The Destiny Of Jesus - [Isaiah 53]

Now, the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child from the

Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.

But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying,

Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the

Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

And all this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name

Emmanuel, which means God with us. When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the

Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son.

And he called his name Jesus. I would say at the top of the list of things that you want for Christmas is forgiveness, wouldn't you?

Out of all the needs that we have with finances and health and jobs and everything else, at the very top is forgiveness.

And here God planned to send his son to secure that very thing. And for me, if you want to play word association, if you say

Christmas, I say forgiveness. We need to be forgiven.

And I have wonderful news. Jesus was born to save sinners just like you.

Donald Gray Barnhouse used to talk about different people in the world. And some said, you know what,

I have 20 % righteousness, so I need 80 % of Jesus's. Like a convict, they do a few things good, but they need a lot of righteousness.

Ordinary citizens, they have about 50 % righteousness, and so they need 50 % from Jesus.

Really ethical people, moral people, religious people, they think they have about 80 % righteousness, so they only need about 20 % righteousness from Jesus.

But what the Bible teaches is we have no righteousness. Convicts have no righteousness.

Ordinary citizens have no righteousness. Religious people have no righteousness. Matter of fact, can you imagine, the

Bible says all our righteousnesses, plural, are like filthy rags.

And so we need a Savior, and that's why we celebrate Christmas, because everyone here is a sinner and we have a great

Savior. And I believe that the Bible magnifies sin. Why?

Because the Bible's realistic. But when you know how great sin is, then it's greater news to see what

God saved you from. In other words, if you know you're a horrible sinner, then you know you need a great

Savior. I heard something this week that kind of shocked me. This person said on the radio that God came to not only save us from our sins, but also our good works.

Because our good works still don't measure up. We need 100 % righteousness.

I like S. Lewis Johnson, and he always pulls in invisible witnesses to try to let the congregation know that they're sinful and therefore need the great

Savior. Great sin, greater Savior. And so he pulls in these invisible witnesses, and he'll pull in Job.

And Job will give a testimony. Job, a righteous man, upright in all his ways, yet he called himself, what, vile?

And he abhorred himself because God was so great. That's one of the greatest persons who had ever been born,

Job. Then he pulls another witness up, and he pulls Isaiah. Compared to everybody else,

Isaiah's the prophet, but when Isaiah stands before God, he says, Woe is me, I am what?

Undone. He's one of the greatest people who was ever born. Then he pulls another witness in, and that another witness might be

Peter. Peter's in the boat with Jesus, and he says, Behold, I'm a sinful man.

Peter, of all people. He pulls in Paul as a witness, and Paul says, I'm the chief of sinners.

Now, if Isaiah needed a Savior, Job needed a Savior, Peter needed a

Savior, Paul needed a Savior, we need a Savior.

We need a great Savior. I couldn't believe it when

I was researching Harry Emerson Fosdick from past generation. And he wrote a book called

A Guide to Understanding the Bible. He probably should have entitled it A Guide to Wrongly Understanding the

Bible, but here's what he said. God is evolving. So Noah's God, flood, angry.

He was kind of this primeval God, and bloodthirsty. Abraham's God, maybe a hair better, but he delighted in animal sacrifices.

God of Moses, not much better, maybe a hair, but all this fire and volcano and judgment.

David maybe had a kind of a good God, but once in a while he slipped back into this God of imprecatory Psalms. But by the time of the prophets,

God was getting a little better. And then Fosdick said, but the bad news is, then

Jesus came along, and was going back to what Moses' God was like with all that talk about hell for Jesus.

Fosdick said, God was really making improvement. He now hated unrighteousness and spoke out against crime committed by men.

And when Jesus came along, well, Jesus gave men a beautiful concept of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

But there was one thing that was faulty in Jesus' theology, and that is he was always talking about hell.

But fortunately, now since Jesus is no longer with us, Fosdick says, just so you make sure

I'm not saying this, we've reached the place now where we have modern ideas of God that are worthy of his name.

He has no hell for the wicked and man, and God are now able to have fellowship with one another.

Because God has become so respectable that he can be worshipped in Highland Park, and University Park, and Richardson, and any other of the places where nice people are supposed to live.

I have good news. Even though sin is real, death is real, hell is real, Jesus is a great savior, and he's very gracious to people like us.

