Biblical exposition
Keller explains the three shocking aspects of the death of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53:
The violence of His death.
The vicarious nature of His death.
The voluntary nature of His death.
He then explains how Jesus could voluntarily suffer in our place to forgive our sins.
He draws on a statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Illustration – When you forgive, you pay
Dietrich Bonhoeffer has written: “Forgiveness is a form of suffering.” Can you grasp that statement’s implication? If someone has really, really wronged you…you’ve got to forgive them. If you don’t forgive them, you’ll be eaten up with bitterness…and you’ll become part of the endless cycle of retaliation that makes the world the mess of a place that it is. So you’ve got to forgive. But, Bonhoeffer’s right. Forgiveness is agonizing. When you want to pay somebody back but you don’t pay them back, you pay. When you want to make them suffer but you don’t make them suffer…because you’re trying to forgive them…you suffer. Real forgiveness always entails suffering. There is no such thing as forgiveness without suffering. Not if you’ve really been wronged. And, if that is true for us, with our miniscule and flawed sense of justice, how much more would it be true of God? With Philip’s help, the Ethiopian eunuch realized…this is God suffering in order to forgive us.
If God was not going to pay us back, then He had to pay. Just like with us. When the eunuch realized God underwent a violent, voluntary, vicarious death to forgive him and receive him, it changed his life.
Tim Keller in The Gospel
The illustration’s point
Forgiveness is not pretending that the wrong never happened. The person who forgives absorbs the cost rather than demanding retaliation. This helps us understand the suffering of Christ on the cross.
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