The Pain Of The Cross

Matthew 27:1-50

One of the biggest struggles that many people have in accepting Christianity is the problem of evil, suffering, and pain. They say that if God is good, then why does He allow evil or if He is all powerful, then why doesn’t He abolish it? These are pretty pertinent questions and in reality fair questions. My intention in this devotion is not get into the cause of it as much as I want to address the reality of it in the Gospel message.

First of all, God did not deny the reality of evil, suffering, and pain, but indeed entered into the reality of it through the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We need to remember that He didn’t have to, but desired to, in order to reconcile the world of mankind unto God.

Second of all, not only did He enter into the world, He entered into the pain and suffering, feeling every aspect of them at our level, and in many ways to a greater depth than we could ever imagine.

Finally, when we see His death on the cross, we not only see God suffering for us, but with us. He suffered three types on pain on the cross, not only confronting pain, but triumphing over it.

The first type of pain is Physical. When we look at the physical pain that Jesus endured from His scourging, to the beatings, the crown of thorns, the weight of the cross, and finally the nails, we see Jesus experience a level of pain that most of us would never have to endure, but deserved!

The second type is Emotional. Christ being the creator of mankind was rejected by His creation that He loved and this caused Him much emotional anguish and grief. I had an old college friend who killed his parents a few years ago. I never would have thought that he would be capable of doing such an evil act. But that’s the power of evil. The one thing I keep imagining, as an outside observer of this event, is possibly the look in his parents eyes toward him as they lay there dying. I imagine this is the way Christ felt as He looked upon His creation that would become His murderers that day.

John said that “He (Jesus) came unto His own and His own received Him not.” I had an uncle who served two tours in Vietnam. His mental and emotional scars that he carried around with him for all of his life at times was pretty overwhelming. In his time there, he witnessed and experienced things that he could not talk about, dealing with not only his own pain, but as a medic the pains of others. But he told me that the worst pain, was the emotions he felt when he came back home, and was rejected, ridiculed, spit upon, and just simply ignored by the liberal protesters of the day. I am sure that Jesus experienced this same emotional pain as He was rejected by His own people.

Finally, there is the Spiritual pain. The Bible records seven sayings of Jesus on the cross. The one that describes the spiritual pain of Jesus is “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” Jesus experienced the greatest pain of all when God the Father had forsaken him as He became our sin-bearing sacrifice. No doubt this is the hell of hell. To be separated from a loving God, is the greatest anguish that one can experience. To enter in death without God is just the beginning of eternal evil, suffering, and pain. But thank God that this is the one pain that a believer in Christ will never have to suffer. He was forsaken so that we will never be forsaken in life or death.

In surveying these three types of pain we see that God not only acknowledged the reality of evil, pain, and suffering, but He conquered it through His death on the cross. Everything we experience in this fallen world, Jesus experienced and overcame it that we may have:

Joy in sadness

Patience in grief

A mediator in our struggles

Hope in despair

And a peace in the midst of chaos.

Jeremiah asked a question in Jeremiah 8:22 “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?” Yes there is a physician, there is a remedy, and there is a cure all found in one person; the person of Jesus Christ!

Pastor Robby