That's why it's called the gospel. It means good news. Here's what you do with things like the gospel.

If you have a child, remember when your first child was born, what do you do? Even news itself, the way it's said, comes across like, it's a boy, it's a girl.

That's how we talk about good news. War is over. Allies won. The president so -and -so has been elected, or fired, depending on what you like.

War is over. The baby's been born. This good news has been delivered to Paul, and now to us, that Jesus died for our sins according to the

Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised three days later according to the Scriptures. And you can almost feel that you should kind of stand up and shout it.

We're sinners, yet we have a great savior. It was

Easter time, and Mr. Sanger, a preacher, couldn't talk, couldn't walk, super weak on his deathbed, and he wrote his daughter this little note.

And I think it's not just apropos for Easter, but also Christmas. Sanger said,

It's terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice with which to shout, He is risen.

But it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout.

To wake up on Christmas day and think, Out of all the needs I have, I am forgiven.

So here's what we're going to do today. Let's turn our Bibles to Hosea chapter 7. We're going to look at two Old Testament passages, because Matthew talks about this

Messiah that would come. Come now, expected Jesus. Long anticipated. Great sins the

Israelites knew they had, and they needed a great savior. And the prophets talked about a great savior.

But we need to know what we're going to be saved from first, and then saved by second.

And so we're going to go to Hosea 7. It's going to be an interesting kind of Christmas message. By the way,

I'm glad I get to preach today, because I get to tell everybody here. Can you imagine, what if you could get in front of 300 people and say,

Jesus Christ is a great God, and no matter how bad your sins are, His forgiveness is better.

I'd like to be able to say that. Only I get to say that today. No others do too. So here's what we're going to do.

Hosea 7, using picturesque Hebrew language to describe sin. Then we go to Isaiah 53 to see the one who will bear those sins in our place.

So we're not Israel, we're not Ephraim, but we see the sins they commit, we commit them too.

And this is a very, very fascinating passage to see the language, the figurative language of sin.

What is sin, and do we sin, and then we'll run straight to the cross for forgiveness.

Because that is why Jesus came. He came to die for our sins. Hosea 7, verse 8.

If you were taking notes, I'm going to give you five descriptions of sin. The kind of sin that only God can forgive.

The kind of sin that everybody here commits, and only God can forgive. And if you're a Christian, it should just cause you to rejoice.

What only one sin would bring, and yet God has forgiven us all our sins. Five Hebrew pictures of sin that God forgives.

First, verse 8 of chapter 7. Ephraim, another word for Israel, mixes himself with the peoples.

Ephraim is a cake not turned. Now that's a description of sin, a cake not turned.

I had scones this morning. Well, I had one scone. But it was baked all the way through.

What if it was only half baked? Really, back in the old days, if you would cook some cake in these

Bible days, and you wouldn't flip it over, one side would get super crusty and burnt and hard, and the other side would be very doughy.

And so what the author is trying to say is, this doughy, half -baked commitment to God is what

Ephraim had. Or possibly, they were so burnt on the outside that they had a resistance to God.

So either way, it was bad. I'm either buttressing myself against God, and I'm hardened towards God, or on the other side of the cake is just doughy, half -baked commitment to God.

Inconsistent. George Adam Smith said, for the Scots sitting in the front row, how better to describe a half -fed people, a half -cultured society, a half -religion, a half -hearted polity, than by a half -baked scone.

Can you imagine, when God made us, He made us to worship Him fully. He did not make us to resist

Him and stiff -arm Him, and that's exactly what Ephraim did. And that's what we have done. And we need to be, with full allegiance to God, worshiping

Him. Full allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ. Pre -eminently worshiping

Christ. A cake not turned. I think if I look at my life,

I've had times in my life, and even have times in my life, when I'm not fully worshiping the

Lord. And I need a Savior. If that's a great sin for Ephraim, it's a great sin for us. We need a great

Savior. Look at the second one. These are just interesting word pictures. I know

I'm going to step on somebody's feet on this one, so here we go. Hosea 7, 9. Merry Christmas. Hosea 7, 9.

The second picture of Israel's sin, that helps us realize our sin, so that we need a

Savior. You don't need to be going to a doctor unless you know you're sick. Strangers, Hosea 7, 9, devour his strength, and he knows it not.

Gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not. Now, maybe you can't tell because I pretty much shaved them all off, but I have gray hair.

