Servant Songs VI: Isaiah 53 | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder. And during Chuck Baggett's two-week vacation, we've tried to take a look at the songs that Isaiah wrote about the Lord Jesus Christ, the servant of the Lord.

And these are found in Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 53. Now, the first song, 42, starts with a command, behold or look, and it's not an option. It's a sweet command. It's a command that is entirely for the benefit of God's people.

But it's not extra. It is essential to the Christian life, that you see things there about your Lord, that you adjust your view of Christ to fit what Isaiah says, and that you not only adore him, but learn to follow him.

Now, we've looked at 42 when the servant arrives. We looked at 49 when the perfectly prepared servant finds resistance, even among his own people, the Jews. We looked at chapter 50 when we saw that this resistance gets worse, even to the point of great suffering.

But unlike Israel, the unfaithful servant, who suffers because of her disobedience, this servant of the Lord suffers because of his perfect obedience. And the mystery of that is solved ultimately in chapter 53, the final song.

Now, let's just stop and say that while we are more familiar with chapter 53, and we're only going to be able to hit the highlights of that chapter right now, chapter 53 will mean very little to you without chapters 42, 49, and 50.

Having studied those, chapter 53 ought to really be enlarged in our hearts and our minds. Also, without chapter 53, chapters 42, 49, and 50 give you and me no hope at all. Well, let's look at this. First, we have this astonishing contradiction.

The Servant Is High and Lifted Up, Yet Marred Beyond Recognition

We have, again, at the beginning of the fourth song, the command to look. Now, you don't see that in chapter 53, verse 1. You actually see it where the Hebrew Bible begins its 53rd chapter, and that is in the English Bible, chapter 52, verse 13.

So, let me read 52, verse 13 through 15. Behold, or look, there's that final command. My servant will prosper. He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted. Now, what you expect to find following a statement like this is surely one of those scenes in the Bible, like Revelation 5, where Christ returns obedient and victorious from his work as a redeemer, and he is seated at the Father's right hand.

Or Psalm 110, when the Father says to him, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool. But instead, what we see is an astonishing sight. In the Hebrew, the word there is the idea of total devastation.

It's like when you come and you look upon a scene that is so shockingly bad. It's a gut punch. You don't know what to say. There's just hopeless devastation in front of you. It's the word that the Jews used when they looked at Israel after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem.

And so you can imagine returning home, and you cross over the hills, and as you reach the pinnacle of a hill where you can see Jerusalem for the first time, you see it's in ruins, and you just stop. And your heart just drops.

It's devastated. It's also a word that was used of a widow. And, you know, so she's lost her husband. And especially in the ancient Israel and all that that represented. And, you know, is she hopeless now?

Her life is devastated. When we look at the servant in this final song, we are going to see him high and lifted up. We're going to see him exalted. It is the glory of God seen most clearly of all of God's deeds.

And yet, it is a scene that is shocking because it looks like utter devastation. Listen to 14. Just as many were astonished at you, my people, so his appearance was marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men.

So, in this song, we're seeing the foreshadowing of the cross. We see Christ on the cross, and the servant is so marred, he's almost unrecognizable. Now, after that command to look, and the scene is the marred man, the marred servant, and we know that that's the cross, what we find then in chapter 53 is that this message that the prophet brings is not believed.

People are not interested. And when they see the Messiah come, they don't see anything special about him. Listen to verse 2 of chapter 53. For he grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground.

He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him. There wasn't anything outwardly about the God-man that made you notice that there is something extraordinary.

Verse 3. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hid their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him. Just look at those words.

He was despised, he was forsaken, he was shunned, we did not esteem him. In the original language, did not esteem him literally means we calculated his net worth at zero. There just isn't anything about him that interests us.

Now, you might be shocked at that, and we're meant to feel the shock. The prophet is amazed. Who has believed our message, he says to God. But really, knowing yourself, do you not see yourself in there?

If you are a real follower of Christ, do you not see how you used to be? How often you heard the account of Christ and his great redemptive labors. How often, in front of your eyes, the beauties and the perfections of God and humanity united were painted and explained, and you were bored.

You know, I remember as a kid counting the lights in the ceiling of a church, or looking at the bulletin and trying to find how many vowels were in a sentence. We have no interest in Christ until God opens our eyes.

Paul talks about it in Romans 3. Nobody understands, he says. Nobody seeks. Nobody obeys. It's not that we're not religious, but when it comes to the true Jesus Christ, we're not interested. Well, in verses 4, 5, and 6, we find the who and the why behind this amazing suffering.

So listen to these verses.

Verse 4,.

Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried. Yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the chastening for our well-being fell upon him.

And by his scourging we are healed. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way. But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him. After Isaiah explains that the Jews are disinterested in their own Messiah, that they are what Paul says in 2 Corinthians, they are blind to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

And then in verse 4, 5, and 6, the prophet explains who is behind all of this, and why is it happening. Let me read those verses for you. Surely our griefs he himself bore, and our sorrows he carried.

Yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon him.

And by his scourging we are healed. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way. But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him. Well, who is behind all of this?

Who is the great actor? It's not the people who are rejecting the Messiah. It's not the Romans.

We know that.

It's actually God, the Father. If you go back and think about these songs, all the way back from chapter 42, 49, and 50, God has been the great actor. He has been the one who has been sending the Messiah, guiding the Messiah, supporting the Messiah.

In chapter 42, it is the Father who chose the servant, delighted in the servant, put his spirit upon the servant. He called the servant, upheld the servant, watched over the servant, and appointed this servant as the covenant.

