As I was in discussion with my favorite person in the whole world today, the words of a scriptural passage in Isaiah came to mind throughout. As such, I have decided to offer my insights on this passage.
Those of you scriptorians out there that read this know from the title the exact passage of scripture I plan to focus on here. This scripture is found in Isaiah 53:3-5 and reads:
3. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquained with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yes we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
This is a scripture that we've all heard before, and those of that have taken Seminary probably still have it memorized to some extent. The question that you have to ask yourself though is whether you truly realize the awesome extent of Isaiah's prophetic tribute. Yes, we most commonly recognize this scripture as referring to the atoning sacrifice paid by our Savior prior to his crucifixion at the meridian of time, but the problem is just that - its our common recognition and understanding of this scripture that causes us to fall well short of understanding the wealth of knowledge and spiritual reminder that this passage has to offer us.
I submit that many of us treat this scripture as we treat our understanding of the Atonement - which is to simply acknowledge its cleansing power insofar as it becomes necessary for our penitence towards salvation, but in reality acknowledging its power little further. The problem is that if this is our sole view of the Atonement, we have neither an adequate understanding of the life of our Elder Brother, nor do we comprehend the magnitude of His sacrifice during His final hours in mortality.
The interesting aspect of this scripture is not to just dissect its many parts, but in the way that Isaiah speaks Messianically we are somewhat permitted to allow our imaginations to place us almost in those final moments among the crowd that witnessed the illegal trial before the Sanhedrin which condemned our Savior to death. With that in mind though - let's move on to the dissection of the scripture a little bit that will hopefully open our minds to things.
We note in the 4th verse that He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows - which is nothing uncommon to us, but if we roll back to the 3rd verse it notes that he had his own griefs and sorrows to carry also. Too often I think we look at Christ as our Savior and put aside that he was a normal human being just like all of us - having feelings, which included sorrow, grief, pain, joy, sadness, etc. We know from scriptural accounts that he was sorrowful at the news of the passing of Lazarus, and we can easily assert that his foreknowledge of the betrayal by Judas had to have at least stricken him to some extent with sorrow for Judas' choice.
Now, the crux of this scriptural passage rests in the summation of its parts - meaning that we need not focus on just the sorrows and grief, but it also mentions, stricken, smitten of God, afflicted, iniquities, chastisement of peace (pain of peace), despising, and rejection. Why do I address all of these? I do it because I recognize that the true cleansing power of the Atonement covers all of those and rests not solely on the forgiveness of sin.
What does this mean to us individually though? It means that it covers those that have been victims of abuse, those that have had serious transgressions committed against them, those that struggle with finding their own identity, those that struggle to communicate, those that have weaknesses that they are unsure of how to address, those that simply are having a rough day, and the list goes on! What's worse is that our failure to acknowledge the Atonement as a keystone to our lives rather than a tool or a first-aid kit results in a great disservice to both our Heavenly Father who gave us His Beloved Son to work through those things.
It is our duty and privilege in this life to find ways that we can integrate the Savior's atonement into our lives more fully so that we can pattern our lives more fully towards receiving all that the Father has to give us. In order to do this though we have to have to be fully regcognizant of the fact that time is indeed of the essence. What I mean by this is that our delay in addressing those things which burden us and allow the Atonement to have full sway in our lives only causes additional pain and sorrow upon Him who cast his life before sinners and overcame all such that we might cast aside those very things.
We would never accept a gift from our best friend and then put it away in a closet and fail to use it or rather reject that gift and choose to not accept it - but yet when we choose not to invoke the Atonement into the most spiritually arid parts of our lives, we do that very thing. When we choose to delay ridding ourselves of those burdens which hinder our progression towards eternity, we concurrently choose to rid ourselves of any potential blessings we might receive through the cleansing and lightening power of that eternal Atonement.
May we find ways in our lives continually to invoke the power and blessing which the Father has to offer us in the name of His Son is my prayer.
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