Servant Songs II | The Whole Counsel

The Servant Songs and the Command to Behold Christ

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder, and Chuck Bagot is still on vacation, so you're stuck with me. And we are in our second of a number of episodes where we're going to be looking at Isaiah's great servant Psalms, Isaiah chapter 42, 49, 50, and 53, in which we have this gentle unfolding, a progressive revealing of the glorious person and work of Jesus Christ in our rescue.

It's like standing back, a people who once sat in great darkness, and we're watching the sunrise creep over the horizon. And with each minute, you know, as you watch the sun come up, it's amazing all that we can see.

The land is now filled with light, and the Christian life, you know, just opens up before us as we see it in light of Christ. Today we're going to try to answer a question that will help us to really benefit from these four songs, so we're actually not getting to the songs yet.

My question is this, where do you look when you find yourself in particularly dark spiritual times? You know, not the kind that where you would say, well, you know, that was a pretty rough day, but that was a pretty rough week, month, you know, year, where there seems to be an encroaching sense of spiritual despair.

And even though you've searched your soul before the Lord with an open Bible and asked Him, you know, is there sin that I'm protecting from you? You know, you've laid your pleas before Him, and it still seems that things just get darker.

Where do you look?

Looking to God and His Servant in Isaiah 40 and 45

And of course, the right answer is that you look to Him. I look to God. Particularly, I look at the one God sent to save me. Isaiah 45, verse 22, Look unto me, all you ends of the earth, and be saved, for I am God, and there is none else.

And that's a true answer. And the songs open with this. Do you remember in chapter 40, verse 9, the big picture of the magnitude of this God that's coming to save us? In verse 9, it says, Behold your God.

Look at your God. Here He comes. In chapter 42, the first song, the first verse says this, Behold my servant. The final song in Isaiah chapter 53, which actually begins in chapter 52, verse 12 of our English Bibles, it says, Behold my servant.

So when we come to these songs, we want to make it very clear. There are bookends. There are commands, and the command is the same.

Look.

Looking Away from Sin, Idols, and Even Good Gifts to Make Room for Christ

Now, when God tells us to look at Him, to look at His servant, the look is more than just kind of a casual glance. It's even more than studying a passage. We might think of it as a curious glance. Let me give you two Ds.

There is a look of dependence or hope. There is a sense in which we are looking away from ourselves and anything that we might be able to do, and we're looking out the window of our soul, and we're looking to Him to see if there's any hope for us in Him.

There is a look of dependence. Second D, there is a look of desire, a longing, you know, a heartache, a lovesickness. We are looking away from all that has promised to give us real love, and we look away from all of that.

Look out the window of my soul and look away from the world, and I want to see my beloved. So, looking to Him. These are the bookends of the four songs. If you don't understand that and you think of this as just kind of a sweet phrase, and it's easy to do that.

When you think of the commands of God, there are some commands that you know are not optional, but there are some commands that are so sweet, like, look at my son or look to me, that you might think that they're extra, kind of like dessert at the end of a good meal.

You don't have to have it. It's just a nice extra. If you think of looking at Christ as something that is extra, if you think that in these songs, beholding the servant is so pleasant and it's so obviously geared for your good that maybe it's dessert, then you will miss out on so much that Christ has called us to do.

There are aspects of the Christian life which you will never understand and never live. There are aspects that a church will never, you know, parts of the path we will never reach unless we are determined to take very seriously the command in chapter 42 and all the way through chapter 53 that we look and behold the servant.

Looking Unto Jesus in Hebrews 12

But actually there is another place that you have to look before you can look at Christ, and it is essential, and it too is not optional. We find this spiritual principle in Hebrews chapter 12. You remember that the opening of chapter 12 talks about the great author and finisher of our faith.

And it talks about you, Christian, running a race that God has set before you. How am I to live unto Him, by Him, and for Him in the common things of today? And the answer is found in verse 1 and 2, looking unto Jesus you run.

The Greek phrase there that we translate looking unto Jesus is actually made up of three words. First there's the prefix away from, then the verb looking, and then the suffix to. So think of it as three words kind of brought together.

Away from, looking toward. In the book of Isaac Ambrose that's entitled Looking Unto Jesus, there's a 40-page introduction, and it's worth the price of the book. Ambrose spends his entire time talking about this issue.

You must look away from certain things if you're going to make room in the soul for looking toward Christ. So he talks about looking away from sin, looking away from sin's enticements, looking away from sin's dreadful threatenings, you know, the fears that we feel.

But even looking away from good things, even gifts that God has given us, work that God is doing within us, perhaps, or through us, and determining that we will not look at anything for our hope, our determination, our dependence, our desire.

We look away from everything and we turn our hearts to Christ. If we don't do that, the simple fact is there just isn't enough room in your heart to look at all the other things, bad things, good things, and make room for looking at Christ.

