Isaiah 53 - Jesus' Fulfillment Part 2 - January 5, 2025

Now, again, let's return to the Lord in prayer. Father, we come before you this morning well aware of who we are, maybe not entirely of who we are before you, but well aware of our flaws and our sins, our shortcomings, the way that we've dishonored your name.

And yet, you still give us the ability to come to you in prayer. You give us the ability to come and gather as a church family to worship you. While we don't necessarily deserve it, God, we recognize the grace and the mercy and the love that you've shown for each and every one of us, your children.

Your word tells us that you're not slow as some count it, but that you desire for all to come to repentance and that none should perish. And when we stop to think about the implications of that or what that actually means and what that means in light of each of our individual lives we should have nothing but a reaction of gratitude, of falling on our knees gratitude.

So we thank you for that opportunity that we have. I thank you for each and every person who's joined us here at this worship service this morning. We pray that whether it's a song, a prayer, a line from scripture or something else that the Holy Spirit would touch that person's heart, would open their mind, would help them to see either for the first time or just simply to see deeper the truth of your word, the depth of your love and the magnitude of the sacrifice that was made for us.

We also pray for those who aren't able to be with us this morning, whether it's for illness or some other kind of separation. At this time, we offer the congregation the opportunity to lift up the names of those they know in need of prayer.

We bring these names to you in recognition.

Of needs that they have and in recognition of the way those needs may be impacting our lives as well. But also in recognition of the fact that you are a God, you are a father in heaven who hears the prayers of his people, who cares about each one of us and who cares for the names that are being lifted up to you today.

You know them, you desire their repentance and you're working all things for your glory, for their good. We thank you for that opportunity that we have and we thank you that you know each and every one of them.

God, as we continue on in our service, we realize that whether it's health, whether it's material desires, whether it's something else, when we stop to truly consider it from the pages of Scripture, we see that our greatest need is for your word and our greatest need is for the things of God, of Jesus and the Holy Spirit to saturate our lives.

We pray for all these things for the rest of our society. We pray that other people would come to know you and we pray that our politicians, we pray that our legislators would rule in a way that honored you, that we see that they often don't and we pray for revival as a result of that.

We pray that your word would be made known, your will would be done here on earth as it is in heaven. But we have to recognize that starts with each and every one of us, God. So we pray for illumination, we pray for inspiration of the Holy Spirit when it comes to our own life and our own time and our own understanding of who you are and what you've done so that our lives will reflect that and we'll be so overjoyed that we can't help but tell everyone else about it.

And Lord, we thank you for this opportunity, God, and we thank you for our church family. We love you and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so today what we'll do is we'll finish up what we started last week and the week before talking about Isaiah 53.

The Old Testament Points to Christ and Isaiah as a True Prophet

But in the interest of catching you up, just in case you missed anything, I wanna remind you what it is really that we're talking about. So I already mentioned Isaiah 53, but if we pull way back and we pull back to the big picture, we discussed a couple of weeks ago how all of the Old Testament ultimately points us to Christ, whether it's through types, whether it's through foreshadowing, whether it's through models, whatever it is, it points to Christ.

All that we see, the covenants, the laws, the ceremonies, the rituals, the genealogies, all of those things look ahead to the Messiah. All of those things look ahead to Jesus Christ. Now, that's the big picture.

Again, you look at individual verses and you wonder how on earth could this be pointing to Christ? It doesn't make any sense. But when you pull back and you see the big picture, it's all going in that direction.

Now, another element, we talked about covenants, laws, ceremonies, rituals, another element of Old Testament scripture that points us to Christ is prophecy. So now if we zoom in just a little bit more from the big picture, we can see that a prophet like the prophet Isaiah, among others, also provides a number of prophecies that ultimately point to Jesus.

And now we're getting a little more specific. Now, these prophecies that point to Jesus, as I said, he did not know that that was necessarily what he was doing because this was several centuries before Jesus, but as we're gonna see, it still points to his life.

