Hebrews 12:2 Commentary and Bible Study

We depend on Jesus Christ. We look to him for salvation of course; we trust only in his atoning death. We look to him for help, day by day; we look at his attributes and remind ourselves of his love and power, and his wisdom. We remember his promises. We look forward to seeing him at the end of life's journey, and then all our trials come into perspective. He is the author of our faith, the founder of the Christian faith and the Christian life. What did Christ do to found the way of salvation? He founded it by his love. He loved us with an everlasting love, before the world was created. Knowing how the human race would fall, seeing us in eternity floundering and lost, he set his love upon his people and determined to go to the cross of Calvary to make an atonement for their sins, to purchase them for himself. He has founded the kingdom of God by his love, by his twin acts: his perfect life by which his righteousness is credited to us, and his atoning death which delivers us from hell. The human race had failed and fallen. Here are human beings depraved and corrupt, and there is one human being, the God-man Jesus Christ, who as God, entered into human flesh, who is perfectly resplendent in righteousness, and so the human race can be saved after all. He is also the finisher. It is not a word that we use, but we could call him the completer of our faith. He not only suffers and dies for us, but who restores us. He takes our hearts and renews them, by implanting a new nature within us, a new mind and understanding. He transforms us, turning us into children of God. ‘Who for the joy that was set before him’. We may read this and we may think, when he suffered and died on Calvary's cross, the thing that sustained Christ was to look ahead and to see the joy that he would enter into after it was all over. That may very well be included in the meaning of these words, but that is not strictly what is intended by them. The meaning is this: to secure the joy that was before him, he despised the shame of the cross; he did not let the shame prevent him from securing these things, and not just his joy but the joy of all of us. For the sake of bringing such inestimable happiness and joy, and such an amazing experience, the ultimate fulfilment of the human race, happiness and bliss for all eternity; to bring that about for you and me, and for millions, billions of others, he took the shame and the cross to secure it. What was in the mind of Christ was not so much, ‘This will all be over soon and I will be entering into bliss’, but, ‘By this, I secure this eternal happiness for all my people.’He ‘endured the cross’. In obedience to his Father he bore the agony of the punishment of countless sinners for all eternity. The pain and suffering of Christ were infinitely beyond the pain of the nails through his hands and feet and the thirsting in the heat of the sun. Yes, the physical agonies were there, but they were nothing compared with the weight of punishment that we deserved. The pain of eternal separation from God and forsakenness.‘He despised the shame’ – we do not care for the word ‘despised’ in our everyday circumstances, what does it mean here? The shame of course was all the scorn, the humiliation, the screams and the jeers, the public rejection of the Son of God, the abasement and the treatment of him as a liar, a thief, and a criminal. The betrayal of him: Judas’ ‘Hail master’; how vile. How shameful, how humiliating that he should be treated as somebody who did not know what was going on, and bound as if he was a murder and a criminal. And yet he despised it. That is what enabled him to bear it as he was stripped, scourged, not once, certainly twice, and maybe three times, with thongs with pieces of metal and bone. That was the custom attached to the thongs lacerating the flesh and tearing it to the bone. He was punched and suffered an utterly shameful death, bundled with criminals outside the city, not fit to be crucified near the city. Yet he is God; he is our Creator and our redeemer. The Greek word ‘despised’ means his mind was set against it; he disesteemed the shame – the opposite of esteemed it. He had contempt for it. It was as though he reasoned, ‘This is passing, the atoning death of Calvary is eternal. It secures eternal redemption, the pain and the insults and the debasing; they are passing. They can do their worst and hurl their insults. They can for the time being persuade the people I am a criminal, but they cannot obstruct what I am accomplishing. All they do is entirely irrelevant and ineffectual. It is all going to be swallowed up by life.