December 29. 2024 Isaiah 53

Isaiah 53 as a Christmas Prophecy of Jesus

Now, like I said last week, I thought that it would be interesting to jump into Isaiah 53, to just dip our toes in the water of Isaiah before we went back to Matthew, just a little something different for Christmas.

And that was, it was a good idea, but it was also a really bad idea because there's just way too much that we're leaving undiscussed that we're gonna be leaving on the table. But all that said, we'll still continue to see what this has for us this week.

Now, last week, if you recall, we looked at the end of Luke, and I wanted to use that as a segue into a discussion of the Old Testament to show how important the Old Testament is to us as New Testament or New Covenant believers, because Jesus used the Old Testament to explain everything that had happened and to explain himself, his own life, his own ministry.

Now, that was a very general thing. We didn't see any specifics. We don't know what verses he talked about or anything like that. But that was to get us into Isaiah. And now, this week, I wanna focus a lot more specifically on Isaiah 53, because this is one of the foremost prophecies of Jesus and his life and ministry in the Old Testament.

We just have so much that Isaiah prophesied in this little set of verses, and so much that relates to Jesus and his life and ministry. And as we're fresh off of Christmas just a few days ago, this gives me one more chance to remind us all what it is that we truly celebrate at Christmas.

Now, I did talk about this at Christmas Eve, but we'll just briefly go over this again, because we celebrate the birth of Christ, right? And we rejoice in the birth of Christ, but we have to remember that the birth of Christ is tied so tightly to the death of Christ, because the purpose of his life was to be a sacrifice for our sins.

A way in the manger is tied directly to the old rugged cross, and you can't pull these things apart, even if we celebrate them at different times of the year. And again, Jesus didn't come to provide us a model or an example of how to live a Christian life.

He did that, but that wasn't the reason. Jesus didn't come to be known as a good teacher. He was, and he did, but that wasn't the purpose. He was destined for the cross from the time that he condescended to join mankind on earth, because his death is the only thing that could ever provide us eternal life.

Again, there's no work we can do. There's nothing that we can do to earn our own salvation. And I hope that doesn't sound negative, because this is really, really an amazing thing. It's really positive, because if you sat down and took an honest assessment of your life and your sin, and you thought about what you had to do to make up for that, you would know.

You would know how hopeless it was, and that there was nothing you could do about it. Thankfully, you don't have to. We have Jesus, and his death served as that perfect sacrifice. It served as the substitute for our sins, the death that he died once and for all when he offered himself up on the cross.

So his death atoned for our sins so that we can approach the throne of God, clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, despite the fact that we've contributed nothing to that salvation except for the sin that made it necessary.

And much of what we read in the Old Testament helps contribute to our understanding of this idea. If you look at it in light of the New Testament, the New Testament helping us understand, not changing, we see a lot of this there.

And Isaiah 53, I think Isaiah 53 is just a prime example because of what it tells us about Jesus in the form of prophecy. And this week, just like we started in Luke last week, I wanna start by looking at a brief passage from the book of Acts.

Now, while the passage in Luke was general, the one in Acts is much more specific. In fact, this passage references part of Isaiah 53. It references Isaiah 53, verses seven through eight. And what we're gonna see in Luke's recounting of this story is that it does indeed tie directly to Jesus.

I'm sort of giving away the end of the story. But we're gonna look at Acts chapter eight, starting in verse 26, where we see this story. An Ethiopian receives Christ. But an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, rise up and go south to the road that descends from Jerusalem to Gaza.

This is a desert rose. We're now in verse 27. So he rose up and went. And behold, there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure.

And he had come to Jerusalem to worship. And he was returning and sitting in his chariot and was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the spirit said to Philip, go over and join this chariot. And Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and said, do you understand what you are reading?

And he said, well, how could I unless someone guides me? And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now, the passage of scripture which he was reading was this. As a sheep is led to the slaughter and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he does not open his mouth.

In humiliation, his judgment was taken away. Who will recount his generation? For his life is removed from the earth. And the eunuch answered Philip and said, I ask you earnestly, of whom does the prophet say this?

Of himself or of someone else? Then Philip opened his mouth and beginning from this scripture, he proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him. So we'll leave off right there in that passage. But again, we see here in the New Testament, in the book of Acts, the story of the beginning of the Christian church, this reference to Isaiah 53 and Philip teaching the Ethiopian some of the things that we're gonna look at today about how Isaiah 53 points directly to Jesus.

