Isaiah 53:10 “Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.”

Would it surprise us if God the Father found the day of Jesus’ crucifixion infuriating? Shouldn’t we expect it? Fathers naturally want to protect their children. They want what is best for them. Attend a youth soccer game sometime, or a baseball game. Listen to the way the dads get on the referees, or even their own coaches, if they think their boys aren’t being treated fairly. Several years ago a father became so angry at his son’s hockey coach during a practice that he beat the man to death. Do we think that the Father in heaven loves his Son less? Remember what Jesus once said about his Father’s regard for his children on earth? “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

But what does Isaiah say about the heavenly Father and Jesus’ suffering on this day? “Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer…” It was the Lord’s will. Literally, the Hebrew word Isaiah uses means “delight.” That’s hard to fathom, maybe even impossible for you and me. That the Lord would allow this to happen, even begrudgingly, is hard to get your head around. In his book The Problem of Suffering, Pastor Gregory Schulz describes a father’s agony at watching his children struggle with chronic disease and its pain. He had to tell his son he couldn’t have any food or water as he prepped for surgery. He had to restrain his son while nurses invaded his body with intravenous needles. And then, preparing a sermon on John 3:16, he reads the words, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…” And aghast, looking at those words in light of his relationship with his own son, he could only ask, over and over again, “How could you?”

You see, we aren’t talking about a helpless father watching it happen from a hospital bedside, completely dependent on the doctors, nurses, and medical technology. We aren’t talking about some unfeeling father, too dull to know, too full of himself to care. This is the Father above all fathers, the God who is love, somehow finding delight in what his Son suffers on this day.

Nor is there any analogy or illustration strong enough to describe what happened to this Father’s Son on the cross. “It was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer.” Children have been slowly crushed to death by their parents backing out of the garage. We hear about children burned alive in house fires. All of that pales in comparison to Jesus’ suffering. He was crushed, not so much by Jewish fists, or Roman whips, or nails driven through his wrists and ankles. He was crushed by the combined weight of humanity’s sins, the guilt of all people and all history that he carried to the cross. He was crushed by the fury of hell, the price he paid for those sins in God-forsaken darkness and abandonment.

Still, this is the Father’s will, his delight. How could anyone, much less the Father in heaven, find anything about this “good”?

Our struggle to understand does not come because we are more moral than God. Any idea that we are better than the God who reveals himself to us on the pages of Scripture is a delusion. No, the problem is that we have never felt love for anyone else anything like the love this Father has for you and me. In our sin, our concept of love is wrapped up in affection for those who benefit us in some way. It has to do more with what we get than what we give. Isn’t that so? Don’t you love those who please you, and find excuses not to love those who cause you pain?

The reason our Father could so delight in crushing his Son is that he cannot separate the horrible event from its saving results: “…the Lord makes his life a guilt offering.” In the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament, the guilt was transferred from the worshiper to the sacrificial victim: the lamb, or the calf, or the goat that died in those ceremonies. In the death of the sacrifice the guilt was disposed. The Father made Jesus our guilt offering. The wall of sin that kept us from God is gone!

And so, “he will see his offspring.” Jesus’ death brings many sons and daughters to the Father, millions of them, maybe billions. When God first created man, he did so because he wanted someone to love. He desired a relationship with a creature he fashioned like himself: rational, self-conscious, capable of loving and being loved. Jesus’ death restores God’s dream. Now such a family is possible. Now God’s family is enlarged. This is how “the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.” What God always wanted finally becomes reality at the cross: holy sons and daughters he can claim as his very own. This is why the heavenly Father can also call this day “good.”