And by the way, I promise not to rant about this too much. I know I already did it probably last week and the week before, and every other time I get an opportunity. But the fact that Isaiah made these prophecies hundreds of years before Jesus, and we see them fulfilled in Jesus hundreds of years later is probably the biggest way that we know that Isaiah was a true prophet of God and that he was speaking true prophecies of God.

And we know this because Isaiah set himself at odds with his people because he was speaking words of condemnation. He wasn't giving just generic, basically horoscopes for what was gonna happen in the coming year or anything like that.

He was giving actual words of God, but he was condemning them. He was condemning them for their sin. And he couldn't stop to worry about how that made people feel. And I say that because he couldn't stop to worry about whether or not people like the things that he was saying, because these were actually God's word.

He wasn't sharing his opinion. He wasn't even sharing his interpretation of God's word. So I would never call myself a prophet because while I'm sharing the word of God, we're sharing the word that's already been written.

It's not been delivered to me supernaturally somehow. I have it in this book to look at. And we're giving interpretation. So we're not giving direct downloads from God here. That's the difference between a biblical prophet and people who call themselves prophets, which you know I don't like.

And part of the reason for this was because the prophecies of people like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea, Michael, and all of these prophets, they existed because the written word of God was still being delivered.

They didn't have it like we have it. This was the way that God's word was given to people. It's no longer the way that God's word is given to people. This is the way that God's word is given because the canon is now closed.

Now, in addition to this, if you compare what Isaiah is doing to modern prophets, he wasn't concerned about being able to demonstrate directly the fulfillment of his prophecy. See, that's what people have to do now.

They say, look, this is what I said, and this is how it happened. They have to do that so that you'll think they're actually a prophet somehow. Isaiah didn't care because he knew that these were God's words.

And anything that is from God is going to stand the test of time. And the prophet doesn't necessarily have the right to even expect that they will see that fulfillment within their lifetime. Now, Isaiah certainly didn't see the fulfillment within his lifetime, but Isaiah was vindicated many years after his death.

And Isaiah's death, by the way, was not a peaceful death. He didn't die surrounded by family in his home or in hospice or anything like that. I don't think I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but we have reason to believe that Isaiah is the one who was very briefly referred to in Hebrews 11, 37.

And what that says is that one of those individuals was sawn in two. So this is how the prophet Isaiah most likely died. People loved his message so much that they cut him in half to kill him. So the life of a prophet, as I know I've said multiple times, was not a glamorous lifestyle.

It wasn't an easy lifestyle. It wasn't even some kind of prestigious lifestyle. It wasn't anything that we aspire to. It was something that most of us wouldn't want. But even that, that provides evidence of the difficulty that people face in service, in a life of service dedicated to God.

And that's different from the picture that we see from a lot of people who are trying to attract people to Christianity. So anyway, we were zooming in a little bit more. So we had gone Old Testament, prophet Isaiah.

Now we'll zoom in even further to a passage like Isaiah 53. And we'll see how this specifically is a reference to Christ. And while obviously there's not any kind of worldwide consensus that Isaiah 53 directly refers to Christ, it's my contention.

It's my suggestion to you that whether or not there's agreement, I think beyond a shadow of a doubt, we can see in the life and the ministry of Jesus Christ through Scripture, what is prophesied in Isaiah 53.

But what am I basing this on? As we said, there are people, there are very well-read, very intelligent, very educated rabbis that are equally insistent that Isaiah 53 does not refer to Jesus. They're equally insistent that Isaiah 53 refers to the people of Israel or to someone else.

But as we're endeavoring to show last week and this week, there's just too many ways in which the life of Jesus lines up directly with what Isaiah prophesized. Too many specific details and examples to just be a simple coincidence.

Because if you take this in its entirety and along with the rest of Isaiah and the way that it goes along with other prophets like Zechariah, for example, is one who we also see this in, there's no other person or group of people, you know, for example, the people of Israel who fulfill all of these things the way that Jesus does.