So what we wanna do today is related to this idea that Isaiah 53 is about Jesus. What I wanna do this week and ultimately next week is give some examples from scripture, from the New Testament, from the life and ministry of Jesus and from the writings of the apostles that just back up this idea that Isaiah was prophesying Jesus seven centuries in advance.

The first reason to look at these fulfillments, though, before we get there is because not everyone agrees that Isaiah 53 is about Jesus. This is not a universally accepted principle. And while this might be a little bit of an oversimplification, there's a couple of different schools of thought or there's a couple of different approaches to this.

So there are some critical scholars of the Bible. They practice something that's called, or they did practice something that's called higher criticism, which is a good name. I'd like to call something that because it sounds really important.

It sounds really intellectual, like we're really doing something here. But these higher critics, essentially what they're doing is casting doubt on the inspired or inerrant nature of scripture. Now, one of the things that underlies this is a doubt of the supernatural.

And I may have mentioned this last week. When they see things like miracles, that's not something they have a place in their mind for. They don't understand. So they think that it can't possibly be true.

In the same way, they would say that Isaiah couldn't possibly be written by one person because it was so accurate as to what we see later in scripture. Now, there was a man named Frederick Schleiermacher, who is one of the foremost scholars of this.

I think he was somewhere around the 18th century, taking part in what was known as the modernist movement, which obviously was one of the forerunners to the postmodernist movement, where truth comes into question or truth can be individual as opposed to absolute.

So again, the whole idea, they would say that this is not referring to Jesus because they simply don't believe in the inspiration of scripture. Now, the other approach is pretty significant as well. And this is the one taken by a lot of rabbis and a lot of practicing Jews.

And this is the idea that the servant referred to in Isaiah 53 represents someone or something other than Jesus. Though there seems to be, there's probably some consensus, but there's not complete clarity on their end as to who the actual servant is either.

And I know I mentioned this last week, but a lot of Jews, even those who actively practice their religion, aren't familiar with Isaiah 53. They don't know this passage. It's in their Bible, but it's not commonly read in synagogue services.

So in one of the commentaries I was reading, I read this. So Arnold Fruchtenbaum was quoting a Jewish historian who said, the 17th century Jewish historian, Rafael Levi, admitted that long ago, the rabbis used to read Isaiah 53 in the synagogues, but after the chapter caused arguments and great confusion, the rabbis decided that the simplest thing would be to just take that prophecy out of the half Torah readings in the synagogues.

That's why today when Isaiah 52 is read, the reader stops in the middle of the chapter and the week after skips straight to Isaiah 54. And that was another thing that I told you. We read all the way up to the point where we hit Isaiah 52, 13.

So they read to 52, 12, and then pick up in 54, 1, skipping all of this stuff about the servant because it's so, if you don't believe that it's Jesus, it becomes problematic. And we'll talk about that too.

So if there is a consensus, and again, this is not my scholarly area for sure, but the majority of rabbinic opinion, or opinion of rabbis, seems to be that the servant mentioned in Isaiah 53, again, it's not Jesus, and it's not even an individual, but the servant is the collective nation of Israel.

This is who the prophecy refers to. Now for a variety of reasons, this seems to be an unlikely interpretation. And Arnold Fruchtenbaum says this as well. He says, the context shows that this cannot be so.

And he gives nine reasons as to why this is probably not a valid interpretation. And I'm not gonna go through all nine of them, but I'll give you a couple that I think are particularly compelling. Isaiah 53, 9 mentions the perfection of the servant.

It says, he has done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth. And we can look at the history of the nation of Israel and know that to consider them to be a perfect suffering servant is simply impossible.

While they have certainly been persecuted and mistreated, they've also done their own share of persecution and mistreatment of other people. So in no way are they perfect, in no way did they suffer without any kind of retaliation or for no reason.

Yeah, and we even see, again, if we talk about the idea of perfection, we have only to look at the Old Testament to see how Israel suffered as a result of their sins, not their perfection, as a result of their sins.

Now it also mentions that the servant was a substitutionary sacrifice, which I think we'll get into that next week. But that doesn't make sense because Israel has never suffered on behalf of the Gentiles so Israel did not sacrifice their entire nation for a people group.

So again, this interpretation, it leaves a lot to be desired, but it shouldn't surprise us that rabbis are looking for fulfillment anywhere but in Jesus. Now Jewish tradition for at least a couple thousand years, until about 1050, always viewed this servant passage as being fulfilled by the Messiah.

But as we know from the scribes and Pharisees, they didn't believe that Jesus was the Messiah. So not only are we moving away even from making this a messianic prophecy in order to avoid any kind of ties to Jesus, we're turning, they are turning this into a prophecy about Israel.

