• The Nobel prize winning physicist Niels Bohr once said, ‘It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future.’ That’s hardly a genius comment to make, but he was talking about physics experiments, and how difficult it is to predict for the future based on past experiments.
o But we all know it’s practically impossible to predict the future. If we could, bookmakers would be out of a job. Back in 2016, when David Cameron proposed a referendum about leaving the European Union, who could have predicted the mess we are in today?
A political analyst said on Thursday night on Radio 5, ‘no one knows what’s going to happen in the British Parliament in the next few minutes, let alone the next few days.’ As Neils Bohr so rightly said, ‘It’s very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future!’
That’s why Isaiah 53 is such an amazing chapter. In this passage Isaiah predicts, 700 years in advance, exactly how Jesus was going to save us. In this chapter he predicts Jesus’ trial, his death by crucifixion, his burial in a rich man’s tomb, his resurrection from the dead, the spread of the Gospel around the world, and even Jesus’ ascension and reign in heaven.
That’s what makes Isaiah 53 such a controversial chapter. A Jewish rabbi in the 17th century told Jews not to read this prophecy in Jewish synagogues, because it points so powerfully to Jesus.
And we are going to see how Isaiah does that. The passage actually begins at the end of chapter 52. It's a passage that is called a 'Servant Song', as Isaiah introduces us to the Servant of the Lord who would come in the future.
And in this opening section, Isaiah tells us that God’s Servant will be recognized by a set of seeming contradictions. Firstly
• He will be human yet divine (13)
• (v.13) says ‘Behold, my servant shall act wisely, he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.’ Now it’s very clear from the rest of this servant song that the servant was going to be a human being.
? In the very next verse we are told how much he will suffer, and that his appearance will be disfigured. And later on in Isaiah 53 we are told he will be rejected by others, he will not open his mouth during his trial, and he will die, in some sense, for other people. So we are clearly talking about a genuine human being.
• But in this opening verse, the Servant is described in the same way that God is described in the great vision of Isaiah 6.
• Isaiah 6 opens with the words ‘in the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord, HIGH AND LIFTED UP, and the train of his robe filled the temple.’
Isaiah 52 says the servant will be ‘high and lifted up and exalted.’ This is not the kind of language that the Bible uses anywhere else for a normal human being. So even though the Servant clearly is human, he is spoken about in the same lofty terms as God himself – ‘high and lifted up and exalted.’
The Servant will be both human and divine. And that is exactly what Jesus claimed for himself. In fact that’s what got him crucified. The High Priest at Jesus’ trial said, ‘you, a mere man, claim to be God.’
So as you are thinking this morning, ‘can I really believe that Jesus was God?’, you don’t just have the claims that Jesus made about himself – claims that got him crucified. You don’t just have the miracles he did that even his enemies could not deny, and you don’t just have the resurrection of Jesus, which was the spark that lit Christianity.
On top of all that, you have this prophecy of Isaiah, written 700 years before Jesus was ever born, claiming that God’s Servant would be both human and divine.
And this fits with Isaiah 9, that passage we read at Christmas, ‘unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God.’
You can see why Christians get so excited about Isaiah. He was predicting, 700 years in advance, that Jesus would be both human and divine.
So on one level this verse adds to our conviction that Jesus really is the Son of God. But we need to ask an equally important question ‘why was it important that Jesus was both God and man?’ What difference does that make to our lives today?
Well, it makes a massive difference. For one thing it teaches us about the value that God places on us as human beings. The Christian story is that God himself came into the world to save men and women.
God didn’t send an angel to do this supremely important work.
God himself became human, which shows the value of human life, of every precious soul in this room today. We need to remind ourselves of that, because some scientists in particular are trying to convince us that we are no more than animals with big brains. That we have no more value than chimpanzees, or even worms in the ground.
And that’s what our children are being taught, with deadly consequences. This teaching has a massive impact on our views of the sanctity of human life. We should not be ashamed of saying that men and women are the highest order of creation. More important than animals and even angels. Jesus Christ did not become an angel and die for angels, he became a man and died for men and women.
I was struck by a comment that a Presbyterian minister in Australia made last week. His comments were in the context of the Australian labour party offering free abortions, and increasing access to abortion pills. The minister said ‘we save whales and birds from extinction, with some passion, yet we kill babies by the tens of thousands.’
• God becoming a man in Jesus of Nazareth reminds us that we are eternal creatures, made in the image of a God who values us beyond any other creature he has made. As the early church father Athanasius said, ‘he became like us, that we might be like him.’
? The lowliest street urchin in Calcutta this morning is a precious human being, with an eternal value. In an increasingly utilitarian world, we need to be a church that upholds the sanctity of life, from the cradle to the grave and beyond.
The fact that Jesus was both divine and human is important for the sanctity of life, but it’s also important for the logic of salvation. Jesus had to be the God/man so that he could save us.
He had to be a man so that he could represent the human race. That’s what he was doing at the cross. He was bearing the just judgement for the whole human race, and he could only do that if he was a real flesh and blood man himself.