There's no other people that fulfill these prophecies as thoroughly and as convincingly as Jesus does. And so it's for this reason, you know, among others, that I'm adamant about this. And I'm also equally adamant about not taking verses individually, not taking verses or passages of Scripture out of their context.

And I know that I sound like a broken record, like week after week, we talk about this kind of stuff, right, and we talk about it because it's important. We talk about it because you're gonna go out and you're gonna watch a YouTube video or you're gonna watch an Instagram reel or you're gonna watch someone's sermon on YouTube and they're gonna be doing the exact opposite of this.

They're gonna take a verse and do something crazy with it because there's a point that they wanna prove. And they're gonna ignore other contexts and they're gonna ignore other meanings. So we can't do that when we look at something like this or when we look at any other biblical or scriptural issue.

So now returning to Isaiah 53, last week we talked about what Mitch Glazer, the author that I referred to, called the character of the servant. And we looked at several verses that referred to what his personality was like or who he was as a person.

And then we looked at descriptions of that in Isaiah 53. And then we looked at the fulfillment of that through Jesus's words, through the letters of the apostles. And we could see how he was very much the fulfillment of those things in his life and ministry.

So the character attributes we looked at were humble, rejected, silent, sacrificial, and innocent. And again, I think we saw all those in the life of Jesus. But it's important to distinguish something.

And I hope that I did it adequately last week. And if I didn't, hopefully we can fill in some gaps this week. But it's not just that we see evidence of these characteristics in the life of Jesus, because we probably see evidence of some of these specific characteristics in other people's lives.

I mean, there were a lot of ways that the Apostle Paul was humble. The Apostle Paul was rejected. He was innocent. But the fact that those things are so clearly seen in the life of Jesus and clearly described in the servant of Isaiah 53, make that that much more compelling.

And while I think that there's a lot of convincing evidence in those character attributes, I think we take this whole thing to the next level when we add what we'll talk about today, which is the accomplishments of the servant.

Because again, it's one thing to describe characteristics of a person, tie those back in. But when we look at the accomplishments, we'll see that they go on to describe not only what this person was like, but they go on to describe what would happen to this person, the suffering servant.

But even more amazingly, they speak to the purpose of his suffering. They speak to the purpose of his sacrifice. And another reminder right up front is that this stuff is important. And it's not important just because it's neat or just because it's interesting, but it's important because it gives us evidence of God's faithfulness.

It gives us evidence that when God says something can, that will, when God says something will happen, it will happen. And it will happen in the way that he says that it will happen. And that's because God is sovereign and God is truth.

I know that's a funny thing to say about what sounds like an individual, that they are truth. But in the case of God, he's not a person. He's not like we are. An attribute of God is that he is truth and that everything he says, everything he does is the standard for truth.

Psalm 119, 160 says, the sum of your word is truth. And every one of your righteous judgements is everlasting. And for us, this means that we can rest secure in the knowledge that what we read in the Bible is true because what we read in the Bible is God's word.

And when scripture tells us what we need to do to be saved, we can trust it. It's not a trick, even if it sounds too easy. And when it tells us of the world that is to come, when it tells us of God's eternal kingdom, we can cling to that.

And we can cling to that in the midst of our suffering and our trials and our persecution. Suffering, trials, and persecution, by the way, being all things that are promised to us, not prosperity, health, wealth, success.

Now that's probably enough preamble here. So let's look at what the accomplishments of the servant are. And I did another handout this week. I thank you, Samantha, for taking care of all that, formatting it, printing it, putting in the bulletin.

I just put it out on a document online. So if I had given more thought to this, I probably could have conjugated some of my verbs a little bit better, but we have what we have. So the way I put it was that the accomplishments were burdened, substitutionary, and that refers to his death, humiliated.

He was an offering for sin. His accomplishment was justifying for us. And the final accomplishment that we have on here is that he was resurrected. One, two, three, four, five, six, so that's six of them.

So again, the structure this week is gonna be just like it was last week. We're gonna look at the accomplishment, how it was described in Isaiah 53, what it means, and how it's fulfilled by Jesus. And all the while, the reason that we're doing this is that I hope that what this does is it increases your confidence in the word of God.

