Passage Reading: Isaiah 52-55
In the midst of good news coming for Israel and God’s enduring plan, we see a prophetic picture of our greatest hope coming all the way back from the time of Isaiah. In Isaiah 53 we see the famous “Suffering Servant” passage that so clearly points forward to Jesus Christ, the Messiah. We see the gospel story told hundreds of years before it ever took place!
In multiple ways, Isaiah talks about His suffering. He describes Him as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief and says that He was despised (53:3). Most of all though, we see His greatest suffering in the following verses. He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, He was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, He suffered chastisement to bring us peace and He received stripes to bring healing (53:4-5). He was oppressed, He was afflicted, He was led like a lamb to the slaughter (53:7) and in all of this it was the will of the Lord to crush Him (53:10).
Why? Why did the servant suffer? He suffered on our behalf. It was for us, those who had gone astray and wandered our own way (53:6).
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Isaiah 53:6, ESVAll we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.“
He bore our iniquity and because of this we can be counted righteous (see 53:11). What a wonderful prophetic presentation of the gospel in Isaiah, hundreds of years before the crucifixion of our Lord. As we read passages like this and are reminded of His suffering, we should always be drawn to worship and thanksgiving that He suffered in our place so that we might be saved by a free gift of grace. He suffered for sins that weren’t His own. He was the only one who didn’t deserve suffering, yet He endured greater suffering than all of us! He did this so that we could be accounted righteous when we were unrighteous, He did this so that we could be forgiven when we were consumed with iniquities and transgressions. He did this to make a way for us. Isaiah foresaw it in part, but we know the whole story. Countless Old Testament saints had pieces of the picture of the coming Messiah, but not one had the full story. Not one of the prophets was given an exhaustive account of everything about who Jesus was, today’s passage is the closest one. But we know Him by name! What a wonderful privilege! Peter once wrote about this and described how the prophets searched and inquired about the salvation and grace that was to be ours (1 Pet. 1:10). Things that are now revealed to us through the good news and he says that these are things, “into which angels long to look” (1 Pet. 1:12). Angels aren’t recipients of the gospel-hope that we have, the Old Testament saints looked forward to it, but they didn’t have the whole picture. What an awesome joy it is to know the full story, to know of the Savior and how He died for us, to know Jesus Christ by name and to have the fullness of the Scripture, God’s divine revelation given to us today. We might oftentimes think we’ve heard it enough; we might grow weary of gospel presentations in church, but let’s never forget that this good news that we possess is something that the prophets anticipated but didn’t fully know and even angels long to look into it. It’s something we should never take for granted. It is forever a cause for rejoicing.
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