God was Pleased to Bruise His Son

 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.  (Isaiah 53:10 KJV)

How can God be pleased to wound His Son?  Is there something wrong with God? Does He have a side we need to know about? Or, is the Bible a silly book that presents God as sadistic father who took some sort of delight in hurting his son?

The “bruising of His Son” prophesied by Isaiah 700 years before Jesus, referred prophetically to the crucifixion of Jesus.  When the prophet, speaking by God the Holy Spirit, said that the crucifixion of God the Son “pleased” God the Father, what was he telling us?

The verse above speaks to the very heart of the Gospel, for at the heart of the Gospel is the Cross, the wounding and death of Jesus. The verse trembles with reverence. The Bible is not saying that God took a strange, perverse delight in the death of His Son.  God is Holy and has and will never have a grain of impurity and evil in any part of Him. So, we venture into things at which the very angels marvel (1 Peter 1:12).

God was pleased in the sense that the righteous requirements of His law toward human sin were satisfied in the death of His Son.  Sin had to be punished.  God could not shrug it off and still be holy. God is “pleased” as He sees the death of Jesus as sufficient satisfaction in regard to the sins of those He has saved.  He need not look anywhere else but to His Son to see a perfect payment for your sins and mine. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

God was pleased in the sense that peace has been procured and a living way has now been made for sinners to come to Him. No longer are we banished from His Holy Presence. The curtain is torn from top to bottom, from Heaven to Earth, the sinner is reconciled, the war is over. For the sinless Son, standing in the stead of the rebel race, has made peace for us by His own Blood.  How then could the merciful Father not be pleased with the bruising of His Son? “For God was pleased … through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1:19-21)

God himself will provide the lamb. Genesis 22:8