Priesthood and Life

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 5 - The Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Reading: Isa. 53:1-12.

"And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and the hair of his head shall go loose, and he shall cover his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague is in him he shall be unclean; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his dwelling be" (Lev. 13:45-46).

"Him who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor. 5:21).

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" (Matt. 27:46).

In the Scriptures which we have just read, we have brought before us what I believe to be the very deepest meaning of the Cross. It was not a wrong relating of Scriptures, as we shall see, in bringing that part of the book of Leviticus over and connecting it with Isaiah 53, and bringing back the two New Testament passages to the same point. It may seem a very terrible thing to bring the leper, the awful, loathsome, fearsome leprosy of the leper, into touch with that divine Son of God. Perhaps there might be an inward shrinking from reading the two passages together. Isaiah has become so solemnly sacred to us all, so holy, that to touch it with the leper would seem to desecrate and yet we have to accept not the theory or any suggestion of man, but the fact that the two are one, and the oneness is found in the very language that is used in both, which is identical language.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the book of Leviticus, in which the whole case of the leper and his leprosy is dealt with under the Mosaic economy, from the moment when the first signs of leprosy appeared right through the awful prescribing for dealing with the leper till his ultimate cleansing and restoration, in those two chapters one word occurs fifty times. That is a large number of times for one word to occur in so short a portion of Scripture, but there it is. It recurs with terrible monotony. It is as though the Spirit of God was deliberately making that the note to be struck, to be struck all the time. It sounds like an awful death knell right through the two chapters. Fifty terrible times that word is heard - plague, plague, plague. The leprosy is the plague. We turn to Isa. 53:4 and we have this - "Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted" - and that Hebrew word there translated 'stricken' is exactly the same Hebrew word used fifty times in those terrible chapters - plagued. "We did esteem him plagued of God". Plagued of God. Is it too terrible to say, 'made a leper'? Not too terrible in the light of 2 Cor. 5:21 - "He who knew no sin, Him He made to be sin" - made to be sin! Ah, there is something more than, "Him He made to be the bearer of our sins", Him He made to be sin. Plagued of God!

What did leprosy do? How did it work? Well, if you look again, you will see certain marks of leprosy. First it disfigured, it blotted out the very likeness of a man. It made him appear something other than God meant him to be. We turn again to Isaiah in chapter 52:14 - "His visage was so marred more than any man". His visage marred. Jeremiah uses that word in connection with the potter's vessel. "The vessel was marred in the hand of the potter" (Jer. 18:4), and have you seen the potter's vessel marred as the clay spins upon the wheel? And suddenly the thumb comes upon some foreign hard substance with its pressure, and the whole vessel becomes unshaped, deformed, marred.

"His visage was so marred more than any man... more than the sons of men... and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised, and rejected of men". That is what the potter did to the vessel marred, rejected - the poor leper, marred, disfigured, rejected, repulsive. You and I perhaps never caught that view of the Lord Jesus, but God has. Leviticus 13 and 14 are God's answer to that awful cry on Calvary - "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" - Leviticus 13, the leper. He made Him to be sin in our place, in our behalf, plagued of God, so that God turned His face from Him. Isaiah says that the people did that - "as one from whom men hide their face, he was despised".

I think there are many in the world today who take that attitude and see nothing in the Lord Jesus that they should desire Him, but despise Him and reject Him. But this is not a word only for such. This is a word to bring our hearts down with new worship. I trust that is where we shall be before we are through as we see the deepest meaning of Calvary, disfigured like the leper.

Leprosy disintegrated the whole body, so that joints fell apart, limbs fell off, the whole body fell to pieces in the course of time. Do you remember the cry, the prophetic cry, as in the mouth of the Lord Jesus on the cross? It was sounded through the Psalmist so many years before Calvary, "All my bones are out of joint" (Ps. 22:14). What could that mean in the case of the Lord Jesus but the awful anguish to a soul like His of being made sin? It was as though He were being disrupted, torn asunder - the effect of sin upon a sinless One. You and I do not know anything about that. We may have sometimes felt some horror at man's sin, wickedness, and cruelty, recoiled when we have read or heard of abominations to which men can hand themselves over, but we have never suffered the suffering of a sinless spirit being brought into actual touch with iniquity, so that that iniquity touches us ourselves with its awful, awful hand of evil. I do not know whether you have ever felt the presence of evil in such a way as to become almost petrified, paralyzed, by the sense of naked evil drawing nearer. That is possible even to us, such an experience. The Lord Jesus being made sin suffered so intensely, the sinless One, that it was the disintegration of His very being, the tearing apart of His bones. It was as though He were on the rack; His very limbs were torn out. "All my bones are out of joint". Made sin - He who knew no sin. The leper! And this leprosy is the steady, terrible process of death creeping on, the working of death in all its terrible meaning.

We said yesterday there is no poetical sentiment associated with real death, unmitigated death, unrelieved death, which is not only working in the body but in the soul. It is a horrible thing, is death, real death. Have you seen someone die without hope, without a glimmer of light, and yet in the grip of an awful soul anguish, and can never get through? Ah, that is only a reflection of what He endured, a faint reflection. Death - and leprosy is the steady working of death.

