I Peter 2:24

     Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness – by whose stripes you were healed. 

     We come now to a magnificent verse.  We can hardly study it without falling on our knees.  Jesus, our Lord bore our sins in His own body.  Look who took our sin!  It is not just a heroic man or a kindly stranger; it is Jesus – the sinless, matchless, peerless, immortal Jesus.  If there were ever anyone who should never have tasted the sting and pain of sin, it should have been Him.  Yet He volunteered to bear my sins.  Are we not humbled to the point of kneeling before Him and tremblingly stutter out words of thanks?  And whose sins did He bear?  My sins.  I am sinful, insignificant, unworthy, and prone to repeat the same mistake more than twice.  If there were ever a man born who was less worthy of having a savior lift his sins from his back, it would be me.  And yet I was healed when my Savior bore my sins on His own body on the tree.  How can I rightfully respond?

     We thank doctors for healing our diseases, and yet what do they really do for us?  They point us to a cure and then require that we pay them for it.  A doctor sacrifices nothing to gain us a cure, and yet we shower him with praise and gratitude for restoring our health.  But look at the means by which Jesus cured us of our sin.  It is as if we came to Him with our broken arm and in order to heal us – His arm is broken.  We ask Him to treat our headache, and we are cured when his head pains Him instead.  We, the sick, come to our Healer with our diseases and syndromes and cancers and torments and when we leave Him we are cured – because those things which tortured us are left to torment Him.  For a Physician like that, we would rightly, gladly pay Him all we had.  Our Great Physician Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree -- and by His suffering we are healed.  How can we adequately thank Him?  This same verse begins the answer: “that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness.”  Since our sins have caused Jesus such anguish, let us despise sin.  Let us put to death our willingness to sin and make all effort to “live for righteousness.”  Seeing the anguish that our sin caused Jesus, how can we turn our back on this great show of love and mercy and willingly sin again?  Let us hate sin, the sin which Jesus bore to His own grief, and let us love Jesus who bore our sin that we might be freed of its weight.