Suffering for Love
Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, [There is] no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, [our] faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53:1-4 NKJV
It’s hard to see the sweet face of a baby in this man, isn’t it? But before we can celebrate the blessed baby, we need to know why He had to be born. Isaiah 53:1-4 is a prophecy about what the baby Messiah would do when He became a man. Jesus came to this earth to bear our sorrows, to carry our griefs.
Even though we didn’t know Him or understand His purpose, He clothed Himself in flesh so He could bear our punishment in His body. People in Jesus’s day thought that God must be punishing Jesus because God let Him suffer and die.
But the truth is that Jesus agreed to suffer for us for one reason: love.