Servant Songs III: Isaiah 42 | The Whole Counsel

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Welcome to the

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Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snider, and Chuck Baggett is on vacation, so while we're taking a break from the

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Salvation in Full Color book, we're going to be looking at Isaiah. And this is the third of our podcasts on that, and we've actually, after two introductory podcasts, we're just ready to hit chapter 42, the first of four songs about the coming of Jesus Christ and what

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He would do. It's a strange place for God to direct our attention.

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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.

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It is essential to the Christian life. It's essential to any life. But strangely,

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Maybe you smile and say hello, but do we think of them? Do we think of them as people?

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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.

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What can this common worker do for us? Well, chapter 42 opens with a description of the servant.

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Behold my servant, God says, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights.

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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.

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Look at the description of the servant. He is my servant, the servant of God, the servant whom

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God upholds. That means that whatever the task is that God's about to give him, there is no way that he will fail.

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This is later reinforced when he says that I have put my spirit upon him. Think of the true humanity of Jesus of Nazareth.

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The eternal son of God has taken upon himself our humanity, a human body and soul.

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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.

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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

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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

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Lord. In this servant, there is real humanity, true humanity, so that he can truly represent real sinners from Adam's fallen race.

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And yet there is such an equipping, such an upholding, that no matter how great the task, there is no possibility of failure.

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Another description we read here is, God says he is my chosen one in whom I delight.

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Now I love this because it does help us hold in balance the sovereign choices of God when we talk about salvation.

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It is easy to think of God's electing or choosing work in eternity past, which we read about in the

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New Testament, in particular, in some really wonderfully clear places. You might think of Ephesians 1 as an example.

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We read about God choosing to save sinners, setting his affections upon his enemies in eternity past.

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That's a great truth in the Bible, even if it's a bit difficult for us to understand. We bow before his right.

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He is good. The judge of all the earth will do good. His choices are good.

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And they astonish us. But the greater, the more astonishing choice is that God, in eternity past, turned and looked at, in a sense, the father looked at the son and says,

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I have chosen you as the champion of these fallen people. And the son embraced it.

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Behold my chosen one. This is the elect one in whom

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I delight. Now, is that just kind of an unnecessary additive? Is he just trying to make it clear?

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Is he emphasizing something? No. He's my chosen one. My really, really chosen one. No. He is my chosen one for the task, appointed in eternity past to save a people.

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But he is also the one in whom the soul of the father delights. Jesus is the one for the job.

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And Jesus is the one for the father. Think of a work environment where you're having to do something with a team of people.

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And so the boss comes in and says to the employees, okay, we're going to have to put together this project.

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We need to do it. And we need to do it well. I'm going to put Joe in charge. And there's this kind of rumble that passes through the crowd.

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Everyone says, oh, not Joe. And the boss stops the meeting and says, look, sorry,

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Joe, but we got to be honest. Nobody likes working with Joe. Joe's a jerk. But Joe is the guy for this job.

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It's his area of expertise. And we can't do it if Joe doesn't lead it. So we're just going to have to grin and bear it.

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It's God's way of saying in this passage that the son, the eternal son united to our humanity and the person of Jesus Christ, he is the person for this task, the

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God man. But he is also the father's object of infinite delight.

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Well, that's the description. Let's look at his task. He will bring forth, the scripture says, justice or righteousness, not just for Israel, but to all the nations.

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And how does he do it? And I find that to be one of the most astonishing things in this passage. In verse 3, we read this, a bruised reed he will not break and a dimly burning wick or a smoldering candle he will not extinguish.

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Now what chapter 42 is talking about is God coming and all that infinite strength of deity united to humanity to conquer our enemies, to conquer us, to make us his people, to redeem and rescue.

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This is an act of war. It is a military campaign and Christ comes as a general leading a military campaign.

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Can you imagine in human history, any general landing with his armies on the beaches of his own country and he's going to reconquer it?

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Can you imagine him seeing a bruised reed, a piece of grass, a reed growing along the water's edge that's been bent over?

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Can you imagine him stopping all the armies and saying, wait, and he goes over and he pushes the reed back straight and he binds it so that it heals?

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It's impossible to imagine. Can you imagine that same general in the evening? If we might think of kind of an ancient world scene, he's in a tent with all of his lieutenants and captains and he spread out this map that shows the military campaign tomorrow morning and they put a candle on the table so that they can see the map clearly and it's flickering so badly, it's just, it's an aggravation.

