What happened at the cross? "He was oppressed, and it was He who was afflicted, / Yet He did not open His mouth; / Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter / And like a sheep that is dumb before its shearers, / So He did not open His mouth. / By oppression and by judgment He was taken away; / And as for His generation, who among them had the thought / That He was cut off out of the land of the living/For the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due?" (vv. 7-8). To be cut off out of the land of the living is to die. Those who stood by the cross at the time the Lord was crucified marveled and wondered why this man was being crucified. They did not know the reason why such a thing happened. The prophet said that "He did not open His mouth," and that He is brought "like a lamb that is led to the slaughter /And like a sheep that is dumb before its shearers." Who knew that He was cut off out of the land of the living for the sin of the people? Who knew that it was God working on Him to accomplish the work of redemption? The cross was the way that the Lord accomplished redemption through His death. Verse 9 says, "And they assigned His grave with the wicked,/But with a rich man in His death,/ Although He had done no violence,/Nor was there any deceit in His mouth." Verse 10 is very precious: "But Jehovah was pleased to crush Him, to afflict Him with grief./If You make His soul a trespass offering." The cross is a work that God did. It was God Himself who bore our sins on the cross. He solved our problem of sin. Never give any credit to Judas for delivering the Lord Jesus to the Jews. Never think that without Judas the Lord would not have been able to be the Savior. Even if there had been a thousand or ten thousand Judases, it would still be useless. It was the Lord Jesus Himself who bore our sins.

When the Lord Jesus was praying in the garden of Gethsemane, He may have seemed like the weakest of all men, without any courage. He prayed for the Father to take the cup away from Him (Luke 22:42). But when He came out from the garden and met many evil men, He said, "I am," and "they drew back and fell to the ground" (John 18:6). Please remember that He did not fall while being confronted with man's evil. On the contrary, He caused them to fall. While He was at Gethsemane, considering the suffering involved in bearing man's sins, how the sinless One would be made sin, and how He was to take upon Himself the judgment of sin, He prayed for the cup to be removed from Him if possible. Had it not been for the question of redemption, the Lord Jesus would not have even matched a martyr. How brave were the many Christian martyrs when they marched to the lions' den. But the Lord Jesus pleaded to have the cup removed from Him if possible. Physically speaking, the Lord Jesus was vastly different from all the martyrs. But for redemption, for solving the problem of sin, for God to come to man and bear man's sin, even He had to ask for the removing of the cup if possible. The Bible says that it was Jehovah that made Him an offering for sin. It was Jehovah who laid on Him the iniquity of us all. It was something Jehovah did. The cross was the work of God; it was not the work of man. The cross is God Himself coming to earth to bear man's sins. The cross is not the crucifixion of the Son of God by man.