Messianic Prophecy - “Suffering & Glory”
Lent is a sober season in the Christian calendar. It’s a time of reflection and consideration.
So a sober question during this season of Lent. Do you ever feel you're just scraping by in this life?
I don’t just mean financially, although that is an issue for many of us as well. But scraping by…because of our wounds. Because of being paralyzed by our fears.
We’re racked with doubts about ourselves, our friendships. We’re scraping by because life has hurt us, we sense. Loss that we’ve known has left us lost.
We bear physical wounds from evil done to us. We bear the scars of guilt because of harm we have done to others.
We live with diseases, or we live with the knowledge that disease has taken someone we were close to away from us forever. Or we live with the fear of disease.
We live our lives in a bubble, perhaps rarely allowing even those closest to us to truly get close enough to know us. Perhaps we fear being known. Our experiences have diminished us.
We look at children and on the occasions when we remember we were children once, we wonder at how we got to here from there.
Once we were carefree and alive. Now, it’s all about scraping by. Sober questions during Lent.
We’re in the midst of a study together looking at Old Testament prophesies about the Messiah.
And today in Isaiah 52 and 53 we learn more about the Messiah who was yet to come in that day.
In chapter 52, there are some scattershot comments about the Messiah that nicely sets up chapter 53, which follows a more narrative approach to the identity of the coming Messiah.
This passage is frequently quoted in the NT and has been referred to as the “gospel in the OT” or the “gospel of Isaiah”
13 See, my servant will act wisely ; he will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted. 14 Just as there were many who were appalled at him - his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness- 15 so he will sprinkle many nations, and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.
Here we see that the Suffering Servant, another name for the Messiah,
1. As to His conduct, will be wise in what he does. He will act wisely. He will be prudent, considered, thoughtful and He will have insight. Some translations say here that he will prosper - his life will be fruitful.
2. He will be raised, set on high, and highly exalted - somehow - it’s not clear in this part of the text, but of course the exaltation of Jesus is referred to often in the NT.
3. Yet He will repel many somehow.
4. He will be, at some point in his journey, so disfigured as to be barely recognizable as a person. (The film The Passion of the Christ attempted to show this. The director said that he exercised great restraint in doing this because to show what Jesus actually went through and how he would have looked would have put the film in the category of horror, which he didn’t want to do)
5. Yet He will sprinkle many nations - that word is an odd rendering of the Hebrew that we find in most translations - it’s actual meaning is to spring, to leap, to startle or cause to leap. But we know his blood will be shed
6. King will shut their mouths or be silenced because of him. Interesting to note the thousand of kings and queens have come and gone since the coming of the Messiah, yet Jesus remains the King of kings.
7. Even though they have not heard the prophetic word, kings will understand the mission of the servant when they see his humiliation and exaltation.
So those are the scattershot comments about the Messiah at the end of Isaiah chapter 52 that we will see today start to get fleshed out in Isaiah 53.
Today we’ll be looking at just the first 5 verses of Isaiah chapter 53 about The Suffering Servant, our Saviour Jesus Christ, and how and why it is that He came to us, and why it is that 2000 years later,
Jesus is still so important, still so central to the lives of soooo many people, still inspiring places like the Yonge Street Mission to reach out to the hurting in His name.
So let's begin by considering the bigger picture of Who God is, and of what He accomplished in coming to us in Jesus Christ.
God Was Safe and Away from All Alarm
The God of Creation, the great Healer, the Almighty and Everlasting One lived, existed entirely above all human suffering.
We understand that God is Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That by itself, the very nature of God, is less a tough theological or philosophical thing to get our heads around than it is just the recorded revelation of the Bible.
We can say: “I have trouble understanding or believing the Trinity, and we can think to ourselves then that it can’t be true until we understand it.
Or we can read the text and see that what revealed in the Bible is the fact of the oneness of God and the divinity of the Father, The Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Anyway, God was in a sense unaffected directly by the condition of humanity. He was quite above it all.
To summarize an enormous story, just for the purposes of this message, we’ve seen as we’ve touched on the book of Genesis in recent months how God interacted with Adam and Eve, giving them the Garden of Eden and then, when they broke faith with Him, expelling them from the garden.
Jump far forward over a lot of important stories and details in the OT and we get to the story of God’s people in Egypt.
At first, they did well in Egypt. They were favoured by the Pharaoh. But then time went on and a new Pharaoh arose who began to fear the sheer number of the people of Israel.
And they were put to hard labour, slaves every one of them. And they began to cry out to God for deliverance.
God Starts to Hear Our Cry, Heals and Delivers from Afar
The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey...
And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” Exodus 3:7-10
So, to be really brief, God delivers the people from bondage in Egypt. He delivers them miraculously out of the hand of their slave masters. They are set free.
Finally, after 400 years of oppression. Free at last. And you’d think that could be the last chapter of the book. But…there’s a problem.
The people are free in one sense, yes. But in another, much deeper sense, they are still not free at all.
Why Are We Free But Still in Bondage?
In a sense, the rest of the history of God’s chosen people can be understood in these terms. God set them free from external bondage to Egypt, but they were still not free.