It increases your confidence in the truth that we see here in the verified historical evidence of what Jesus has done and the verified historical evidence that Isaiah wrote this single book hundreds of years before Jesus happened so that we can appreciate deeply what Jesus has done.

So let's get started with the first one. So say that he was burdened, and that is to say that his accomplishment was that he did bear our burdens on the cross. And we see this in Isaiah 53, four. It says, surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried.

Yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. Now we have one principle here, but even within these individual verses, sometimes there's a lot of different ideas going on. So forgive me if I jump around.

Take notes, draw arrows and stuff like that so you can keep up with wherever it is my brain went when I started thinking about some of these things. But the first thing we see here in this is that the servant bore our griefs and sorrows.

Now that third line too is pretty interesting. Yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, fourth line, smitten of God and afflicted. So we're gonna look at that real briefly first. Now what this means is that people would have had a wrong understanding of why the servant was being punished.

When we say, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, that means, yeah, he's being punished, but it's for something that he did. He brought it on himself. So that was how people were interpreting that.

But before we get into that, let's look at the idea of the servant bearing our griefs and sorrows, okay? So that's where we're headed. Bearing our griefs and our sorrows. What does this mean? When you combine the first two halves of the verse, the first part being about griefs and sorrows, now this actually points to a future time.

So we said that people would have a wrong impression of why the servant was suffering. But this, surely he bears our griefs and our sorrows, points to a future time when the people of Israel would actually recognize that it was actually their burdens.

That in the immediate term, they believed that he brought the suffering on himself. Now, we see evidence of this idea that people felt like he brought it on himself in places like Mark 15, 29 to 32. They say, and those passing by were blaspheming them, shaking their heads and saying, ha, you who are going to destroy the sanctuary and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross.

In the same way, mocking him to one another. The chief priests also, along with the scribes, were saying, he saved others. He cannot save himself. Let this Christ, the King of Israel, now come down from the cross so that we may see and believe.

And those who were crucified with him were also insulting him. So we see a group of people that are just, absolutely having no recognition of the true purpose of his death because they think that he was just some random, crazy person claiming to be the Messiah.

So obviously he got killed. He was committing a religious crime. But what about this idea of bearing our griefs and our sorrows? So let's take away this idea of the grand scale, of the messianic, in-time idea of taking away sins, because we're going to look at that one in just a little bit.

The words grief and sorrows, what do they mean? So Arnold Fruchtenbaum says, the Hebrew terms for grief and sorrow mean sickness and pain. And we see a direct reference to this idea in Matthew 8 .17. And of course, this very verse is cited in relation to Jesus healing sickness.

So if we look at Matthew 8 .17, and again, I have to do all kinds of flipping around here for this. Matthew 8 .17 is where he healed Peter's mother-in-law. And it says that he did this, 8 .17, in order to fulfill what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet, saying he himself took our infirmities and carried away our diseases.

So we have a low level, very literal interpretation of what Isaiah was prophesying, and that Jesus came and healed people that were sick. So there's that. But the way that we worded this is that he would bear our burdens.

And what if that means more than physical ailments? Well, we see that in the words of Jesus himself in Matthew 11, 28 through 30. And I probably don't even have to turn to this because a lot of you already know what it says.

Matthew 11, 28 through 30, come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

So now we're talking about the servant who's bearing our griefs, bearing our sorrows. In the Hebrew, literally, that means sicknesses and pains. We see that fulfilled in Jesus in one example with Peter's mother-in-law, but we see it fulfilled all over the place in the Gospels where Jesus heals sick people.

People are healed simply by touching the hem of his cloak. But then we see him taking on other burdens, mental, emotional burdens, those kind of pains. We bring those to Jesus as well. But then one more thing, we can take it another level higher.

