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and inflicted punishment of sin. It is God’s withdrawing Himself with the blessings of life and
happiness from man and visiting man in wrath. It is from this judicial point of view that the
death of Christ must be considered. God imposed the punishment of death upon the Mediator
judicially, since the latter undertook voluntarily to pay the penalty for the sin of the human
race. Since Christ assumed human nature with all its weaknesses, as it exists after the fall, and
thus became like us in all things, sin only excepted, it follows that death worked in Him from
the very beginning and manifested itself in many of the sufferings to which He was subject. He
was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. The Heidelberg Catechism correctly says that
“all the time He lived on earth, but especially at the end of His life, He bore, in body and soul,
the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race.”[Q. 37.] These sufferings were
followed by His death on the cross. But this was not all; He was subject not only to physical, but
also to eternal death, though He bore this intensively and not extensively, when He agonized in
the garden and when He cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?” In a short period of time He bore the infinite wrath against sin to the very end and came
out victoriously. This was possible for Him only because of His exalted nature. At this point we
should guard against misunderstanding, however. Eternal death in the case of Christ did not
consist in an abrogation of the union of the Logos with the human nature, nor in the divine
nature’s being forsaken of God, nor in the withdrawal of the Father’s divine love or good
pleasure from the person of the Mediator. The Logos remained united with the human nature
even when the body was in the grave; the divine nature could not possibly be forsaken of God;
and the person of the Mediator was and ever continued to be the object of divine favor. It
revealed itself in the human consciousness of the Mediator as a feeling of Godforsakenness.
This implies that the human nature for a moment missed the conscious comfort which it might
derive from its union with the divine Logos, and the sense of divine love, and was painfully
conscious of the fulness of the divine wrath which was bearing down upon it. Yet there was no
despair, for even in the darkest hour, while He exclaims that He is forsaken, He directs His
prayer to God.
b. The judicial character of His death.
It was quite essential that Christ should die neither a
natural nor an accidental death; and that He should not die by the hand of an assassin, but
under a judicial sentence. He had to be counted with the transgressors, had to be condemned
as a criminal. Moreover, it was providentially arranged by God that He should be tried and
sentenced by a Roman judge. The Romans had a genius for law and justice, and represented
the highest judicial power in the world. It might be expected that a trial before a Roman judge
would serve to bring out clearly the innocence of Jesus, which it did, so that it became perfectly
clear that He was not condemned for any crime which He had committed. It was a testimony to
the fact that, as the Lord says, “He was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression
of my people, to whom the stroke was due.” And when the Roman judge nevertheless