The Connection Between Isaiah 40, 41, and 42

Now, that spiritual principle is wonderfully exemplified in the chapters that lead up to chapter 42. So chapter 40, you have to understand the connection between chapter 40 and chapter 42, or it really is a waste of time for you to look at chapter 42.

The connection is this. Behold your God. This immense and incomprehensible and incomparable God is coming to save you. But be careful. We're not just thinking about God in the abstract. We're actually seeing the God man described.

God, the eternal Son, will come united to our humanity. So chapter 40 is not just talking about God the Father. It is talking about the God who is coming to rescue us. God coming to us in the person of His Son.

But you also must understand the intimate connection between chapter 41 and chapter 42 and why chapter 41 had to come between the command in chapter 40 to look at God and the command in chapter 42 to behold the servant.

Chapter 41 contains this same command to look or to behold in two places. First is in verse 24. Behold, you are of no account, and your work amounts to nothing, and he who chooses you is an abomination.

What's he talking about? Chapter 41 primarily is kind of a court scene where God calls all the idolatry of the nations before Him, especially the idols that Israel has been hoping in. He asks them, in a sense, before the courtroom to demonstrate that they really are worth hoping in.

Can you do anything, He says. Can you do anything good for My people? Can you do anything bad to My people? Can you just do anything at all? Of course, the idols can't. It's a chapter that mocks the idols and therefore exposes the complete madness of looking anywhere but God.

But verse 24, we find this command. Look, behold, you are of no account. He's talking about the idols. So before you look at Christ, the servant, you're going to have to do this. Stop and take a long, serious look at the idols of your heart, the idols of your culture which have crept in and kind of, you know, shoved and bullied their way into your thoughts and your affections, things that you tend to find yourself drifting toward when things are difficult.

Look at your idols and agree with God. In a sense, look at the idol with God alongside of you and ask Him, what does He see? And don't be satisfied until you see the idol as He sees the idol. And so He says, you, your idol, is of no account.

Your work, the work of the idol, amounts to nothing. And He who chooses you, the idolater, is an abomination. Now one more time in the chapter, the command to look shows up before we're commanded to look at the servant in 42 verse 1.

So 41 verse 29 says this,. Now what He's talking about here is not the idol primarily, but those who make and worship idols. So listen to what He says to the idolater. Look, He says. Look at the man or the woman giving their hope and their love to something other than God.

Every one of them is false, that is, they're deceitful. And their works, the things they've made with their hands that they're trusting, they are worthless, and their molten images are wind and emptiness.

How Idolatry Shapes Us into the Image of What We Worship

Now I want you to notice, other than the fact that idolatry is an empty hope, whatever age, whatever form it comes in, I want you to notice a very important spiritual reality here. Every person begins to reflect and to look like and to be fashioned into the image of the thing that they are looking at with this dependence and delight.

In other words, in every religion that man has ever been involved in, false or true, we are being fashioned into the image of the God that we are constantly looking at. So if it's a false God, if it's the idea of a man's man, and you're watching your television or a movie or however it's getting in past the senses, you have this idea of, now this is a real man, or this is a real woman, this is a successful person, this is a happy person.

And we have this kind of vague image in our mind, and our heart is focused on it for so long that we do in some measure begin to look a little bit like that. We are being molded into the image of the idol that we're worshiping.

Now we don't become what we hope we'll become. But people that look at us can tell, I know what God you love. I know where you're looking. I know what you delight in and what you're depending upon. I can tell because you're starting to look like it.

We see this in men that are in places of successful businesses, and they have become greedy, and their whole character is fashioned. We see this in ladies in whatever way, whether they're idolizing their children, and so that's their righteousness, or whether they're very active in church, and that's their righteousness, or whether they think that their beauty and abilities give them worth, and that's where they get their sense of identity from, whatever it is for you.

We will begin to look like the God we look at. And you can see that in verse 24 and 29. They are almost identical. Look at the idol. Now look at the idol worshiper. Do you notice that the idol worshiper has started to look just like his idol, empty, worthless.

Everything he does is nothing. So, again, before we look at chapter 42, and we read that wonderful command, look, behold, my servant, and there's the sun breaking the horizon. There's the coming of Christ.

Before we look at that, will you by the grace of God determine that you will give significant time to looking at your idols. That does not sound very Christian, but I mean look at those idols with God at your right hand and to say to God, what's the truth?

How do you see this? And see the emptiness, and then look at yourself when you're tempted to be an idolater and see the emptiness there. To the degree that you are willing to say to God, whatever it costs, I will look away from every foul thing and even the nice things, and I will turn my heart's deepest longings and all of its hopes upon your son, especially as I see him revealed here.