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The Shadow of Calvary Chp 2:
The Agony of Sorrow

Hugh Martin

“My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death”  Matthew 26:38

That the sorrow of Christ in Gethsemane was of a very intense and terrible description, we have many infallible proofs. The Scriptures testify, recording indeed his own testimony, that he “began to be very heavy,” to be “sorrowful,” to be “sore amazed,” and “sorrowful even unto death.” And these expressions are far from conveying the great force and emphasis of the original.

The terms in which Jesus himself poured out his griefs into the ears of the disciples, combined with the simple fact that he felt induced and constrained to speak of them at all, afford very affecting evidence that they were of a nature and degree which only the overhanging shadow of death, with all its woe could have caused to fall upon him. The aid and concert of that vigilance which he implored, as if their sympathy in his sore affliction word afford some comfort and alleviation; the fact that he instantly betook himself to prayer, that mightiest of all instruments which created natures can wield; the paroxysmPAROXYSM n. a sudden outburst of emotion. of earnestness and energy with which he prayed; the frequency with which he recurred to agonising prayer as his only resource; his reiterated but unsuccessful appeals and visits to his disciples; and the bloody sweat which his intense wrestlings in prayer produced, even in that cold night (for it was that same night in which the soldiers made a fire for it was cold”) - all these are proofs that the anguish of the Saviour’s soul in Gethsemane was unparalleled by anything that even he, the man of sorrows, had yet encountered or endured.

In confining our attention at present to the consideration of the sorrow of the Lord, to discover what from the Scriptures may be learned of its nature and causes, we ought to feel that we specially require the Spirit of the Lord to rest upon us, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord, that we may not irreverently intrude where angels might tremble to advance, or gaze with presumptuous eye where angels might veil their faces with their wings. Deep grief, among mere men, is for the most part, generously accounted a sacred thing. Here we have the grief of him who is the ever-blessed God; the sorrow and weakness and fear and trembling of him who is the Lord God Omnipotent; the tears and prostrate agonies and cries of one who is now seated on the right hand of the majesty in the heavens, angels and principalities and powers being made subject to him!

Perhaps the most impressive proof that can be given of the inconceivable terrors of Christ’s sufferings considered as a whole, and as constituting the one undivided ransom for sin, results from the fact that the darkness of Gethsemane must be regarded as but the shadow of Calvary, this remark, at the same time, opening to us the nature and sources of what Christ endured when he said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” The sorrows of the garden arose from the prospect and foresight of the sorrows of the cross.

That this was the case is obvious from the tenor of the Saviour’s prayers, for surely the one must throw light upon the other. Without doubt it was the source of his sorrow which formed the subject of his supplication. Now we learn, from the reiterated prayers which this sorrow called forth, that Jesus was not at this time directly drinking from the cup of his Father’s wrath. That he did upon the cross when, there in his own body, on the tree, he bare our sins and was made a curse for us, and suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust. But now, in Gethsemane, the agony or wrestling of prayer which arose from the agony and anguish of grief, concerned not the immediate but the ultimate drinking of that cup - not the immediate drinking of it, but only the immediate and final allocating of it to him as a cup which he should in due time drink, and which it was his now simply to accept and acknowledge as his portion. It is impossible to read the narrative carefully with a view to this question without observing that the Saviour agonises in his deadly sorrow and his oft-repeated wrestlings, not from anguish caused by drinking of this cup, but simply by the prospect if having yet to drink of it, by the foresight of the dreadful and inconceivable travail of his soul which drinking it would cause, insomuch that, were it possible, nothing could be so unspeakably desirable as that this cup should pass from him, and by the clear view of the absolute necessity of accepting it to which his love to his Father’s will and his people’s salvation finally and irreversibly committed and engaged him - “Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” And so, this paroxysm of the Saviour’s agony passed away, not with the cup being drained, but simply with the cup being put into his hand by the Father’s will on the one side and accepted by Jesus in full submission to the Father’s will on the other. And that the cup thus given and received was not at this time drained, but simply received, is intimated by the Saviour himself subsequently when, on his entrance on the final and ultimate sorrows of death, by the arrest which Judas effected with his band of soldiers, Jesus reproved the untimely zeal of Peter, saying, “Put up thy sword into his sheath: the cup that my Father hath given me to drink, shall I not drink it.” His submitting to be thus arrested as a criminal was the commencement of his drinking that cup.

