How was Jesus' death a real sacrifice if He knew He would be resurrected?

The depth of suffering the work of the cross involved is seen in the fact that the anticipation of it caused the holy Sufferer to sweat "as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground." May we ponder this solemn moment, and the love which many waters could not quench! Christ knew all that should come upon Him. The grief and suffering, infinitely beyond all else, was to be forsaken by God, when He was numbered with the transgressors, and bare the sins of many. Though dark and sorrowful beyond all thought as it was, yet He could discern at the end light and glory and rest; for we are told that "for the joy that was set before Him" He "endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."

169 A weight of another character pressed upon the Lord, I doubt not, often through His life; and must and ought to have done so, though only shewing perfectness (that is, in blessed submission to the divine will). I mean the anticipation, when the time was there for Him to look at it (how often are we distracted by our little anticipated sorrows!), of His sufferings on the cross and their true and pressing character. On His path of life death lay. He could not, as we see, take His part with the excellent of the earth, and bring them into the purposed, or indeed, any real and permanent blessing, without going through death, and death as the wages of sin, for they were sinners. If the corn of wheat did not fall into the ground and die, it abode alone. There none could follow — not indeed the disciples, as He tells them, more than the Jews. And for Him death was death. Man's utter weakness, Satan's extreme power, and God's just vengeance, and alone, without one sympathy, forsaken of those whom He had cherished, the rest His enemies, Messiah delivered to Gentiles and cast down, the judge washing his hands of condemning innocence, the priests interceding against the guiltless instead of for the guilty — all dark, without one ray of light even from God. Here perfect obedience was needed, and (blessed be God!) was found. But we can understand, and just in the measure of Christ's divine, while human, sensibilities, what such sorrow must have been in prospect for a soul who looked at it with the feelings of a man made perfect in thought and apprehension by the divine light which was in Him.

Note, this includes the resurrection; for therein is the thing which shows its value. There was a "therefore" for grief and (so to speak) shame to God; but resurrection, Christ, was not merely good, but met this, wholly setting it aside. Without death there would have been no resurrection. Resurrection is not simply what is good. Without resurrection death was merely the power of Satan and of evil as from God, marred in honour in the imposition of curse in the works of His own hands. See Moses' argument: "Wherefore should the Egyptians say?" But it was not merely the fact but the mind in which He did it: therefore, "Therefore doth my Father love me." It was the bona fide giving of His life; as a Man, too, sensible of death. This was wondrous faith, perfect obedience, perfect honouring of God. It was the giving of life now, but it was in the knowledge of value, and that He might have it. So He trusted, as Abraham of old [to] receive it again. The union of living, done in Himself, yet in obedience, is very marked. Both were necessary to make it perfect. "I lay it down of myself; no one takes it from me." Not man, he dare not; not God, He could do no such thing. Yet did He in one sense treating Him as a sinner, and man in another sense treating Him also (strange to speak) as a sinner; both, as to the suffering of it; neither, as to the will by which He died: "I have authority to lay it down, and authority to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father."

“He gave Himself for our sins” (Gal. 1:4). Did He not know what this involved? Had He underestimated the weight of that awful judgment that must be poured out mercilessly upon the One made sin? Was He unaware that it meant being made a curse? Had He overlooked the abandonment of God? He knew everything. He was well aware of all that was to be enacted at Golgotha. He neither overlooked nor underestimated anything. But at all cost He would do the will of the Father, and at all cost He would ransom our souls from the power of death. Therefore, in love beyond all human thought, He gave Himself for our sins.

All this is sound and healthful teaching for us—Behold, however, the cost! Behold the depths of sorrow and anguish into which the Doer of that will went! Behold the garden of Gethsemane bedewed with His sweat as blood! Behold the tree of Calvary crimsoned with the sacrifice and the offering of the body of Jesus! He knew all that was involved in undertaking to do God’s will: the price to be paid was fully estimated by Him: As He knelt in prayer upon the soil of Olivet, being withdrawn about a stone’s throw, from His disciples, He looked into the dreadful cup which he must drink, and the very perfection of His holy sensibilities deprecated it; nevertheless, though His soul was very sorrowful even unto death, though a deep depression came upon His spirit, though the sweat became as great drops of blood and fell upon the earth, He was in conflict and prayed more earnestly; yea, though amazement, oppression, and inexpressible grief were then His, yet, in all the strength of His holy devotedness to His Father’s will, and in a depth of communion which is beyond measure, He said, “My Father, if this cup cannot pass from Me unless I drink it, Thy will be done.” He alone could do it! He had come to do it and there was no other way! The awful depth to which He must go had in anticipation been fathomed! “THY WILL BE DONE,” He says to His Father! In the past eternity, in the roll of the book, His words had been recorded—“Lo, I come to do Thy will”; and now, from the most dreadful deeps of suffering in spirit that had ever been known His devoted language is …

