Reading: “Reproach hath broken my heart.”—Psalm 69:20
Pause over the subject and think that the whole mass of sufferings of Jesus was crowned with the rebuke of the Father. This was the greatest and heaviest weight in the whole curse. Nothing weighed so hard on Jesus as the Father’s rebuke. To search into the depths of this is impossible. What human or even angelic intellect can fathom it?
Could not this have been spared Jesus; must the rebuke of the Father be also in the curse? When Jesus made His soul an offering for sin, would not the Father of mercies, and God of all consolation, shew the least portion of favour to His dear Son? But think, it pleased the Father to bruise Him, to put Him to grief.” We cannot explain the extremity of the Redeemer’s sufferings, in the rebuke of the Father for sin, which broke His heart. When the Son of God assumed our nature He took upon Him the curse for sin. He was first made sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) and then a curse for us (Galatians 3:13). As such, he was invested with everything belonging to the frailties of our nature. The sentence of the fall was, “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19) so that the curse, then seizing the human nature of Christ, at once tended to waste all the animal spirits, and to induce a state of mind peculiarly low and dejected. Agreeably to this, we find, that the holy Jesus, though it is once said of Him, that in that hour “he rejoiced in spirit,” when the devils were subject to His name (Luke 10:18–21.) yet is it never said of him, that He was once seen to laugh.
As the sinner’s surety, He sustained everything of sorrow which belonged to God’s curse against sin; and became marked with affliction in a way that made the horrors of death more tremendous and bitter, so much so that the very sun became darkened at mid-day with the forsaking of the Father. This was the rebuke of the Father, and by bearing it silently He swallowed up death in victory.
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