Objection: Jesus’ Bearing of Our Sicknesses Meant His Sympathy for the Sufferers, Not Literally Taking Them on Himself, Which He Did Not Do in Matthew 8

Without realizing it, this objector is taking us closer to the real meaning of Matthew 8:17, namely that Jesus did what He did on the basis of His coming atonement. It takes some study to reach that conclusion, so there are a lot of “bad tries” to explain that it can’t mean that.  You can read responses to those related objections in this book.

Anyone who doubts that healing is in the atonement HAS TO try to make a claim that Jesus did not literally BEAR our sicknesses, and this objection is an attempt to do that by explaining away His “bearing” as mere sympathy.  The objector would like us to believe that Jesus felt bad for the people who were sick, and that this somehow “weighted Him down” so that He was “bearing” their sicknesses.  The objector actually went on to say that we see this “sympathy” aspect when Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb.

That is a novel idea.  Have you ever heard anyone in normal (not theological) conversation say that he was BEARING the disease of someone else in the hospital?  If so, the “bearer” ought to get a sympathy card while the sick person gets a get-well card!  “Oh, George, I’m so sorry to hear that you’re bearing your cousin’s cancer!”  We don’t do that in real life.

Matthew quoted Isaiah, so for this objection to be true, Isaiah must have prophesied that Jesus was “feeling sorry” for the people who had sicknesses.  A reading of Isaiah 53 shows that the “feeling sorry” idea does not make any sense because it clearly refers to the punishment He took when He bore our sins.  Do you believe that He bore our sins? Good, so do I.  That word bore refers to “bearing something away,” that is, taking something in place of another to relieve the other of having to bear it.  Yes, Jesus bore the punishment for our sins so that we would not have to bear that punishment.  But the same Hebrew word in that chapter is used to say that He bore our sicknesses – in other words, He carried them Himself to relieve us of having to carry them.

Given that it’s the same Hebrew word, if the objector is right, when Jesus was tortured, He did not really take away our sins; He was just “weighed down” with the thought of us carrying them and He “felt sorry” for us.  That “logic” would destroy the entire gospel, which is based on His blood atonement for us, not sympathy for us.

If all Jesus had to do was “feel sorry” for us to free us from our sins and heal our bodies, He could have accomplished that while staying completely whole without being tortured at all at the end of His life!  The cross and the whipping post would have been useless experiences.

I said what I did earlier because when you think this through, you realize that Jesus did not “bear” (in Isaiah’s prophesied sense) our sicknesses in Matthew 8.  He did not “take” infirmities on Himself at that time – He merely healed them.  He had not been “made sick” for us yet.  So the objection has a hint of truth in it that points us to the right interpretation of Matthew 8:17 – that Isaiah’s prophecy was clearly about the atonement, which certainly did not occur in Matthew 8.  He atoned for our sins ONCE, so there is no way that He could have “lived an atoning life” in Matthew 8.  (I agree with another objector that Jesus did not “live an atoning life” before the cross.  Sometimes these objections can steer you in the right direction when you study them out!)