By His Wounds We Are Healed

March 19, 2023 Sermon - Isaiah 53:6-12 - By His Wounds We Are Healed

An event in my life, maybe 24 years ago, came back to mind this week as I was dealing with massive fatigue that resulted from not being able to take rheumatoid arthritis meds this week for 4 days.

Here’s the story: My family and I were on the beach at the Pinery Provincial Park where we often spent some of our summer vacation time camping. I was maybe 37 at the time.

I saw some young kid swim out to a buoy maybe 25 or 30 meters out from the shore. I thought...Hey, I can still do that.

So I decided that bright, sunny afternoon to swim out to that buoy. So I started to swim out to the buoy that was maybe 25 meters out from the shore.

About half way there I started to feel the undertow. There was a lot of water coming in to the shore and water leaving the shore at the same time.

About 3/4’s of the way there I started to feel tired, but I was proud and wanted to accomplish this ‘little feat’, so I kept going. When I reached the buoy I was pretty tired. I started to get nervous about swimming back, but I didn’t have a choice.

On the way back, about 1/2 way to the shore, I began to feel exhausted. Really exhausted. And I panicked.

My heart was racing, the undertow was making it very difficult to make any progress to the shore. I wasn’t moving despite swimming my very best and hardest.

But I didn’t have a choice, so I kept going. I reached the point of complete exhaustion and I thought, “Wow, this is it.

I’m going to drown. This is how it ends. God keep my family safe. I’m done here”. Pause

Completely spent, after treading water for a moment and being pushed like a rubber duck back and forth in the water by the brutal undertow, I flailed my arms forward and tried one last time to try to touch the sand under the water.

I felt the bottom of the lake and was able to crawl to shore.

I sat there dumbfounded for a while, got up and walked over to my family, from whom I had drifted quite a bit to the west.

Before I decided to do that I had sat on the beach, I evaluated my abilities, decided that I felt strong enough, I was a good enough swimmer.

And I launched out into the water in what could easily have been my last swim.

It wasn’t until I was caught in the undertow that I realised I needed help, I needed saving, I needed a Saviour to save me from myself, my arrogance, my overestimation of my goodness as a swimmer.

When I was finally forced to stop trying because I came to understand that I just couldn’t do it on my own, I was rescued. Was it the tide? Was it angels, was it God controlling the undertow so I would survive. Yes, yes and yes I believe.

You don’t get to be my age, or often a lot younger, without having your own story of rescue. If you are close to my age, 60, and you think you don’t have a story of being strangely saved from yourself, it’s because you’ve forgotten it.

Last week we looked at the last few verses of Isaiah 52 and the first five verses of Isaiah 53.

There is a great deal of content in these Messianic Prophecies, and a lot of important and subtle nuance and details, so that's why we are looking at the second half of Isaiah 53 today.

And I want to say that Isaiah 53 in particular among all of the prophecies about Jesus is the one passage that gets me the most every time I read it, and I read it often.

I love that within it contains a poorly hidden secret. We’ll come back to that.

So let's continue looking at this prophecy, written by the prophet Isaiah, 750 years before Jesus Christ was born.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him

the iniquity of us all.

Humans share a lot in common. We are one race, after all.

The whole concept of the human race being divided into multiple races was created by François Bernier (1625–1688) and European naturalists and anthropologists who wanted to justify slavery.

We share a lot in common. We are one race and only one race, but we’re divided often enough.

We share hearts that long for peace, but our hearts are often anxious. We share minds that yearn for calm and order, but our minds are filled too often with chaos and disorder.