He Knows

The next time you’re with a half dozen women - at lunch with some coworkers or swinging the kids at the park - take a good look at them. In all likelihood, one or two of them carry a memory of a time when they were assaulted. In a typical congregation this may be true for 35 or 40 women.

Scripture tells us in Isaiah 53:3 that Jesus bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. But how can He make that claim? What does He know about being a woman? He came to earth as a man, in society that treated women like property.

According to the gospel of Matthew, after Jesus was sentenced to crucifixion, the soldiers guarding Him gathered the entire battalion to watch as they stripped Him, slapped Him around and made sport of Him. They didn’t humiliate Him secretly in some hidden place, but publicly. They did it for kicks, because the power they had over Him made them feel strong. Jesus knows the shame.

He was also heartbreakingly vulnerable. No sin had ever come between Him and the Father. He was more innocent than any little child ever was, but He allowed sin - our sin - to rob Him of His innocence. He knows that pain.

But our sin does not diminish His holiness. God does not look at Jesus and see Him used and stained with sin. Hebrews 7:26 describes the risen Christ as “holy, innocent, undefiled.” In the same manner, we who are alive to God in Christ Jesus, walk in newness of life, and His blood is like Scotchguard for our souls: sin’s stain does not penetrate, and we are precious and holy and pure in His sight.

If so many women carry such memories, then so do the men who abused them. Christ felt their shame and dishonor and reproach when He bore it for them on the cross. He put away their sin by the sacrifice of Himself. In Christ, each man now can be a man of “honor, sanctified, useful to the Master, prepared for every good work.”

Although He was God’s Son, Jesus learned obedience from the things which He suffered. He knew that His persecutors had been created in the image of God to do good works. Grieved at their hardness of heart, He responded with love and righteous anger, yet without sin. The Man who taught other to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them, looked on the faces of His abusers and prayed, “Father, forgive them, for the know not what they do.” As God gave Him grace, Jesus bore the painful consequence of their sin, and rose up victorious over it.

God loves all His children and gives them all things freely. What He did for our Brother Jesus, He will do for us. If we ask Him, He can enable us to see our abusers not as they are, but as He meant them to be. He shows us how we can be angry, yet without sin. By His strength we can endure the pain, and by His grace, we can forgive. He may do all these things for us in a single moment, or He may allow us to work through them over a period of time. Either way, the result is the same: The Lord heals the brokenhearted, and binds up our wounds; He has risen over the past things, and He raises us in triumph with Him.

Scriptures

Romans 6:11
Romans 6:4
Psalm 69:19
Hebrews 9:28
1Timothy 2:21
Hebrews 5:8
Matthew 5:44
Luke 23:34
Mark 3:5
Ephesians 4:29
Romans 8:32
Psalm 147:3
Colossians 2:12, 15
Colossians 3:3