The external bondage they experienced in Egypt in a sense just covered up a much deeper, much more problematic bondage.
It was a bondage to sin. A bondage to self. A deep, abiding allegiance to our own self-interest and pleasure, and a pretty shallow, luke warm, uneven relationship with God,
where God keeps offering grace, extending mercy and love, and they kept rejecting a relationship of love with God.
So the people were free in one way - no longer captives to Pharaoh and his mighty machine of an oppressive regime, but they were mightily in bondage in another, much deeper way.
Physical emancipation from slavery didn’t cut it, after all. What is to be done? What is to be done?
God Draws Near in Jesus
The way humans approach problems or challenges is to look at a situation that is undesirable, consider what is a more desirable reality, and then strategize to fix the problem.
Hopefully we come with the solution. If our best idea doesn’t work, then we try something else. If our solution to the problem creates other, worse problems, we try to fix those problems.
We can sometimes mistakenly apply human logic and human process to God. If we do that, we might think that God choosing to send Jesus was Plan B.
We might think that initially God hoped that the Garden of Eden would work out. When it didn’t He went into crisis mode, turfed them from the garden and hoped for some opportunity to fix the situation.
But it was God’s plan, from the beginning, to send Jesus to us, to deliver us from our sins. This touches on the Biblical view of God’s sovereignty that can give us real insight into God’s longsuffering nature.
It WAS God’s plan, from the beginning, to send a Messiah to us, to send Jesus to us, to deliver us from our sins.
How could or how did the everlasting Creator, the sovereign Lord of the universe, the One with no limits to His power, become human?
We simply know the account of His incarnation - the way He chose to show up. In a manger. In a barn.
In the humblest of ways, the glory of God is revealed in His matchless humility. God drew near to us in Jesus Christ.
God in Christ Bears All Our Suffering
So now we come to our passage, having laid some groundwork. Our passage today begins with a challenge in the form of a question:
1 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?.
So it kind of gets personal right from the outset. Who will believe? Who here in this room will believe? Who will come to see that the arm, the strength of the Lord has been revealed in the humility, the ‘weakness’ of Jesus Christ?
The message about this suffering servant is not easy to receive.
The context is full of weakness, vulnerability, and rejection.
The servant’s appearance will not evoke majesty (v. 2). This is ironic, since the servant of the Lord will be the promised Son of David—the King of kings.
One of the things that is really fascinating about this passage, and many other prophetic passages in the Bible, is that of course: they are prophecies.
That means that the passages themselves look ahead, into the future, far outside the scope of what humans could possibly predict or understand about the future.
So, to understand what's happening in the passage we're looking at today, it's important to understand that Isaiah was not using his accumulated wisdom.
And he's not tapping into the knowledge of someone with a time machine kaleidoscope who is able to see what's coming down the pipes in the future.
Isaiah is writing what God is telling him to write, inspiring him to write.
Isaiah existed on the same plain as you and me. God, who exists above time, and who makes His plans from a place above time, planned and saw that the Messiah was coming.
He not only saw that Jesus was coming, but the fact of Jesus’ coming to us on this planet was part of His sovereign plan from the very beginning.
So while Isaiah is recording the prophecy about the future that God is giving Him, God is merely dictating His plans that He has always had.
If you recall a few weeks back, Pastor Jonathan talked about his plan right at the moment of the Fall of humanity, in Genesis chapter 3.
There God says that He who would come forth from the woman that God made “will crush (Satan’s) head, and (that the woman) will strike his heel.
That’s another prophecy, written by Moses, of what was to come.
The season we are in Lent, and Lent wraps up with Holy Week.
The low point of Holy Week is Good Friday, when Jesus is crucified. On that day, it truly looked as though Satan had won.
But on Resurrection Sunday Jesus rose from the dead, defeating death, defeating Satan. In defeating death, in His victory over Satan, Jesus crushed Satan’s head.
Let’s keep reading:
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
This speaks of Jesus infancy and childhood, the tenderness of youth. He grew up as one of us. He grew up without status, in a low condition. And in a way not that didn’t conform to the ideas of those who were waiting for the Messiah.
They thought He should come in pomp, in power, as a mighty warrior, to violently overthrow their Roman oppressors.
Instead of that, he grew up as a plant, as a tender shoot - not any kind of stand out personality. He had nothing, it appeared, of the glory which one might have thought he would have.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
So not only was the manner of Jesus coming unimpressive to those awaiting a mighty deliverer, He was, in the end, hated and turned down by those He came to save.
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. John 1:10-11
He was despised by the Pharisees who looked at the display of His power in His miracles, and who heard the wisdom of His teaching –
He was hated so much, that their best thinking was that He needed to die. So rejected was He that He was plotted against. That’s a pretty active rejection, not a mere turning of the back to someone.
And Jesus was a man of sorrows. He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. In fact he was the taunted one. The bullied one.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
We ended up hating him. Our Saviour knew what it was like to have people turn away, hide their faces.
To say “no!”. To say in one moment: “I will follow you wherever you go”, only to be followed up in the next breath by “I swear I never knew the man!”
