Precious Blood 4 - R.C. Sproul

Now we've considered already the ways in which Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecy of the e suffering servant of the Lord that is contained so brilliantly in that chapter of Isaiah 53.  "Surely He has borne our sorrows..." and so on... 

But there is a line in there that is confounding.  There's a line in there that baffles us or to use the contemporary jargon "boggles the mind".  When the prophet is speaking the Word of God, listen to what He says.  "And it pleased the Lord to bruise Him."  Who can get their arms around that?  How can it please God to bruise His only begotten Son in whom He Himself is well-pleased? 

Doesn't that seem like a radical conflict of pleasure?  How could God take pleasure in the pain of His Son?  How can the Bible say by divine inspiration that it pleased the Lord to bruise Him?  To understand that, we have to go not only back to the prophet Isaiah, but many, many years in fact to eternity before the prophet even spoke.  Back to eternity when the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost agreed on God's eternal plan to redeem a fallen race, and God the Father sovereignly decreed that our redemption would be accomplished through the sacrificial death of His Son.  That He so loved the world that He would give that gift that was most supremely precious.  Not because He took delight in inflicting pain upon His Son in some sadistic cosmic form of child abuse.  The only reason it pleased Him was that He knew that by His Son's bruises, you and I would be healed. 

The bruises of Jesus are precious in the sight of the Father, and not only in the sight of the Father, but in the sight of the whole hosts of Heaven. One of my favorite texts in all of the New Testament is found in the book of Revelation, in the 5th chapter of that text. 

Before I get to that, let me give you a little background from chapter 4 where John says, "After this I beheld that a door was standing open in Heaven.  The first voice which I heard speaking to me like a trumpet said come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this. God pulled away the veil."  Well, John was in exile on the Island of Patmos and he said, John, I'm going to let you peak into the inner sanctum of Heaven itself." So John writes...  He said, "At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in the heaven with one seated on the throne, and He who sat there had the appearance...,"

Now listen to this...  "of gemstone, the appearance of jasper, Cornelia, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald, and around the throne were 24 thrones, and seated on the thrones were 24 elders, clothed in white garments with golden crowns on their heads.  I saw this throne and from the throne came flashes of lightning, and rumblings, and peels of thunder, burning torches of fire, and in front of the throne there was as it were a sea of glass like crystal."