Download Isaiah 53 01 Lent Midweek 4 2015 3 11

“His Injuries, My Healing” – Isaiah 53:1-12
Lent Midweek 4 – March 11, 2015
Pastor Chip Winter
Grace to you and Peace, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,
Amen. The text for our sermon is the Old Testament lesson appointed for this service and read for
us from Isaiah’s 53rd chapter.
My dear family in Christ, when the subject of injuries comes up, as it does in the title of this
sermon, I imagine there are many of us who can point to a variety of scars whose origins can be
traced back to childhood “learning experiences”, adolescent sports, and various accidents and
surgeries along the way. Originally, wherever they happen to be, these were never to come to the
light of day.
We were made perfect in the Garden of Eden. We were constructed for a very, very long
haul.
But the image of God in which we were formed was tarnished by our descent into sin. With
Adam and Eve’s disobedience/rebellion the punishment for sin was the degradation of not only
humankind but the world. Recall that the wages of sin – ultimately death – are also known in the
heaviness of labor: both the toiling, sweat-of-one’s-brow-to-make-a-living kind and the delivery-ofbabies kind. We experience it, too, when we aren’t paying attention and allow for the competition
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for supremacy in the household: one will try to have their way through their wiles, the other through
brute strength and size.
Sin’s toll, in both physical and emotional illness, still faces a formidable foe in the resilience
of the body. Most of our cuts and bruises will receive their healing simply over the passage of time,
the body wondrously knitting itself back together.
Even after the fall into sin, this body works remarkably well. According to Dr. John Medina,
a genetic engineer at the University of Washington (lecture at Multnomah Bible College, 1995):
The average human heart pumps over 1,000 gallons a day, over 55 million gallons in a
lifetime. This is enough to fill 13 super tankers. It never sleeps, beating 2.5 billion times in a
lifetime.
The lungs contain 1,000 miles of capillaries. The process of exchanging oxygen for
carbon dioxide is so complicated that "it is more difficult to exchange O for CO than for a
man shot out of a cannon to carve the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin as he passes by."
The body uses energy efficiently. If an average adult rides a bike for 1 hour at 10
mph, it uses the amount of energy contained in 3 ounces of carbohydrate. If a car were this
efficient with gasoline, it would get 900 miles to the gallon.
Regardless, death and damnation always await. Born in our original sin we are dead in our
trespasses, agents actively set against God. For that reason Jesus came into the world for our
healing.
But in what might be considered to be a counter-intuitive strategy, He would accomplish
this through His injuries. Yet, if we think about it long enough we conclude, yes that’s the way it
had to be. Someone had to pay for it – the sin, that is. This was foreseen in the text from Isaiah
already read for us. This was predicted, foretold by our God as the way in which He would redeem
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us back to Himself. This was to give our forefathers hope as they awaited the instrument of their
salvation. It gives us comfort and encouragement to learn that we, the wayward children, have
always been on the mind of God.
These injuries, these stripes that cause our healing are no mean thing. Jesus, the sinless Son
of God, was made to be the sin of all the world of all time – how repugnant that must be to God. He
has been awake 36 hours before the torture begins. He is beaten numerous times, mocked and
whipped. He carries the 110 pound patibulum or crossbar in His weakened condition for perhaps a
quarter of a mile on an incline and who knows what abuse He suffered on the way. The crown of
thorns has been pressed into His brow, the nails driven through each of His extremities. He labors
under the damnation of His Father until, finally, the punishment has been completed. It is finished.
The ascertainment of this completion is a note to us. Instead of breaking the legs of Jesus, as
they did to the two thieves to make certain that they could no longer push up to enable them to expel
the carbon dioxide from His lungs, they pierce His side. This is in fulfillment of God’s plan for our
forgiveness as well.
We see later in John that such was predicted. 36 For these things took place that the
Scripture might be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken.” 37 And again another
Scripture says, “They will look on him whom they have pierced.” Also, it further ties Jesus to
the foreshadowing made by the Passover Lamb. None of the limbs of the animal whose blood
would protect the Israelites in Egypt from the angel of death were to be broken, either.
It is this blood of Jesus that cleanses us, that heals us from our sin-sickness. It assures us of
forgiveness and of our life with God now and forever and it is for the blessing of all: also, on either
side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.
The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. (Rev. 22:2)3
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The injuries sustained by our Lord are also our source of comfort for our brothers and
sisters. 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and
God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to
comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are
comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ
we share abundantly in comfort too.
His injuries, My healing. His injuries and His resurrection – our healing now and always.
Amen.
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