Dr. Klaas Schilder On The Sufferings Of Christ

I first recall hearing Dr. Klaas Schilder's name from one of my Old Testament Professors at Westminster Seminary California. In his commentary on Jonah, while comparing Christ and Jonah, Dr. Bryan Estelle writes:

Jesus Christ underwent abandonment of his own accord, not for his own sins and rebellion (like Jonah) . . . This cup [The cup Jesus asked His Father to take away from Him in Mark 14:36] is the cup of God’s wrath against sin. Why did Christ not want to partake of this cup? It meant being utterly forsaken by God . . . this abandonment for Christ was the experience of an active wrath [or anger!] exerted upon him by his heavenly Father. God the Father was sending all the torments of hell against the Son. As Klaas Schilder says, it is as if he were in the arena, like the martyrs of old, watching the animals being released one by one to tear at his flesh and crush his bones. And throughout the process, he saw his heavenly Father releasing the wrath against him, all the storehouses of wrath . . . Christ had to be identified with mankind in every respect, including the full experience of death itself: this was hell. He went through hell, so to speak, for a heavenly cause. This was separation from God himself, and what Christ had to experience . . . it was not a literal hell into which he descended; it was the experience of hell as it is known in God-forsakenness.

Dr. Schilder (1890-1952) was a Dutch theologian who served the Reformed Church in the Netherlands. Geoff Thomas writes: "The life of Klaas Schilder is fascinating, and anyone who has read his trilogy on the death of Christ will realize that in him you are confronted by a very great man."

Dr. Schilder is a faithful guide to rightly understand Penal Substitution (the heart of the Gospel) and the Cross of our LORD Jesus Christ. Below are a series of statements he made about the center of the Christian faith and our only boast: the cross. These quotations come from his books on the death of Christ. All three of his books can be ordered at Sovereign Grace Publishers.

We know that a drunken man cannot stand; he sinks down. Nor can a dazed man "come near"; he stumbles, he gropes. But Jesus who refuses the myrrh both stands and conies near. Now He ascends to the altars of God, to God, to His God, the source of suffering. Now He descends into hell and yearns for the commandments. God is striking Him — hence He must feel the pain. Jesus feels that the heavenly pronouncement of justice differs from that which is pronounced on earth. When God punishes He punishes completely. His verdict is not characterized by that inner contradiction which characterizes the verdict of a Pilate who wounds the victim with a nail while he soothes him with myrrh. When God in His flaming wrath begins to punish, He does not administer one stroke too many, nor one stroke too brutally. Hence every stroke He gives must be felt. God is not playing a game. The world may hold a sword in one hand and a soothing cup in the other but God holds a sword in the one hand and a sword in the other, God is wholly love or He is wholly wrath. Therefore that, cup of myrrh could not be given Him by God.

The meaning of "this cup" can be no other than the fact that Christ finds the door of His Father’s house closed to Him. Now is the Son the lost Son. He would arise and go to His Father, but the Father is not awaiting Him; the door of the heavenly mansion is closed. The Judge has barred Him from access. “There is no fear in love.” Love and fear, yes. There are two worlds. One is the world of heaven. There love is without fear. Casting out fear can have no meaning in heaven, for heaven is exalted above any need of it. The other world is the world of hell. In hell there is no love in fear; there fear has sunk to a plane so low that it can not possibly communicate with love. Christ Jesus is being bandied back and forth between these two worlds.

The hour of Gethsemane — the release of the devils! They are coming now, for now they may come. Their privilege is not, indeed, the most pleasing application of God’s justice but, nevertheless, they come with His permission. This is the hour of high noon in the great world-day. They come; they have their hour; they have their authority. God allows them to come, for they must begin the battle against the Son of man. And they find Him, laden with sin. That is why they are authorized to let judgment accrue to Him. God is blowing the flames of judgment against His son, because He has made Him to be a curse. Hence, those who fan the furnace in God’s universe may employ their arts to blow the flame into a whiter heat, to drive the hot vapors of the Wrath of the Eternal quite up to and against the heart of Jesus. This is their hour and their province. God’s permission is absolute. The divine activity represented in that permission is also absolute. God Himself throws open the doors of the prison-house of hell; and all the ominous demons creep out of it and rush to Jesus, to hiss and sting Him into death.