Now, it makes sense that they would do this because again, if we look at the scribes and we look at the Pharisees, from the time that Jesus was on earth, they denied that he was the Messiah. They denied that any of the prophecies that they studied and taught were about him because it was necessary for their entire religious system that Jesus not be the fulfillment of this prophecy.

He had come and was correcting their teachings. He was changing the teachings that they had corrupted from Scripture. Now, obviously this didn't sit well with them. So for this person to be the Messiah and to tell them that they're wrong, well, they've got to do something about that.

So again, it makes sense that they would not have accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Now, that doesn't mean that all Jews have taken this route. There are some that do accept Jesus as Messiah. They're called Messianic Jews.

But that's certainly not in the majority. And oftentimes they find themselves sort of pushed out of their communities for this belief. So anyway, that's the background of why we have to sort of, we have to talk about this because not everybody believes it.

The Servant's Humble and Exalted Character

So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn our attention to the ways the prophecy of Isaiah 53 is fulfilled in the life of Jesus. And I read a book by a Messianic Jew named Mitch Glazer who divides this into two categories as we look at the specific verses.

There's categories that talk about the character of the servant and categories that talk about the accomplishments of the servant. Now, I have to warn you, today we're gonna be bouncing back and forth all over the place between Isaiah and between various Scriptures in the New Testament.

And I know that that gets hard to follow. But there's no other way for me to show you this. So that's why we put together a little handout that has each of the attributes listed. It has the verse in Isaiah that we're referring to.

And then it has some of the New Testament Scriptures that we'll look at. Now, we'll get started talking about the character of the servant as portrayed in Isaiah 53. And under this heading, we have five different attributes we'll consider that you see here on the handout.

Character attributes are humble, rejected, silent, sacrificial, and innocent. And as we walk through all these aspects, we have to consider something. It's possible that you could see how some of these things might describe someone other than Jesus.

So if you were to take one aspect of these individually, or if you were to take one of these verses individually out of its context, you could make a case that maybe it was somebody other than Jesus. Maybe it was another individual.

Maybe it was the nation of Israel. But this is where we see, once again, the importance of taking Scripture as a whole, taking the inspired Word of God as a whole, not pulling out the things that we want, or not building a theory or a theology on a single verse or on a single concept.

Now, as we look through these verses, consider also the pronouns that are used in the descriptions. Sometimes they're singular, and that makes it also less likely that a singular pronoun would be referring to a collective group of people to fulfill this.

It makes it a little bit of a stretch. Now, and also for the sake of time, I'm obviously not gonna go into every single verse that could possibly serve as a fulfillment. On the handout, I have multiple references for each of these points, but even in these multiple references, it doesn't include everything that you could look at and find to tie back to this verse.

So I encourage you to do some study of your own. If something pops into your mind during the service, write it down on there. Again, this is not a perfect and 100 complete reference guide, but it's some of the things that I'll talk about today and some verses that I think are important for a variety of reasons.

All right, so with all that out of the way, we'll go ahead and get started. The first attribute that we have is humble. Now, this speaks to the humility of the servant. So again, sometimes we'll say the servant.

Sometimes we'll say Jesus because it doesn't say Jesus in Isaiah. He's called the servant. But if we look at Isaiah 52, 13 and 53 too, we see this. Behold, my servant will prosper. He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.

For he grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of parched ground. He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should desire him. So we see right from the beginning of this particular pair of verses, the idea of being humble just with the title of servant.

Now, we think of Jesus as a Messiah. I'm telling you that Jesus is King. The Gospels are telling you that Jesus is King. But he didn't, he knew who he was, but he didn't always see everything that way.

And it's very clear that he was a humble servant. So we look at a verse like John 6, 38. For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. Now, we also see in this prophecy the future reference that he will prosper and he will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.

So even that has implications that he's a humble servant, because if he's going to be in the future lifted up and greatly exalted, that's not where he started from. Now, if you think back to one of the first things or one of the early sermons that we had on Matthew, he came from humble beginnings.

This is reinforced in 53 too. For he grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of parched ground. Now, this could be a reference to his birth, because we see in Matthew 2, 5 through 6 that he was born in the humble town of Bethlehem.

Now, that was to fulfill other prophecy. That was to fulfill prophecy in Micah. But even that, he was born somewhere that no one would ever expect a Messiah to have come from. Not a huge metropolis or a big city like Jerusalem where we would expect great people to come from.

He came from a small place. And then what did he do? They moved to Nazareth. Now, Nazareth is not a place with a good reputation. In John 1, 46, Nathanael says, can any good thing come out of Nazareth?

