Servant Songs IV: Isaiah 49 | The Whole Counsel

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Welcome back to the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snyder, and Chuck is on vacation, so we've been taking this short time to look at a number of really wonderful songs written by the prophet

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Isaiah, in which he unfolds the hope, not only of Israel, but all humanity.

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It's a description of the coming of the servant of the Lord, of Jesus Christ. And we find these in Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and of course, the best -known, 53.

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Now, while these are pictures of Christ, I want to encourage you, again, not to get ahead.

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There is a very clear progression in these. Things that are said in 42 prepare us for 49, and those for 50, and that for 53.

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Isaiah 53, as wonderful as it is, will carry so much more weight with you, will be a much greater benefit to your soul if you understand 42, 49, and 50 that preceded it.

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But the temptation for all of us is, because we know this is speaking of Christ, and we know our

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New Testaments, we want to jump right in, in the middle of the prophet teaching us, so in 42 or 49, you know, as soon as we recognize descriptions, foreshadowings of Christ, we want to raise our hand like children in Sunday school and say, oh, oh,

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I know who that's referring to. And immediately, we take what we know of Christ, and we inject it into the passage.

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The problem with that is, you don't really learn anything new about your Lord. You just really repeat what you already know.

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And you become the teacher instead of the prophet Isaiah. And no matter how good a teacher you are,

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I think that's a bad trade. I would much rather have Isaiah teach John Snyder than John Snyder teach

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John Snyder. Well, in Isaiah 49, we see for the first time one of the really rare benefits of these songs, and that is that we're allowed to enter into the interiority of the human struggles of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Truly God, truly man, sinless man, but not effortless human life.

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We're going to see how the Messiah speaks to the Father and the trial and the triumph of his faith when everything around him in his ministry seems not to match up with what the scripture said it would be.

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Sometimes people say to the Christian, I'm sure that your faith is a great comfort to you. They say that to us in difficult times, like a funeral or when you lose a job.

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And they mean well, but they don't really understand faith. For one thing, faith isn't the great comfort to the

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Christian. It's the great realities that faith lays hold of. Faith is just the empty hand that takes hold of God's realities as he's revealed them in scripture.

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It's not hopefulness that we live on. It's facts, but facts lived upon by faith.

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But there are times in the Christian life, many times where what we believe breaks our heart.

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And so like the psalmist in Psalm 77, we read this in verse 3 and 5 and 10.

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He says, when I remember God, then I am disturbed. When I sigh, then my spirit grows faint.

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I have considered the days of old, the years of long ago. Then I said, it is my grief that the right hand of the most high has changed.

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Perhaps you recognize that kind of struggle. When I go back and I open my Bible and I remember the great things about God, and I remember the things that he did in times past for his people, and then

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I look at today, then I feel it's as if God's strong right arm has changed.

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Now we know that's not true, but because we believe that's not true, it bothers us that what we're seeing and how we're living and what's happening in our marriages, in our homes, our churches, and what we see when we look in the spiritual mirror, it seems so distant from what

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I'm reading in the Bible. I read what God has provided for the believer in the new covenant. I read what

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Paul says about not being in the realm of the law and under the curse of the law and the dominion of sin, but being in a realm of grace and graciously ruled by this king of grace and no longer a slave of sin.

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And yet when I look in the mirror, I don't know how to justify the gap. How do you respond when what you believe breaks your heart, when there's an apparent gap between what you're reading in scripture and what you're living?

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For the unbeliever, of course, it's easy because the unbeliever doesn't believe the Bible, and so it doesn't bother an unbeliever to hear a sermon about the

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Christian life and then to look in the mirror and say, well, there's no connection between what I'm doing and what I'm hearing.

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I think to a misguided believer, oftentimes this doesn't bother them as well because they say, well,

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I have been taught that I'm supposed to accept these New Testament statements as fact, but I'm not to expect the experience of these.

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So Ephesians 1 and 2, I believe them. Ephesians 3, and especially the end of Ephesians 3, as well as the end of Ephesians 1, where Paul prays for the experiential understanding of these things.

