The Footprints of the Flock
“For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered, He threatened not; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously: who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we being dead to sins should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.”
I Peter ii. 21-25.
‘^^^[ITRAY sheep! Can you not see them? They have broken through some narrow opening in the fence; have wandered afar to browse on the sweet grass that enticed them forth; have been scared and driven by dogs, broken into smaller and ever smaller companies, till at last they wander alone, or fall into pits, or lie feebly bleating with exposure and fatigue, the easy prey of lion or wolf Far from the fold; torn, wounded, driven; panting with alarm; splashed and draggled with filth; certain to perish, unless rescued by the shepherd. Such were all of us. “We were as sheep going astray.”
How shall we ever sufficiently adore the Good, Great, and Chief Shepherd of souls, that He did not leave us to our hapless fate, but came after us — down mountain rent, through thorny brake, over jagged flints, seeking until He found us, and, laying us upon his shoulders, brought us back. We “are now returned.” Safe sheltered in his fold. Listening for Him to call us by our name. Bearing his name branded on us. Not dreading to be put forth to new duties, trials, or temptations, because so sure that “when He putteth forth his own sheep, He goeth before them; and his sheep follow Him.” But this following of the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls involves suffering.” Christ io6 ®Ij£ jFootprittta of tljE JFlorh.
also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that we should follow his steps.” It becomes us to mark well those footprints, as they lead down into the dark valley, ere they climb upward to the Resurrection and Ascension heights.
(i) The sufferhigs incident to the coyii7no?t lot ofuien. — “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” “Work is but one half of life; suffering is the other. There is a hemisphere of the wcrl.d in the sunshine of work; but there is another in the shadow of suffering.” All suffer, either in body or soul; in themselves or their families; from what they have or have not; through the malice of their fellows; the malevolence of wicked spirits; or their own follies and mistakes.
In all such sufferings, except the last, Jesus suffered. Whatever is meant by hunger, thirst, weariness, poverty, and toil, physical weakness and suffering, bereavement with its prostrating anguish. He knew. These things are common to man. Enduring these he earns his bread. Through these his character is formed. By these he acquires the mastery of nature. And because the Lord was found in fashion as a man, He bowed his royal head to endure them. Though Maker and Monarch of all. He chose the mendicant’s empty purse, the outcast’s fare, the exile’s bed, that no child of Adam should be able to boast of an excess or peculiarity of suffering, in the feeling of which He could not be touched. “He was made like unto his brethren.”
(2) There are also siifferittgs peculiar to Christ as Mediator and Saviour; — The Apostle lays stress on these as the necessary foundation of our relationship to God. He “suffered ybr us”; and the preposition unmistakeably denotes that He took upon Himself the curse and consequence of our sin, relieving us of it for evermore. And then as if to emphasize the work of mediation and substitution more emphatically, the Apostle quotes again from that great evangelic prophecy of Isaiah in which the Spirit of Christ testified so clearly beforehand of the sacrificial aspect of the Redeemer’s sufferings (Isa. liii.).
He bore our sins. — It is a sacrificial word. As of old the Jew “leaned hard” on the head of the victim destined to die for him, and the innocent lamb bare the burden, dying beneath its load, so did Jesus bear our sins in his own body on the tree. It was not the anticipation of approaching physical torture which bowed Him so low in Gethsemane, or pressed the bloody sweat from Him, as the feet of the peasant press the grapes in the autumn vintage. It was the foreboding of the pressure of our sins, which already began to crush his heart, and which broke it on the cross. No sufferer has ever experienced sorrow like this. There has been nothing like it in the history of the ages; nor will it admit of repetition. “Once in the end of the world hath He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself” In one of Adam’s race alone has this tragedy of love been possible: that the sins of untold myriads should “meet on Him,” and so be expiated and put away for evermore (Isa. liii. 6, mar.).
We must not linger long over the phrase which emphasizes the gift of /it’s own body to the work of our redemption. That body so purely born, which must have been a fair casket for the holy jewel it contained; which in the Jordan waters was first identified in outward seeming with the weight of human sin, though in itself without sin; which was the very shrine and home of God, who had prepared it for Him ;• which was the vehicle for so many blessed words and deeds of ministry — that body was made a sin-offering, and, so to speak, was burnt in fire without the camp, as the bodies of the bulls and goats under the Levitical law. Nor must we stay to compare that tree with the wood which Isaac carried on his strong young shoulders to Moriah’s brow. It is enough to know that it has taken deep root in our world, and is filling it with its spreading branches, beneath which even the fowls of the air are finding shelter — the true tree of life, whose fruits drop on all lands, and whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
But there is y. one consideration which claims our attention ere we pass on. Those sufferings, utterly unique and unapproachable by us, which rear themselves amid all compeers, in lonely and unapproachable grandeur, have for ever absolved us from having to bear the righteous penalty of the broken moral laws of God’s government. We may have to bear the natural consequences and penalties of our wrong-doings. The converted io8 ®{je JF0otpnnta of tire flock.
drunkard, though forgiven and delivered from the penalty of God’s wrath, will yet carry to his grave the marks and traces of his excess; though even these may be transmuted into blessings by the near presence of our Lord. Out of the eater will come forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness; but, as for the eternal, governmental, and judicial consequences of our sins, these have been borne for us, and have been exhausted in the sufferings of our blessed Lord. In the person of Jesus, the great God took them home to Himself, and put them away for ever. Because He has suffered them, we need not suffer them; because He has borne them, we need not bear them; because the stripes fell thick and heavily on Him, they need never fall on us. “By his stripes ye were healed.”