To say “Hosanna” in one breath and “Crucify him!” in another.
The KJV says he was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. I have to wonder if there’s not a terrible irony in that verse. A little dark humour.
Let’s be honest. It’s a terrible understatement to say that Jesus was acquainted with grief. “Acquainted” means to know something or someone superficially - on the surface.
But the truth is that no one has suffered pain like Jesus suffered, no one has been more rejected, abused, neglected, despised than Jesus was and it was the world who rejected him. That means me. That means you. That’s the point.
I saw a T-shirt once that showed a picture of Jesus’ bloodied body on the cross with words that said,
“If I am alright and you are alright, then why did this happen”? Let’s continue.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah clears up the nature of the suffering servant’s work. The servant will bear “our” griefs and sorrows. God’s people can be confident (then and now) of his work on their behalf.
In the servant’s pain, he will take up our pain. In his suffering, he will bear our suffering. God will put forward a righteous substitute for sinners. In our place, the servant will be stricken and afflicted.
Isaiah says the future servant will be wounded and crushed. The servant will face chastisement for our iniquities.
The penalty will fall on one who does not deserve it. The servant will suffer not for his own sins but for the sins of others.
The servant will be treated as a transgressor. His “wounds” represent the penalty for our transgressions.
But the point is not the physical pain. Other people endured crucifixion. The suffering servant will accomplish something unique through his death.
He will bear punishment that brings us peace. On the cross, Jesus bore God’s justice for sinners. He paid the wages of sin.
Our transgressions were counted to him, and he who had no sin then became the sin offering on our behalf.
We were wandering sheep, going our own foolish ways, traveling the path of sin and error. And God laid on Jesus, the suffering servant, the fullness of our iniquity. All of our sins.
Our Saviour has offered us an unspeakable gift. By his own choice, when he didn’t need to, when he was seated at the right hand of God the Father, he came to us.
And he came to us with an attitude - with an attitude worth considering:
“Being in very nature God, (Jesus) did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
Do not ever forget that even before he came to heal us, he came to suffer with us. Think about that.
As we think about the healing that we each need most deeply, we need to remember that Jesus did not come firstly to put an end to suffering, but rather to fill it with His presence.
All of this was God’s will. It was God’s plan, for Jesus to bear my sins, to stand in my place in judgment.
If you are not impacted by this, I feel confident to say that you do not, actually, really, understand this.
If you have trouble believing this, then you're in the good company of all who have considered the gospel,
everyone who has wondered at the power of the gospel story, who has struggled to imagine and come to terms with not only the details of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
But you’re also in the company of those who have struggled with the even more difficult idea behind the gospel: that you are loved so powerfully,
so extravagantly by God, that you are so valuable and objectively your life matters so much to the Creator of the universe, that He would do all that He did in the gospel for you.
Even if some of what I've said today is hard to grasp, or if it's just really new to you, waaay harder is letting it in, letting it into your life.
You might be like me when I was, as I described at the beginning of this message, just scraping by. No sense of meaning or purpose to my life.
My family broken up, parents apart. Struggling to find any meaning whatsoever to my life. Having given up in many ways.
Any then I heard about this fellow-sufferer, Jesus. I learned that He gave His life for me, that He died on the cross, He suffered as He did because He loved me.
Because He wanted me to be forgiven of my sins. Because He wanted me to know how much I am loved, and to have that love proven. He wanted to make a way for me to be saved, to live an abundant life.
I didn't really grasp much of the gospel at that point. I was raised by my parents outside of any knowledge of God, let alone trusting Him.
But I was moved to tears to learn that I was loved by God, and that if I would just trust Him, if I would believe, if I would place my faith in the gospel, He would show Himself faithful and good in my life.
Why Are We Just Scraping By in This Life?
Scraping By is No Longer Necessary. The Power to Overcome Trials and Be Refined by Suffering is Ours in Christ.
I learned that far from my feeling before I believed, that my life didn't have any particular value or meaning, the opposite was true. I learned that God had a purpose for my life, and it wasn't to just scrape by.
I wasn't to just exist until I died. I learned that in Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant, my life was intended BY GOD to matter. He would give me the power to overcome trials in a very important way. He would place His Holy Spirit in me.
And He would give me the power to grow through suffering rather than being destroyed by it. God would now use my trials, my temptations, my sufferings to refine me to be more and more like Jesus.
No more just scraping by. And in fact He would turn all our suffering in something good
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who[i] have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28
So, this Lenten season, as we consider the prophesies in the Old Testament, written many hundreds of years before Jesus was born, as journey to the cross together during this Lenten season, may we embrace the God who draws near to us in Jesus Christ,
Who whispers to us that He has the power to deliver us from whatever bondages we face, and most importantly, from the slavery to sin that so robs us of all the joy God intends for us.
May we look to Him who bore our sufferings on the cruel cross, no longer wondering: “Why do we suffer God?”, and instead understand that suffering will always happen in this fallen world,
but that our own suffering is given consolation and meaning as we live in the truth that God is deeply present to us in our suffering, and means to use it to transform us into the likeness of Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen.