From this we may see that the cup which the Father gave him consisted substantially in the imputation to him of a criminal’s guilt, and the assignment to him of a criminal’s position and destiny. No sooner is the mysterious transaction of Gethsemane over than the secret and spiritual nature of what was there determined immediately begins to be manifest. From this moment, onward to his resurrection, Jesus is seen among men no more in any other character than that of a criminal. Every step now in his history is that of the history of a criminal. The whole may be summed up briefly thus: He is arrested - libelled - judged - condemned - executed. This whole series of successive positions and endurances as an offender, a transgressor; so immediately begun, so completely sustained and perfected; was the cup which he finally drained upon the cursed tree. This cup, Peter would have had him refuse; this position of a transgressor, Peter would have had him to renounce; when he set himself against the first element of it, in his Master’s arrest. Jesus refused to resist his seizure, on the ground that this were refusing the cup which the Father had given him to drink. Can there be any difficulty, then, in understanding what that cup was? That whole treatment of his person as the person of a malefactor, of which the arrest in the garden was the first step, constituted the cup concerning which the sorrows and wrestlings of the garden had been conversant.

We know how unrighteously the blessed Jesus was forced by men into those attitudes and destinies of an offender. We know that the arrest was unprovoked: the accusation, false: the trial, a mockery: the evidence, perjury: the sentence, unrighteous and malicious: its execution, murder. Yet still, here were all the circumstances and steps, if not the pomp and dignity, of judgment upon life and death: and if we look beneath the surface into what infinite wisdom meant in righteousness to shadow forth by the things which the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God determined should thus be done, we will find that, even as to hear of Christ drinking the cup of wrath, is but to hear in a figure of the atoning sufferings of the suretySURETY n. a person who makes himself responsible for another’s performance of an undertaking or payment of a debt.
[Latin securitas - security]
Christ is his people’s surety in the Covenant of Grace, because he paid their debt as their substitute, in laying down his life in their place.

By so much was Christ made a surety of a better covenant.
Hebrews 7:22

I will be surety for him;
of my hand shalt thou require him:
if I bring him not unto thee, and set him before thee, then let me bear the blame for ever:
Genesis 43:9; so to see him arrested, accused, condemned, and led to the death of a special malefactor, is in like manner only to see in a figure, to see as in a mirror, the successive footsteps of the avenging justice of the highest, as, armed with a valid commission to arrest, and a terrific scroll and handwriting of ordinances to accuse, and the warrant of the judge of all to condemn, and the everlasting sword of heaven’s wrath to avenge - she inwardly and unfalteringly pursues unto the end the Substitute if the guilty, the Seeker and the Saviour of the lost. That visible seizure of his person which the traitor accomplished - that libel, judgment, sentence, death, which in quick succession followed - in themselves so unrighteous; what were they in the determinate counsel of God, but the outward and visible sign of the hidden and spiritual process and prosecution which the incense, avenging judge carried on against the man that was “numbered with the transgressors”? Every position in which he now stands, whether as a captured criminal in the hands of constituted power, or accused at the tribunal of authority, or condemned by the highest voices in the Church and in the State, and led away bearing the cross, and crucified between two malefactors, one on either side - every one of these positions, however unrighteous as assigned to him by man, is but an index and an emblem of a corresponding and true and righteous position or relation no assigned to him, and which he now assumes, towards the Judge of all the earth. Yea, even the preference of Barabbas, who was a robber and seditious and a murderer, viewed as the emblem and seal of Christ’s hidden condemnation, is but righteous and necessary. Jesus, as the substitute of sinners, is more heavily laden than he!

We see then the cup which the Saviour drank, the doom which Jesus accepted, namely, a malefactor’s position and a malefactor’s retribution, symbolized with minute, prolonged, sustained accuracy by all that the wicked hearts and voices and hands of men now accomplished in him, but realized under and along with, yet far above and beyond these emblems, in the reckoning he now had to meet with God and the wrath of God he now had to bear.