And can you imagine a person who has a bunch of gray hair, but they don't know they have gray hair?

A sign of getting old and decaying, and you don't even know it.

Israel was decaying spiritually, and they had no idea. The picture here in Hebrew is, you walk to the mirror, you look at yourself, you're basically salt and pepper hair.

You're getting older, you're decaying, but you don't know it. Israel's decaying on the inside, and they had no idea.

When I was growing up, what you do with gray hair, I never had to do it at the time because I was younger. It was a Grecian formula to get rid of your gray hair.

Here, Israel had signs of decadence. Everybody else knew it. The pagans even knew it.

The other nations knew it. Certainly, God knew it. And Israel was fat, dumb, and happy, as we say.

Unconscious of our corruption. Now, think about it just for a second. Before God saved you, if you're a Christian, was there not a time in your life where you were unconscious of your corruption?

You thought you were pretty good. Maybe you stumbled here or there. But a little baptism, a little sprinkling, a little communion, a little bit of good works could kind of clean you up.

But you didn't know how bad you were because you didn't know how great God was. And you didn't know how he demanded perfection to get into heaven.

And here, Israel, unconscious of what they were. We need forgiveness just like Israel did.

We need a great Savior. Well, there's another interesting word picture here of sin. Hosea 7, 11.

Finding security outside the Lord. Finding your stability with the 401Ks in your health, in your home.

Verse 11. Ephraim is like a dove. Silly and without sense.

Calling to Egypt, going to Assyria. Running pell -mell over to security in money.

Running pell -mell to security over in doctors. I almost said in doctrine. That would have been good.

Silly, fickle, running around. When I was a kid, we'd say running around like a chicken with its head cut off.

When you could tuck yourself underneath the wings of God, you run to the strong tower.

God is a refuge. Make sure I say things correctly.

A fortress. A refuge. And you're supposed to run under Him.

But you say, I have to run to the doctor. I have to run over to the psychiatrist. I have to run over to so and so.

I need help someplace else besides God. They were fickle.

Trusting in their own goodness. Well, that's not all. Number four. Look what else they did.

Look what else they did. They didn't look upward. They looked all around for help. But verse 16, it says what?

They return, but not upward. They ran around for cures everywhere.

Cures for all their problems, human solutions. They looked to their left. They looked to their right.

They looked underground, as it were. But they forgot to look up. They forgot to repent. Roland Hill used to say, he has a regret.

And here was his regret. He couldn't take repentance to heaven with him because there's nothing more enjoyable than having repented.

No repentance for Israel. We would be told before we were saved, this is

God's law and we wouldn't repent. We needed a savior. And then lastly, number 16, before we get to our passage today.

This is just all introduction. Hosea 7 .16. Hosea 7 .16.

Just pictures of sin that are interestingly written in the Hebrew language.

So we see what they did and we realize what we have done and we need a savior. Hosea 7 .16.

They return, but not upward. They are like a treacherous bow. Their princes shall fall by the sword because of the insolence of their tongue.

They shall be in their derision in the land of Egypt. The bow is crooked.

They try to shoot straight, but you ever try to shoot straight with a crooked bow? When I was growing up,

I was probably 15 and we would take a kayak or a canoe upstream in the

Missouri River. We would drift down three or four miles an hour with the current. We would wait for a carp or catfish or something else to go to the top of the water, maybe spawning, maybe swimming.

And we would take our fishing bow. We had a Zebco 808 reel on there and you depress it and we had a fishing arrow and we would shoot the fish like that.

Well, actually, my dad would always tell me to put that bow away and I think I left it in the canoe one night.

It got soaked with water. I picked it up the next time to restring my bow and that thing was like that.

Bows are supposed to be like that. It was hard to shoot fish with a crooked bow. And here,

Israel is said by God through his prophet Hosea that they're crooked. They can't shoot straight because it's not that their deeds are bad.

They are bad, but they're bad. It's hard to shoot a slingshot straight when your slingshot's crooked.

So what do we do? We're just like this as well. Where do we go? How do you get rid of sins?

Well, let's turn our Bibles to Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53. We'll see this great Savior, Israel's Savior and our

Savior too. Isaiah 53, one of the greatest chapters in all the Bible.

We are all sinners and we need this kind of Savior. If you don't think you're a sinner, you're not going to love this chapter.

