Healing Stripes

Healing Stripes
by Thomas Doolittle

We should admire the wisdom and the grace of God that by the stripes inflicted upon Christ the wounds that sin had made in our souls should be healed. The wisdom of God is wonderful in this, to find out such a way, that the scourging of His Son should be the cure of our souls, and His wounding our healing.

And the grace of God is in this to be admired, that when He might have laid the strokes of His revenging justice upon us, He would accept the scourging of his Son for the punishment of our sins, that we might not be scourged forever. We deserved to be broken into pieces with His iron rod, and to be beaten with the rod of His wrath, but we are saved and delivered by the stripes that were laid upon His Son.

Our wounds were killing wounds, but the wounds of Christ are healing wounds. Oh what a surgeon is the Son of God that makes a balsam of His sores, to heal and cure ours! What manner of physician is this, that by His own blood fetched from his body, by cruel stripes and blows, makes a potion for diseased sinners, and thereby cures all their maladies!

Oh think of this till you do admire the wisdom and grace of God.

---Thomas Doolittle, Day by Day with the English Puritans, Randall Pederson, ed. (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), p 108

"...O to grace how great a debtor...