And if such was the cup, what could his receiving the cup or consenting to receive it imply, but his submitting to be numbered with the transgressors, submitting to have the iniquities of his people laid upon him? This was what Gethsemane beheld transacted between the Father and the Son. Finally and formally the Father proposes to Jesus the assumption of the guilt of his Church unto himself. Finally and formally Jesus accepts and confirms what had been determined mutually in the counsel of peace from everlasting. He agrees, or rather solemnly ratifies all his previous agreements to be responsible in all the responsibilities of his elect people. “Not my will but thine be done.”  “Thy will be done.” The Father lays upon him the iniquities of all whom he hath given to him: imputes to him the guilt of all that shall be redeemed: makes him that knew no sin to be sin for us: numbers him among the transgressors, as bearing in his own person the sins of many; and looks upon him as lying under the imputation of all their countless transgressions. It is unto this that Jesus says, “Thy will be done.” He assumes, therefore, at his Father’s will, the sins which he is to bear in his own body on the tree; and the baptism of blood in his agony which follows is the sign and seal of the covenant, which thus by imputation makes him out to be the chiefest and the most heavy laden of transgressors!

Can there be any difficulty now in understanding generally what the nature and emphasis of his sorrow must have been? Think of Jesus coming into this terrible position towards the Judge of all - towards his Father and his God - towards him whose approbation and pleasure were the light and joy of his life unspeakable! Think of him consenting to have all the sins of myriads imputed to him by his Father: to underlie, that is, the imputation, in his Father’s judgment, of every kind and degree and amount of moral evil - every species and circumstance and combination of vile iniquity! There is a book of reckoning which eternal justice writes in heaven, wherein is entered every charge to which infinite unsparing rectitude, searching with omniscient glance alike the darkness and the light, sees the sons of men become obnoxious. This terrific scroll, so far as the elect of God are concerned in it, was unrolled before the eye of Jesus at Gethsemane: “the iniquities of us all” which God was about to lay upon him, were therein disclosed: and you have to think of the sorrow with which he should contemplate his becoming responsible and being held of God to be responsible, for all that that record charged - his being accounted of God, in his own one person, guilty of all that that record bore! It was hereupon that the Christ who, in prophetic Scripture as in the fortieth Psalm, proclaimed himself the Father’s willing Covenant servant - “Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it iw written of me; I delight to do thy will, O my God; thy law also is within my heart” (Ps 40:6) - exclaims also, as one heavily laden with accumulated sins, and trembling, ashamed, and self-doomed because of them - “Innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of my head, therefore my heart faileth me” (Ps 40:17). And by the consenting testimony of historic Scripture, be began to be “sore amazed” and “very heavy,” and said unto his disciples: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.”

In forming a judgment of the sorrow and anguish which the imputation of sin to the holy Jesus must have caused, there is a vexing fallacy to be guarded against. We are ready to suppose that however hard and terrible to bear must have been the wrath and death which were the wages of the sins for which he suffered, yet the imputation of these sins could have, in itself, cost him little anxiety, or caused him little sorrow, in the consciousness that he was not personally guilty of them - the consciousness of his own unsullied holiness.

