Church has been a part of my life since I was a baby. My mom made sure we went every Sunday right up until we left home. For the longest time we went to the beautiful and locally semi-famous Catholic church by my grade school. Inside, you would have thought you were in the Sistine Chapel with the way the ceiling was beautifully painted with the most fascinating characters. Weekly it gave me something interesting to look at when I was bored with the sermons.
Over on the right was a cross, and on the cross was a statue of a man. There he was with blood marks on his hands, feet, and a mark at his side, with his head bound by a crown of thorns faced downwards. He looked sad, and when I was young I wanted to know why the man was sad, and what he’d done wrong to end up on that cross. As I got older, I learned the statue was a representation of a real man whose name was Jesus and who lived on this earth a couple thousand years ago. That Man died for the sins of the world (1Jh. 2:2) even though He himself was innocent of any sin (Heb. 4:15 ).
I used to look at that man and wonder many things about Him. It was difficult for me to reconcile Him with the man I read about in the Bible mom bought me. There was never much of a connection between the two especially since I never read to the end of the gospels. An aunt of mine got my mom and I involved in the charismatic movement of the church, and I began to learn the truth about the man, and even though we moved to a different church, I remembered that statue.
In 1983 at a charismatic conference I heard the real gospel message for the first time. You see, knowing Jesus died for the sins of the world, and Jesus died for your sins are two different things. One is an impersonal fact, and one says- you’ve got to do something with this information personally now because your eternal life is on the line! I gave my heart to the Lord and the truth about what Jesus did on the cross began to sear into my spirit.
I’ll never forget my first experience reading Isaiah 52: “They shall see my Servant beaten and bloodied, so disfigured one would scarcely know it was a person standing there. So shall he cleanse many nations.” (v.14,15).
After I cried for a while I thought, how can this be? The statue I always remembered looked like a normal man with a few bloody scars- was what I’d seen for so many years wrong? The people who saw Him were stunned; Jesus’ appearance and figure were so disfigured. That doesn’t happen to you just being nailed to a cross. There had to be more.
Beaten, battered, bloodied from head to toes, whipped excessively, flesh shredded by sharp metal barbs: that’s the real image of ‘that Man’ they nailed to the cross. That Man was tortured for my sins (Is. 53:5). That Man gave up His life for me (Jh. 10:18 ). That Man loved me even before I knew who He really was. That Man has a name, and His name is
Jesus!