Passage: Isaiah 53:10-12
Intro: It has to be one of the greatest feelings there is.
1. you fill in the last figure on the spreadsheet and click on “print”
2. you finish the last part of the wall, clean up the mess, and then stand back to admire the new look because of the paint you have app.
3. you stand at your daughters wedding and recognize that a phase of your life is over and by God’s grace you and your spouse have accomplished a great thing.
4. In the pre-dawn darkness of Jerusalem on a Sunday morning around 33 A.D., Jesus Christ, the victim of a vicious public execution just days earlier, walked out of His temporary tomb.
5. the gospels say nothing about what he might have felt standing there in the presence of angels and soldiers scared into unconsciousness.
7. but a prophet writing 700 years earlier gave us great insight into how Jesus felt, what emotions He experienced, and even why He felt like He did.
8. as we’ll see, the sense of accomplishment was not self-focused, but actually great joy in what He had accomplished for others.
I. He Gave Life To The Dead.
1. the torment of the crucifixion has been well-documented.
2. beyond physical pain, sin caused separation from God which Jesus experienced.
3. we will never know the full extent of that ordeal.
4, but even in the midst of it, Jesus could be comforted by the knowledge that it was God who was executing Him and not man.
5. v10 “God was pleased” to crush, cause suffering. Why?
6. for the same reason Jesus endured that crushing and rose from the dead with joyful satisfaction.
7. Jesus kept His eyes on the purpose, the goal, the end result of this substitutionary sacrifice.
8. “guilt offering”=in OT, the death of a lamb for the guilt of the people.
9. “see his offspring”…but wait! Didn’t v8 he would have no descendants?
10. physical, yes. But spiritual is what really counts.
11. Joy just that he is alive? Like a miner trapped in a cave in who is freed?
12. no, because His resurrection proves God has accepted His sacrifice and therefore will “justify” many.
13. “declare to be righteous”, sin penalty removed, reconciliation, restoration to God
14. best image to use is clearly the one Isaiah has already introduced.
Il) many mothers here with more than one child. Didn’t having the first one cause you enough discomfort to last a lifetime? Then why did you have another?
15. the suffering of Christ gave life to us, was required so that we might live.
16. he knew that sin had been paid for, God’s wrath against sin was satisfied, and He had reconciled men and women to God.
PP John 20:18…a great statement of tremendous change in the lives of disciples. My God is now Your God, My God now Your God
18. what joy he must He have experienced on seeing his followers and knowing that they were reconciled to God, saved from death, forgiven and loved.
19. He had redeemed us, reconciled us to God, given us life.
20. and because Jesus is oriented toward the benefit of others, that’s what gives Him joy, He was therefore tremendously joyful.
II. He Brought the Lost Children Back to Their Father
1. since God is perfect in everything He does and is, satisfaction is hard to come by
il) we might be satisfied with an “B”, a promotion, displaying a certain level of competence. Baseball players are the best if they get 1 hit every 3 at-bats
3. but God is only satisfied when His perfect will is perfectly fulfilled.
4. He is only content when exactly what He planned happens.
5. and sin stood in the way of God’s satisfaction with His creation, specifically human beings.
PP Genesis 1:31
6. God had made man and woman and pronounced them “very good”, meaning that He was satisfied.
7. only one thing could interfere with that satisfaction, and that was for His creatures to rebel against Him.
8. and of course, that is just what happened in the garden.
9. all through history, God’s desire to have His children home blocked by sin
10. but God had a plan, a perfect plan to make the perfect payment for sin so that His children could be returned to HIm
11. and when Jesus rose from the dead, He knew that God’s wrath against sin had been satisfied, that His perfect justice had been satisfied, that there was perfect acceptance of the perfect Lamb of God, and that, as v10 states, “the will of God had prospered in His hand”
12. what emotion other than great satisfaction, knowing that the task had been completed, the Judges requirements fulfilled,
13. He had satisfied God’s greatest desire, given Him pleasure, and in the process manifested the character of God perfectly to a dying world.
14. and once again the joy of Jesus, the sense of accomplishment, was in response to serving another, giving joy to another, to His Father
il) “Without a Trace”, a movie about a young boy kidnapped, missing for months. When they finally found, great joyous reunion. And in the background, the detective who found him, beaming from ear to ear at what he had been privileged to accomplish for these estranged people
15. what did God receive from Jesus? He received His children back from the dead, the restoration of close relationship. He received us!
16. and Jesus, standing in the darkness outside the now-empty tomb, knew He had accomplished the humanly impossible.
III. His Exaltation is the Result of Humility
1. in the past few weeks, we have witnessed self-promotion on a grand scale.
2. all over Iraq, statues, murals of Saddam Hussein.
3. if you spoke out against Him, you were jailed, beaten, sometimes killed.
4. trouble with self-promotion is that someone comes along and challenges your opinion of yourself.
5. and if your image is based on your own assessment, it will collapse.
6. Jesus, on the other hand, did not promote Himself.
7. just the opposite, He put others before Himself.
PP Phil 2:6-8
8. now what happens in that situation is that others lift you up, exalt you.
9. and in Jesus’ case, as He stood resurrected that morning so long ago, He knew that He had received life back from God as the start of exaltation
10. Why? V12 tells us…”because”…
11. Philippians says the same thing
PP Phil 2:9-11
12. it’s no wonder that in that powerful book of The Revelation of Jesus Christ, the most common image of Christ there is found in 5:6
PP Rev 5:6
13. Frank Sinatra may have done it “my way”, but Jesus did it God’s way.
14. the way of other-orientation, of selfless love, of sacrifice for the benefit of others.
15. and because He did it God’s way, he received and continues to receive God’s exaltation.
Conc. Now in the face of such perfection, such humility, we cannot leave without responding in some way.
1. the hole has been blasted in the wall of your prison cell. You can be free!
2. if you will transfer your trust from your own ways to the way of God in Jesus Christ, you will be given life, restored to Your Father, receive God’s exaltation
3. and believing brothers and sisters, let’s recognize once again and seek to live in the way Jesus lived, died, and rose.
4. for others, for others! Letting God do the raising up, the exalting.
5. living and dying so that our friends and neighbors and co-workers and even those with whom we share the road can see something different in us.
6. and we too will know the wonderful sense of accomplishment that Jesus did on that Easter morning.
