David Morris

Divine Wounds

Sometimes I think it sounds a little cheesy when people describe a particularly compelling Bible verse as "jumping off the page at them." My experience has normally been that verses become meaningful, not at first glance, but after repeated meditation. In this case, however, perhaps both ideas were in action. Call it jumping off the page, or arresting my attention, or what you will, my attention was riveted in an unusual way to I Peter 2:24.

I'd been reading through 1 Peter, and I was just getting ready to start chapter 3, so I was going back to get a little bit of context out of the end of chapter 2 when verse 24 halted my progress. I never did make it out of that verse in the time I had that morning.

I think it was the recurring pronouns and focus on Him contrasted with His creation. He himself...our sins...his body...upon the tree. He bore my sin.

He--Divine Son of God, perfection, love, truth, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Creator. He bore our sins.

Our sins--heinous, deliberate, rebellious, recurring, disgraceful, God-hating.

And He bore those in His very own body. No transcendant eradication, no distant fix, no wooden agent. Genuine flesh and blood of God incarnate.

In the 4th century, Athanasius described it:
"What—or rather Who—was it that was needed for such grace...as we required? Who, save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of nothing?.... For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are.
But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us.... [Pitying] our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery ... He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.
Nor did He will merely to become embodied or merely to appear; had that been so, He could have revealed His divine majesty in some other and better way. No, He took our body.... He, the Mighty One, the Artificer [Creator] of all, Himself prepared this body in the virgin as a temple for Himself, and took it for His very own, as the instrument through which He was known and in which He dwelt.
Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us."

...by His wounds you have been healed.

It took Divine wounds to heal me.

Was my sin so great, my offense so extensive, my ability to make amends so impoverished? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The Puritan John Flavel put it, "Judge the greatness of the wound by the breadth of the plaster." The plaster had to be the spotless Lamb, the great "I am", the Son of the only God. I had an enormous wound, and it took Divinity in flesh to heal me.

This isn't the first time Peter has been awed by the greatness of the Sacrifice. You were not redeemed with corruptible things,
but with precious blood...

And what did that Divine sacrifice accomplish? What can you get in exchange for precious blood? What kind of healing comes from Divine stripes?

so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness...

His death made it possible for me to die to sins and live for righteousness. I could never do either of those things on my own! In fact, I'm not so sure I'm doing them well right now. I have willfully contradicted Christ's purpose in His extravegant gift of Himself. Every time I live to sins and die to righteousness, when I run to sin and live for self, or flirt with sin and only dabble with righteousness, I am living contrary to the very purpose and provision of Christ's agonizing stripes.

It took Divine wounds to heal me, and precious blood to buy me.
But they did. And now I'm free to sin no more! And to live doing righteousness!

Will I?

Will you?

Posted by apelles at November 11, 2003 04:51 PM