Christ’s Passive Obedience Before His Death

Most Christians, when they contemplate the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ as our Great High Priest, probably think immediately of His crucifixion. Of course, our Savior’s death on the cross serves as the pinnacle of His sufferings, for by it He endured the wrath of God. The sufferings of Christ on the cross do not, however, constitute the whole of His passive obedience.

Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley write in their Reformed Systematic Theology that “Christ’s sufferings for the sins of others began from the moment of his incarnation as a human being, for he did not deserve the least suffering that touches every human being in this fallen world.” This must be so, for Scripture teaches that all the pain and misery of this life occurs only on account of the curse that came upon creation when Adam sinned (Gen. 3:17–19; Rom. 8:18–25). We suffer pain, sickness, tragedy, and finally death because such things are part of the just penalty for sin that God has imposed on sinners. This does not mean that every specific kind of suffering we endure can be traced back to a specific sin of ours as its cause, though we can make such a connection with some of our suffering. Instead, suffering is part of life for sinners in the present order—even for redeemed sinners like us—because creation in its fallen state is subject to the painful consequences and penalties for sin. Jesus, however, never sinned. His experience of suffering was wholly undeserved, for unlike every other human being who has ever lived, He had no personal transgressions and did not participate in Adam’s sin. His suffering, therefore, is a consequence of our sin and thus part of what it means to bear our sin on our behalf.

Scripture plainly teaches that Jesus suffered long before He went to the cross. He knew the grief of losing a friend to an untimely death, as we see in today’s passage (John 11:35). He experienced the onslaught of temptation when suffering the pangs of hunger (Matt. 4:1–11). Much more could be said, but Louis Berkhof summarizes things well when he says that Jesus “suffered from the repeated assaults of Satan, from the hatred and unbelief of His own people, and from the persecution of His enemies.”

Jesus “learned obedience” and was “made perfect” by His sufferings (Heb. 5:8–9). He could not sympathize with us in our miseries if He never endured them, and He could not save fallen people if He did not overcome sin and temptation when beset by suffering.