Acts 3:18

“But those things, which God before had showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he has now fulfilled.”

— Acts 3:18

Our adorable Lord was a sufferer—the Prince of sufferers—the Martyr of martyrs. None had ever suffered as He; no sorrow was ever like His sorrow. Scarcely had He touched the surface of our sin-accursed earth, before the cup of suffering was placed to His lips. The deep fountain of human woe, stirred to its very center, poured in upon His soul its turbid streams from every source and through every channel. Human malignity seized upon Him as its victim, and mingled the first draught that He tasted. Linked though He was by the strongest sympathies to our nature, descending though He had, to elevate, sanctify, and save him, man yet ranked himself among His first and deadliest foes. Oh that condescension and love to our race so profound should have met with a requital so base!

The necessity of Christ's sufferings is the chief point that arrests the mind in contemplating this subject. In His wayside conversation with the two disciples journeying to Emmaus, our Lord clearly and emphatically pronounced this characteristic of His passion—"Ought not Christ to have suffered?" The following considerations would seem to justify this plea of necessity.

The sufferings of Christ were necessary in order to accomplish the eternal purpose and counsel of God. To suppose that His sufferings were contingent, originating in the circumstances by which He was surrounded, is to take a very low and defective view of truth. But the light in which the Scripture presents the doctrine of a suffering Redeemer is that which gives the most exalted view of redemption, and reflects in the richest manner the glory of the Triune God. The truth we have now advanced, the apostle Peter embodies in his awakening discourse on the day of Pentecost, and which truth the Holy Spirit employed in the conversion of three thousand souls—"Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, you have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." Our Lord Himself confirms this doctrine when he says, "The Son of man goes, as it was determined." Dear reader, behold the fountain-head, where arise all those precious streams of covenant mercy which flow into your soul—the electing love of God, which constrained Him to present His beloved Son as an atoning Lamb for the slaughter, from before the foundation of the world! oh! that must be infinite love—vast love—costly love—unchangeable love—which had its existence in the heart of God towards you from all eternity. Oh, repair with humility and gladness to this holy and blessed truth. Welcome it joyfully to your heart as God's truth, from which you may not, you dare not turn, without robbing your soul of immense blessing, and incurring fearful responsibilities. And when by faith you stand beneath the cross, and gaze upon its glorious Sufferer, remember that in His death were fulfilled the eternal purpose and counsel of the Triune Jehovah; and that to predestination—rejected and hated as this truth is by some—you owe all that is dear and precious to you as a ransomed expectant of glory.

To fulfill the types and to make good the prophecies concerning Him, it was necessary that Jesus should suffer. The Levitical dispensation and the prophetical Scriptures point steadily to Jesus; they are replete with Christ crucified. He who reads and investigates them with his eye turned from Jesus will find himself borne along upon a rapid stream of prophetic annunciation he knows not where, and involved in a mass of ceremonial usages to him perfectly chaotic and unintelligible, "without form and void." But with the Spirit of God opening the spiritual eye, and moving upon the word, a flood of light is poured upon every page, and every page is seen to be rich with the history and effulgent with the glory of a suffering Messiah. Thus does our Lord assert this truth—"Think you that I cannot now pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?" Again, "But all this was done that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled." It was necessary, therefore, that Christ should humble Himself—should be a man of sorrows—should drink deep the cup of suffering, and should be lifted upon the cross, in order to authenticate the Divine mission of Moses, to establish the consistency of the Jewish dispensation, to vindicate the truth of the prophets, to fulfill the counsel of the Lord, and thus to verify His own most blessed word.