Now let it be remembered that the imputations which even malicious men chose to make him underlie - the reproaches and revilings under which at man’s tribunal he was traducedTRADUCE n.
to misrepresent in an unfavourable way,
to slander. - did, notwithstanding their very certain falsehood, much anxiety and grief in so much that he exclaims in his Psalm of sorrow: “Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness” (Ps 69); that same affection of his weary soul which he now endured in Gethsemane, when he was sore amazed and very heavy. And if these reproaches thus affected him, let us note these two points of difference, viz, First, that in the one case, the imputations cast upon him were from man and at man’s tribunal. In the other case, God laid upon him the iniquity of us all. God made him to be sin. God imputed to him - the Father whom he infinitely loved - the judge whom he infinitely revered as one who could not do but what is right - reckoned him among transgressors. And, secondly, in the next case, the imputations of men which broke his heart and filled it with heaviness, were repudiated and denied by him in all their extent, and to every effect. In the other, there was an imputation admitted as righteous, the proposal of infinitely righteous love and wisdom - the product and decree of divine Triune counsels from everlasting. If, then, misdeeds imputed by man and in every sense denied, and which indeed had no existence at all, were yet unto the breaking of the heart, what when iniquities are imputed by God and in a true and righteous sense admitted - admitted in a sense and to an effect which entailed immediate and full responsibility, avenging and unmitigatedUNMITIGATED adj. absolute; not excused to make milder or less severe.
God “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up” (Romans 8:32) reckoning? True, the sins which were charged upon him were not his own, but they were so laid upon his and so became his, that he could not merely endure, but accept as righteous, the penalty which they entailed. He did not merely suffer the death which is the wages of sin: he did voluntarily give himself up to death - accepting it as due to him - acknowledging his holy liability to it - justifying as very righteous the doom which he trembled to anticipate. And if the punishment of those sins was thus not in semblance, but in reality accepted by Jesus as justly visited upon himself, must it not have been because the sins themselves had first been made his - verily, really his - to every effect save that alone of impairing his unspotted holiness and perfection? And if they were his to bring him wrath unto the uttermost in their penalty, must they not have been his to cause him grief and sorrow inconceivable in their imputation? True, they were not personally his own, and so they were not his to bring self-accusation, self-contempt, despondency, remorse, despair. But they were his sufficiently to induce upon his holy soul a shame, humiliation, sorrow - yea, sore amazement - as he stood at his Father’s tribunal, accountable for more than child of man shall ever account for unto eternity!

Still, confessedly, it is difficult to understand the sorrow and amazement and agony of a holy being in having sin thus by imputation imposed upon him. It is only a legal or judicial arrangement; so we reason. It is but a scheme of mercy to relieve the miserable. Or, be it that it is more; that it is a scheme of justice also to absolve the guilty; why should not the Surety’s conscious innocence triumph over the sorrow and the shame of this imputed sin? Why should he quail and tremble, filled with anguish and amazement, not merely by the prospect of the penalty which this imputation will ultimately bring, but in the immediate sense of shame, and the immediate endurance of a sorrow, which this imputation itself inflicts? What can there be in sin, when not personally his own, that can thus cause him agonise in pain and prayer, and offer up supplications with strong crying and tears?

There is nothing that we know of in all the history of God’s moral administration that can aid us by comparison in considering how sin imputed by the Judge of all to a personally holy being , should fill his soul with sorrow. But the illustration, which there exists no comparison to furnish, may be derived from a contrast. The sorrows of imputed sin may be illustrated, perhaps, by the joys of imputed righteousness. Sin imputed to a holy one must produce effects directly the reverse of righteousness imputed to a sinner. And thus, perhaps, in the justification of the believer and the Church, through the righteousness of Christ, we may learn somewhat of the terrible shame and condemnation of him who became responsible for all their sins.

1.  The Contrast Stated in Scripture

To prepare the way for this reasoning from analogy, and in order to justify us in adopting it, let it be observed, first of all, that the contrast which we wish to examine is very emphatically stated in various Scriptures; the one term being represented as the issue and the fruit resulting and contemplated from the other. “He hath made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor 5:21). “Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor 8:9). It is very clearly implied in the latter of these texts that whatever was contained in the poverty wherewith Christ became poor, the very reverse should accrue to us in the riches wherewith by his poverty we should be made rich: if sin and sorrow and shame and death in the one, righteousness and joy and dignity and life eternal in the other. And in the former text it is very distinctly asserted that if God imputed our sins to him to have no sin of his own, it was in order that to us who have no righteousness of our own he might impute Christ’s righteousness in turn. To effect this marvellous exchange is the design contemplated in Christ’s union with the Church in federal unity, in one person mystical. He assumes her sin to taste its bitterness and bear its curse, that she may be enriched with his righteousness, to taste its joys, and be endowed with its heavenly rewards.. This contrast, therefore, is of express divine constitution - the one term moreover being the glorious fruit of the other. Sinners can be counted righteous, because the Holy One was reckoned a sinner.

