Daily Manna · Day 310 · November 6
Healed by His Stripes
“Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”
Imagine a slave in a Roman household undressing in the evening. There are fresh marks on his back from that afternoon, and in the same room someone is reading aloud the letter we call 1 Peter.
That picture comes straight from the letter. A few verses before today's verse, Peter speaks directly to household servants. He tells them how to live under masters who are "froward," an old word for harsh and crooked. He uses the word "buffeted," which means being struck with fists. Then he writes, "by whose stripes ye were healed." He is quoting Isaiah 53, and he is quoting it to people who had real stripes on their backs. In their world a beaten slave had no legal complaint to make and no court to make it in. Peter does not soften that, and he does not explain it away. He places the marks on Christ's back beside the marks on theirs.
When we come to this verse, we usually bring something quieter. Most of our wounds cannot be seen: the thing done at nineteen, the marriage we stopped fighting for, the words thrown at a child in the kitchen last month. Many of them are wounds we gave ourselves, and unlike that slave, we live in a world where we could at least complain about them. It would be dishonest to pretend the man in that room and the person reading this are in the same position.
Still, the grammar of the verse reaches both of us, and the grammar matters most. First: "bare our sins in his own body." Christ did not arrange for our sins to be dealt with from a distance. He carried them Himself "on the tree," and "tree" is the word Deuteronomy uses for a cursed death: "he that is hanged is accursed of God." Then comes the tense: "ye were healed." The healing is past and finished. It is not held back until you improve.
So whatever you are still carrying, you are carrying a second time, and you do not need to. Christ already carried it in His own body. You can set it down with Him today and live as the healed person He says you already are.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 310 is Before the Commands (Exodus 20:2).