Grief

“He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”  Isaiah 53:3

Grief –  Has sorrow ever made you sick?  Sometimes it doesn’t take a virus or toxic bacteria to make us ill.  Sometimes all it takes is intense pain.  Job had the right idea (Job 33:19).  In this life, there is no avoiding pain.  Did you notice that Isaiah says that the suffering servant is a man of pains (plural)?   That’s what the word “sorrows” means.   I often deserve my pain.  It comes as a result of my sin.  But Jesus was innocent.  His pains were cast upon him because of our sins.  Now Isaiah says that all of the pains that he bore for others “acquainted him with holiy“, the Hebrew word for sickness.  Jesus knew what it was like to be sick from sin – my sin.

Sin is more than physical ailment.  Sin is moral sickness.  And it is mental illness too.  Sin is the ultimate form of mental breakdown.  It distorts my reality so much that I think I can be my own god.  Sin in the final insanity because it propels me to do the very things that drive me away from life.  No wonder Paul cries out, “Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”

If you have never reached the point of sin sickness, you haven’t understood the full mission of Jesus.  We can regret our mistakes.  We can experience remorse over our failures.  We can even repent of our immoral past.  But the day will come when we will realize that sin is the sickness of death.  That death sickness is what Jesus took on himself.  It wasn’t just the pain and the torture.  It was the death disease that ransacked our lives over and over and over.  Jesus stepped into my life and said, “I’ll take this horrible disease on me so that you can be well with God.”

When I revisit my illness unto death, when the tortured cells of my body and my mind drive me back toward those days of endless haunting, I need to hear his voice more than ever.  “By his stripes I was healed”.  Jesus took my illness away from me just as surely as he healed the lepers.  My body was rotting away, beyond my control when he grasped me in his arms and let the sickness pass to him. 

God, forgive me for imagining that my sin was a moral inconvenience.  I hammered in the nails too.