If you don't think you deserve eternal justice, then you're not going to like this chapter. But if you know you're sinful and your bow's messed up and you're fickle and you trust other people besides the

Lord, you're corrupt on the inside before you're saved, you run to this passage and you highlight it. You underline it.

I remember my kids when I first was trying to teach them how to underline things in the Bible. I would pick up their

Bibles six months later, a year later, and everything was underlined. My first response was, that's kind of dopey.

It's kind of like a silly dove. But then I realized, everything should be underlined.

And when you read this chapter, you're going to say, I have to underline this. So much so that you're probably going to go to 52 .13

to start your underlining, because it's so great. This is a chapter that highlights what

God alone does for sinners. We're not the ones saving as you watch this.

You're not going to see a God who says, I primarily want to suffer with you. That's what people want these days.

I need sympathy. I need empathy. I need somebody to come alongside and suffer with me.

Primarily, that's not what you need. Secondarily, of course, through the ministry of the Spirit, we get that.

But at the top of the list, you don't need to have someone suffer with you. You need to have someone die for you.

And that's Isaiah 53. Maybe 80 plus times, Isaiah is quoted in the

New Testament. And most of them are from this chapter. Isaiah 53, the substitutionary atonement of the

Messiah. Bliss said, bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned he stood.

Sealed my pardon with his blood. Hallelujah, what a Savior. So every one of these pictures that I'm going to give you of substitutionary atonement, that's the outline.

Pictures of substitutionary atonement in Isaiah. I want you to think, if it wasn't for God, what would I be doing?

Vicarious substitution in the place of another. That's what vicarious means.

Instead of, in place of, on our behalf. Jesus not dying as a martyr. Oh, he just got caught up in this messianic thing and then, oops, accident.

I went a little too far and got killed. No, but Jesus at the top of the list dying on our behalf, in our place.

And there are 11 either explicit or implicit illustrations of substitutionary atonement.

11 of them right here in Isaiah 53. So we're just going to work through this and I want you to, as I give you these 11,

I want you to think that the God of the universe would die for me. In my place condemned he stood.

But before we get to the chapter 53, let's go to 52, 13 and make a few introductory comments about the

Lord's servant, the exalted sin bearer, as ESV Study Bible calls him.

Behold, my servant shall act wisely. He shall be high and lifted up, Isaiah 52, 13, and shall be exalted.

As many were astonished of you, his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of the children of mankind.

So shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him. For that which has not been told, they shall see.

Them they see. And that which they have not heard, they understand. All right, here's what the author says.

This is shocking. This is startling. Why are you shocked and startled, nations?

Well, Jesus is going to start off so lowly and then be so disfigured and then be exalted so highly.

It's going to shock you. It's going to shake you. When I was in fifth grade, we had to all hold hands in a circle with a teacher with some device, and he had these two electrodes.

Put one in one kid's hand, and then he had the machine over here, and we all held hands and that went around a big circle until the last kid held the other side of the electrode and he would begin to generate that thing.

And you could kind of feel the strange... Does anybody know what that's called, by the way? Some of you already know. The WPI students have probably invented such a thing.

But they're on vacation back at home. So you're holding on, and in the beginning, you're just feeling the sensation.

Then when you wanted to drop out, probably because the lawyers were close by, you could just let go.

And then you'd have to hold the next person's hands. And the fewer people were in the circle, the stronger the current was.

And pretty soon, it got down to just two people. Me and a lady, a girl, fifth grade girl.

I'll never forget her name. Her name was Alice Police. And so all the boys were rooting for me, and all the girls were rooting for Alice Police.

Problem was, I was in fifth grade, and I was about this big, still losing my baby teeth.

And Alice Police was a grown woman, fifth grade. I was the late bloomer. And our arms were going like this.

And all the guys are rooting. But anyway, that's not part of the sermon.

It was startling, though. What I was doing physically, the nations are going to do mentally and spiritually, because Messiahs don't start off lowly.

They're Marlboro men, warriors. Messiahs who rescue people from their sins and from slavery to the

Romans or whoever else is there, they don't become disfigured.

And Messiahs who are lowly and disfigured don't get exalted to this degree.

No human Messiah can be so exalted. And so the nations are startled.

I know someone's going to ask me, so I'll tell you. I dropped out first, like a silly dove, like a half -baked scone.

