WHAT DID OUR REPENTANCE ACTUALLY MEAN TO US?

“…The chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed”

(ISAIAH 53:5).

Have you ever really considered what it meant for Isaiah to report that “the chastisement of our peace was upon him”?

 

A chastisement fell upon Jesus so that we as individual humans could experience peace with God if we so desired. How few there are who realize that it is this peace—the health and prosperity and welfare and safety of the individual—which restores us to God!

 

But the chastisement was upon Him. Rebuke, discipline and correction—these are found in chastisement. He was beaten and scourged in public by the decrees of the Romans. They whipped and punished Him in full view of the jeering public, and His bruised and bleeding and swollen person was the answer to the peace of the world and to the peace of the human heart.

 

We who are forgiven, and justified sinners sensed in our own repentance only a token of the wounding and chastisement which fell upon Jesus Christ as He stood in our place and in our behalf. A truly penitent man does not feel that he can actually dare to ask God to let him off—but peace has been established! The blows fell on Him!

 

Isaiah sums up his message of a substitutionary atonement with the good news that “with his stripes we are healed.”

 

  1. W. Tozer