And then we find here that leprosy resulted in the separation of the leper from all holy fellowship and relationships. The leper had to go outside the camp, be refused the very habitation of men, be a stranger and a wanderer, apart from all held dear, whose company was coveted. That is exactly what happened to the Lord Jesus on the cross. His cry there was the cry of an exile, the cry of one who for uncleanness had been put outside; 'cut off' is the word here. That is Isa. 53 - "cut off out of the land of the living". Yes, the Lord Jesus, terrible to say, spiritually and morally in a representative way, but in such a real way to Himself, took the place of the leper and on the cross before God He was as a universal leper, that is, He gathered all men unto Himself and became one all-embracing, all-comprehensive leper, and suffered what the leper had to suffer in a spiritual way, even to having the face, the company, the fellowship of God, withdrawn from Him. We shall never know, thanks to God, what that means. Here is this word. "Him who knew no sin He made to be sin on our behalf; that" (it is the other side now to the story) "that we might become the righteousness of God in Him". Oh, that we might have a deeper and more acute sense and consciousness of the awfulness of sin in the sight of God, the loathsomeness of sin in the nostrils of God, and the costliness of sin to the Son of God.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the book of Leviticus - I think we might just look there for a moment.

"And when the flesh hath in the skin thereof a boil, and it is healed..." (Lev. 13:18).

"But if in his eyes the scall be at a stay, and black hair be grown up therein; the scall is healed, he is clean" (Lev. 13:37).

"And the priest shall go forth out of the camp; and the priest shall look; and, behold, if the plague of leprosy be healed in the leper..." (Lev. 14:3).

"And if the priest shall come in, and look, and, behold, the plague hath not spread in the house, after the house was plastered; then the priest shall pronounce the house clean, because the plague is healed" (Lev. 14:48).

"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed" (Isa. 53:5).

The tremendously impressive fact is that the word used in Isaiah 53:5, the word 'healed', only occurs in this precise form elsewhere in the whole Bible in the passages we have just read from Leviticus. You will come upon 'healed' in many parts of the Bible in other connections, but the precise form of the Hebrew word used in Isa. 53:5 only occurs elsewhere in the whole Bible in those chapters dealing with the leper healed. "With his stripes we are healed". It is the healing of the leper, not another healing. By His Cross, the leper is healed. Oh, marvelous thing, we who are sinners, and, being sinners, are in the sight of God naturally what Christ was when He was made sin hanging upon the cross and what the leper represented when he was expelled from the camp. We, by His cross, are healed, so that the priest, the expert in matters like these, the one whose eye is trained to search out and detect any trace of a blemish, the one who before God and man is held responsible for the question of life and death, and to where corruption may be, that priest can find no trace of the plague and pronounces it healed. And who is the priest? "By His stripes we are healed".

Oh, the Lord Jesus is not only the healed leper in representation, but He is also the High Priest. Has there ever been a priest with a more acute sense and discernment of sin? Think you that He has gone through all that without that sense of sin becoming, if possible, ten thousand times more acute and sensitive? Yes, He knows and He is able to look upon a believer, one who has come to the Cross, one who has accepted all His redemptive, atoning, substitutionary and representative work, and simply pass the word: Healed! And for such a one to say, "Healed!" means indeed there is no trace of the sin. He has blotted out our transgressions. He has cast them into the depths of the sea. "Come now, and let us reason together, saith Jehovah; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isa. 1:18).

Do you see from what depths to what heights the Lord Jesus has brought the believer, the trusting child of God, by His Cross? Into what depths He has gone and into what glorious heights He has risen! "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us" (Psa. 103:12). Well might we sing, "Redemption - oh, wonderful story!" "By His stripes we are healed", I am sure you are going to invest that little clause with a new meaning whenever you read it in the future, and we are going to see that poor, abandoned, outcast leper healed and brought back, the restoration of all that was lost through his leprosy.

One more word.

"Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand" (Isa. 53:10).

"When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin". Do you see the margin? "Thou shalt make his soul a trespass-offering". If you go back to Leviticus 14, verses 12 and 21, you will see the offering prescribed for the leper, and then you will see that it is exactly the same offering as is here mentioned in Isa. 53:10. "Thou shalt make his soul a trespass-offering for sin". That is precisely the offering that had to be provided for the leper. I think this is all tremendously impressive. "Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin" - the leper's offering, the offering for the cleansing of the leper, and when that is done, the rest is illuminating.

See the leper. Oh yes, he is excommunicated, he is shut out. No family life for the leper, his days seem to be counted, numbered. For him there is no prospect, no future, nothing of home, nothing of family, nothing to look forward to in his own day or in succeeding generations for him. But heal the leper, and "he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand". This glorious work of the Cross brings a new prospect into view, a new hope, a new assurance, a new blessing. "The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand".

I do not think I need add much more to this. It all speaks so strongly, so deeply, so wonderfully. It tells us of how great, how deep, how terrible, and yet how marvelous and glorious Calvary was and Calvary is. In reading that account of the leper, we read the clause - "He shall go without the camp", and in reading that another clause similar at once leaps to our minds from Hebrews 13 - "Let us therefore go forth unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach". But these are not the same thing. In the case of the leper and the case of the Lord Jesus, that place outside the camp was execution from the presence of the Lord. In Hebrews 13, the place outside the camp is execution in fellowship with the Lord.

We may have to know something of being outside the camp, but we need never know being executed from the presence of the Lord. He knew that for us, and if we know something of what it means to be without the camp in fellowship with Him, we may be out there, exiled perhaps by others, but have the very blessed fellowship of the Lord which He forfeited, that we might have it. It was because He took the place of the leper outside the camp and lost for that eternal moment the face and the fellowship of God His Father that we, though suffering with Him here below, may enjoy, even in our suffering, the abiding fellowship of the Father. His exclusion has brought our inclusion; His lost fellowship has secured our eternal fellowship, that is, if we believe and in our believing accept by faith that Jesus died, being made sin on our behalf that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.

May we glory in the Cross more than ever, and appreciate what that cross meant to Him and therefore appreciate Him more than ever we have done as we see the depths, the awful, terrible depths, to which sin led Him; the awful leprosy - plagued of God.