But being a man wasn’t enough if his death was to have the power we need it to have. He needed to have the power to rise from the dead.
The only way that Jesus could have power to rise from the dead, is if he was God incarnate, the source of life and creator of the universe.
And the writer to the Hebrews says that today in heaven, Jesus ‘lives in the power of an endless life.’ It is because Jesus is eternal that he can be our Saviour forever. His death takes the punishment for our sin, and his resurrection and ongoing life in heaven for us, gives us the hope of eternal life.
In the first 500 years of the early church, the biggest theological battles revolved around the humanity and the deity of Jesus, because who he is, is crucial to our eternal salvation.
The Chalcedonian creed says ‘Jesus is perfect humanity, and undiminished deity, united in one person forever.’
Keep this wonderful tension in your heart today. Jesus is human and divine. ‘He became like us, so that he could make us like him.’
This passage is describing God’s servant, 700 years before Jesus arrives. And God’s Servant would be recognized by a set of seeming contradictions. Firstly he would be human and divine. Secondly
• He would be a Sufferer and a Saviour (14)
• (v.14) suggests that the Servant would suffer horrendously. ‘As many were astonished at you – his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind.’
o The verse implies that the Servant would be barely recognizable as a human being. Marred ‘beyond human semblance’.
o It would take a fearful battering for someone to be considered ‘beyond human semblance.’ And that’s exactly what Jesus’ crucifixion was like.
The Gospels record not just that Jesus was crucified, but that he was scourged first before he ever got to the cross. Most crucified men weren’t scourged beforehand. But Pilate wanted Jesus to look hideous after his scourging, so that people would take pity on him and release him. Which of course didn’t happen.
Scourging meant being beaten repeatedly with a whip that had bits of bone and metal on it that could tear the flesh. I won’t say any more.
But as Jesus stumbled through the streets of Jerusalem, he was already so torn from the scourging, that he didn’t have the strength to carry his own cross. An African bystander called Simon of Cyrene was asked to carry the cross beam. Many men died of scourging alone.
So this prophecy from Isaiah, 700 years before Jesus’ crucifixion, is disturbingly apt. In fact it could be describing very few scenarios outside of scourging and crucifixion.
Illust: A few years ago Liz and I braced ourselves to watch Mel Gibson’s the ‘Passion of the Christ’ movie. If you have seen Jesus movies you would be used to the tame versions of Max Von Sydow in ‘the Greatest Story ever told’, or Robert Powell in the series Jesus of Nazareth.
But they aren’t proper depictions of crucifixion. The Passion of the Christ was certificate 18 because Mel Gibson got the closest to the reality of the cross, and there were scenes we had to wind forward.
Interestingly the Gospel writers do not emphasize the horror of crucifixion near as much as they might have done, probably because they want us to concentrate on what the cross accomplished, rather than its gruesome reality.
Isaiah 52 is one of very few places, alongside Psalm 22, that give us a real picture of what Jesus went through for us. He was brutalized to an extent that people had to look away – ‘like one from whom men hide their faces’.
So Isaiah is clearly predicting that the Servant will be hideously disfigured. But he would be both a sufferer and a Saviour. In fact he would save us through his suffering. (v.15) says ‘so shall he sprinkle many nations.’ The ‘so’ shows the connection between the Servant’s sufferings, and the sprinkling he will bring to the nations.
The idea of sprinkling had nothing to do with garden hoses. It’s what priests used to do to symbolize forgiveness. They would sprinkle the worshipper with water or oil or even blood. So this verse is predicting that the Servant’s death would sprinkle, would make clean, would provide forgiveness for, ‘many nations.’
This is why Isaiah 53 is such a powerful prophecy. We have the whole Gospel here hundreds of years before Jesus ever arrives.
The Gospel centres around this idea that we need to be cleansed by God. We are unclean in our sins, unfit for God’s presence, and Jesus’ blood cleans us.
1 Pet 1 opens with these words, ‘to God’s elect, chosen by God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus and sprinkling with his blood.’ Every Xian is someone who has been sprinkled with Jesus blood.
Do you know this morning that you need to be sprinkled, washed clean, by the blood of Jesus? Not literally of course. But we need our sins forgiven, washed away.
God has given you and I a conscience, so that we feel bad when we do bad, and we feel good when we do good. Our conscience is difficult to live with, but it is proof that you and I are moral beings, created by a moral God, who wants to expose our sin for what it is, so that he can clean us up.
Our culture tells us we don’t need to be cleaned. I was reading an article recently that was arguing how wrong it was to ever tell a child they had done something bad. That would damage their self esteem.
I was wondering how you could be a proper parent without ever telling your kids they did something wrong! Has the world gone mad? But it’s all part of our crazy culture, where it’s all about respecting each other, but never defining what right and wrong is.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, ‘If God does not exist, everything is permissible.’ And that’s the world we are trying to create. It’s all about rights, but never about wrongs. It’s about self fulfilment, but never about soul searching.
