Isaiah 53:11-12

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

As we saw yesterday, so much of God’s salvation plan has already been accomplished that we can be confident that what still needs to happen will also be fulfilled. And here, in our final verses, we find out what that final stage of the salvation plan, which we are still waiting for, looks like. Because we know that our eternal future is already secure, we might not think very much about what will happen when Jesus returns to judge. Perhaps we’re so used to the idea that the cross and resurrection of Jesus are the high point of history (which they are!) that we assume that everything that is still to come is going to be a bit of an anti-climax (which it isn’t!) The victory of Jesus over sin and death is already won. But we can still look forward to the victory parade, where we get to join in the rejoicing as Jesus is displayed as victorious king over all of creation.

I’m not much of a football fan, but even I know that when a team wins a really significant victory, there is often a celebratory parade in their hometown. Open top busses, cheering crowds lining the streets, the cup held high for everyone to see. The victory is won on the pitch, but the celebrations aren’t complete until everyone has welcomed their heroes home to receive the praise of their fans.

Jesus’ victory was won at the cross, but the victory parade will reach his climax when he gathers his people from every tribe and language and nation to sing his praises and declare his glory. On that day, he will get to show off ‘the spoils’ which he has snatched from the hands of his enemies – that is, his people who he has rescued from the grip of sin and death and the devil. So great is the glory due to Jesus that it will take all eternity to adequately praise him for what he has done for us.

We live in a world that wants us to believe that we are the heroes, that the spotlight of my life should be firmly fixed on ME. But the victory on which my whole life depends is not mine, but Jesus’. The whole purpose of my life, now and forever, is to sing HIS praises and declare HIS greatness.

So, as we reach the end of our time in Isaiah, let’s do that today. And let’s ask for God’s help to be people who continue to sing his praises and live for his glory every single day, both in this world and in the life to come, which he has won for us.

Isaiah 53:10

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

For the past 6 and a half weeks, we’ve listened to Isaiah, and God himself, introducing us to the figure of the Servant. We’ve seen that the Servant will come to rescue wayward people, reconciling them to their loving, holy Lord. We’ve seen that this rescue will be achieved through the willing suffering of the Servant. And we’ve seen how all these promises are fulfilled in the coming of Jesus, who fleshes out and makes real what the people of Isaiah’s time must have been longing and hoping for.

There was a tension for Isaiah and his generation. Even as they trusted in the promises of the Servant to come, they still had to live through the experience of the coming exile which Isaiah also foretold. Similarly, we who live after the coming of Jesus have a much clearer understanding of the life and work of this promised Servant. Much of what was ‘future’ for Isaiah is now ‘history’ for us. We have seen (in the pages of the gospels, if not with our own eyes) Jesus be born, live, die and rise again. But we are still caught in the tension between the ‘now’ of life in a fallen world, where sin still entangles us, and the ‘not yet’ of the heavenly kingdom which we are still waiting to experience. And so today and tomorrow, as we end our time together in this book, these verses turn our attention to what is still to come.

The Servant who suffered and died is already alive again – he is already ‘seeing his offspring’ (those who are born into God’s family because of him) and ‘prolonging his days’ in the present. Today and every day stretching on into eternity, the will of the Lord continues to prosper in his hand. And so, even as we continue to battle with our sin, and struggle with our brokenness, we can do it with hope. So much of what God promised through Isaiah has already been fulfilled that we can trust he will finish what he has started. The Lord Jesus, who suffered and died and is now risen and reigning in glory, WILL come back and take us to be with him forever. The ‘will of the Lord’ will continue to be done, on earth as it is in heaven, every day of our lives and beyond.

Let’s pray that we would continue to trust in that great promise today.

Isaiah 53:9

He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘identity’ in our society at the moment. Whilst we might take issue with where some people now draw the line between which aspects of identity are fixed and which can be chosen, we all recognise the frustration that comes from being wrongly-identified. The passionate football supporter doesn’t take kindly to being thought of as supporting an opposing team. If someone makes a wrong assumption about our political affiliations, we may well be offended. From time to time I get emails intended for a woman in America who must have an email address that’s easily confused with mine. I find it easy to ignore the marketing emails from companies that she has signed up to, giving my email address by mistake. But I mind much more when I get email reminders in her name from a debt management company. I feel like I’ve been wrongly assigned to the category ‘debtor’ and I don’t like it. At least until I remember that it isn’t really me that they’re talking to.

So imagine how it felt for Jesus to be wrongly assigned to the category ‘wicked’. There could be no greater miscarriage of justice than to identify the perfect and holy Son of God as belonging ‘with the wicked’. In our society, we might think that being identified with ‘the rich’ was a compliment, but from the context of these verses it’s clear that being buried with the rich somehow implies an involvement with violence and deceit. His grave ought rightly to have been labelled ‘Here lies the best man who ever lived’. But instead it’s in the section marked ‘Here lie the criminals’.

Yet this wasn’t the first time in his life Jesus had been wrongly-labelled. Throughout his earthly ministry, the Pharisees repeatedly assigned him to an incorrect category. As Jesus himself put it, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, “Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”” The implication is clear – to be a ‘friend of sinners’ must mean that he himself is a sinner. Yet they are only half-wrong. He is certainly not a glutton, nor a drunkard, nor a sinner. But he is the ultimate ‘friend of sinners’. The Servant was willing to be mislabelled, misunderstood and misrepresented, in order that we might be assigned to a category we could never have expected to belong to. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Let’s praise him for that today.

