In the Summer
of 1939 Sam Stern received his diploma.
This was a rabbinical degree, or Smicha, and Sam, a Jew, had his sights
set on entering the ministry as a rabbi.
But then, in September, Adolf Hitler’s German war machine rumbled into
Poland, launching the second world war.
All of Europe was engulfed in flames, and six years later, when the war
ended, Sam was in a concentration camp.
He had survived the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. However, all of his family members were dead. Sam’s faith in God had been shattered by the
realities of a world gone mad.
Eventually, in
the aftermath of World War 2, Sam made his way to America and began to work as
an assistant rabbi at a Synagogue in Rhode Island. But, he had tremendous conflict in his
heart. He could not understand how God
could have allowed the massive devastation of the Holocaust. Frankly, he no longer believed in Judaism, he
had lost faith in mankind, and was not sure what he believed about God.
One day, a
few years later, Sam met a Christian missionary who gave him a copy of the New Testament
in Yiddish. This missionary also
connected Sam with a Jewish Christian. They
met together for a while and discussed life and religion. Eventually, this man told Sam about a poem
called “The Sufferer.” Here is part of
it…
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 be attracted to Him.
He was despised and forsake 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.
Surely our griefs He Himself bore,
And our sorrows He carried;
Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.
But He was pierced through for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,
And by His scourging we are healed.
All of us like sheep have gone astray,
Each of us has turned to his own way;
But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all
To fall on Him.
Some of you
may recognize this poem. It is a portion
of the 53rd chapter of the book of Isaiah. Sam, however, did not recognize it as coming
from the Hebrew Scriptures. His Christian
friend asked him who he thought the subject of the poem was, who suffered for
our sins, and by whose scourging, or stripes, we were healed. Sam responded that the poem was probably
referring to Jesus. Imagine Sam’s shock
when he was informed that the poem was actually just Isaiah 53:2-12, out of his
own beloved Scriptures. His friend had
copied it onto a piece of paper, and read it to him. Sam went to his Hebrew Bible, and sure
enough, there it was.
Indeed, Sam
was correct about the referrant of Isaiah’s prophecy. We know without question that the servant is
Jesus. In Acts 8 Philip, one of the
seven deacons of the early church, encountered an Ethiopian eunuch traveling on
the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. This man
was reading from the scroll of Isaiah, specifically verses 7 and 8 of chapter
53. He asked Philip who Isaiah was
referring to. Philip’s response was to
preach Jesus to this man, resulting in his conversion.
Sam placed
his faith and trust in Christ soon after his experience with Isaiah 53. It may surprise you that a Jewish Rabbi,
trained in the precepts of Judaism, would be so unknowledgable with a passage
out of his own Bible. But, there is a
very good reason why Sam was not familiar enough with Isaiah 53 to recognize it
when it was read to him. Every year the
Rabbis in Jewish Synagogues adhere to a Bible reading schedule for each Sabbath
that has been in place since the middle ages.
But, something curious happens in the middle of August each year. The reading schedule stops one week at Isaiah
52:12 and picks up the next week at Isaiah 54:1. If you ask a Rabbi why this is, he will
probably answer that it is simply because they cannot read every passage of the
Bible in their weekly readings.
However, I
think there is a deeper reason. I think
that the real reason is because it is impossible to read Isaiah 53 and not come
away with an image of Jesus in your mind, assuming you know even a little bit
of what happened to Him in 32 AD. The Old
Testament has hundreds of Messianic prophecies and allusions. Four of them are the servant songs of Isaiah
42, 49, 50, and this one in chapters 52 and 53.
That final prophecy, extending from Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 is, I think,
the greatest of them all. It is the
Everest of Old Testament Messianic prophecy.
It is the climax, or the peak of the grandeur that God has revealed in
the Hebrew Scriptures about Christ. And,
in fact, no passage of Scripture has been more instrumental than Isaiah 53 in
bringing Jews to faith in Jesus. Sam
Stern is only one of many Jews who, when confronted with the explicit
description of Jesus in Isaiah, were forced to confront their own preconceived
notions that had been given to them by an orthodox Jewish rabbinical system
that vehemently denies that Jesus was and is their Messiah.
