Behold this Servant

It's a strange place for God to direct our attention. Again, there's the command in verse 1 of chapter 42, behold or look. This is not a command that we can afford to take lightly. It is essential to the Christian life.

It's essential to any life. But strangely, God directs us to look at a servant, at a person who is, we would think in our culture, it's a person that has a minimum wage job and it's the kind of job that people that do the job often get overlooked.

Think of going to a grocery store, someone is stocking the shelf. You're interested in something that they're stocking. And so it's almost as if you're looking around them, trying to look through them to see, okay, where is that?

Sometimes I think of people who clean rooms in hotels, how they get overlooked. You leave your room and you go do what you're going to do that day. And as you're walking down the hallway of the hotel in the morning, there come the workers and maybe you don't even notice them.

Maybe you smile and say hello, but do we think of them? Do we think of them as people? Do we stop and talk to them? God directs the gaze of all humanity at its worst place to look at a servant, at a common worker.

What can this common worker do for us? Well, chapter 42 opens with a description of the servant. Behold my servant, God says, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights. What we're going to see as we look at the highlights of this section is that there isn't any other servant quite like this servant.

Look at the description of the servant. He is my servant, the servant of God, the servant whom God upholds. That means that whatever the task is that God's about to give him, there is no way that he will fail.

This is later reinforced when he says that I have put my spirit upon him. Think of the true humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. The eternal son of God has taken upon himself our humanity, a human body and soul.

But as he accomplishes the work of redemption, what the theologians call the economy of redemption, in actually doing the things assigned to him, he does it as a true man, as a true representative of true people.

And to do that, he does it by depending upon the spirit. But Isaiah has already told us about the work of the spirit in the life of the Messiah. In Isaiah 11, verse 2, we read this. The spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

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