Objection: Jesus Bore Our Sins, Not Our Sicknesses, on the Cross (1 Peter 2:24)

The objector asserts that the statement that He “bare our sins in his own body on the tree” shows that it was our sins, not our sicknesses, that He bore, and that within that verse, our sins must be what were healed, not our sicknesses.

The Bible does not teach that sins can be healed; it teaches that sins can be forgiven.  That’s the first problem.

The second problem is that the objector denies that Jesus bore our sicknesses when the literal Hebrew in Isaiah 53:4 is absolutely clear that He has borne our sicknesses and carried our pains, as pointed out elsewhere in this book.  The statement about being healed by Jesus’ stripes in 1 Peter 2:24’s parallels Isaiah’s statement about being physically healed by Jesus’ stripes, and the word healed definitely means “physically healed” (Greek iaomai).

Interestingly, Jesus’ bearing of our sicknesses did not start on the cross – it started when He was whipped by the Romans and made so physically weak that He could not carry His cross.  It is by His stripes that we are healed, not by His blood.  Jesus was already in horrible physical condition – as punishment for our sins – before He was hung on the cross.  However, He still had those sicknesses while on the cross.  When we partake of communion, we celebrate the fact that His body was broken FOR US as well as the fact that His blood was spilled FOR US to ratify the New Covenant.  (The New Covenant and the New Testament are not the same thing.  The four gospels describe mostly action that was under the Old Covenant even though they are in the New Testament.  The New Covenant was ratified by Jesus’ blood, which was only shed at the end of the four gospels.)

The third problem is that I would like for the objector to describe how Jesus could bear sins in His body, as Peter says.  Clearly, Jesus was physically punished for our sins.  He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.  This, to me, is the only sense in which anyone, including Peter, could say that Jesus bore our sins in His own body.  We know that He bore them spiritually as well because He became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).  We have to conclude that bearing sins in His body meant that He had to suffer physical punishment for our sins, which He had taken on spiritually.

But now “by whose stripes ye were healed” reveals its obvious meaning.  Jesus took the physical punishment for our sins as our Substitute so that we need not bear physical punishment for our sins.  Because we need not bear physical distress ourselves now, that is how God can say that we were healed by Jesus’ physical torment.

So this objection is another half-truth, as many of them are.  Jesus DID indeed bear our sins in His body on the cross, but “bearing our sins in His body” meant that He bore physical punishment in our place for our sins while He was on the cross.