“When Jesus took the curse upon Himself, He so identified with our sin that He became a curse… At the moment that Christ took upon Himself the sin of the world, He became the most grotesque, most obscene mass of sin in the history of the world… I have heard many sermons about the physical pain of death by crucifixion. I’ve heard graphic descriptions of the nails and the thorns. Surely the physical agony of crucifixion was a ghastly thing….
“Just imagine what the weight of the sins of the world felt like. Just imagine the one man ‘who knew no sin’ being ‘made to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God… For the sins of abortion, adultery, anxiety, arrogance, backbiting, bearing false witness, bitterness, blasphemy, boasting, bribery, complaining, coveting, contention, coarse joking, deceit, defrauding others, despising the poor, dishonoring the government, disregarding the Lord’s people on the Lord’s Day, disrespecting your parents and…
“If I understand Gethsemane at all, it means that Jesus loves me even more than I can imagine. It is not just that he died for me, but that he died this horrible, damnable, God-forsaken death that no one would ever want to die. He died this death because there was no other way for sinners to be saved, no easier road to redemption, no alternative to the cross… We will never have to suffer what our Savior suffered in…
“Even if we cannot feel God in our darkest and most dry times, he is still there. And so there is no more basic way to face suffering than this: Like Job, you must seek him, go to him. Pray even if you are dry. Read the Scriptures even if it is an agony. Eventually, you will sense him again—the darkness won’t last forever. The strength you need for suffering comes in the doing of the responsibilities and duties God…
“Here is the heart of the plan of God and the wonder of the gospel. The best of all men dies as though He were the worst of all criminals… God can point us to the cross and say: ‘Do you see how much I love you?’ ‘I was prepared to bear My own judgment against your sin in the person of My own Son.’ ‘If I was prepared to do that for you, there is nothing I will withhold from…