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Well, that's not really for us. And it's almost as if faith is simply accepting religious words without expecting to live and experience them.

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But I think the healthy believer is bothered when what we experience, how we're living and what we're seeing, especially in God's people and in ourselves, seems to be so distant from what the scripture says.

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So what do you do with that? Well, the best pattern is our Lord, how

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He lived on what the Father said to Him as a man when it didn't appear to match up with what

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He was experiencing. And that brings us to Isaiah 49. Now, let me read you the first three verses.

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You remember in Isaiah 42, we left off with this really mountaintop scene where the writer says that all creation ought to gather and bring its praises before the

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Lord and sing for joy because God Himself was coming like a warrior to take the field of battle.

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And with the war cry, He was entering into the fray. And that is a picture of the

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God -man coming to save us. One of my favorite pictures of Christ in all the Bible. Strangely, when we come to 49, what we expect to be just a continual crescendo, we expect to continue to go ever higher and to see ever more beautiful pictures of Christ's triumph.

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But instead, we see an unexpected resistance to His ministry. Let me read the first three verses.

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Listen to me, O islands, and pay attention, you peoples from afar. The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother

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He named me. He has made my mouth like a sharp sword. In the shadow of His hand,

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He has concealed me. And He has also made me a select arrow. He has hidden me in His quiver.

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He said to me, you are my servant, Israel, in whom I will show my glory.

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Wonderful opening here. A bit strange, though. Notice that the Messiah turns to the world. The servant says, listen to me,

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O islands. Now for the Jew, the islands, the coastlands, that's saying everybody other than Jerusalem.

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So not just Jews, but all the world, listen to me. Nobody talks that way in the book of Isaiah, except God.

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The prophet says things like this. Thus says the Lord. But only God says, hear me.

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So we have a servant coming from God, but He speaks with the authority of deity and not the authority of a normal prophet.

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And His message is for the nations. And then He gives an autobiographical description. He says, the

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Father called me. In other words, God not only created me, but chose me for this wonderful task.

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But what a calling for the Son of God. The most high Son is called for the humility of becoming a man.

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The lawmaker is called to carry his own law. The clean one is called to bear our filth.

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The rich called for impoverishment. The one worshiped by angels is called to a task that will result in him being mocked by his own people.

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Not only as he called me, he says, but he named me. And we remember the wonderful passage in Matthew where the angel says to Joseph that the name of this child who is the

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Son of God is to be Jesus, Yeshua, Joshua, because he will save his people from their sins.

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And then he says, he's equipped me. I'm like a sword that God himself sharpened.

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I'm like an arrow that God himself has honed and straightened. I will be able to penetrate any human armor.

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I will be accurate and never miss the mark. And yet he hid me like a sword in the sheath, like an arrow in a quiver.

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So for 30 years, this perfect servant, this God come and uniting himself to our humanity in the incarnation, the

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God man is hidden and nobody seems to notice him. He talks about his task.

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And in verse three, he says, you said to me, you are my servant, Israel, in whom

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I will show my glory. That's a very basic statement about the task of Christ. You are my servant, my

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Israel. Well, is he talking to the nation? Not this time. Israel meaning prince with God.

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Jesus is the Israel. He is the prince. He is everything that Israel, the nation failed to be.

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He is the perfect servant. And your task is to rescue a people in a way that reveals to them my glory.

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Now we come to verse four and the troubling contrast between all these wonderful things that the father has said to the son and what the son is experiencing.

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And so here we find the agony. Look at verse four, but I said, but the

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Messiah said, and we're allowed to listen to what Jesus says to his father. But I said, I have toiled in vain.

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I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity yet.

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Surely the justice due to me is with the Lord and my reward with my

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God. So what do we see? There is an apparent contradiction. It's only apparent, but there's a temporary and an apparent contradiction between what the father said to the son and what the son sees to be real.

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Christ's unceasing labors. I mean, just jump in anywhere and Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and you see

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Christ pouring out his life and the crowds gathering around. But what does he say? He says, you've said these wonderful things to me, but I say to you, my work is literally in the

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Hebrew without purpose and without substance. We could almost say it looks more like the effort of the idols in chapter 41, than the work of a living

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God. The idols can't do anything. All that they do ends up being nothing. And it looks like at times in the ministry of Jesus, as the crowds turn away, you could think of John chapter six, they just turn away and walk away and the thousands leave him and he's left with 12.