It’s about being happy, but not about being good. In fact it is offensive to tell anyone they are a sinner who is unclean in God’s sight. But who cares what the culture says! What does your own conscience tell you?
Do you feel your sins exposed? That’s what light does. It exposes darkness. And Jesus is the light, and he wants to expose you so that he can wash you, forgive you, and give you peace with him. That’s what he died to do. To sprinkle you with his blood.
And that exposure needs to keep happening when we are Christians. Ephesians 5 says the Word washes us. Expose yourself to the cleansing power of the Word of God every day. It cleans you up, and stops you living a double life as a Christian. ‘Be holy, because I the Lord your God am holy.’
In a culture that has lost any notion of sin, it’s very easy to let our standards slip in the church. To find permissible, what the Bible clearly calls sin, simply because more and more people are finding it permissible. ‘It’s not the boat in the water that sinks it, it’s the water in the boat. In the same way, it’s not the Christian in the world but the world in the Xian that sinks him.’
Let’s keep exposing ourselves to God’s word to make us clean. To keep us holy. Sprinkled by the blood of Jesus.
This passage, written 700 years before Jesus, is telling us that the Servant will be recognized by a set of seeming contradictions. He will be human and divine, he will be a sufferer and a saviour, and thirdly,
• He will be hidden and revealed (15)
• (v.15) ‘kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand.’
o Clearly what the Servant does will have an impact way beyond Israel. The good news of Jesus will be revealed to the whole world. The kings of nations around the world will be astonished by the Gospel. They will ‘shut their mouths’.
• No one could have predicted in 700 BC, that one Jewish man, who suffers horrendously, dying as a criminal within the tiny nation of Israel, would impact every nation on earth, and that we would still be talking about him 2000 years after the event.
• It is vanishingly improbable, and yet it has happened, exactly as Isaiah predicted. Within 300 years of Jesus’ death, the entire Roman empire officially became Christian, and kings and emperors called church councils to agree on Xian doctrines. Christianity is a worldwide faith, against all odds.
The Gospel has now been fully revealed, as people from every nation on earth submit to the rule of Jesus over their lives.
But the intriguing thing about this verse is that the Gospel is hidden as well as revealed. God planned for the cross before time began, but he kept that plan hidden for centuries, revealing snippets here and there through mysterious prophets, in remote Israel.
You have to dig deep to see the plan unfolding. The kings of the nations will see ‘what has not been told them. They will understand what they have not heard.’ The Gentile world outside of Israel was completely ignorant of the plans of God for generations.
They knew nothing of the promises of a Messiah who would save the world. And it’s only as Christians bring this Gospel to new nations that people can hear the story of Jesus and be saved. It’s such a mystery how God reveals his plan of salvation.
And today the Gospel is hidden and revealed. We live in a culture that has abandoned church and forgotten or rejected most of the Bible stories it was brought up with.
And maybe you are here this morning from a totally unchurched background, and you have never heard about this Jesus being the Saviour of the world. Your parents haven’t told you. Your teachers haven’t told you that there is a God who sent his Son to die for your sins.
And like these kings in Isaiah 52, you are only now discovering what you have never heard before, what you have never been told, and yet what has been planning for centuries.
Illust: Colin Robertson told me shortly before he died, how angry he was that he had been raised in a church that never told him the Gospel. Never called him to believe in Jesus as Saviour.
You can spend half your life in a church and never hear the message. God hasn’t made it easy for us to respond to the Gospel. We’ve got to search for it.
You’ve got to dig into the prophets, and see the story unfold, and let God open your eyes to true faith in Christ. Jesus even said that his parables were told in such a way that people would be blinded who weren’t genuinely seeking God. The Gospel is hidden as well as revealed.
And God, in his sovereignty, has set the Gospel up in this hidden yet revealed way for 2 reasons. Firstly, so that regular Christians realize the need to be missionaries who take the message of Jesus to neighbours and friends. As Romans puts it, 'how will anyone here unless preachers are sent to witness to them?'
The church, you and me, is God’s chosen vehicle to get his Gospel out there. Who are you going to witness to this week?
But there’s also a challenge to you if you are not a Christian. If you don’t really want to find God, you won’t. If you are not prepared to repent and submit to Jesus, God will ensure that you cannot understand the cross, that it remains a mystery to you.
In other words, our search for God reveals as much about us as it does about him. Jesus said an amazing thing to Pilate during his trial. He said ‘all those on the side of truth listen to me.’ In other words you will understand and be won over by the Christian message, not when you grasp the logic of it all, but when you are on the side of truth. When you are prepared to go wherever the truth leads. And that demands heart breaking humility.
Samuel Rutherford said, ‘be humbled, walk softly, down with your topsail; stoop, stoop. It is a low entry to go in at heaven’s gate.’
Jesus is an enigma, a mystery hidden for long ages past, and hidden from many today. He is human and divine, he is a sufferer and a saviour, and he is hidden and revealed. The Gospel is like a treasure buried in a field, and you will only ever find Jesus when you seek him with all your heart.