But the forsaking of God is also positive. God is directly sending the torments of hell against Christ . . . It is God who looses the devils against Him . . . The Spirit of Christ, as it battles against the forces of hell for three hours, sees the devils rising up against Him, and as He sees it, God is taking the role of the supervisor in the arena, and it is God who releases the lions, the bulls and goats and cattle of Bashan, and it is God who releases the dogs (Psalm 22) against the great martyr with an agonizing calmness. It is God who lifts the doors of the cages . . . Just as the martyrs in the arena saw the man who opened the doors of the cages, and maintained the supervision from that point on, so the Saviour saw God in His arena . . . He released the Dragon . . . the son, the shepherd is being destroyed. Listen to the summons of the Lord of heaven: sword, awake thou against my shepherd.

There, too, we confess that the Mediator who is to truly redeem us must consciously experience in His earthly life, before His death, before His departure from the world and from the circumference of time, that which the lost human being will suffer after his death and on the other side of this bourne. Before the Mediator can say "It is finished," the eternal punishment, the eternal, perfect expression of an unrestrained and unbounded wrath of God must be endured and left behind. Not after His death, understand, but before His death. Not in the other world, but in this world.

However, no one will see the offer in this event unless he sees it by faith. The knife of the sacrifice had always been manipulated by the hand of a priest. These spikes, however, are being driven through His flesh by the firm hand of the accomplices of Cain. Nevertheless, this is the offer. The whole of Christ's own work lies behind the act of the soldiers. He Himself led the process of events to this point; He Himself arranged His feet upon the accursed wood; in the last analysis He Himself manipulated the nails and the hammer. He is the priest, therefore; He has nailed Himself to the cross. He has slain Himself. That is why the Lamb, after a while, can "stand as the slain," hallelujah!                                                                                                                       

God's hand, therefore, strikes most terribly at the Son of man. God breaks Him into pieces. God alone can make and break. Fear Him who cannot fail to kill the body when He must kill the soul, the soul of Him Who has been made sin. Fear Him in this portentous hour Who up to this time has withheld all His nails and lightnings in order that they might strike the Son of man now. God can only despise Jesus; God must turn His ear and eye aside from His supplication.

At that time, therefore, Christ had been dead. He had also endured this death in His body, for His whole human existence suffered the affliction of hell. The flesh, too, had been consumed in God’s anger, and forsaken.

It is not the coming of God in wrath, but the recession of God's love which determines the diction of the fourth utterance from the cross.

His abandonment is not a phase of a latent process of acceptance, but is the essence of the process of rejection itself . . . For this poet, apparently David himself, the abandonment is a relative one. For Christ it is absolute. For David it is a feeling that he lacks the blessings of grace; for Christ it is reality . . . For this Christ, God in absolute sense was the "wholly Other." That, and the wholly and diametrically Opposed One . . . The abandonment on the cross therefore was an objective abandonment.

This is mystery. We cannot appreciate it because - to refer to what was said a moment ago - we have not been in the country of the poet. His country was heaven, and it is hell. We have not understood the poet, will never understand Him, because He is God, because He is in heaven, and because He therefore in His speaking transcends our comprehension. Nor will we be able to think as we should about the poem itself, for the poet is now in hell. Whoever would understand Him as He is in His hellish torture must have been in hell; and may God forbid that. Yes, God Almighty forbid that we should ever enter into the country of this poet. May He protect us from a comprehension of the fourth utterance from the cross. God forbid that we should concoct a theology of experience for we shall have to pay the expensive price of damnation for it. 

In fact, even if someone after this life, and in the real suffering of the lost condition, should want to reflect upon the torture of Christ, which He experienced as God forsook Him, he would find that an eternal impossibility still. For whoever is in hell outside of Christ is here as a sinner; his pollution has not been annihilated. But Christ suffered the pain of hell as the holy man, and besides as the Person of the Eternal Son. No one ever was in hell in that way, and no one will ever be there in that way. The fourth utterance from the cross is unapproachable to every creature on earth, in hell or in heaven. 

Klaas Schilder, Christ In His Suffering, Trial, And Crucified, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans) 1938. (I used a Kindle edition no longer available.)

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

To learn more about the great King Jesus and His glorious Gospel message, please watch American Gospel: Christ Alone. You can watch the full documentary here with a free, 3 day trial.