So leading into 53, there's this shock. This is a bewilderment. How can this happen?

Lowly, disfigured, and then super exalted. And you're going to quickly see, this is never going to talk about some prophet.

This is never going to be said of a nation like Israel. Some people want to make

Isaiah 53 about the nation of Israel. No. Small beginnings and great endings.

How can this be? Now, that word found right there in verse 15, sprinkle.

You probably see a little note there in your Bible. If you have some kind of study Bible, it means either sprinkle or startle.

Commentators are split. If it means sprinkle, this candidate will stand for God and Levitically, as it were, priestly, as it were, be the mediator to cleanse sin.

That would certainly work. Purifying the nation with blood as a priest would.

Or it means to startle. It's probably startle. Because that's the language here.

And slip down into 53 .1. You can feel the startling language with questions.

There's two of them in verse one. Who has believed our message? You mean this lowly, disfigured king who could be exalted so high?

Who's going to believe that? And to whom has the arm of Yahweh, the Lord, been revealed?

We're going to be seeing a shocking illustration of a deliverer who is weak in the eyes of people.

The arm of the Lord is an illustration of the personal delivering hand of God.

And arms were strong. Men are supposed to have strong arms. And you can imagine if you could take

God's arm. This is all a figure of speech, of course. He has no appendages.

To roll up the sleeve of this Messiah's arm, you're going to see not a big bicep, not a big tricep.

But you're just going to see flab. You see some kind of guy who's going to be a bench -press king.

And he stands up in front of everyone with his suit on. And he's got flabby muscles. And he's got nothing.

And you're thinking, yeah, Messiah. He's going to out -bench -press all of us. Just kind of flabby. I almost said flabby, but I cannot do that in public.

Who's going to be saved from such a great amount of sin? As a weak

Messiah. Who's going to believe that? The arm of the Lord? The mighty arm of the

Lord? Isaiah 40, mighty arm. Isaiah 48, mighty arm. Isaiah 51, mighty arm. Isaiah 52, mighty arm.

What? Jesus, born in a stable, laid in a manger.

Jesus on the cross. He saved others. Let him save himself. That mighty Messiah?

Who could imagine such a claim? For those of you that do gardening, maybe you can identify with verse 2.

For he grew up before him like a young man, like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him.

And no beauty that we should desire him. It's so unexpected.

The nature of the servant's ministry. Not a dominating, forceful, attractive,

Hollywood -looking superstar. But more like we have a tree in our front yard.

And sometimes the seeds will drop down. And then right next to the tree, there'll be these little suckers, these little sprouts.

And what do you do? You just walk over there. It takes nothing to take a little pair of tin snips or dikes or any other proper tool that gardeners use.

Right, Gail? I just use whatever I got. I just use whatever you leave at my house. And just with ease, you can just snip them off.

Just a little sprig. How much does it take to just take a pair of diagonal plowers and just go snip? Gone.

The mighty arm of the Lord could be so vanquished. He's just like a little shoot, a little unwanted shoot.

Gardener snips off. It's not that he was great to look at or ugly.

That's not the passage. There is no beauty in him. The tenor is more, he just doesn't look like, he doesn't look the part.

The casting director has made a horrible mistake. Superman has been cast as a four -foot -five man with a squeaky voice.

This is not what we expect. Oswald said the Christian thinks inevitably of Jesus Christ, a baby born in the back stable of the village inn.

This would shake the Roman Empire? A man quietly coming to the great preacher of the day and asking to be baptized?

This is the advent of the man who would be heralded as the savior of the world? No, this is not what we think the arm of the

Lord should look like. We were expecting a costume drum major to lead our triumphant parade. Our eyes are caught and satisfied by superficial splendor.

As a result, our eyes flicker across him in a crowd and we do not even see him.

His splendor is not on the surface and those who have no inclination to look beyond the surface will never even see him, much less pay him any attention.

We want a majestic cedar. We want a triumphal redwood. We want a mighty oak.

And you get a little sprig. Verse three is despised.

Notice that word twice in this verse. By the way, this is all poetry. You can see in your ESV Bible the indentations.

This is poetry. Lots of repetition. Lots of parallelism. He was despised and rejected by men.

By the way, that word despised is not nose up emotion. I despise you.

That's the English word. The Hebrew word is worthless. No big deal.

