By Alexander Whyte

      "Who hath believed our report?" (Isa. 53:1).

      Among the amazing things of which this amazing chapter is full, there is nothing that arrests us, and overawes us, and, indeed, staggers us more than this--that it "pleased the Lord to bruise" His Messiah-Son.

      But the simple truth of God in this matter is this. God was so set, from everlasting, on the salvation of sinners that the most awful steps that had to be taken in order to work out that salvation are here said to have absolutely pleased Him. It is somewhat like our Lord's own words--"I delight to do Thy will": even when His Father's will led Him to the garden of Gethsemane and the Cross of Calvary.

      God so loved the world that He gave up His only-begotten Son to die for the sin of the world. God could not be pleased with the death of His Son--in itself. No. But nothing has ever pleased Him more than that His Son should lay down His life in atonement for those sinners whom the Father had chosen and ordained to everlasting life.

      Paul has everything. And he has the Father's indebtedness to His Son and His good pleasure in His death in this great passage: "God hath set forth Christ Jesus to be a propitiation through faith in His blood: to declare His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. "It pleased the Lord to bruise Him, because in this way alone could God's full hatred of sin be declared to men and angels, and at the same time God's justice might be manifested in the salvation of sinners.