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And one of them is a traitor. And you can imagine Christ getting alone that evening with the father and saying, you said to me, but I'm telling you, it looks like all that I'm doing is without purpose and without substance.

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So what do you do in a time like this? Well, the sinless son of God, this is a true struggle, but look at the perfectly obedient response.

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And it's the answer for us as well. Yet he says, surely the justice due to me is with the

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Lord. And my reward is with my God. In other words, he honestly lays before the father, the struggle he's feeling, what you said doesn't look like what's happening.

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It doesn't seem that these match up. Has the father lied to me? Is this all really worthless? Is it all for nothing?

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No. How do you know? Because surely the justice, the fair reward due to the

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Messiah is in the hand of his father, God, and God will do what he said he will do.

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And Christ clings to this. Now in verse five and following, we find the

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Messiah preaching to himself. And that it reminds me of what Lloyd -Jones said that in difficult times, quit listening to yourself and start preaching to yourself.

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If you understand what he means, don't just kind of let your mind run into fears and doubts and, you know, in complaints in the soul, go to scripture, lay hold of facts, take them in hand and speak to yourself the true things.

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So listen to verse five. And now says the Lord who formed me from the womb to be his servant, to bring

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Jacob back to him so that Israel might be gathered to him for I am honored in the sight of the

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Lord and my God is my strength. We're going to get to listen now to what the father said to the son when the son poured out his heart to the father saying, it feels as if what

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I'm doing is resulting in nothing. It's purposeless. Verse six, he, the father says, it is too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved ones of Israel.

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I will also make you a light of the nations so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

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That's what the father said to the son. And we get to listen to it. So he reminds himself who it is that speaking to him,

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God, the one who formed him and called him for the task, the one that sent him to raise up stumbling, fallen

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Israel. And he listens to what the father says. And the father says such a wonderful thing. This one phrase, it is too small a thing, too small a thing.

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You're preaching, you're laboring, and the Jews are rejecting you and it breaks your heart.

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But I want to tell you, the father says to the son that it is too small a thing for a servant like you to rescue only the remnant from Israel.

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But I will send you to bring salvation to the nations. You will be the light or the truth to all the world.

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You will be their salvation. Later, he says, you will command the prison doors to open and you will call the captives out of their dungeon.

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Wonderful, quick look at what Isaiah says in chapter 49 about the servant, the one that's the beloved of the father, the faithful servant, chapter 49.

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Immediately we see he encounters resistance. He lays his complaint before the father.

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Why is this so? Is it really for nothing? It's what it feels like. The father answers him and the son of God without sin passes through that trial of faith and triumphs by grabbing hold of the word of his father and living on it.

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Now, Christian, two very simple applications. Do you adore the

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Jesus that really is? We might not ever have thought of Christ in this way.

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We might have thought that the deity, the godness of the God -man overruled any questions, any agonizing times of prayer.

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You say, well, I feel like that and I cry out to the Lord, but I can't imagine Jesus of Nazareth doing that. Well, then you would be wrong.

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So every time we come to the scripture, we have a chance to adjust our view of Christ to what the scripture says, to let the

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Bible alter our view of Christ, to make it clearer, more mature, enlarge it.

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And then we adore him. But also now that we have a clearer picture of the

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Lord Jesus Christ, especially in difficult times, not only do we adore him better, you ought to follow him more closely.

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Every believer can read Isaiah 49 and recognize the struggle in your own life, whether it's struggles with your own sanctification and what you're reading in the

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Bible doesn't seem to be matching what you're seeing in your life, or whether it's the struggle of loving people around you and bringing the gospel to them and helping true

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Christians to grow and being a part of a body, a church, the body of Christ and all the problems that come with that in this present life.

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How do you lay your soul's complaints before God without sin? And how do you take hold of truth and continue in a way that triumphs, that obeys in the midst of so many struggles?