Peter SmytheDecidedly Unprofessional

The Laying on of Hands

For the Day of Atonement ceremony, the high priest laid his hands on both the YHWH goat and the Azazel goat. By tradition, the high priest confessed:

Ah, YHWH, they have committed iniquity; they have transgressed; they have sinned, Thy people, the house of Israel. Oh, then, YHWH cover over (atone for), I intreat Thee, upon their iniquities, their transgressions, and their sins, which they have wickedly committed, transgressed, and sinned before Thee, thy people, the house of Israel. As it is written in the law of Moses, Thy servant, saying: “For on that day shall it be covered (atoned) for you, to make you clean from all your sins before YHWH ye shall be cleansed.

By this laying on of hands, the goats became identified with the people’s sin. Indeed, the translator Joseph Rotherham points out that the Hebrew is so pungent that the Israelites would say, “There goes - there dies - my Sin!” once the laying on of hands took place. It is even more so with Jesus.

Approximately 600 years before Jesus was hung on the cross, the prophet Isaiah penned his book which included Isaiah 53, the chapter on the Suffering Servant. In that chapter, Isaiah is shown the spiritual side of the crucifixion, or maybe better said, the laying on of hands and his identification with the sins of the world (see 1 John 2.2 - “And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world”).

And Yahweh caused to light upon Him the guilt of us all. (Isaiah 53.6, Rotherham)

Yet Yahweh purposed to crush him, He laid on Him sickness - (Isaiah 53.10, Rotherham, marg.)

Yet he was pierced for transgressions that were ours, was crushed for iniquities that were ours,- The chastisement for our well-being was upon him - (Isaiah 53.5, Rotherham)

And we see how in the Gospels that this laying on of our sins, this identification, bore the fury of total separation from God, the Father:

My God! My God! Into what have you abandoned me? (Mark 15.34, Smythean)

Jesus’s scream not only denotes the fact of separation, but also the effects of it. Prior to his becoming man, he existed as the Word, the second person of the Godhead. It was he who created a universe containing trillions of stars in billions of galaxies that is so large that we cannot comprehend it no matter how hard we try. It was he who has dazzled us with the swirling storms of Jupiter, the monolithic rings of Saturn, the cuteness of the snow seal, and even the remarkable creation of a single blade of grass. Yet, possessing so much of that awesome glory, he agreed to totally empty himself of it in order to rescue us.

But in order to do it, he had to become what we were. He had to fully identify with us which meant that he had to fully identify with sin. And so, Isaiah, speaking from a seat in the realm of the Spirit, watched the laying on of hands and recorded the tragic depth of Jesus’s identification:

So marred beyond any man’s was his appearance,

And his form beyond the sons of men (Isaiah 52.14, Rotherham)

How is it that this glorious Son of God had to lend himself to go so far? As the Garden of Gethsemane shows us, there was just no other way.

Notes

1. We rendered Mark 15.34 as “into what have you forsaken me?” which is consistent with Rotherham’s translation: “to what end didst thou forsake me?” The operative words are εἰς τί which are many times translated “why,” but not always. In Acts 19.3, the words are translated “into what then were you baptized?” (NASB, NET, WEB, ESV, Weymouth). As Jesus was aware of what he had to accomplish in death, but had never experienced sin before, we believe that “into what” is the better translation (“why” just has never sat well with us).

2. Many preachers have looked upon Isaiah 53.14 in the physical sense - the beatings that Jesus bore prior to being crucified on the cross. The entire context of Isaiah is the spiritual side of the crucifixion. As even Spurgeon once noted, there is no mention of blood in Isaiah (which is also significant for the sacrifice sequence). In addition, there is no evidence in the Gospels that Jesus was beaten so badly that “he was marred beyond any man’s appearance.” Even Mel Gibson didn’t pull that off.

3. Franz Delitzsch, one of the greatest Hebraists ever, wrote this about Isaiah 53.10 which we see is consistent with our essay: “that the asham [guilt offering] paid by the soul of the servant must consist in the sacrifice itself, since He pays it by submitting to a violent death; and a sacrifice presented by the nephesh (the soul, the life, the very self) must be not only one which proceeds from itself, but one which consists of itself.” (Commentary on Isaiah)

4. Some ministers have objected to Jesus becoming sin on the basis that it equates him being a “sinner,” but that is a false analogy. In Genesis 3.7, Adam sinned against God and that sin (and death) came upon all men (see Romans 5.12). Jesus was born of a virgin and was perfectly sinless when he presented himself upon the cross. Unlike the Genesis account, God laid the sins of us upon Jesus. That action of the Father in the redemptive plan can hardly be said to render Jesus a “sinner” in the same sense that Adam was a sinner; God is not the author of sin.

5. Fred Price has preached about Jesus becoming sin and has said: “Somewhere between the time He [Jesus] was nailed to the cross and when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane - somewhere in there - He died spiritually. Personally, I believe it was while He was in the garden.” (Frederick K.C. Price, Identification #3 (Inglewood, CA: Ever Increasing Faith Ministries, 1980), tape #FP545, side 1). We disagree that Jesus was made sin in the garden because that violates the type of the Day of Atonement and what is shown to us in Isaiah 53. In the garden, Jesus became fully conscious of the dreadful fate that awaited him on the cross, but the “laying on of hands” occurred after he presented himself “without defect” on the cross.

6. Some preachers in preaching healing, mostly charismatic and Word of Faith, hold that Jesus had physically come onto him every sickness and disease known to man while on the cross. Frankly, we do not see it that way. Isaiah 53 bears witness that the root of sickness and disease is spiritual and not physical: “Yet surely our sicknesses he carried, And as for our pains he bare the burden of them.” Jesus bore the spiritual cause of sickness and disease, not the physical effects of them on the cross.