In light of
all this, I think it is entirely appropriate and fitting that, as we approach
Christmas next week, we take some time to linger over the glorious truth
revealed in this precious text. You see,
although it is fitting and proper that we focus upon the birth of Christ during
the Christmas holiday, it is also entirely appropriate to fix our gaze upon the
breadth of His messianic ministry, including His atoning sacrifice upon a Roman
cross. If our understanding of Jesus is
limited to His time as a human baby, then we do not even know enough to
experience genuine Christian salvation, let alone to begin to appreciate the
Lord Jesus’s amazing sacrifice for us.
That being said, the servant song of Isaiah 53 is a long passage. To plumb its depths would be the work of
multiple sermons. So, I would like to
focus on only a small portion of the entire prophecy. Specifically, I want to dig into the last
three verses of Isaiah 52 as well as the first verse of chapter 53. This section serves as a sort of prologue to
the servant song in the rest of chapter 53.
In these verses we see Christ’s stunning exaltation, His horrific
disfigurement, and His work of purification.
These three elements are followed by Isaiah’s admission of the
inexplicability of the message he is conveying.
The prophet
begins in verse 13: Behold, My servant
will prosper, He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted. Notice the repeated emphasis here. Isaiah uses four distinct words in Hebrew to
explain just how magnificent would be the servant’s glorification. He says that the servant will prosper, He
will be high, He will be lifted up, and He will be greatly exalted. Now, as you might imagine these four words
have similar meanings in Hebrew. They
are essentially synonyms. There is some
variation and nuance among them, to be sure, yet there is a harmony of meaning
as well.
Prosper has
the idea of both success in one’s endeavors as well as an increase of
understanding and comprehension. High is
literally to be elevated physically, on a platform or a mountain perhaps. Lifted up has a slightly different emphasis,
in that it is to be lifted up by another or carried. And, greatly exalted, in contrast to high, is
to be elevated in one’s own nature.
The question
we should ask is why. Why does Isaiah
pile up all these synonyms one after another?
I think his purpose is to emphasize the greatness of God’s Servant. Isaiah wants us to be very clear that this
Servant will be elevated to the highest position possible, His status will
exceed the rank of all others, and His glory will outshine the world itself.
And now
things begin to get very strange indeed.
The transcendent exaltation of the Servant in verse 13 is only matched
by His stunning humiliation in verse 14: Just
as many were astonished at you, My people, so His appearance was marred more
than any man and His form more than the sons of men. To get at the meaning behind this verse we
need to dig into a little bit of Israel’s historical interaction with God. Two passages will help us here. In Deuteronomy 7:7, Moses wrote to his
countrymen: “The LORD did not set His
love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the
peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.” The Hebrew nation did not start out as a
strong and vibrant people. They were the
least of all families of the earth. God
deliberately chose the weakest among the tribes of man to set His favor upon.
It gets even
more graphic in Ezekiel 16. In verses 4
to 6, in addressing the Jews, God says: “As
for your birth, on the day you were born your navel cord was not cut, nor were
you washed with water for cleansing; you were not rubbed with salt or even
wrapped in cloths. No eye looked with
pity on you to do any of these things for you, to have compassion on you. Rather you were thrown out into the open
field, for you were abhorred on the day you were born. When I passed by you and saw you squirming in
your blood, I said to you while you were in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you while you were in your
blood, ‘Live!’”
Do you see
the horrific picture God is painting? He
describes Israel as essentially an ancient abortion. In those days, there were no medical
procedures to surgically murder a child in the womb of its mother. So, if a baby was unwanted, the mother would
come to term and deliver. Then, the
parents would take the newborn out into the woods, a field, or anywhere else
that was remote and away from civilization.
They would leave the little one there to die. That is exactly the picture God is giving of
Israel when He chose them. They were
like a newborn. Their umbilical cord was
not cut. They had not been washed with
water to cleanse their skin or rubbed with salt as an antiseptic. They were not even given any clothes. They were unwanted, unloved, and abandoned in
a field, squirming in the blood of their birth.
Now then,
look again at the first line of Isaiah 52:14.
God says, of His Servant, that people would be astonished at Him just as
they had been of Israel. Actually, I
think the New English Translation of the Bible is much better here: just as many were horrified by the sight of
you. That carries the force of
meaning implied in this verse. But, in
the case of the Servant, what is it they would be horrified by? They would be appalled at His
appearance. The Servant’s looks would be
marred, or disfigured more than any other man.