The Lord reverts to thoughts of His approaching death. There is no avoidance of contemplating that which it was part of His perfection to feel, as no man ever did. He estimates it rightly and fully as before, instead of braving it as men do who cannot escape. To Him it was no inevitable doom, but Divine love, that God might be glorified in a guilty world, that sinners might be saved righteously, that the entire creation of heaven and earth (I say not those under the earth, the infernal beings of Phil. 2) might be reconciled and blessed for ever. He, and He only, had authority to lay down His life (φυχὴν), as He had authority to take it again. As He is the Resurrection and the Life (ζωὴ), so no one takes the life He had in this world from Him, but He lays it down of Himself, though also in obedience to His Father, and to the everlasting glory of God, as the fulness of His Person enabled Him to do. None the less but the more did He feel the gravity, humiliation, and suffering of what was before Him. There was the deepest sense of death, not only as man and Messiah, but of its import from man's hand and from God's judgment. Not an element of grief and pain and shame and horror was absent from His heart, compatible with the perfection of His Person and His relationship to God.

Many a martyr has laid down his life, but their lives were taken from them; none but the Son of God had authority to lay down His life. His entry into death was of His own volition; He entered the dark domain of death as no other ever entered into it, in all the confidence of the authority that was His to break death's power, and come forth in the triumph of having accomplished the work that His Father had given Him to do. And yet, while it was of His own will He went into death, His death was also an act of obedience in sub-mission to His Father's will. The Son delighted in the Father's will, even if it meant death for Him, and all that death meant; for we hear Him again speak of it as an expression of His love to the Father in obedience, where He says, "'But that the world may know that I love the Father; and as the Father gave me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence" (John 14:31). His death expressed His love to the Father, and called forth the Father's love for the Son.

The first thing was winning Christ; the second, knowing Christ. There is the victory over the whole power of evil - death, and everything else. I want to know Him - His perfect love and life; to have Him as the object before the soul-occupying the soul, and mind, and heart, and so grow up into Him; and to know the power of His resurrection, for then the whole power of Satan was set aside. He had spoken of the righteousness as that which he sought in Christ, not in himself and the law; and now he wanted to know the power of the life expressed in the resurrection of Christ. When he has known Christ as a Person, and victory over death, he can take up the service of love as Christ did, and can know "the fellowship of his sufferings." How different from fearing, and dreading, and creeping on as the apostles did when told of His death, in Mark 10! "They were amazed, and as they followed, they were afraid," instead of rejoicing because death was before them. But, if I know the power of resurrection, death is behind me, all its power is broken. So, when He rose, He said, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth"; "Preach the gospel to every creature"; "Be not afraid of them that kill the body," He had said before: they killed His body.

His was no ordinary death, but the death of the curse, the bearing of guilt and suffering on behalf of ruined sinners, agony unparalleled in all history. Well knowing previously, too, the horror all this would entail, yet His willing self-humiliation did not end until He had come to the lowest place, in which He could reach and save the lowest sinner. Indeed, it was only this that could save any sinner: He must come to the lowest place possible, and this He did in willing sacrifice. Blessed be His Name forever!

How significant the voice for today, particularly when we consider this one death, His death, in which all centres for God and man. It is not to be wondered at that the Christ of God is thus shadowed. How urgent and momentous it is, that each evangelist should by the Holy Spirit not only present Him in His person, life, and character, but give solemn and varied aspects of His sufferings and death with their effects. Blessed indeed when in any measure God's light, purpose, and truth appear. In eternity we shall know, as we are known. What unfathomable depths of a death, known only to God the righteous Judge of sin, and to the Lamb, the holy and righteous Sufferer Who sustained the judgment due to it! It is especially in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, that His victim character as the Sin-offering appears. Both the sufferings of Gethsemane, and the actual death due to sin are recorded. There was the cup which justice mixed and He in holy horror anticipated. If He desired that it might pass from Him, yet drink it He would, to do the will of God. Then at the cross itself, when under the judgment of God, and making peace by His death and precious blood, He cried "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" This consummated the answer to every typical death. The wages of sin was paid, the glory of God vindicated and established, to the everlasting glory of Him Who bore the cross. It was when Jesus died that God gave witness to it by rending the veil, proving that the distance was gone and the way opened; man and God were brought together.