Isaiah 63:9, “In all their affliction, He was afflicted…”
Two things to notice in this picture:
First, the same nail is piercing both the hand of the believer and of Christ. In a mysterious sense which I am still—and will likely ever be—trying to wrap my mind around, Christ bore our sufferings on the cross. Not merely an equal amount of suffering—though that is surely true—but our cancers, our losses, our agonies, our fears, our specific and personal griefs and sufferings were borne in Him on the cross, such that He is Daniel’s “fourth man” with us in every furnace of this life. This requires much more and deeper thought, but for now I’ve expressed this concept with the nail in the image.
Secondly, see that Christ’s hand is beneath the suffering believers. This, in turn, highlights a three more things:
First, that He bears the “worst” of it and He goes before us into it. Christ does not ultimately meet us in our sufferings as one who follows us in—though of course in a sense that is true; If He is truly a lamb slain, as it were, from the foundation of the world (Rev.13:8), then He meets us as one already there; as if we are thrown into the dark cell and—once we get our wits about us again—realize that someone is there with us and has been there before us.
Second, because Christ’s hand is below the believers, His hand is in the fire. The idea here is that Christ bore our sufferings as an enemy of God, He bore our sufferings as curses from God, and so absorbed into Himself all that it would mean for God to be “against us” in these things. Therefore, our experience of the same sufferings is as children of God, and we receive said sufferings ultimately as expressions of good from God (Romans 8:28, 31). We still suffer, but the damning sting of those sufferings is gone….Christ bore the “venom” of our sufferings in Himself when He was condemned in our place so that—though the fangs still tear our skin—their poison is gone.
Third, because—from this position—the lifting up of Christ’s hand from the nail entails and necessitates the lifting up of our own hand. His resurrection assures our resurrection. And just as the resurrection of Jesus shines a glory back on the cross that transfigures its horrors into beauty, so too will all of our sufferings one day be seen.
