A SUGGESTION FROM THE MARGIN.
By G.
The common rendering of 1 Peter 2:24 is, “Who His own self bare our sins in His own body on the tree,” etc. The margin reads “to the tree.” From the expression in the text, the casual reader is apt to get the idea that it was only on the cross that Christ suffered for our sins; but the marginal reading, “to the tree,” or cross, indicates that He was bearing our sins before His crucifixion, had borne them all the way, and did not shrink even when confronted with the cross. Christ was a “Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” just because He was bearing our sins. This was His daily experience. His long and wearisome journeys; His incessant labors in preaching, healing, and privately instructing; His long nights of watching and prayer, were full of weariness and other forms of physical suffering; but these were nothing to His sorrow of heart because of the sins He was bearing for an ungrateful race. These were trifling compared with the agony of soul for those who would not be reconciled to God—the agony that caused Him to sweat “as it were great drops of blood.” The contemplation of the doom of His people who rejected His overtures of mercy, caused Him far more agony than the thought of suffering on the cross. His weeping over Jerusalem shortly before His betrayal, and His counsel to the weeping women while on the way to Calvary, show that His sufferings on the cross were a small part, if any part at all, of His concern. That had been contemplated in His mission when He became a willing sacrifice for sin. It was not the pain of the nails, but the turning of the Father’s face from One occupying the place of the condemned sinner, that caused Him to cry out, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” We would not imply that the sufferings on the cross were not all that any human imagination can picture, for as a cruel execution it was a really Satanic invention, but that was a comparatively small item in the process of bearing our sins. From the time He became the burden-bearer of fallen man in Eden, He bore our sins even “to the tree.” Nor did it cease there, for He is still the burden-bearer of all that will cast their burden upon Him; and by the turning away of those who have “tasted the good word of God,” He is “crucified afresh,” and put to “an open shame.” Verily the “mystery of godliness” is beyond our comprehension; but, praise the Lord, we may believe it unto salvation. G.