What Is In A Name – Man of Suffering

Man of Suffering

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
(Isaiah 53:3, NIV)

“That’s not fair!”  
“Yeah, well, life’s not fair!”

Life really isn’t fair.  It’s a lesson we have all learned, usually the hard way.  We all grumble and complain about it.  No doubt, we have gone to God in prayer, complaining about the unjustness of it all.  But when was the last time you went before God and thanked Him that life is indeed unfair.  What would it mean if we truly lived in a fair world?

If we lived in a fair world, there would be no grace of God.  There would be no salvation for mankind.  Jesus would never have died as the sacrifice for our sins.  A fair world would be a world of suffering and agony.  It would be a world without hope, without joy, and without redemption.  It would be a world doomed.

The prophet Isaiah foretold many things about the coming Savior of mankind.  In the 53rd chapter of his book, Isaiah spends time ruminating on the suffering that the Savior will endure during His life, calling the Messiah the “man of suffering.”  This does not mean that the coming Savior would be a sorrowful man.  Jesus was like any other man –  He laughed and joked with His disciples.  He celebrated the marriages of His friends and He mourned their deaths.  Jesus experienced all the emotions that we feel.

Jesus also experienced suffering greater than we can imagine.  He first suffered by leaving all the splendor of Heaven, coming to earth as a mere mortal man.  He suffered through living a perfect life in an imperfect world.  And in the end, He suffered a brutal and torturous death, made all the more painful by suffering separation from God.  During that separation from God, God poured out His wrath against all mankind onto Jesus.  Was that fair?

So what does this mean for us?  Jesus suffered through an unfair world for us! For you!  For me!  So next time you want to complain about life not being fair, thank God for His unfairness.  Because we really don’t want to live in a fair world.

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