Part 2:The World's Greatest Hero - Christ Crucified.

Preached at Gateway 24th February 2013
Isaiah 53.1-9
Hospital - Healing

Focus verse – ’But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and

by his wounds we are healed’, v5.

Main theme: Jesus is wounded so you can be healed.

Introduction

Today is part 2 of our preaching series, The World’s Greatest Hero – Christ Crucified.  Just to remind you or if you’re here for the first time, we’re looking at - in the run up to Easter Sunday - at the most famous death in history, the death of Jesus Christ.  In particular we’re looking at different images and metaphors that that Bible, the Word of God, presents to explain this one message of the death of Jesus and his resurrection. 

The truth is this, you will never understand Jesus Christ, until you understand Jesus Christ Crucified.  Not Jesus Christ Superstar – but Jesus Christ Crucified.

Our focus verse today from the Bible is – ’But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed’, Isaiah 53.5.

The cross restores your health – hence picture of a hospital ambulance.  Christianity is not just a crutch, it’s the best hospital in the world.  The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart, and Jesus is the only qualified surgeon to deal with the heart problem - sin.  It’s only Jesus who can remove it.  Or to put it another way, through the lens of Isaiah, Jesus was pierced, he was crushed, he was punished, he was wounded, so you can be healed.  Jesus is your substitute.

Ajith Fernando, an Sri Lankan theologian asked, “Have you ever had an infected wound or sore?  When you open it what comes rolling out?  Pus.  And what is that?  It is basically the collective corpses of white blood cells fighting the infection that have died so that you may live.  Do you see?  Substitutionary salvation is in your very blood.”

Jesus is your substitute.  He dies in your place.  Consider this – Jesus is wounded so you can be healed.  Let’s have a closer look.

1) A Suffering God : ‘By his wounds...’ v5.

Isaiah 53.1-9 is part of a very moving chapter that speaks of the suffering servant of God.  What stands out is that the suffering of this servant brings healing and wholeness to others.  It’s no wonder that the church in the New Testament, 700 or so years later, understood this chapter in the light of Christ.  There’s no cover up as to who the New Testament writers think the identity of this suffering servant is – it’s none other than the Crucified Christ.  For example, the apostle Peter, perhaps the one closest to Jesus during his earthly ministry, writes this about Jesus, ‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Pet.2.24).  Do you make the connection there?  Where does Peter get the phrase ‘by his wounds you have been healed’?  Isaiah 53.5.

What Isaiah reveals here is the amazing Gospel, e.g. that God enters into your situation and he knows what it is like.  He shares in your pain and suffering.  Indeed, he knows what it is like to die.  ‘By his wounds...’

Let me give you a personal illustration.  I recently had an operation on my right knee to sort out some damage which had been accumulated over the years from playing football.  I’d never had an operation before...so it was really meaningful to me when I spoke to a surgeon who not only had performed the operation many times, but had also undergone the same operation on his own knee.  So the surgeon was speaking, in human terms, as both healer and sufferer.  Christ is both healer and sufferer.  By his wounds you are healed.

This is what makes Christ Crucified so different from every other founder of every other religion.  The God of the Bible knows what suffering is like.  The other day I was in Meadowhall and there was a shop there selling all sorts of ornaments, including various sized statues of Buddha.  I looked at this image of Buddha, with eyes closed, arms folded and legs crossed, with this detached look across his face and a slight vague smile round his mouth.  Has Buddha ever become human and experienced suffering?  Contrast Buddha to the one true living God who is not distant or removed from our world of pain and suffering.  Whilst there are still questions we cannot fully answer about pain and suffering, what we can declare is that the God we worship, Christ Crucified, knows exactly what it is like.  We only have to consider the cross, Isaiah 53 paints the picture of a suffering servant, the gospels fill in the detail of Isaiah’s vision of the torture of Christ, the crown of thorns twisted onto his head, his hand and feet nailed, his back already torn to pieces by two bouts of the most severe lashings possible.  So that’s our starting place, that when suffering crosses your path, God knows what it is like.  He has suffered.  He has been ‘wounded’.  God is a Suffering God.

2) A Healing God : ‘...we are healed’, v5.