This is part of the reason why the Jewish believers at the time doubted that he was the Messiah, because none of these aspects of his humility or his humble beginning or his humble ministry suggested greatness or suggested deity or royalty or Messiahship.

And we see, as we look at the idea of having no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should desire him, we see Mark 6, 1 through 3. I'm not gonna read that one, but this is where Jesus was teaching and all the people say something along the lines of, this is my paraphrase, who is this guy?

He's the son of Joseph and Mary. There's his brothers and sisters right here. Why is he talking to us like this? Again, no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him. But one passage that I really wanna highlight with regards to humility, and this ties in the future exaltation of Jesus is in Philippians.

And this is Philippians 2, verses 5 through 11. Philippians 2, 5 through 11. Have this way of thinking in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who although existing in the form of God did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a slave by being made in the likeness of men, being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore, God also highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

So from a humble beginning, a servant, a king who became a servant, we see these verses in Isaiah, starting with 52 13 and 53 2, speaking of the same person that we see throughout the New Testament and the same person that we see spoken of in Philippians 2.

Again, those inspired words of Paul there echo the prophecy of Isaiah. And they emphasize the humility, they emphasize the obedience. And they emphasize the fact that he took on a lowly form of man to die on the cross.

And yet we also see the exaltation that follows. We see the name above all names that was bestowed on him, the ultimate glory that is to come. So that's the first one, humble. This is the first character attribute of the servant and how we see it reflected in the person of Jesus.

The Rejected Man of Sorrows

Now the next one is rejected. And we'll pull in Isaiah 53 3 here. Now, I will say that as we go through this, you're gonna see that a lot of these are interconnected. They're tied together. There's references that work for both of them.

The concepts are similar. But we see that the servant prophesied would be rejected. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised and we did not esteem him.

So again, restating that, we see that the servant was prophesied to be despised by men. Now, if we turn and we look at the New Testament, we see Jesus teaching his disciples that he himself would be despised by the people.

The very people that he came to save. We see this in Mark 8 31. We see it in John 1 11 through 14. And also in John 15 18 through 27. I don't think I put that one on the sheet. John 15 18 through 27 is the passage that starts this way.

If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. Now, as we saw in the verses on humility, many of the people that he taught, the people that he came to deliver his message to didn't have any particular respect or didn't give any credence to his teaching, just like we saw in Mark 6 one through three.

We also see this in the response of the Pharisees, the rabbis, the scribes to the teaching that he gave. They despised him for it. They hated what he was telling them because he was telling them that, despite how religious they thought they were, they were condemned.

We see the words, he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we see that constantly in his ministry. We see grief all over the place. You know what we don't see a lot of is joking. We don't see a lot of laughing.

We don't see a lot of talk about Jesus smiling. We see that Jesus wept. We see his compassion. We see his grief for lost souls. We see that compassion for sheep without a shepherd. And we see constant prayer.

And I'll talk about that in just a little bit as well. But a big reason that Jesus was rejected is because what he taught was challenging. This is why he was despised and forsaken of men. So to give an example of this, I wanna look at John chapter six.

And we're gonna look at verses 60 through 66. And we see the rejection of Jesus. Therefore, many of his disciples when they heard this said, this is a difficult statement, who can listen to it? But Jesus, knowing that his disciples were grumbling at this said to them, does this cause you to stumble?

What then if you see the son of man ascending to where he was before? The spirit is the one who gives life, the flesh profits nothing. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and our life. But there are some of you who do not believe.

For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe and who it was that would betray him. And he was saying, for this reason I have said to you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted him from the father.

And then verse 66, as a result of this, many of his disciples went away and were not walking with him anymore. So we see Jesus, verse 65, is a teaching that a lot of people struggle with. And he was saying, for this reason I have said to you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted him from the father.

This flies in the face of anybody who teaches that there's something you can do for yourself to earn your own salvation. And we don't like this because we wanna be in control. We wanna know that there's something we can do so that we're not at the mercy of something that we don't entirely understand.

And these are the things that he was teaching. And they didn't respect him. They didn't view him as the Messiah. They didn't appreciate him enough to stick around when he told them the truth about who he was, but even more so, they didn't wanna stick around when he told them the truth about who they were.

And so they despised him and they left him. And we look at this verse and we judge him, or we judge them, not him. But then the very same thing happens today. None of us appreciate being told that we're hopeless sinners because we like to think that we're good people.

Deep down inside, the vast majority of us like to think that no matter what we've done, we're good enough to get into heaven when everything is weighed in the balance. And that's just not the way it works.