We see in verses like 1 Peter 2, 24, it says, who himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. So no matter what level we're looking at, whether it's simple physical illnesses, whether it's emotional burdens and griefs or sorrows, or even something as grand as our sins, we find fulfillment of that in the New Testament through the life and the ministry of Jesus, including a direct reference to this very verse that we're reading in the context of healing sickness.

So we have that, that he bore our burdens, he took away our griefs, he took away our pains, sicknesses, sins. At every level you can think of, we see that verse 53, four fulfilled in Jesus. Now, the second one for today, substitutionary, meaning that his death was substitutionary.

The Servant as a Substitutionary Sacrifice

Isaiah 53, five and six, surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried. Oh, I started that one already, sorry. But he was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities.

The chastening for our peace fell upon him and by his wounds we are healed. Now we're in verse six. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, but Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.

Now, if we weren't taking these verses in the order that they're presented in Scripture, this one would probably serve as the grand finale. So Mitch Glazer says this, he says, this is the very heart of the prophecy.

And indeed, this is probably one of the most significant things that we see and one of the most significant connections that we can make here. Because every bit of these two verses describing the servant as one who's being punished for the wrongs of others would suggest to us what Jesus has done.

And then that last line of verse six tells us that exactly, but Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him. Now, because this is probably one of the most significant concepts that we see, it's one of the most significant concepts in the New Testament.

There's references to it everywhere. This is in the gospels, this is in all the letters. But something that I find interesting is the parallel here between what we see in Isaiah 43, which talks about the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way for Yahweh.

That verse in Isaiah 43 finds its fulfillment in John the Baptist in the beginning of all the gospels. Again, I know this seems disconnected, but hopefully we'll make the connection here in just a second.

So Isaiah 43 prophesies John the Baptist's ministry. And then we see John the Baptist early on in the gospels. For example, in John 1 29, we see John the Baptist's ministry. But that's not what I wanna look at.

What I wanna look at is what John says the first time that he sees Jesus. This is in John 1 29. And it says on the next day, he saw Jesus coming to him and said, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

So John the Baptist already knew who Jesus was, and he knew what he was going to do. He knew that he was going to be a substitute for the sins of the world, not just the Jews, but the Gentiles as well.

So this is already, not only is it foretold in Isaiah earlier, but it's fulfilled with John the Baptist in the gospels. But then even later in Matthew, in Matthew 20 28, we hear Jesus himself talk about exactly what's going on.

So Matthew 20 28 says, just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So Jesus is saying this about himself. So that's just a couple of examples of where we see people referring to Jesus as a substitute for us all, just like 53 five says he was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.

And then of course, we have the retrospective testimony of all the apostles. I put a bunch of verses on your handout so that you can check those out on your own time if you'd like to. And then there's some stuff that we've already looked at.

First Peter 2 24, I've already said that one. First Corinthians 5 21, I believe we looked at that last week. But we also see it in one of John's epistles. First John 2 2. Speaking of course of Jesus, he says, and he himself is the propitiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world.

So again, the idea that the suffering servant died in the place of sinful people is directly stated in Isaiah and fulfilled over and over, or at least evidence of fulfillment over and over in the life of Jesus, whether it's through John the Baptist, whether it's through Jesus's words himself, or whether it's through the writings of the apostles.

And again, I highly suggest that you look at some of those verses for yourself just to see this. Don't just take my word, and even though I'm gonna talk for a long time, I could talk for much longer, but we're not gonna go over all those examples.

I saw people's shoulders relax, so that's what we're going for. Now, what's the next one? Humiliating death, Isaiah 53 8 and 9. By oppression and judgment, he was taken away. And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, that for the transgression of my people, striking was due to him.

So his grave was assigned with wicked men, yet he was with a rich man in his death, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth. Now, you might recognize this from last week when we talked about the character of the servant, and one of those character attributes was that he was humiliated, and everything about his death was humiliating.

This, we won't spend quite as much time on because it should already be pretty familiar, but we see the servant being taken away in oppression and judgment. Again, the words of Isaiah, by oppression and judgment, he was taken away.