‘By his wounds we are healed’.  Therefore, the Bible declares, you need to be healed.  Why?  Because you have been wounded by sin.  In our English language, the words ‘healing’ and ‘salvation’ tend to mean different things in our thinking.  But in the language of the Bible they are closely connected.  In Luke 7 we read about a woman ‘who had lived a sinful life in that town’ where Jesus was at that time (Lk.7.37).  The woman turned to Christ in a quite dramatic way (read Luke 7.36ff sometime).  Then Jesus says to her, in front of house full of people, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Lk.7.50).  In the original Greek language that Luke’s gospel was written in, the word ‘save’ has a range of meanings including ‘heal’ or ‘make whole’.  So it could be translated, quite fairly, into English as ‘Your faith has healed you’ or ‘Your faith has made you whole’.  So that is your first clue...that healing and salvation go together.

·        Psalm 41.4, “O Lord, have mercy on me; heal me, for I have sinned against you”.

·        Jeremiah 17.14, ‘Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved, for you are the one I praise’.

You may ask, ‘healing from what, I feel in quite good shape at the moment?’  Let’s for a moment define what is sickness?  It’s the state of being ill.  It is a condition which is some kind of deterioration from a healthy state.  It’s some kind of failure in the body or some kind of virus invasion.  You know something is wrong when you compare your condition to what you know to be healthy.  The alarm bells in your body start ringing when you are sick.  So to be healed is to be restored to good health. 

But let’s go to another level with this.  There is a sense that you know as person, even in good physical health, that something is wrong in life, your life.  Despite experiencing good health, deep down there is still something that doesn’t seem to be right in the world, in your own experience.  That’s the sickness which the Bible verses I’ve just quoted refer to. That you and I, the world we are part of, doesn’t operate as it should.  Whether it is the deception of horsemeat being found in what’s advertised as 100% beef burgers, or whether it’s Oscar Pistorius killing his wife, or whether it’s something happening under your own roof, behind closed doors of your household...it is the wound of sin.  It’s an open wound.  You can’t just deal with the symptoms and apply a nice plaster or some soothing cream.  Society is good at that – treating the symptoms.  We might throw money at the problems or seek a political solution, or turn to science, or apply the law of the land.  Whilst all these options may achieve some measure of success, and by the way I believe Christians should be at the forefront of these limited solutions e.g. I went to see my local MP on Friday about one or two concerns I have - nevertheless the root problem of the ‘sickness’ must be dealt with.  The Bible tells us that you are sinful and that you need salvation or healing.  You need restoring.  Indeed, creation needs remaking and renewing.  What Christ has accomplished on the cross achieves for you that healing, so that one day you shall be made whole.  You may yet experience physical weakness, but the promise of God is this for those who trust Jesus Christ - there’s coming a day when you shall be restored as God originally intended.  God is a God of Healing.

3) Present Healing and Future Healing

Let me say a word about present healing and future healing, so that we don’t confuse the sickness of the physical body with the sickness of sin.  Yes, the two are clearly connected, but we cannot affirm and assume that physical health is just as readily available to everybody as forgiveness of sins is – which is spiritual health.  We only have to read the New Testament, starting with Jesus and the Apostles to understand that physical suffering is part of being a Christian in this life, especially persecution. 

On the other-hand, let’s not underestimate God’s healing power of the body.  We can marvel at how God has ‘wired in’ to our bodies therapeutic processes which fight diseases and restores the body to well-being, especially these days through medical and scientific expertise.  Let’s declare that all physical healing is divine healing, including miraculous healing which is without human aid and is instant and permanent.  So I believe, based on the Bible’s teaching, that yes God heals people today – physically – as a sign of God’s love and mercy and power, often in response to pray.  Of course such people who experience physical healing will eventually fall sick at a later stage – so ultimately physical healing in this life is not the be-all and end-all.  Even those who are raised from the dead, and it’s happened, will eventually die again.  My point is this, we must not expect the sick to be healed and the dead to be raised on the same par as we expect sinners to be forgiven.  Or to over-emphasise physical healing at the expense of sins forgiven – spiritual healing, which is far more important.  To do so would be to emphasise the ‘already’ at the expense of the ‘not yet’.  What do I mean?  Let’s clarify...