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I can imagine a general saying, what fool brought me a candle that doesn't work? But I cannot imagine a general stopping the entire meeting and saying, wait, and going over and carefully trimming the wick so that that candle would burn brightly.

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Wonderful picture of Christ and what Christian has not found this to be true. I am like a candle that's supposed to burn brightly for the honor of Christ.

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And though I am fueled by all the grace of God, I'm more like a smoldering wick.

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I fear I will go out. But how many times has Christ stopped and knelt down and carefully dealt with my soul to cause it to flame up again?

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I'm a bruised reed and the sorrows and the enemies in this life have dealt such a blow to me, so many repeated blows that I feel like that I will break.

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And Christ stops the great work of the military campaign and seems to pay attention only to me and he walks over and he binds up my soul.

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Another amazing thing is what we find in the next verse, it says that he, this military captain, this servant will not be disheartened or crushed until he has established justice in the earth.

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In other words, even though he deals with bruised reeds and smoldering candles, it's the same exact words in the

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Hebrew language, dimly burning wick. That's the word that we find in verse four, disheartened.

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He comes to smoldering candles, but he will never be made to smolder. He comes to the bruised or crushed reeds, but he will never be crushed.

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Gentle, yet almighty. It's quite a rare combination. Now let's kind of close our look at this first song by seeing what the father says to the son.

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In these songs, we often get to listen in here. We're going to get to hear what the father says to the son.

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Verse five, thus says God, the Lord who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and its offspring, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it.

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I am the Lord. I have called you the Messiah, the servant in righteousness.

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I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you. And I will appoint you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon and those who dwell in darkness from the prison.

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I am the Lord. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another.

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Couple of things that are just really wonderful here. First, look who's talking. I mean, that makes all the difference. It is the creator.

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It is the same deity that we saw in chapter 40 when he compares himself to creation and all the oceans of the earth just fit in the little hollow of his hand and all the mountains of this planet are like dust on a scale.

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This is the God that says to the God -man, I will hold you by the hand and I will watch over you.

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Second, look at how he gives Christ the servant to us as a covenant.

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Now we know what a covenant is. It's a contract where God has initiated a relationship of amazing mercy and grace, but also a relationship that has obligations.

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He has initiated it with sinners, the new covenant, but he does it through our representative,

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Jesus of Nazareth, the second or the last Adam that Paul talks about in Romans 5.

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Christ is our representative, acts on behalf of every one of his people. Every Christian looks to God, deals with God, and God deals with us through the perfect obedience, and sinless death of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Now he gives him as the covenant. That's such a wonderful picture. Coming to God through Jesus Christ is not embracing a plan of salvation and agreeing with its steps.

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It is embracing a person, the person who embodies this covenant.

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Christ did not come just to explain the covenant. He did not come merely to accomplish what needed to be accomplished to inaugurate this new contract of grace.

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He is the covenant. He is the embodiment of every wonderful thing in our rescue.

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Think of a marriage license. A marriage license is important. It helps to define the kind of love that I have with my wife, and it is a legal foundational doctrine.

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I have a right to love her this way and only her this way. If I came home at the end of the day and had supper with the family and then went and sat on the couch with the marriage license and looked at the marriage license and said, you're such a wonderful thing.

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I'm just so impressed with you. I love you more every day. It'd be a bit odd, wouldn't it? You know, just leave my wife in another room.

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Nobody does that. I don't even know where my marriage license is. My wife does. I don't. I come home.

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I sit by my wife. She's the object of my affection. When we become serious about getting doctrine straight, sometimes

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I find, especially in Reformed churches, that we can become enamored with the marriage license and we forget that it's the husband that's so attractive.

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We love the great doctrines of the New Covenant. We love the federal headship of Christ. We love the sovereignty of God.

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We love the unshakable grace of God, the loving kindness of God. We love the doctrines of conversion, the work of the

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Holy Spirit. But do not become so enamored with the intellectual aspects of doctrine that you forget that while these are foundational and they spell out your relationship with God through His Son, they are not the great attraction.

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They point me to the great attraction to Christ Himself. So before we meet again and look at chapter 49, the second look at the servant, take some time to really soak in all of chapter 42 and gather to yourself all the small print of this covenant of grace as we see it embodied in our