2.  Imputed Sin Brought Sorrow and Shame

Notice, then, secondly, that he that believeth on Jesus, though ungodly, and who is thereby accounted righteous, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to him, is not the less entitled to rejoice in that righteousness, even while it is true that it is not his own; yea, while it is true that he has nothing but sin of his own. He is entitled to rejoice, as one clothed in the glorious unsulliedUNSULLIED adj.
pure, unblemished. robes in which omniscient holiness can find no spot nor stain. While in himself, that is, in his flesh, there dwelleth no good thing, yet in the Lord he hath righteousness, and in him he may glory and make his joyful triumphant boast.

Even so, Jesus, when he was accounted a transgressor on for the transgressions of his people imputed to him, and received in infinite love to them and submission to his Father, when he said, “Thy will be done,” is not the less subjected to inevitable sorrow and shame in that imputed sin, even while it is true that it is not his own; yea, while it is true that he has none of his own; yea, while it is true that he has nothing but glorious and unsullied holiness of his own. He is subjected to sorrow and shame as one clothed in filthy garment in which omniscient holiness - his Father’s and his own - alike behold unbounded material for abhorrence. While in himself he is the beloved Son of God - in whom the Father is ever well pleased, yea, delighting in him specially in this very transactionTherefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.
John 10:17 because of his holy acquiescence in this holy liability in the sins of his sinful and unpurged Church, yet identified with his sinful and still unpurged Church in all her unpurged sin, he hath ground only for horror and humiliation. The believer’s own unworthiness ought not to avail to impair his joy, because a true righteousness is imputed to him, and he hath the blessedness6  Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works.
7  Saying, Belssed are they whose iniwuities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.
8  Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.
Romans 4:6-8 of him to whom the Lord imputeth not his sin. The Surety’s own unspotted holiness cannot avail to prevent his sorrow, because sin is imputed to him and he hath voluntarily therefore assumed what misery must belong to him to whom the Lord imputeth - not his holiness - to whom the Lord imputeth nothing but sin.

3.  Amazement Added To Sorrow

The fact that the righteousness which the believer rejoices in is not his own, not only does not diminish his joy, but on the contrary adds to it an element of wonder, a thrill of unexpected and surprising delight. To be exalted from a relation fraught with guilt and wrath and fear and death, and to be brought at once, on the ground of another’s merit, into one of favour and peace and blessedness and eternal life - to have the angry frown of an incensed judge turned away, and all replaced by the sweet smiles of a Father’s love - this, the fruit of the imputation of another’s righteousness, hiding all my sin, quenching all my fear, wonderously reversing all my fate, this is not only joyful but surprisins - wonderful, the doing of the Lord and marvellous in our eyes!

And so, for Jesus to be accounted a sinner by imputation must have added a pang of amazement to the sorrow and humiliation which ensued. In point of fact, this very element in his sorrow is pointed out. He began to be “sore amazed.” Not but that he fully expected it. Yet when it came, the change was in its nature “amazing.” To pass from a state of unimpeachedUNIMPEACHED adj. completely trustworthy, not open to doubt or question. integrity to one in which he was chargeable with all grievous sins - from a state in which his conscious and unsullied love and practice of all things that are pure and lovely and of good report caused him to obtain the announcements to his Father’s complacency and love - (“I do always those things that please him”) - to a state in which that love and practice still unimpaired, he nevertheless justified his Father’s justice in frowning on him in displeasure by the very horror and struggle in which he would, but for his Father’s will, have refused to be plunged: this must have struck into the very heart of all his sorrow an element of amazement amounting to absolute agony and horror. If an ecstasy of wonder thrills through the believer’s joy in the Lord his righteousness, there must have been a deeply contrasted paralysing amazement when the Holy One of God realised himself as worthy, in the sins of others, of condemnation at his Father’s tribunal.

