God has taken to Himself our weakness and infirmity, piling up in His own body our illness and sores. Not one spot was left untouched; our pain became His. From the top of His head to the soles of His feet, He was wounded because of our cruelty to one another. It pleased God to afflict Christ, the Redeemer, with our infirmities---not to punish---but to bring us to health. Only He could take this body of death to the new life of resurrection from the dead. The body we now have becomes a new creation in the Son of God. We rise to a life where there are no tears and where pain does not exist.
What mother or father, if their child commits a crime, would not gladly take upon themselves the punishment, if they knew the child would go free and live a wholesome life afterwards? It now seems that Joren van der Sloot's father might actually have helped his son dispose of the body of the girl in Aruba. But the anguish of what his son had done eventually destroyed the father, who knowingly took upon himself the guilt that his son might live. In this case, the analogy breaks down, for the son went on to kill again. But still, the father's dilemma: to die himself, almost in place of his son, or to allow the son to undergo the punishment, and maybe even death.
In Jesus, the criminal nature He took to death is gone for good; what He brought back was a new spiritual life, no longer inclined to evil, but animated by and alive to the Spirit of God---the persons we were created to be, not what sin had made of us. If only the death of Van der Sloot's father could have accomplished the same!
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