In chapter 49, he prepared the servant in secret, like a sharpened sword or a honed arrow. And he made him to be the light and salvation of the nations. In chapter 50, he gave the servant words to sustain his followers.

He awakened the servant. He opened the servant's ears and he helped the servant and defended the servant so that none could disgrace or condemn him. But now, after all of that, it is still God that's acting.

Don't miss that. And in chapter 53, verse 6, he lays the sin of his people upon the servant. Chapter 53, verse 10, he is pleased, it is his will, it is his pleasure to crush the servant, putting him to grief if he would offer himself as a sin offering.

Now, we see this in the book of Acts. In chapter 4, we read, Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your God, your hand, and your purpose predestined to occur.

If that's not amazing enough, think about the role of the servant. The servant does not complain, does not resist the will of the Father. Remember chapter 50, he doesn't rebel against the will of God when it's the cross and he doesn't sidestep or dodge the will of God.

But he drinks the cup, the New Testament says, of the wrath of God all the way to its dregs. In John 14, 31, on that last night with his disciples before his crucifixion, he talks to them a lot about obedience being the evidence that we love God.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And at the end of the chapter, he himself is the great demonstration of that. That the world may know, he says, that I love the Father. I get up and I go to the cross.

It's not because there was anything wrong with Christ. He says the evil one has nothing in me. But I want the world to know that I love my Father. And so I embrace my Father's will. But why is it the will of the Father that the perfect servant would be crushed?

We find that in verse 6 when we see this legal transaction. God the Father lays the sins of his people upon the servant. We call that imputation, to place legally upon an account. Actually, there are three imputations in the Bible.

And they're all very important for us to understand the cross. First, the sin of Adam was imputed to every person Adam represented. We may not like that, but that is how God has dealt with humanity, is through a representative, Adam, the original representative.

If Adam would have perfectly obeyed, hypothetically, we would have been treated as people who had perfectly obeyed. Romans chapter 5 explains this. But there is a second imputation. When Christ was on the cross, God imputed to the perfect servant every sin of every one of his people.

And so he was treated as if he had done what we did. He did not become sinful, morally contaminated, but he became the legal bearer of our shame, of our guilt, treated as if he had done these things. So our sin imputed to him.

And finally, Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we have been given his righteousness, his perfect obedience imputed to the believer, so that we're not only washed by the cross, but we are also, legally speaking, we stand before God clothed with the righteousness of someone else, a foreign righteousness.

Expiation, Propitiation, Reconciliation, and Ransom in the Cross

What is the outcome of the cross, of the crushing of the sun? Well, just to highlight some of the biblical themes, I want to give you four words that come to mind, and we're only going to be able to just mention them.

One is that Christ becomes the sacrifice or the atoning death. He has expiated or removed the shame and the guilt of our sin. He has carried it off. He has legally atoned for it. Expiation is man's view of the cross.

We look at Christ on the cross, and we realize my sin is there. And my sin has been dealt with by a sacrifice, and it is now covered and removed from the sight of God. Sacrifice, second word, propitiation.

We could say that this is God's view of the cross. God looks upon the cross and sees that his just and right wrath is satisfied by the full payment that was due. His law is actually upheld. So God is being honored as the one that is perfectly righteous because Jesus Christ becomes the object of his wrath, and Jesus satisfies all that the law requires for the payment of sin.

So here we have God, the lawmaker, who is upheld. His honor is upheld at the same time that the enemies of God, us, are rescued. Propitiation, third word, reconciliation. This is a favorite word of the New Testament writers.

We are reconciled through Christ's death. That is the death of Christ removing the object of offense between God and us. God is now, if we might say it, is free to unleash this unexpected love upon us and to rescue us in a way that is not only merciful but just, not only kind but right.

The object being removed, there is no longer any alienation between my soul and my creator. We are reconciled. There is a restoration of what was lost in Adam, and it's restored in Christ. And finally, ransom.

Christ purchased us from slavery. Who was the ransom paid to? Well, to God, not to the enemy. He doesn't own us. In a sense, it's a very human way of describing it, so there is a sense in which the metaphor breaks down, but Christ has purchased our freedom by paying to God all that was owed from us.

And we are now free. Now, as we bring these songs to a close, just a couple of words of advice. Do not settle for a vague understanding of the person of your Savior or His work. Think of the person. Why not make it your goal to get to know the Lord Jesus Christ, the God-man?

Why not make it your goal to know Him better than you know any other person? What about His work? Get acquainted with the fine print of the new covenant. I mean, grab it like a greedy miser would grab up a document that explains your inheritance and all the ways that you will get it and when you will get it and how much there is and where does it come from, and you just read it over and over and over.

Come to the New Testament. Wrestle with these words. Go back to the Old Testament and see the foreshadowings, but do not leave the scripture alone. Crash against its chapters until it yields its riches to you, particularly all that Christ is and has done for you.

Sin does not come with kind of vague generalities. Temptation comes very precise. It's high def. It comes to allure us. And when our conscience accuses us before God when we do sin, it's not just generalities.

It's very specific. And if you want to have a cure for temptation, and if you want the cure for despair and despondency, it's going to have to be an equally clear view of the glorious person and work of your Savior.

So don't settle for anything less. And go back now and take time and let Isaiah walk you through these four songs again until you too, like Richard Roll from the medieval English church said, until you too find yourself singing what you once only spoke.

Can I close these four songs with a quote by Spurgeon? It's a quote we've used before, but perhaps you don't remember it or haven't heard it. Spurgeon said this, Don't be afraid of living in a second-hand religion.

Lord, save us from having borrowed communion. No, I must know Him myself. Oh God, let me not be deceived in this. I must know Him on my own account.