4.  Bearing the Sin of Those He Loved

The justified believer finds his joy in the righteousness of Christ augmented to the highest exaltation by the fact that this righteousness is not only not his own, but is the righteousness of one so beloved, so closely related to him as his living head, his elder brother - “my Lord and my God.” Had it been the righteousness of one standing in no endearing relation to him (were this conceivable) one who in future should be nothing more to him than any other, or one never more to be heard of, or at least never to be enjoyed in the embrace of friendship and the offices of love: the believer’s joy in such a righteousness imputed to him would have been unspeakably less. The exulting delight, unspeakable and full of glory, which the believer cherishes in clasping to his heart that righteousness of Jesus which is all his boast before God and angels, and which evermore is as a cordial to his fainting heart, the ever-reviving fountain to him of life from the dead, the secret and inexpressible exultation of his joy in this righteousness of Jesus just springs from the remembrance that it is the righteousness of one whom his soul loveth; of one who is all his salvation and all his desire; of one with whom he shall dwell forevermore - and thus better to him far than had it been his own. Imputation, therefore, it is evident, can carry with it a fervour and intensity of joy to which actual and personal possession can never reach.

And ah! Why may not this principle operate when imputation infers sorrow, being the imputation of sin? If Jesus had been forced to assume the place and responsibilities of the guilty (were that conceivable) the case in this respect would have been very different from what it was. It must not be forgotten that it was love that induced him to accept the imputation of iniquity - to bear away, as the Lamb of God, the sin of the world. Had it been the imputation of the sins of those whom he did not love (were that conceivable) his resulting sorrow would have been unutterably less; and there might have been some scope or place for the idea that the sin being merely imputed, and not all his own, he could afford to let it lie lightly upon his soul. But it was the sin of those whom he was not ashamed to call, and could not be induced to refrain from calling brethren - the sin of his children; his Church; his dearly beloved; his elect; his bride - “the Lamb’s wife.” His electing and everlasting love, therefore - free, sovereign, distinguishing, self-consuming - choosing this sinful Church into this intensely and divinely endearing relation, wherein his delights were with her by anticipation ere yet the morning stars sang for joy - bound her iniquity upon him as his own, even as it bound her as a seal upon his heart and as a seal upon his arm. Thus came the Holy One of Israel to have sin to reckon for - sin not his own in his own name, yet still his own in her name. And so, having guilt, and having conscience, even while he had not a guilty conscience, his soul was “exceeding sorrowful even unto death.” For he realised that he was “made sin”!

Oh, let us not think that, because personally and in himself perfectly holy, Jesus could on that account have experienced little sorrow from being numbered with the transgressors.

Not because in himself he is a sinner is the believer excluded from rejoicing in the imputed righteousness of Christ. Justified by faith in another’s merit, he may rejoice in the Lord, and glory in the God of his salvation. Yea, the fact that it is another’s merit which is the fountain of all his joy and the ground of all his glorying, infuses an element of admiration and astonishment into his glorying and his joy. And that it is the righteousness of his beloved and his friend, gives to his joy the crowning character of inexpressible delight and sweet and most generous exultation. Oh, blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputeth righteousness without works! “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God: for he hath clothed me with the garment of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.”

And turning now to the mournful side of this contrast - and surely it should break our hearts (Zech 12:10) to have to do it - turning to the mournful side of this contrast, which in its deep abasing poverty in sorrow has procured for us all this riches in gladness, we may surely understand how in like manner his personal holiness did not exempt him from sorrow when sin was imputed to him; how, rather, his sorrow was mingled with a peculiar terror and amazement, springing from the fact that the sin was the sin of others and not his own; and how that sorrow must have been deep and terrible in proportion as the love which bound these others to him in love even as his own soul, and thus identified them with himself, did thereby bind upon him as his own, in the name of those whom he was infinitely far from repudiatingREPUDIATE v.t. to reject, disown or deny utterly., all the iniquity which his Father’s justice charged against them.

It is not indeed the joy which a believer actually experiences as justified in the merit of Emmanuel which can properly be chosen as the counterpart and contrast to the sorrow of Jesus. It is rather the joy, in its purest form and fullest measure, which there is ground for the believer enjoying, that can alone form anything like an accurate, though even then the most inadequate, index to the contrasted sorrow of the Substitute and Surety of sinners. But we have seen enough in the analogy between imputed sin and imputed righteous to show, that as the latter, though imputed and not personal, does yet lay a ground of righteousness and surprising joy, so the former in like manner, though also not personal but merely imputed, does not on that account any less entail amazing sorrow and shame as its result.

