“But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you” (I Peter 5:10).

The sufferings of Christ have been chronicled in many portions of Scripture: “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair” (Isaiah 50:6). “His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men” (Isaiah 52:14). “All my bones are out of joint: . . . My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death” (Psalm 22:14,15). But God, after Christ was “made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death,” has “crowned (Him) with glory and honor” (Hebrews 2:9). “For it became Him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect [complete, finished] through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10). We who are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (I Peter 1:23) have “received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15).

“Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when His glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy” (I Peter 4:13). Christ must “needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead” (Acts 17:3) to “(take) away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and we, by faith, as children of God and joint-heirs with Christ, are “Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body” (II Corinthians 4:10). But “I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). CJH