The slaves whom the Apostle was addressing understood full well the meaning of “stripes.” The Greek word means flie weal left by a stripe. From the grave the Saviour came, bearing the weals of many stripes, wound-marks in hands and feet and side; but those bruises and wounds tell a story which makes our hearts leap with joy. When the Great Shepherd, raised through the blood of the everlasting covenant, met his timid followers in the upper room. He bade them behold the print of the nails, and the scar in his side. “Then were the disciples glad.” And as we consider the Lamb, “as it had been slain,” and discern those precious memorials of his finished work on our behalf, we too may break forth into new songs, like those in heaven. Those stripes are the price of our redemption, the evidence of our purchase, the sign- manual of pardon. Let us then appropriate these triumphant words, and the whole verse of which they form the appropriate close; and let each of us dare to say, not because we feel it, but because we accept it as the word of God, which cannot be broken: “He was wounded for my transgressions; He was bruised for my iniquities; the chastisement of my peace was upon Him; and with his stripes am healed.”
But the death of our Lord Jesus has a double aspect. — It looks first towards the justice of God, to which it rendered an adequate equivalent for our many sins. This was altogether independent of us, for whom it was given. But it also looks towards man in the effect it produces on those who rightly apprehend it. “That we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness.” There is a remarkable coincidence of testimony between this statement and that in Rom. vi. Indeed, in these words we strike one of the main seams of Scripture teaching. In the sight of God, we are reckoned as being so identified with our Lord that what is predicated of Him is also true of us. Dead in his death. Raised in his resurrection. Seated with Him in his glory. And it should be the purpose and aim of our life to realize by faith in actual practice and experience all that is ours in the mind and purpose of God. Ye died: reckon yourselves dead. Ye are risen: set your affection on things above. Ye are seated in heavenly places: walk worthy of your high calling. By the grace of God, there should be a perpetual deadness to every appeal that comes from the flesh, the world, or the devil; and an ever fuller response to the inspirations and appeals which come from the Spirit of God to a life of righteousness.
The mediatorial sufferings of Christ do thus involve some suffering to us. Because we must submit to daily death; we must take up our cross and follow Him; we must sow ourselves, falling into the ground to die. A perpetual self-denial; a setting up of the cross in our lives; a conformity to his death; a drinking of his cup; a baptism into his sufferings — all these are the indispensable conditions of that salvation from the love and power of sin which He has wrought out for us. But in no deeper sense can we follow in his steps as the Substitute, Mediator, Reconciler, and High Priest of men.
(3) The sufferings of the sinless Man. — That He was sinless was universally attested. No lamb or heifer was ever so searched for blemishes as was He. Judas, who knew Christ’s innermost history, declared that he had “betrayed innocent blood.” Pilate repeatedly insisted that he could find no fault in Him at all; And the only charge that the priests could substantiate against Him was his assumption of Deity. “He did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth.” He did not say. Yea and Nay; but all the promises of God in Him were no i;ije ^ootprtttta of tlje Jlork.
yea, and, through Him, amen. He was the true and faithful Witness.
And how lovely was his silence before his accusers. Silent before the Sanhedrim, whilst the false witnesses hopelessly involved themselves. Silent before Herod, so that from entering his halls to leaving them, no word escaped his lips — emblem of the silence of God to those whose natures are closed to Him. Silent before Pilate, except when that poor craven soul gave expression to thoughts and questionings which surged up from its very depths. Silent in the Palace-hall. Silent in the Praetorium. Silent on the cross, save in words of blessing and prayer.
But how inevitable it was that holiness like His, even though so still and uncomplaining, which did not strive, nor cry, nor lift up, nor cause its voice to be heard in the streets, should come into collision with the spirit of his time; and in that collision suffer bitterly! As the shining of the sun brings out the poisonous fumes of the stagnant pool, so did the presence of Jesus among men stir up the evil of human hearts; and that evil must in itself have been a cause of awful sufifering to one so sensitive, so delicate, so holy as He was. The keener the appreciation of musical harmonies, the intenser must ever be the agony of a discordant note.
Sum up, if you can, the ingredients of suffering in Christ’s cup. That the race with which He stood in such close identification was so steeped in sin that He was compelled to breathe our polluted atmosphere, all the more terrible, in contrast with that of the world from which He had come, as the foul miasma of a foetid court or room is the more distressing to those who have just entered it from the fresh outer air; that He was misrepresented and misunderstood and held guilty of sins against the divinest traditions of his people; that He was treated as a madman, and as possessed of weakened intellect; that He was obliged to endure the contradiction of sinners against Himself; that He was opposed and hated by those whom He yearned to save; that He was exposed to the temptations of men and devils — are not all these footprints of suffering flecked with blood, which substantiate the frequent references of this eye-witness to the sufferings of Christ?
In all this He has left us an example that we should follow in his steps. It is inevitable that we should pass through many of the same experiences. The Christ-life in us must pass through the same stages of development, and meet with the same treatment, as it did in Him. The world is not more friendly than in the long past to the Master’s spirit; and in proportion as we are animated by it shall we be brought into the same collision with the spirit of human society, and suffer from its incongruity to the holiest instincts of the soul.
Expect to be reviled and buffeted, misunderstood and misrepresented, cast out and crucified, as He was. The sheep cannot expect to fare better than the Shepherd; nay, they know that they are on his track, when constrained to follow in his footprints of suffering and sorrow. But the end will be glorious, when the whole flock are gathered on the hills of eternity. If we died, we shall also live, with Him. If we suffer, we shall also reign, with Him. “Ye are they which have continued with Me in my temptations; and I appoint unto you a kingdom as my Father hath appointed unto Me.”