But the overall picture given here is of a servant, someone who is being completely mistreated, someone who is being completely abused and indeed humiliated at the hands of the people that are killing him, and not because of something that he has done.

So let's look again at the Gospel of Mark chapter 15, verses 16 through 20, just to get a picture of this. Mark 15, excuse me, 16 through 20. So the soldiers took him away into the palace, that is the praetorium, and they called together the whole Roman cohort, and they dressed him up in purple, and after twisting a crown of thorns, they put it on him, and they began to greet him, hail, king of the Jews.

And they kept beating his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling. They were bowing down before him. And after they had mocked him, they took the purple robe off him and put his own garments on him, and they led him out to crucify him.

So what we see here is after the big show trial, miscarriage of justice that we talked about last week, the six different illegal trials that he faced all in one night before this crucifixion, when he was found unjustly guilty, then the people that were taking him to be crucified just made fun of him the whole time, dressed him up, mocked him, said he should be saving himself.

But then there's not only that. The manner of death that they gave him, crucifixion, was one of those things that was reserved for lowlifes, criminals, the worst of the worst. This was humiliating in itself.

He was hung on a cross among a couple of thieves. So when we look back at this and we realize that it was the Messiah, it was Jesus who had come to take away the sins of the world, and they hung him with a couple of people who were common criminals, it becomes even more humiliating, at least in appearance.

Now, thankfully, we know that this would be finished in glory, but to the people that were seeing it and to the people that would have received the prophecy from Isaiah, this is ridiculous. And Philippians 2 .8 reinforces this.

It says, being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. So when we look at the fulfillment of Jesus, his death was humiliating in multiple ways.

I mean, the crucifixion, as we already talked about, but he was God and he became man. How much more humiliating is that? There's not a single one of us that wants to take on a station in life lower than we think we deserve.

And if we believe that we're in one place and someone wants to put us a little lower than that, that's pretty darn insulting. So to go from God to man has its own little element of humiliation as well.

All right, so that's humiliating death. Now let's move on to offered for sin. The verse we see this in is Isaiah 53 .10. But Yahweh was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief. If you would place his soul as a guilt offering, he will see his seed, he will prolong his days, and the good pleasure of Yahweh will succeed in his hand.

Now, Glazer says of this verse, the death of the servant is compared to the sacrifice in the temple known as the Ashim. This word is translated as trespass offering. Now, why is that important? Because again, now we're jumping around and we're going back to Israel and how the Jews would have understood this and what this means to the audience that is receiving the prophecy and to the audience that's seeing what happened to Jesus.

Because we can't just assume that any of this is meant in the way that we would understand it, right? Because these things weren't written to us. We have to understand that they were, the prophecy was to Jews, you know, long before 700 BC, and Jesus was right around the first century.

So Fruchtenbaum goes a little bit deeper in this. He says that this trespass offering is the most important offering of the Hebrew Bible. But this also points to something else. So now we see that he was offered for sin.

The servant was offered as the trespass offering, the most important offering, but we also see that God the Father was still in control of every bit of this, even in the suffering and the death of the servant.

And that idea comes through in phrases like the good pleasure of Yahweh will succeed in his hand. So we see that this suffering, which by all appearances is unjust, is undeserved, is still part of God's plan.

And I would suggest to you that as we move into the New Testament, this is evident in the words of Jesus himself in the prayer that he prays in John 17. Now, I put the whole chapter, I put all of John 17 in your handout, but we'll just look at verses one through five here.

So again, we're talking about the idea that Jesus was an offering for sin, but it was all part of God's plan and God is in control. So John 17 one, Jesus spoke these things and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, Father, the hour has come.

Glorify your son that the son may glorify you. Even as you gave him authority over all flesh, that to all whom you have given him, he may give eternal life. See, we see that idea. I mean, again, it's not quite as clear, you sort of have to look for it, but you gave authority over all flesh that to all whom you have given him, he may give eternal life.

And this is eternal life, that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on the earth, having finished the work which you have given me to do. Now, Father, glorify me together with yourself, with the glory which I had with you before the world was.