He Bore Me in Himself
Isaiah 53:1-9
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God.
smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:4-5
In about 1950 I ran across an article in Time magazine that told an astounding medical story. In those days doctors were just beginning to experiment with new kinds of treatments, and there was a young boy on the West Coast who had a kidney infection. The infection became so bad that his kidneys were contaminating his blood rather than cleansing it. His situation reached a crisis point, and the doctor told the parents that unless something radical was done he would die.
The boy’s doctors had a conference with the best medical people in California, and one of them suggested a radical experiment. The idea was to hook the boy’s body up to another person with healthy kidneys and let the good kidneys clean the boy’s blood and give his kidneys a chance to recuperate. The doctors agreed that it might be possible, so they talked to the parents about it. The parents immediately agreed to the procedure.
The father’s blood type matched his son’s, so they took the father into the hospital, put him on a bed right beside his son in the operating room, and linked the blood systems together. The blood from the boy began to flow into the body of the father, and the blood from the father began to flow into the body of the son. The boy had maintained a very high temperature. As they lay there together, the boy’s temperature began to drop and the father’s temperature began to rise until they reached the same level. Then both temperatures slowly dropped until they were normal.
The experiment appeared to be a success. They kept the boy in the hospital for nine days, and he was fine. After nine days they let him go home, but they kept the father for observation. On the eleventh day the father’s temperature suddenly skyrocketed, and he quickly died.
This is perhaps the best illustration of the Cross that I have ever heard. The heavenly Father has caused his holiness to meet the fatal disease of our sin – all our crookedness and twistedness – in his son. Jesus took our sin and disease in his body, bore our punishment, and died in our place.
This is an excerpt from the book This Day with the Master by Dennis Kinlaw
If you would like to buy this book please click here.