It has become a curse for us!

[AI translation] Dear Brothers and Sisters! It sounds so simple to say that "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law" (Galatians 3:13a), especially when we have heard it so many times and in so many forms. For there is nothing else the Word speaks of among us but the fact that Christ has redeemed us. Who can say anything new here that we have not already heard in some setting? Nor do I want to say anything new now, but I would like the Lord, by His Holy Spirit, to show us something of His redeeming passion, so that we may have an inkling of what it is that has saved us? That we may feel something of the immeasurable weight of the revelation that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law! So that it may not sound so simple in our ears that Christ has redeemed us, but may make us fall on our knees before the Saviour!The most terrible thing that is written about Christ in the Bible is that He became a curse for us! It is terrible even to say it, let alone to do it! To imagine it is horrible, to be in it and suffer it! The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, the Holy One, who is Life and Truth itself: he has been cursed, not only cursed, damned or accursed, but cursed! What does this terrible expression mean?
That Christ became a curse: is expressed in the very outward appearance of His death. It must have been a terrible death! A few days ago, when I reread the passage in the Bible where Jesus tells His disciples of the sufferings that awaited Him, I was struck by this phrase: "The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men" (Mt 17:22b). It's a terrible thing when someone is helpless and vulnerable and falls into the hands of evil men. It is worse than being taken before wild beasts! Only man can really torture another man to death. "Given into the hands of men": it sounds like the parable of the Good Samaritan, "A man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who plundered and wounded him, and went away, and left him half dead." (Lk 10,30b)
And so did the men to whom it was given into his hands. No one can be more plundered than Jesus was when the King of heaven was tried on earth, chastised, condemned, stoned, beaten in the face, crowned with thorns, mocked, stripped of all his divine dignity, his heavenly glory! Then they wounded him. The forty lashes with which Pilate had him scourged were such a cruel punishment among the Romans that they were not even allowed to be inflicted on Roman citizens, only on the people of conquered lands! The strokes of the lead-tipped, five-pronged whip literally peeled the skin from the body of the bound victim. Most of the time the wretched man has already died! Our Lord endured! But what must it have been like afterwards, when Pilate again led him before the crying people, saying, "Behold the man!", we can get an idea from these words of the prophet Isaiah: "We looked on him, but his countenance was not desirable; he was hated and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and a physician of diseases!" They took him down and carried him on with another, not to lighten his load, but so that he would not die prematurely, for then his agony would end too soon. They fastened him to the cross with nails driven through his hands and feet. They did not kill him like an animal killing its prey, but tortured him slowly to death. His blood did not flow, but his death was caused by increasing convulsions, muscular fever and finally suffocation. It would have been impossible to imagine a more serious, painful, and shameful method of execution! This is what it meant to be "delivered into the hands of men"! It is a curse, but it is not a curse in itself; it gives a sense of the horror of having been cursed for us, but it does not fully exhaust it. It is an even greater horror!
The death of Christ was not only a horrible death, but a death which that word means in the Bible in all its fullness. So it is not only death, the end of life on earth, a state of death, but a total separation from God, the full burden of God's wrath, the full execution of God's wrath punishing sin, the full curse of the mighty and holy God's destructive judgment upon sin: that is, eternal death as the wages of sin, as the punishment of sin! The consuming fire of God's justice! Have you ever thought how horrible it must be to die in sin, to die in a trial with God, to die in a wrathful relationship with Him, and to go to God's judgment knowing that He is justly angry with me?! To die burdened with the sins of one life is a terrible thing. No wonder every man instinctively fears it! And Jesus not only instinctively suspected what death was, but consciously went to it, accepting it as the curse of God's wrath! And not only burdened with the sins of a single life, but crushed under the sins of the world, he entered into the divine judgment of sin, death! For "the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isa 53:6b).