There is coming a day – if you are a believer in Jesus - when you shall be completely healed, when physically you shall be perfected – never to experience physical weakness again.  There is coming a day when the dead in Christ shall be raised to eternal life, when all God’s people shall receive the full resurrected life – never to die again.  That is to come, that is the ‘not yet’ part which we wait for patiently.  The apostle Paul talks about how we groan inwardly for that day.  ‘We ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom.8.23).

Whilst we believe in physical healing today – naturally, medically, supernaturally – and often we pray to God for healing of people we know, it is not until Jesus returns, when the new life begins in all its fullness, will our bodies be TOTALLY FREE of sickness and death.  That part is the ‘not yet’ part which the cross of Jesus has accomplished.  To inherit that future you need to be forgiven today.  That’s why spiritual healing is more important than physical healing.  By his wounds, Christ Crucified, you have been healed.  This is what Isaiah 53.5 means.

So whilst sin brings the whole range of pain and suffering in its wake, because before sin there was no sickness or death, the death of Jesus offers a comprehensive cure for them all.  As the theologian Theodore puts it, ‘Here is a new and strange method of healing; the doctor suffered the cost, and the sick received the healing’.

Conclusion

The good news is that you can know that promise today.  It starts today.  But you need to admit you are sick, that you have the problem of sin.  It’s like seeing the Doctor, you admit your illness, you are prescribed some medicine. 

So to experience God’s healing – the forgiveness of sins, you must admit your sickness, that is the prerequisite for healing and wholeness in the long-term.  No admission of sin, no divine forgiveness.  Do you have the honesty and integrity to admit that you need care and help?

Mark 2.17, ‘On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners”. 

Where do sinners go?  To church!  It’s like a hospital ward, where you mix and mingle with other sick patients who are on the road to recovery, to learn about how to carry out the instructions of the doctor...Jesus Christ.  So you need to be healed from the sickness of sin which will ruin you eternally in its present condition.  But you must admit to God your condition, your sickness, your sin, that you have lived your own selfish way and not God’s way.  You must also believe in Jesus Christ, that by his wounds you are healed.  You cannot heal yourself, it’s only Jesus, by his death, his blood shed on the cross.  He sacrificed his life for yours.  He went under the knife instead of you.  He is your substitute, remember this is even illustrated in your own blood when your white blood cells fight infection and die in order for you to live.  But you must receive Christ into your life, be committed to changing your ways only possible by God’s Holy Spirit and likewise take up your cross and serve him in this world, whilst looking forward to the life to come in the new heaven and earth.

Let me close by sharing with you a scene from the film Ben Hur: a famous old film now – where there are some poignant and symbolic moments.  Yes, the film is centred on Ben Hur and his family at the time of Jesus, but the climax to the film and indeed the turning point it seems to me is the death of Jesus.  The significance of what is happening upon the cross is symbolised in different ways, e.g. Ben Hur’s mother and sister suffer from leprosy and at the moment of Jesus’ death they are cured.  There is a snapshot of Jesus on the cross clearly symbolising how Jesus heals our wounds.  What happens next is the two women walk out into the rain and the rain washes away the scabs of leprosy and filth from their faces.  Simultaneously, there is another snapshot of Jesus.  This time his blood flows down mixing with the rain on the ground as pools and streams are quickly formed – signifying how the death of Jesus and his shed blood cleanses the scabs and filth of our sins and washes them away.  This is the love of God – in all its fullness - that comes to you this afternoon. In Christ Crucified, God comes to your aid and gives you all you need.

’But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed’, Isaiah 53.5.

Opening questions for Q & A: Do you know of a better alternative to the truth of the Bible?  Have you experienced the healing of Christ Crucified in your life?

Prayer of commitment & faith:

Lord Jesus, I have done a lot of things wrong in my life.  I am sorry for going my own way instead of your way.  I am sorry for the life I have led without you.  Thank you for dying on the cross to forgive my sin and offering me complete healing that begins now and will be completed when you return.  I believe that by your wounds I am healed.  Please come and take first place in my life and make me the person you want me to be, filling my life with your healing power and sacrificial love.  Amen.