Unworthy of attention. But he was unworthy of attention and rejected by men.

Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. That's not the Messiah. Man of sorrows.

Remember the Old Testament framework that many people had? Do bad, suffer. Do bad, suffer.

Remember Job's friends? Do bad, suffer. He's suffering. Therefore, he must be doing bad. Now we're going to have a

Messiah who's small in stature spiritually, figuratively, and now he suffers.

Who wants the suffering servant? It doesn't go together. It's oil and water.

As one, the text says, from whom men hide their faces. This guy's a loser.

He was despised. Unworthy of attention and we esteemed him not.

You come across as the powerful, mighty arm of God and you're a nothing.

That's how people thought of him. From Herod to many, many others.

Not even giving him a second thought. Moitner said, when all that the human eye saw and the human mind apprehended was added up, the result was zero.

Well, let's see. Now let me give you those 11 echoes of substitutionary atonement. Christ dying in our place, in our stead, on our behalf, for us.

There's 11 of them. If you're calculating the sermon and how long it's going to go today, I'm going to tell you young ones, like Alistair Begg likes to tell the young people, we're going to go faster.

You're going to see us pick up the pace. You're going to see us fly through these. I sat next to Alistair Begg one time on the front row of a church service and he was about ready to preach and I saw him looking through his notes and he was nervously looking through his notes and I thought,

I'm not the only one who does that. Trying to focus on worship, but he was kind of going over his notes and I said,

Alistair, the first time I preached, I remember I couldn't get any spit in my mouth. I was so nervous.

Now, he's the headline of this conference and he was going to get up and speak and he looked at me and he said,

Mike, that's how I feel right now. What does that have to do with anything?

Well, Alistair Begg likes to say, preachers, last points are always faster than the first points.

That's all it has to do with. 11 echoes of substitutionary atonement. Here is the

Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. 1. Christ bore our griefs, found in verse 4. I'm just going to try to use the language of Scripture.

If I was preaching, I'd say Christ bore your griefs and try to preach to you.

But here I'll use the language of Scripture. Christ bore our griefs. See it in verse 4. Surely, even though he seemed weak in our eyes, even though he didn't seem mighty in our eyes, even though we esteemed him not, even though he came across as worthless.

Surely, though, what has he done? He has borne our griefs. As you look through this passage, you're not going to see

Jesus suffering with us. He's going to suffer for us. Dying for us.

It's one comment I want to stress again. Second comment is this. This is not going to be Jesus dying for his own sins.

We have the sinless mediator. He's not dying for his own sins. He's dying for ours.

And here, the language of bearing. See the text? He bore our sins. That's language from Leviticus.

Where the sacrificial animal bears the sin. Yom Kippur. Not just suffering with the people, but for them.

We are the sinner. We have the illness, our sickness. That's what that word means in verse 4.

Griefs means sickness. We have the spiritual sickness. Not Jesus.

And he bore those. He took them away. You could think scapegoat if you'd like. Number 2.

The second echo of substitutionary atonement that we so need, especially to be reminded of on Christmas.

Christ carried our sorrows. It's just the next part of the verse. And again, wonderful poetic language.

And he carried our sorrows. Carried is also right from Leviticus. Carrying away a burden.

Got something on your shoulder and you carry it away. Israel had sin on their shoulder and the Levitical sacrifices carried them away.

The word stricken, some translate it in the

Talmud as leprous. It's like a leper.

We thought God was smiting him for his own sins, but he was smiting him for our sins.

Number 3. The third echo of substitutionary atonement found in verse 5. Christ was pierced for our transgressions.

I mean, the weight of this just keeps building and building and building. You should be saying, I need a

Savior. I need a substitute. Verse 5. He was pierced for our transgressions.

Now we step up a little bit intensity in the Hebrew language. It's becoming more severe. Obeying, caring, and now the language turns up the volume.

So you realize how bad this is. Commentator Dalich said, it's the strongest term for violent and excruciating death in the

Hebrew language. Pierced. And of course, your mind is just going straight to the

New Testament and thinking about the piercing of the sides of Jesus. The sinless one, the high priest.

So tempted in all things as we are yet without sin. It wasn't for his sin, but it was for ours.

The first couple were, were kind of ill spiritually. Now we've got an injury.

And now it goes further. Number 4. Christ was crushed for our iniquities. The language is increasing in its severity.

