, the divinely inspired prophet Isaiah wrote down in precise detail how he would die. Words like pierced, bruised, and crushed all describe the scene brought on by the Jews and Romans on that fateful day, Good Friday. Many would have passed out from only a portion of what Jesus endured. Amazingly, he hung in there through the suffering. All for you and me.

Taking a look at the sacrifice he made, the torture, the humiliation, and how he was mentally and emotionally brought down by the weight of humankind’s sin, it’s mind boggling. What the Lord went through is stirring in the deepest of ways because what he suffered was what we deserved, not him. An innocent lamb led to slaughter. The marvelous mystery of God’s plan to redeem man through the scourges of his son is unfathomable. Though because of this miraculous feat, we are now set free. Set free spiritually from everything that besets our souls forever.

The compassion of God is truly greater than anything we’ll ever come to know. The more we dwell upon the flogging he endured… the stripes upon his back… the nails in his wrists, and the crown of thorns on his head, we more fully can understand the magnitude of his suffering. The greater meaning of it all, we’ll understand in heaven, but for now, we can rest in the truth of God’s word that these things were designed from the beginning for good.

The only remedy for the world’s sickness and disease of sin with all of its manifestations is the Lord. Isaiah tells us: “By His stripes we are healed.” We take medicine for our physical ailments, but the only medicine to cure our souls is the blood of the perfect lamb.