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146
S.D.A. Bible Commentary Vol. 5
Son of God, knowing all the steps in His humiliation, that He must
descend to make an expiation for the sins of a condemned, groaning
world. What humility was this! It amazed angels. The tongue can
never describe it; the imagination cannot take it in. The eternal Word
consented to be made flesh! God became man! It was a wonderful
humility.
But He stepped still lower; the man must humble Himself as a
man to bear insult, reproach, shameful accusations, and abuse. There
seemed to be no safe place for Him in His own territory. He had
to flee from place to place for His life. He was betrayed by one of
His disciples; He was denied by one of His most zealous followers.
He was mocked. He was crowned with a crown of thorns. He was
scourged. He was forced to bear the burden of the cross. He was not
insensible to this contempt and ignominy. He submitted, but, oh! He
felt the bitterness as no other being could feel it. He was pure, holy,
and undefiled, yet arraigned as a criminal! The adorable Redeemer
stepped down from the highest exaltation. Step by step He humbled
Himself to die—but what a death! It was the most shameful, the
most cruel the death upon the cross as a malefactor. He did not die
as a hero in the eyes of the world, loaded with honors, as men in
battle. He died as a condemned criminal, suspended between the
heavens and the earth—died a lingering death of shame, exposed to
the tauntings and revilings of a debased, crime-loaded, profligate
multitude! “All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out
the lip, they shake the head.”
Psalm 22:7
. He was numbered with the
transgressors, He expired amid derision, and His kinsmen according
to the flesh disowned Him. His mother beheld His humiliation,
and He was forced to see the sword pierce her heart. He endured
the cross, despised the shame. He made it of small account in
consideration of the results that He was working out in behalf of, not
only the inhabitants of this speck of a world, but the whole universe,
every world which God had created.
Christ was to die as man’s substitute. Man was a criminal under
the sentence of death for transgression of the law of God, as a traitor,
a rebel; hence a substitute for man must die as a malefactor, because
He stood in the place of the traitors, with all their treasured sins upon
His divine soul. It was not enough that Jesus should die in order to
fully meet the demands of the broken law, but He died a shameful