The suffering servant now rejected, crushed. You could ask yourself the question, how seriously does

God take sin? Minor indiscretion. Small little faux pas.

No big deal. No. If you ever want to know how God thinks of sin, you think of what

God did to his own innocent son. He hates sin. We try to say, well,

I have a mistake. I made a mistake. I apologize. And I came up short. That's not how

God deals with sin. Even if it's his son bearing someone else's sin.

How could this be? Israel is a nation. How could this be a prophet? Number 5. 5. Christ was chastened for our well -being.

This is all God language. God did this for us. We are passive. God is active.

We have a Savior. We are saved. We don't contribute. We don't say, I'll let you do this.

I'll allow you to do it. God did it all. 5. Christ was chastened for our well -being. You can see it right there in verse 5.

Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us shalom, our peace. You want whole living, spiritually, physically, emotionally.

Jesus bore the chastisement that brought us peace. Chastisement.

If you have a child and they disobey, you chasten them. You correct them. That's what the word is.

In our place. For the offender. 6.

Christ was scourged for our healing. Christ was scourged for our healing. See it at the end of verse 5? And with His wounds we are healed.

It's fascinating. Literally, in His welts, it is healed to us.

How many welts did Jesus deserve? When the people punched

Him, how many of those did He deserve? But this text isn't talking about physical welts.

A welt is when you punch somebody so hard, underneath the skin, under the epidurus, there becomes blood and a contusion, and it starts to just fill up.

And you can see the swelling. How many did Jesus deserve from the Father? This is, by His stripe, we are healed.

Language of 1 Peter. By His stripe, singular, taking all the wrath of God, dumping it out in one whack to Jesus.

Figuratively. He didn't deserve any of them. It was for us. Substitutionary atonement.

I have a friend, and he, I don't know if he saved or not, but he deals with university people, and he teaches at a university.

And some mainstream, mainline, liberal, quote -unquote, Christians came and said to him, what is the essence of Christianity?

Could you just define Christianity with a sentence? You know what he said? You know what my friend said? Substitutionary atonement.

He was right. By the way, the teachers responded with words that I can't tell you, but they knew he was right.

With His stripes, with His bruise, we are healed, pardoned of sin.

Number seven, Christ had our iniquity placed on Him by the Father. We don't need sympathy primarily.

It's good to have secondarily. We need substitution. All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to His own way. And the Lord had laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

Single -minded sheep getting in trouble, rescued by the shepherd. Short -sighted sheep.

Here we have, as Kidner said, grace wholly answering sin. John Calvin said, in ourselves we are scattered, in Christ we are collected.

That's good language. We wander, Christ saves. We're like those pigs that go off the deep end in the

Gadarene area, aren't we? Yet we're rescued. Planned by God. Verse 7, He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not

His mouth. Now when we talk about Jesus the Lamb, we're not saying short -sighted, gets lost easily.

When we're talked about as lambs, that's the point. When Jesus is talked about as a lamb, we hear sacrificial language, quiet language, submissive language.

The Father sends me, I obey. Innocence, like a lamb that is led to slaughter.

Like a sheep that before it sears is silent, so He opened not His mouth. I think of Jesus setting

His face towards Jerusalem, afflicted and oppressed in our place. Not complaining.

Number 8, we've got three more to go. We've got to wrap it up. Number 8, Christ received the stroke for our transgression. Verse 8, by oppression and judgment,

He was taken away. And as for this generation, who considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living?

Stricken for the transgression of My people. Is this a miscarriage of justice?

Is this Israel the nation saving? He dies the death that they should be dying.

This is voluntary submission, just like Tom sang of Philippians 2. Stricken in our place.

Cut off, meaning premature death. Cut down with an axe. Killed before His time humanly, but right on time divinely.

Number 9, Christ was our guilt offering. By the way, if you were going to give a guilt offering back in the

Old Testament, you would know you personally sinned against God. All the language so far, our, we, maybe it's your wife that needs this, maybe your neighbor needs it, maybe your kids need this, maybe the person with the elbow and the ribs next to you needs this.

But now when guilt offerings are talked about, you don't give a guilt offering unless you say, I have sinned against you

God, I present the guilt offering. So now it gets very personal. Yet it was the will of the

Lord. By the way, it was the will of God to kill the Son. And we need to wrap our minds around this.

