1 Peter 2:24

1 Peter 2:24. who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, or, as in margin of the R. V., carried up ... to the tree. From Christ's fellowship with us in suffering, and from His innocence and patience as a Sufferer, we are now led up to the crowning glory of the example which He has left of an endurance not for wrong-doing, but for well-doing. What He endured was not only without personal cause or personal demerit on His own side, but in the cause and for the demerit of others. The vicariousness of His sufferings adds to His example a power and grandeur higher still than it receives from the qualities already instanced in it. So far, therefore, as vicarious suffering is a possibility to us, this new statement applies to the example which we are to study in Christ. It is clear, however, that in taking up here the idea of suffering ‘in your behalf with which he had started, and showing what that involved, Peter speedily carries us beyond the idea of example, and into a region in which Christ stands alone as a Sufferer. He places us now before the Cross itself, and in words each of which is of utmost value, touches upon the great mystery of the relation in which Christ's sufferings stand to our sins. The phrase ‘to the tree' points us at once to the climax of His vicarious suffering, His death upon the Cross. In designating the Cross ‘the tree,' Peter is supposed by some (e.g. Bengel) to have selected a term which would appeal with peculiar force to slaves, their class being familiar with punishment by the tree in various forms, the cross, the fork, etc. Peter, however, uses the same term in Acts 5:30; Acts 10:39, where there is no such reference to slaves. So here he adopts it simply as it had been suggested by such Old Testament passages as Deuteronomy 21:22. It is probable, too, that he has in view those ideas of criminality and shame, and the position of one under the curse of the law, with which the word is associated in the Old Testament passage. The same great Passional of Isaiah (specially Isaiah 53:4; Isaiah 53:11-12) is also manifestly in Peter's mind, some of its characteristic terms, as rendered by the LXX., reappearing here. No interpretation, therefore, can be just which fails to be in harmony with the prophetic basis of the statement. How, then, is the central phrase ‘bare our sins' to be understood? The verb occurs indeed in the New Testament (see also on 1 Peter 2:7) in the simple sense of carrying up, or bringing up, as e.g. of Christ bringing Peter and James and John up to the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1), of Christ being carried up into heaven (Luke 24:51), etc. It has also the sense, frequent enough in the Classics, of sustaining. Here, however, its accessories shut us up to a choice between two technical meanings, namely, that of offering up, and that of bearing punishment. Hence some (including the great name of Luther) take the sense to be ‘made an offering of our sins on the tree,' or ‘brought our sins as an offering to the tree.' In favour of this, it may be urged that the same verb has already been used in this sense in 1 Peter 2:5 (as it is again in Hebrews 7:27; Hebrews 13:15; cf. also James 2:21), and that there is a distinct analogy in the Old Testament formula used of the priest offering on, or bringing offerings to, the altar (Leviticus 14:20; 2 Chronicles 24:16). But there are fatal objections to this view, as e.g. the unexampled conception of the sins being themselves the offering; the equally unexampled description of the Cross as an altar (notwithstanding Hebrews 13:10); the fact that it was not upon but before the altar that sacrificial victims under the Old Testament were put to death; and the difference thus created between Peter's use and Isaiah's use of the same terms. The other sense, viz. that of bearing the consequences, or paying the penalty, of sin, is supported by the weightiest considerations, as e.g. the fact that the verb in question is one of those by which the Greek Version represents the Hebrew verb, which (when it has ‘sin' or ‘iniquity' as its object) means to bear punishment for sin (whether one's own or that of others) in numerous passages both of the Pentateuch and the prophets (e.g. Leviticus 19:17; Leviticus 20:19; Leviticus 24:15; Numbers 5:31; Numbers 14:34; Ezekiel 4:5; Ezekiel 14:10; Ezekiel 16:58; Ezekiel 23:35); the New Testament analogy in Hebrews 9:28; the harmony with what is said of the Servant of Jehovah in Isaiah 53. The addition in His body brings out the fact that this endurance of the punishment of our sins was discharged by Him, not remotely as was the case with the Israelite under the Law who brought a victim distinct from himself, but directly in His own person. The phrase to (or, on to, not on) the tree is not inconsistent with this meaning. It gives the whole sentence the force of a picture representing Christ with our sins upon Him, and carrying them with Him on to the final act of penal endurance on the Cross. The statement, therefore, is more than a figure for securing the forgiveness of sin, and means more than bearing sin sympathetically, burdening one's heart with the sense of sin, or destroying the power of sin in us. It involves the two ideas of sacrifice and substitution; the latter having additional point given it by the ‘Himself' (or, as our E. V. puts it, ‘His own self'), which is set both emphatically first and in antithetical relation to ‘our sins.' It can scarcely mean less than what Weiss recognises when he says: ‘It is plain, therefore, that in consequence of Isa. iii, Peter regards this sin-bearing of Christ in behalf of sinners as the means whereby sin has been removed from them, and by which, therefore, the stain of guilt has been effaced' (Bib. Theol. i. p. 233, Eng. Trans.). It gives no theory, however, of how this sin-bearing carried such efficacy with it.

in order that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness. The ransom, from the necessity of ourselves bearing the consequences, or legal liabilities of our sins, however, is not an end to itself. It is done with a view to the killing of the practical power of sin in us, and to our leading a new life. A death unto the sins which He bore is given here as the position into which we were brought once for all by Christ's great act of sin-bearing. Hence the use of the historical past ‘having died.' The idea of this death, though it is expressed by a term not found elsewhere in the New Testament (which some wrongly render ‘being removed away from'), is the same as the Pauline idea (Romans 6:2; Romans 6:11). And through this death comes the new life which is dedicated to the service of ‘righteousness;' which term has here, of course, not the theological sense of justification or a justified state, which some still give it, but the ethical sense which it has, e.g., in Romans 6:16; Romans 6:18-19, etc.

by whose braise ye were healed. The word rendered both by the A. V. and by the R. V. ‘stripes,' occurs only this once in the New Testament. In the original it is a collective singular, and means properly a weal, the bruise left by blows or by the scourge. Hence it is thought that Peter uses it with reference to the slaves punishment. He takes it, however, simply from Isaiah 53:5, adopting what applies properly only to the effects of one kind of punishment as a vivid figure of Christ's sufferings as a whole, and passing at the same time naturally from the ‘we' and ‘our' to the direct personal address ‘ye,' which so distinguishes the Epistle. Bengel calls this ‘a paradoxical expression of the apostle.' It gives the double paradox of grace healed with a stripe, and healed with what is laid upon another than the patient himself. The moral sickness of sin is translated into the health of righteousness by the pain of the Sinless.