So we turn away from these teachings too. In that way, we despise Jesus. And we may be good people, but obviously, that means nothing when it comes to obtaining salvation. That comes only through Jesus.

And again, that's the message that leads to the servant, the Messiah, Jesus, being despised. So as we look at that, there's another verse that we can see very easily being fulfilled in the person of Jesus.

The Silent Suffering Servant

Now, the next attribute we wanna look at is silent. And we'll look at Isaiah 53 7 for silent. Hopefully, we're not moving too fast or too bouncing all over the place. And if we are, I apologize. 53 7 says, he was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that is silent before his shearers, so he did not open his mouth. Now, I think that this might be one of the most remarkable aspects of the prophecy and the way that it was fulfilled with Jesus, because this shows us something that's basically a supernatural level of restraint or self-control.

Now, I know that we've all been wronged. Everyone in this room has experienced that. And we probably have the capability of being silent about it up to a certain point. And there's a point beyond that where it becomes too much, where we bottled it up for so long that it just explodes.

We're not able to remain silent. Now, this is not the case for the servant referenced in Isaiah 53 7. We see that despite oppression and affliction, he didn't open his mouth. And we see that in several places in the New Testament with Jesus, ways that this could possibly be referring to him.

First Peter 2, 21 and 23. It summarizes this pretty nicely. First Peter 2, 21 through 23. For to this you have been called since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps, who did no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth.

Verse 23, who being reviled was not reviling in return. While suffering, he was uttering no threats, but kept entrusting himself to him who judges righteously. I think that's a very important aspect of this as well, as we've seen verses about this before, entrusting himself to him who judges righteously.

Paul writes about that in Romans as well. But while that's the summary of Jesus's ministry in First Peter, we see exactly what's being referenced here when we look at the show trials that Jesus was subjected to.

And a perfect example of this is Mark chapter 14, verse 61. So if we look at Mark 14, 61, we'll read this and then we'll talk about it just a little bit. Mark 14, 61, but he kept silent and did not answer.

Again, the high priest was questioning him and said to him, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed one? Now eventually he did answer. But while I only read one verse of that, there's a lot more to that whole scene that happens.

And it's particularly remarkable when we realize something. We have to realize that it was not just one single trial that Jesus faced. But that night when he was taken, it was actually six different trials that he bounced back and forth to, six different illegal trials.

Jesus was taken from Annas, that was the first trial, the high priest, a religious trial, to Caiaphas, another high priest, another religious trial. From there, he was taken to the Sanhedrin, another religious trial.

And this is all happening in the same night. This is not a lengthy period of time. From the Sanhedrin, he was taken to Pilate. So now we're looking at a legal trial, not a religious trial. And then from Pilate, he was taken to Herod Antipas, another legal trial.

And what did he do? He sent him back to Pilate once again. Now the thing that's interesting about all these different trials was that every one of them violated the various laws and rules under which he was supposed to be tried.

They were trying him at night with no witnesses. They were trying him with false witnesses. They were bringing him up with no actual charges. They were forcing him to testify against himself. And they were physically abusing him in the midst of these trials.

Yet in spite of all this, Jesus did not speak up. He did not demand his legal rights. In some cases, he didn't even answer the questions that were asked of him. So again, think about the implications of this.

If we talk about, and this, we're going a little bit out of order because we have to also work in the accomplishments of the servant. But to have a verse that tells us what's gonna happen. He was oppressed and afflicted, did not open his mouth like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.

These trials where he didn't speak up, he didn't demand his rights, led him directly to the cross. It's hard not to see these two things as related. R .T. France says that to a Christian familiar with the prophecy of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53, this example in Mark, no doubt, also reinforced Jesus' assumption of that role.

Jesus' assumption of that role is the suffering servant. So again, I would encourage you, because we certainly don't have time to do this all today, to look at some of these verses, to read about his trial, put yourself in that place.

The Sacrificial Death and Atonement of Christ

But look at how he remains silent in the face of this ridiculous mistreatment. Now, the next thing we're looking at is that the servant was sacrificial. And we have a lot of, as I was going back and looking at this, there's a lot of different ideas kind of floating around underneath that.

So let's look at Isaiah 53, eight, and what Isaiah 53, eight says. It says, 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.

And that gets to the sacrificial aspect, that last line, that for the transgression of my people, striking was due to him. But we see this tying back to the humiliation as well. The first line of verse eight, by oppression and judgment, he was taken away.

The oppression and the judgment we see in the show trials that we just talked about. We see the fact that he was taken to these religious and legal events of questionable standing, and we see that he was very clearly taken away by oppression and judgment.