The sooner we do, the better it is for us. The men sinned, yet God planned it.

Both sit side by side. Perfectly fine to accept both. They were judged for their sins, yet God planned everything.

The will of God. It was the will of the Lord to crush Him. This is the love of God.

This is the grace of God. This is God our Savior by nature, God. He has put

Him to grief. It should have been us. When His soul makes an offering for guilt, He shall see

His offspring. He shall prolong His days. The will of the Lord shall prosper Him. So the

Lord's will to do that wasn't miscarriage of justice. Justice was being offered.

And you know what? It worked. You see the text? He shall see His offspring. Now the picture isn't

Jesus had children, but Jesus has children, were adopted as sons and daughters into His kingdom.

Lots of descendants. Prolonged His days. The eternal

God. Here's the point of this sentence in this verse.

Christ's death wasn't futile. That's the point. The Lord's promises are true.

To please the Lord, raised His Son, and accomplished salvation.

And two more, super fast. Number 10, Christ bore our iniquities out of the anguish of His soul.

Verse 11, He shall see and be satisfied by His knowledge shall the righteous one,

My servant, make many to be accounted, declared righteous, based on Christ's righteous work, and He shall bear their iniquities.

That's what we call double imputation. God treats us not like what we deserved, but He treats us like Christ, as if Christ earned our righteousness and He treats us that way.

Jesus didn't sin, but God treated Him as a sinner. We're not righteous, but God treats us as righteous based on Christ's work.

And finally, number 11, Christ bore the sin of many. The 11th and final echo of substitutionary atonement in Isaiah 53.

Verse 12, Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoiled with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death, and he was numbered with the transgressors.

Yet he bore the sin of many. That's not all, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

Well, this is the Christmas story. God didn't have to send His Son to rescue us, but God did.

And that little baby grew up. Can you imagine perfectly? I have a question for you. If all we needed was the death of Jesus, then why don't we just have

Herod kill Jesus? Because Jesus had to live that perfect life.

That Adam couldn't live, that Israel couldn't live, Jesus lived. That gives us righteousness, but we also have to deal with our sin, and then

Jesus died in our place. So I have a question for you. How do you know if Jesus died in your place?

How do you know? The way you know is, if you believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, if you've turned from your sins, if you've forsaken your sins, realize you have no good thing in you, and you take

God at His Word that Jesus is the sin bearer who was raised from the dead, Christ's atoning work is for you.

And if you don't believe, then all that substitutionary atonement is not for you. And you alone will stand before God, stricken as a transgressor.

And we want you to believe. We want you to be forgiven. That's what we want. So turn to the

Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved. Confess Him as Lord. Believe in your heart God raised

Him from the dead. If I had every one of you come up and give a little testimony.

I don't think we have time today. It's time to go home and unwrap the presents and eat the rest of my half -baked scone.

No, it was baked well. And I had each one of you come up and said, this is how much righteousness

I have before God, and when I die, this is why He's going to let me in. Baptism, circumcision, church membership.

I'm good. I didn't do too many bad things. How many of you would be accepted into God based on what you've done?

Saying essentially, what Jesus did on the cross, I didn't need.

Because I can get to heaven on my own. What a loser. What a weak arm of God that was.

I don't need Him. You say, well, I don't believe in hell.

I don't believe in a judging God. Well, can I say with kindness, you will. And God, even in His goodness now, has left you alive long enough to hear the message.

Jesus saves sinners just like you. Well, I'm a

Harvard graduate. I'm pretty good. I came to church on Christmas morning. You need a

Savior to die in your place and be raised from the dead. That's why we sing.

And since I'm the pastor, we're changing the last song to Hark the Herald Angels Sing for this reason and this reason only.

Well, that's not the only reason. God and sinners reconciled.

God, sinners at war with each other. God has us as an enemy, natural -born enemy.

We are to God. And God, through His work of the Son Christ Jesus, a suffering servant who was raised from the dead, takes what was estranged and then reconciled.

Irreconcilable differences without the cross. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Let's pray. Father, we praise

You today for Your Son, that it was the will of You to crush Him for us.

And can it be? How could we gain such a great Savior? I pray for all the families here today.

Thank You, Father, for bringing so many people out to worship You on the Lord's day. Bless them in and through Christ Jesus.