This ancient Isaianic prophecy is expressed by the Apostle Paul: "He who knew no sin has made him to be sin for us" (2 Cor 5:21a). Imagine if we were to give a dirty, bloody, filthy, infected, wormy garment to someone to put on and put on: any one of us would turn away from such a garment in disgust and not even touch it with his hands! But let us go further: let us imagine, could any one do it, that a wretched man should have the dirty debts of one of us taken upon himself? Would he not say, "No, I won't take it, why did he run up that debt, why had he no more sense, why was he so frivolous? But to go further: would any of us take on the shame of another? Who would willingly take the name of a man defiled by sin? Or think of a wretched, scarred, disease-ridden man standing before you, with not a limb intact, covered with sores, with bleeding wounds, with disgusting diseases, and you would be asked to take his place, to take his disease upon yourself. You couldn't do that, could you? Yet it is still only a vague reference to what Jesus did for us. He took upon Himself our beggars' rags, He took our debts, He took our shame, He took our wounds. And that still does not express the horror of what this Word declares, that God "made him sin for us". The Holy One of God, the innocent One, Who knew no sin, in Whom was no sin: He was made sin, made into something so abominable, so abominable, so satanic! He takes sin upon himself like a horrible garment and must regard it as his own, must identify himself with something most alien to his being: sin! And therefore the King of Heaven can be surrounded by the armies of hell, at their mercy, they can take revenge on Him, they can do what they want with Him. They can kill Him, the Head and Source of Life!
God made His Holy Son sin for us, He became a curse for us! How terrible this must be, I understood, or rather, I suspected, when I once witnessed in my soul Jesus' agony in the garden of Gethsemane. It is written that he was on his knees praying, agonizingly begging for this bitter cup of curse to be removed from him. What a terrible thing it must have been that even the Son of God should have been repulsed by it, so much so that he sweated as when great drops of blood fall to the ground! The Jesus to Whom the forces of nature had yielded, Who had calmed the sea, From Whom the sickness had fled, Satan, Who knew no fear: now complaining, terrified, crawling on the ground, he groaned and agonized! Why? Because of the curse he must have been for us! For what redemption has cost! Is it not true that when a man looks into the fire, his eyes reflect the flames of the flames that have flared up and up? Jesus is in agony because he sees hell, and the flames of the horror of hell, of damnation, are reflected back in his bloody sweat, his writhing writhing, his terrible agony! What horror must hell be, that even the Son of God is shaken by its nearness?!
He has become a curse for us! Do you know what this means? It means that the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, has been damned, has suffered damnation, has endured it, has emptied God's cup of wrath, has filled the death penalty to the very last detail! "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree" (Gal 3:13), says our fundamental hymn. When it was written in the Mosaic Law, no one knew that it would also be fulfilled in Jesus. This is the old provision in the law, "If any man have a sin unto death, and are killed, and thou hang him upon a tree: his dead body shall not remain upon the tree by night, but thou shalt bury it the same day: for he is accursed of God which hangeth upon the tree: and thou shalt not defile the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance." (Deut 21:22-23) This provision was literally fulfilled in Christ. He is the One who hangs on the tree, and He must be taken down from the tree and buried before nightfall, before the sun goes down, so that the land which the Lord has given will not be defiled. He is the cursed one before God, Who hangs on the tree. But it was not because of Himself, but because of our sin of death, that He was put on the tree, it was because of our sin that He was cursed, it was because of our sin that He carried the curse of our sin to the tree and to the grave, it was because of our sin that He became so cursed that He had to be buried before the sun went down, so that He would not defile the earth with the curse of our sin. Yes: Christ took the curse on the whole human race with him to the grave, so that the earth would no longer be defiled, but would be cleansed: cleansed once and for all from sin and its curse, from damnation!
Do you see what the Lord has delivered you from, what a terrible thing death is, namely eternal death, damnation, hell, and from this he has delivered you! What a terrible thing is sin, from the curse of which he has delivered you! For for whom, or for what was all this hellish suffering, but for your sake and for mine? Can it be conceivable that it was only a majestically great divine spectacle that the mighty God wished to entertain the world with? Can it be conceivable that He would have given a piece of Himself to hell and damnation, if without this tremendous sacrifice the cause of man's salvation could somehow have been solved? Could it have been that the Anointed of God could have become damnation if He had not had to become it for us, if it had not been the only way and the only way from death to life? Could it not! In fact, it is very true, now we see how true it is, what Paul warns the Corinthians, "If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed." (1 Cor 16:22) This does not mean that Paul is here pronouncing an apostolic curse on those who do not accept Christ, but simply stating, as a fact, as a state of affairs, that those who have not been saved from the curse by Christ are still under the curse, are still under the curse of the paradise curse!
But the great gospel is precisely what our fundamental doctrine says: "Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us." Accept, then, that he has redeemed you too, having made you a curse. Accept then the state of redemption, the state of forgiveness of sins and the state of eternal life that God offers.
Let us now remain in complete silence for a few moments and try to give thanks for our Saviour's love in such a way that this thanksgiving becomes an acceptance of redemption!
Amen
Date: 7 April 1950 (Good Friday)