Any aid which this analogy may furnish to us in looking into the amount of the Saviour’s sorrow is at the best but small, and the abyss of his troubles must ever be unsearchable - a matter of faith rather than of knowledge. But if the analogy is correct, then, to give to our idea such expansion as it is capable of - measuring still the sorrow of the Redeemer by the joy of the redeemed, we may observe:

1.  Deeper Insight Brought Deeper Sorrow

That the more the believer sees of Christ’s righteousness, and the more he realises it by faith as his own, the deeper does that joy become which he is warranted to cherish in the Lord his Righteousness. We can conceive his faith, and his believing consciousness, to attain the consummate strength of a divine and infallible assurance. And, further, we may suppose the glorious spiritual insight he may have attained into the moral loveliness and beauty of the righteousness thus imputed to him to be such, that knowing of God that he is of God invested in this matchless robe of salvation, his joy thereupon should rise above all power of sublunarySUBLUNARY adj. situated beneath the moon, or between the orbit of the moon around the earth.
[ie: things within the sphere and influence of the earth.]
That is to say, worldly or temporal things. things to shake or overshadow it. This much as to the measure of the purchased joy - joy in imputed merit - and the conditions on which its rise and increase depend.

Similar are the conditions needful to depth of sorrow in imputed sin. First, infallible assurance (not to be called faith in this case, yet supplying its place in the other), infallible assurance that the imputation is effected; and secondly, a profound insight into the hatefulness and moral deformity of the sin that is imputed. To convey these the Jesus was verily the Father’s object in dealing with him in the garden. He gave him a view of the cup such as revealed to him the elements with which it was charged; and accurate and terrible therefore as was the view given him of the iniquities thus laid upon him, profound in proportion must have been that sorrow of which he spoke when he said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.”

2.  Christ’s Holiness made him more sensitive to the load of sin

But again, secondly, a believer’s joy in the righteousness of Christ rises to its fullest ecstasy of unmingled exultation and unassailable security, only when he actually enters the home of the redeemed and the presence of his Father on high. Then indeed will he glory in the Lord his righteousness, accepted into everlasting life in virtue of the righteousness of his Lord. And why should his joy then be bounded only by his own capacity of joy? For one reason among others, because the undimmed spiritual eye of his own personal and now unsullied holiness, can look with hitherto unknown appreciation and blessedness upon the transcendent moral beauties of the righteousness in which he walks in light. His perfect holiness now crowns his joy in the righteousness of Christ with its final and celestial radiance.

Ah! Does not the contrast again hold, very affectingly? Personal holiness and unspotted purity did not diminish the terrible humiliation and anguish Jesus underwent in being clothed with filthy garments, in being made sin, in being laden with iniquity and accounted a transgressor. Ah! no. The stainless personal perfection of Jesus made him inconceivably sensitive to all the degradation which his position at his Father’s tribunal as a transgressor implied. The believer, rejoicing in his Saviour’s righteousness, must at death be made perfect in holiness and pass into glory before he can comprehend the glorious depths of perfection in that righteousness which his beloved and friend hath brought in on his behalf. But Jesus, ever absolutely sinless, did, in virtue of that very sinlessness which we would reckon on as if it alleviated his sorrow, penetrate the depths of moral evil in all its compass and deformity and vileness which was now to be laid upon him: and his soul, because it was holy, was so much the more amazed, and very heavy, and exceedingly sorrowful even unto death.

3.  A Mighty Aggregate

But the perfection of the contrast lies not between the joys of a single believer and the sorrows of the one Saviour who died for all. There shall be a people in the realms of day, blood-washed and redeemed and rejoicing, whom no man can number. Who shall measure the sum of the joy wherewith these millions of once apostate but justified transgressors, saved and sanctified for ever, shall joy in the God of their salvation? The voice of that mighty aggregate of joy shall be loud and long - yea, for ever. It shall be as the noise of many waters, ever springing up yet more and more from exhaustless abyssmal depths. It was that mighty aggregate of joy to which Jesus gave being by his sorrow. It is with that mighty aggregate of joy - ever deepening in the Holy Ghost unto eternity - that the sorrow of Jesus must be contrasted!

Are we not, then, in some measure prepared to rend our hearts and mourn, to bow our heads and worship, while a still small voice is asking: “Was there ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?”

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