Just how bad would His appearance be distorted? We can tell by the force of the people’s
reaction. One commentary says it this
way: “The Servant’s sufferings brought
such a disfigurement that those who saw said not only, ‘Is this he?’ but ‘Is
this human?’”
Now, before
we go on, we need to stop and consider just how ridiculous this is. We need to take off our evangelical,
Christianized, Americanized glasses for a minute. We who have perhaps been raised on stories of
Christ along with our mother’s milk. We
who might take the truth of the gospel for granted. Look at what the prophet is saying here. It does not make any sense whatsoever. First, he writes that God’s servant will be
exalted. He will be glorified to such an
extreme level that Isaiah needed to say it four separate ways, with four
different Hebrew synonyms. But then,
with his next breath, Isaiah turns around and says that this same Servant will
be so horribly and brutally mutilated that He will not even look human
anymore.
In what
obscure and bizarre universe does this sound plausible? Is it any wonder that the first century Jews
were completely confused and off base with their expectations of the
Messiah? I think sometimes we like to
pile on the Jews, talking about how ignorant they were. But honestly, would we be any different,
short of supernatural revelation, with the ridiculous insanity of a Messianic
prophecy like this one?
And, to top
it off, Isaiah then writes, with the first line of verse 15: Thus He will sprinkle many nations. The Israelites were quite familiar with this
phrase. Their Levitical sacrifical
system under the Mosaic Law included copious amounts of blood. The blood of sacrificed animals splashed as
their throats were cut, the life blood of the animal overflowed the surface of
the altar, poured down, and collected at the base. The priests dipped branches of hyssop in the
blood and sprinkled objects with it to consecrate them. In many ways, ancient Judaism was a religion
of blood.
The most
prominent example of this was on the singular Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur in
Hebrew, that occurred once each year. On
this special day, the high priest would take the blood of a sacrificial goat,
dip his hyssop branch in it, and the enter the holy of holies inside the tent
of meeting of the Tabernacle or Temple.
He would take the hyssop and use it to sprinkle the mercy seat, the cover
that sat on top of the Ark of the Covenant and upon which the presence of God
Himself rested in the midst of the people.
It was this blood, the blood of an innocent, spotless sacrifice that
consecrated the mercy seat and provided atonement for the sins of the
people. Were it not for this sprinkling
of blood, the holiness of God would engulf the people and destroy them because
of their wicked natures and actions.
So, the Jews
who read Isaiah knew exactly what he was talking about when he wrote that through
these means the Servant would sprinkle the people. In some incomprehensible way, the Servant’s
exaltation and His humiliation together would provide an atonement, or a
propitiation, for sins. Furthermore, it
was not only the Jews who could expect to be covered under this blood. The Servant would sprinkle “many nations”
with His blood.
Again, I
realize we who live after the advent of Christ in the 1st century
can see, with the benefit of hindsight, exactly what this means and how it
played itself out. We know that God’s
Servant was God Himself, in the flesh, born as a Jewish man named Jesus in the
first century. We know that this man,
Jesus, lived a sinless life and was perfect in every way that none of us is
capable of. We know that He went
willingly to a horrific death on a Roman cross to pay the penalty for all of us. We know that God, in His infinite holiness,
demands such a payment of death as recompense for our terrible slandering of
His character, that we produce just by merely existing in our sinfulness. We know that placing our faith and trust in
Christ, accepting the free gift of salvation, reconciles us to our Creator and
guarantees us eternal life spent in His presence, basking in the warmth of His
love and being eternally awestruck by the magnificence of His splendor. Those of us who are Christians know all of
this, and perhaps sometimes we take it for granted. However, do not overlook how difficult it
would have been for the Jews to make heads or tails out of this prophecy. And, do not overlook how perplexing the
message of the gospel continues to be, to the mind of sinful man.
In fact, I
think Isaiah alluded to the difficulty of his message with what he wrote next: Kings will shut their mouths on account of
Him.
Picture a king, sitting upon his throne. Perhaps it is King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel
2, sitting in pomp and circumstance. He
is steaming with anger, because none of his so-called wise men, enchanters, and
astrologers can tell him what his dream was, nor what it meant. In walks a young Hebrew boy. This upstart lad proceeds to unfold with
exacting precision and clarity the very images in the king’s mind, that no one
else had been privy to. As Daniel
speaks, I can imagine Nebuchadnezzar’s jaw slowly dropping in amazement, along
with probably his entire court. And
then, perhaps, when he realizes his mouth is hanging open, he snaps it shut in
surprise. I think that is the image
here.
