Duncan Christian Reformed Church

The Passion of Christ

Many have seen how gruesome the suffering of Christ was when they witnessed Mel Gibson's portrayal of in the movie, "The Passion of the Christ" (2004). The beating, the striking by wicked fist, the scourging by hooked whip, the 5 to 7 inch long nails smashed through his hands and feet were horrible and devastatingly cruel. It was a physical torture that was inhumane and presented humanity at its worst. Yet the Bible makes it clear that the physical suffering was barely noticeable compared to the suffering of soul that the Son of God experienced that day. God viewed Jesus as sin that day, and all the disgust and anger of God was poured out on Jesus (2 Cor 5:21).

How are we to understand the anger of God? Many of us have very bad experiences with this sometimes violent and unpredictable emotion. When God is angry at sin, it's not as though he flies off the handle for no reason at all. Neither is it true that God loses his temper at the most trivial of provoking. God's anger is never malicious, never spiteful, never vindicative. John R.W. Stott makes these observations and writes, "The wrath of God... is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations." God hates sin because of what it does to us as humans. F.F. Bruce writes that humanity, "created by God for his glory, was prevented by sin from attaining that glory until the Son of Man came and opened up by his death a new way by which humanity might reach the goal for which it was made": the glory of God.

The book of Hebrews gives a keen insight into Jesus, and to us his children. "In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering" (Heb 2:10). As the author of our salvation, he was "one who began" something as first in a series (this from Walter Bauer's Greek Lexicon). He suffered death, he tasted death for us (Heb 2:9) and so came into glory when God raised him from the dead. The most significant part of suffering is the temptation that goes with it (Heb 2:18): to despair, to not believe, to wonder where God is, to come to a place where we believe not even God can resolve the issue. Jesus ":learned obedience through what he suffered" (Heb 5:8); that is, he did not stay up in heaven in the comfort of his glory, but became deeply involved in the world the way it is, with all its brokeness and sin, finding out for himself how hard it was to trust in God. Yet he did trust, despite the hardship of it all. His passion is his suffering, and he leads the way for us who follow him. He suffered and came into glory; we suffer, and one day will also attain glory (Rom 5:2), coming back to God's original intent for us.

Pastor Walt Vanderwerf