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character of His humanity, with His ethical perfection, and with His sense of righteousness and
holiness and veracity. No one could feel the poignancy of pain and grief and moral evil as Jesus
could. But besides these more common sufferings there were also the sufferings caused by the
fact that God caused our iniquities to come upon Him like a flood. The sufferings of the Saviour
were not purely natural, but also the result of a positive deed of God, Isa. 53:6,10. To the more
special sufferings of the Saviour may also be reckoned the temptations in the desert, and the
agonies of Gethsemane and Golgotha.
e. His sufferings in temptations.
The temptations of Christ formed an integral part of His
sufferings. They are temptations that are encountered in the pathway of suffering, Matt. 4:1-11
(and parallels); Luke 22:28; John 12:27; Heb. 4:15; 5:7,8. His public ministry began with a period
of temptation, and even after that time temptations were repeated at intervals right on into
dark Gethsemane. It was only by entering into the very trials of men, into their temptations,
that Jesus could become a truly sympathetic High Priest and attain to the heights of a proved
and triumphant perfection, Heb. 4:15; 5:7-9. We may not detract from the reality of the
temptations of Jesus as the last Adam, however difficult it may be to conceive of one who could
not sin as being tempted. Various suggestions have been made to relieve the difficulty, as for
instance, that in the human nature of Christ, as in that of the first Adam, there was the nuda
possibilitas peccandi, the bare abstract possibility of sinning (Kuyper); that Jesus’ holiness was
an ethical holiness, which had to come to high development through, and maintain itself in,
temptation (Bavinck); and that the things with which Christ was tempted were in themselves
perfectly lawful, and appealed to perfectly natural instincts and appetites (Vos). But in spite of
all this the problem remains, How was it possible that one who in concreto, that is, as He was
actually constituted, could not sin nor even have an inclination to sin, nevertheless be subject
to real temptation?
3. THE DEATH OF THE SAVIOUR.
The sufferings of the Saviour finally culminated in His death. In
connection with this the following points should be emphasized:
a. The extent of His death.
It is but natural that, when we speak of the death of Christ in this
connection, we have in mind first of all physical death, that is, the separation of body and soul.
At the same time we should remember that this does not exhaust the idea of death as it is
represented in Scripture. The Bible takes a synthetic view of death, and regards physical death
merely as one of its manifestations. Death is separation from God, but this separation can be
viewed in two different ways. Man separates himself from God by sin, and death is the natural
result, so that it can even be said that sin is death. But it was not in that way that Jesus became
subject to death, since He had no personal sin. In this connection it should be borne in mind
that death is not merely the natural consequence of sin, but above all the judicially imposed