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Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:4-6)

Last November, Mumbai, the largest city in India, was the target of a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that killed 173 people. Two of the victims were from Brooklyn, New York – a Jewish Rabbi and his wife, both in their late 20’s. Kashmiri militants entered the rabbi’s home and slaughtered the parents. The nanny found their 2-year-old son, Moshe, sitting in a pool of his parents’ blood.

When the memorial service took place in Brooklyn, New York, the two-year-old boy cried out for his slain parents. “Ima! Abba!” he said, using the Hebrew words for mother and father. Little Moshe’s weeping wail echoed through the synagogue, drowning out the voices of the hundreds of people mourning his parents’ death.

Do you ever ask Why? Why does God allow this kind of pain? Why is it that the world is such a messed-up, broken place? And yet why is it that we can see so much beauty in this world together with so much ugliness?

I have often wondered what it must have been like for those suffering in the Holocaust to have witnessed a beautiful sunset from behind the barbed wire of the concentration camps. How do you look at a gorgeous sunset, and at the same time see smoke from the smokestacks rising to the sky, smoke coming from the piles of burning bodies of men, women and children?

Why do the innocent suffer? Asking this question leads us to Jesus. Why did Jesus, the Innocent One, suffer the way he did? Isaiah gives us answer as he focuses on the suffering Servant. It is an ancient prophecy about Jesus Christ.

And Isaiah says of his people: “We like sheep have gone astray, and yet God has laid on him the iniquity of us all!” In other words, we are to blame. Our evil is responsible for the brokenness of the world.

Our powerful God created us to reflect his image, to rule wisely over creation. And we rebelled. Our good God called out a people, the children of Israel, to be the light of the world, the people through whom his blessings would flow. And they rebelled.

But where we as humans rebelled against God, and where Israel revolted against the Lord, Jesus submitted to the Father’s plan. He laid down his life in obedience. Where we as humans failed in our task to reflect God rightly and where Israel failed in her task to shine God’s love to the rest of the world, Jesus remained faithful. He accomplished God’s will in its fullness.

So there he is, upon the cross. Crushed for our iniquities. Bearing our sorrows. Taking upon himself our sin, our shame, our evil, our pain. The perfect Son of God puts himself in our place, taking the evil we have perpetrated against God, and suffering its horrible consequences.

You see, the cry of little Moshe was once the cry of Jesus. “Abba! Abba!” he cried in the Garden of Gethsemane. “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not my will, but yours be done.”

It is because of the cross that we know God is not absent from our suffering and pain. It is because of the cross that we can experience forgiveness and reconciliation and peace with God.

And so, as we see the evil of this world, and admit and confess the evil present in our own hearts, we too cry out: Abba! Abba!

Jesus is God’s answer to our cry.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2009 Kingdom People blog

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