THE STORY OF HIS SCARS

If you overheard someone who didn’t know Jesus’ story, pointing at the scars in His hands and asking, “Where’d you get those? What happened?” you might be surprised at Jesus’ answer. One of our children, when still quite young, had this thing of pointing to each scar on her body and describing how she came to have it. Most everyone knows the story of the scars on their bodies. As I typed that preceding sentence, I saw a scar on my right thumb, and immediately the story behind it lunged into my thoughts. So, weren’t those scars in Jesus’ hands from the nails that fastened Him to the cross? Well, yes, and no—not just from the nails. God, who erased all the effects and damage of death when He resurrected Jesus, could have easily erased Jesus’ scars too. The scars in His hands and side had been purposely left. They were the undeniable testimony to Jesus’ crucifixion. No one ever survived a crucifixion. Jesus didn’t either. He died; then, He rose from the dead. Yes, Jesus’ scars tell the story of His being nailed to a cross. But, there’s more. It seems that the scars from Jesus’ other wounds, such as the puncture of the thorns on his head and the ripped open gashes from the whip on His back, had been erased. But, Jesus had other wounds that left no apparent scars on His body. These wounds were the greatest He endured. While Jesus hanged on the cross, God laid on Him all our griefs, sorrows, iniquities, and sins. All of them. Of all of us. That must have been extremely painful and wounding. While preaching this, I have often given a self-concocted illustration: I choose a man to help me. He stands beside me on the platform. Then, I address the congregation, “At any given time, most of us have some type of sore on our body. I do. Imagine with me. Suppose I took my current sore and every sore on every person in this sanctuary and put them on this one man here beside me. Now suppose I took every sore on every person in this city and put them on this man. And every sore on every person in this state. Every sore of every person in this nation. What if I put every sore of every person in the world of all time on this one man? What would he suffer? What would he look like?” The man would look unimaginably horrible, ghastly. He would be totally disfigured. But, wait. This is what happened to Jesus. Our every sorrow, grief, and iniquity were put on Him on the cross. No wonder the prophet Isaiah said, “As many were astonished at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men:” (Isa 52:14), and, “…he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. …we hid as it were our faces from him; ...” (Isa 53:2-3). If Jesus had been physically injured by all our iniquities which He bore on the cross, He would have been a pulp of conglomerated wounds. Had He maintained after His resurrection the scars from the wounds of all our iniquities, He would have been an unrecognizable mass of overlapping and intersecting scar tissue with no part of Him unmarked. Instead, He maintained only the scars on His hands and side. These scars tell the story that He had been crucified. But, they are also representative scars. They also say that there, on the cross, He bore our many iniquities. For “…he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities:” (Isa 53:5). It wasn’t just the nails that caused His scars. It was my sins. I am not sure what Jesus would say to the man in my opening scenario; but, the man does need to know that Jesus would have no scars had He not borne our sins. That’s the story of His scars.

THE STORY OF HIS SCARS

Contact

Follow Us