But notice
why Isaiah says that the kings will react in this way: for what had not been told them they will see, and what they had not
heard they will understand. Unlike
Daniel with Nebuchadnezzar, people will not come to an understanding through
the words of men. The only way they will
perceive the truth of the Servant is via things not even explained to
them. The explanation of humans, no
matter how educated and sophisticated they are, will be incapable of providing
illumination to the mind such that comprehension dawns. In other words, Isaiah writes, his message
about the Servant is so inexplicable that it cannot be understood.
I think that
is exactly why the prophet wrote the first verse of chapter 53. I think it serves as a hinge between the
prologue of the Servant, here at the end of chapter 52, and the more detailed
description of Him in the next chapter.
Verse 1 reads: Who has believed
our message? And to whom has the arm of
the LORD been revealed? The implied
answer? No one has believed the
message. To no one has the arm of the
LORD been revealed.
God is so
serious about helping us to see how confusing the message of the gospel is that
He made it a central theme of the entire gospel of John. In John 12:37, after Jesus had done countless
incredible miracles right in the midst of the people, we find that: though He had performed so many signs
before them, yet they were not believing in Him. Lest we think this was an accident, and the
people’s unbelief took God by surprise, look at the very next thing John
wrote. He quoted this same verse, Isaiah
53:1. John 12:38 makes it clear: This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the
prophet which he spoke: “LORD, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been
revealed?” Paul echoes his fellow
Apostle John in Romans 10:16 by quoting Isaiah 53:1 yet again.
This
response of hardhearted disbelief was not new to the prophet Isaiah. In fact, it is by design. Right from the beginning, God had revealed to
him what the outcome of his ministry would be.
In Isaiah 6:9-10 God revealed the future to His prophet: “Go, and tell this people: Keep on
listening, but do not perceive; keep on looking, but do not understand. Render the hearts of this people insensitive,
their ears dull, and their eyes dim, otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed.”
The Lord is
so serious about making sure we understand this point that these verses are
quoted in every gospel (Mt. 13:14-15, Mk. 4:12, Lk. 8:10, Jn. 12:40) as well as
Acts (28:26-27) and Romans (11:8). All
of these verses point to the inability, short of grace, for Israel to believe
in Christ. But, this is not a condition
exclusive to Jews. We Gentiles share
this racial inability to believe.
This is
exactly why Paul described the gospel as utter folly when he wrote to the
Corinthians. 1st Corinthians
1:18-19 tells us: the word of the cross
is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is
the power of God. For it is written, “I
will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will
set aside.” Again in verse 27: but God has chosen the foolish things of
the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to
shame the things which are strong.
Why does He do this? 1st
Corinthians 1:29-30 gives us our answer: so
that no man may boast before God. But by
His doing you are in Christ Jesus.
Now then, I
have been hammering on this for several minutes now. What is my point? Am I trying to drive you to depression the
week before Christmas? No, not at all. What I seek, and what I think Isaiah hoped
for, was that through understanding the truth, that only God can open the eyes
of the blind and make them see, we will enter into Christmas week by worshiping
our Savior in gratitude not only for what He has done for us.
But also, I
believe we ought to be humbled as we realize that we do not deserve to be saved
and we did not believe in Christ because of our own intelligence. In fact, left to our own devices, we would
reject Christ every single time, just like the Jews did. I am convinced that, once we come to truly
understand this, then we will burst with joy inexpressible for the wondrous
revelation of Christ that God opened our minds to when He removed the scales of
spiritual blindness from our eyes.
I think if
we embrace this doctrine then we will overflow with thankfulness, as David did
in Psalm 138:1-3, a powerful prayer of thanksgiving: I will give You thanks with all my heart; I will sing praises to You
before the gods. I will bow down toward
Your holy temple and give thanks to Your name for Your lovingkindness and Your
truth; for You have magnified Your word according to all Your name. On the day I called, You answered me; You
made me bold with strength in my soul.
The natural
result of such appreciation should be amazement and wonder, as Paul expressed
in Romans 11:33-36, one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture: Oh, the depth of the riches both of the
wisdom and knowledge of God! How
unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the LORD, or
who became His counselor? Or who has
first given to Him that it might be paid back to Him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are
all things. To Him be the glory
forever. Amen.
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