The context connects His opened ear and His not being rebellious with
His giving His back to the smiters. That involves the idea that these
indignities and insults were part of the divine counsel in reference to
Him. That same combination of ideas is strongly presented in the early
addresses of Peter, recorded in the first chapters of Acts, of which
this is a specimen: 'Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel
and foreknowledge of God, ye with wicked hands have crucified and
slain.' The full significance of Christ's passion as that of the
atoning sacrifice was not yet clear to the apostle, any more than the
Servant's sufferings were to the prophet, but both prophet and apostle
were carried on by fuller experience and reflection on what they
already saw clearly, to discern the inwardness and depth of these. The
one soon came to see that 'by His stripes we are healed,' and the other
finally wrote: 'Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the
tree.' And whoever deeply ponders the startling fact that 'it pleased
the Lord to bruise Him,' sinless and ever obedient as He was, will be
borne, sooner or later, into the full sunlight of the blessed belief
that when Jesus suffered and died, 'He died for all.' His sufferings
were those of a martyr for truth, who is willing to die rather than
cease to witness for it; but they were more. They were the sufferings
of a lover of mankind who will face the extremest wrong that can be
inflicted, rather than abandon His mission; but they were more. They
were not merely the penalty which He had to pay for faithfulness to His
work; they were themselves the crown and climax of His work. The Son of
Man came, indeed, 'not to be ministered to but to minister,' but that,
taken alone, is but a maimed view of what He came for, and we must
whole-heartedly go on to say as He said, 'and to give His life a ransom
for many,' if we would know the whole truth as to the sufferings of
Jesus.
Again, since Christ suffers according to the will of God, it is clear
that all representations of the scope of His atoning death, which
represent it as moving the will of the Father to love and pardon, are
travesties of the truth and turn cause into effect. God does not love,
because Jesus died, but Jesus died because God loved.
Further, it is to be noted that His sufferings are the great means by
which He sustains the weary. The word to which His ears were opened,
morning by morning, was the word to which He was docile when He gave
His back to the smiters. It is His passion, regarded as the sacrifice
for a world's sin, from which flow the most powerful stimulants to
service and tonics for weary souls, the tenderest comfortings for
sorrow. He sustains and comforts by the example of His life, but far
more, and more sweetly, more mightily, by that which flows to us
through His death. His sufferings are powerful to sustain, when thought
of as our example, but they are a tenfold stronger source of patience
and strength, when laid on our hearts as the price of our redemption.
The Cross is, in all senses of the expression, the tree of life.
Wonder, reverence, love, gratitude, should well forth from our hearts,
when we think of these cruel sufferings, but the deepest fountains in
them will not be unsealed, unless we see in the suffering Servant the
atoning Son.