Isaiah 53:8

By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.

I rather like this phrase ‘the land of the living’. It’s got a much more poetic ring to it than simply saying ‘life’. And the idea of being ‘cut off from the land of the living’ is much more striking than if this verse simply said ‘he was killed’. The whole verse seems to underline the separation that took place between Jesus and everyone else. He was ‘taken away’ and ‘cut off’. The lonely figure of Jesus walks to his death whilst the whole of the rest of his generation stand idly by, doing nothing and saying nothing to stop it.

He was cut off from the land of the living. Cut off from fellowship with others. Cut off from all that is good, enjoyable, nourishing and happy. That would be bad enough. But we know that it was, in fact, even worse. When he was punished for our transgressions, Jesus was also cut off from his heavenly Father. Cut off from the very source of life itself. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he cried out on the cross. But why? Surely God, who sent him to the cross, could at least have hung around to comfort and encourage the Servant during his darkest hour? Why all this loneliness and abandonment?

Sin is the ultimate separating force. It cuts us off from a Holy God, and from the life which he gives. And it also cuts us off from fellowship with one another, undermining love and trust and loyalty. Abandoned by his followers and his friends, alienated from his father as he had never been before or since, Jesus was experiencing the separating power of our sin.

It’s hard to imagine the strength of a force that could turn the Father’s face away from his beloved son in the moment of his greatest suffering. And yet, there is an even stronger force at work in the world. The gracious, forgiving, redeeming love of God, expressed in the Servant’s sacrificial death, reconciles us with a power much greater than the separating power of sin.

Because he was cut off, we have been brought near. Because he was excluded from the land of the living, we have been welcomed into an abundant and eternal life that is better than anything this world can even begin to imagine.

Let’s praise him for that today.

Isaiah 53:7

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

One of the things I find most remarkable about the behaviour of Jesus during his arrest and trial is the fact that he remains silent when facing unjust accusations. I realise that his physical suffering and the experience of being separated from his Father on the cross, are in many ways worse things to experience. But they feel very far removed from our everyday lives, whereas the experience of being falsely accused, or misrepresented, or wrongly blamed is something that we probably all know a little of. And I know how much I hate it when it happens to me. I might, perhaps, be willing to bear some small consequence for something that wasn’t actually my fault. But when that does happen, I want to make very sure that everyone knows how undeserved it is! I can’t really imagine being able to bear it silently. Letting go of the opportunity to vindicate myself. I want it clearly on the record that I am innocent. If I have to experience unjust suffering, I want the injustice to be publically noted! The arguments spring easily to mind: “Justice matters. Injustice isn’t OK. It would reflect badly on God if a Christian was thought to have said this or done that.” When really I’m motivated by the desire to vindicate myself. I care much less about justice, or God’s honour, than I care about what people think of me. And in any case, even if I am largely innocent of the particular thing of which I am accused, I can never claim to be totally blameless. Yet Jesus was. If ever anyone had the right to protest against injustice, it was him. Yet he remains silent. Why? Doesn’t he care about injustice? Doesn’t he care that God was mocked because of the verdict of ‘guilty’ which his Servant received? Of course he does. But he was motivated by a deeper concern for justice and God’s honour than I will ever be. His desire to see justice done, whilst justly forgiving sinners was what kept him quiet. His concern for God to be glorified as the one who defeats sin and evil and death at the cross is what sustained his silence.

Let’s praise him for that today.

Isaiah 53:6

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

When our girls were younger we were all great fans of the Australian Christian musician, Colin Buchanan. A significant number of the Bible verses I know by heart are cemented in my memory because of his catchy tunes. So much so that I can’t read or think about today’s verse without mentally adding in the ‘Bah Bah Doo Bah Bah’s at the end of every clause! (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, stick Colin Buchanan Isaiah 53:6 into your search engine of choice and have a listen)

Sheep noises aside, this is a verse that deserves to be in the mind and heart of every Christian. If you were only ever going to learn half a dozen Bible verses in your whole life, I’d suggest that this ought to be one of them. In this one sentence we have the heart of the gospel. We have each chosen to wander away from the Lord. And what has he done in response? Sent a sheepdog to fetch us back to face our punishment? Turned us loose to fend for ourselves in a world of thorns and wolves? No. He laid all our wrongdoing on the Servant, Jesus, so that we don’t have to live under the penalty it rightly deserves.

How could this be anything other than wonderful news? Yet it is only good news for those who know themselves to be wandering sheep. Perhaps for city-dwellers, being considered a sheep doesn’t seem so bad. If our ideas about sheep are drawn from children’s picture books and model farms, we might not mind the comparison. Surely they are cute, clean, cuddly and harmless? But if you’ve had dealings with real live sheep, you may feel differently.

My grandparents were farmers on the Welsh border. I remember when we visited, my brother and I having to join in when sheep were being moved from place to place. Stationed in a gateway or on the yard, we would shout and wave our arms around, attempting to head the sheep towards where they ought to go, and deflect them from where they wanted to go … which was generally anywhere other than the direction intended! Clean, cute and cuddly they were not! In fact, they were often muddy, infuriating and apparently very stupid. Why would you want to go and wedge yourself between a Land Rover and a gatepost, when we’re offering you a huge field full of grass to enjoy? If that’s your experience of sheep, this verse is not so flattering. We all, like mucky, stubborn sheep who have no idea what is good for us, have gone astray. So how wonderfully surprising that the Lord has provided a way for our punishment to fall not on us but on the Servant instead.

However familiar these words are, let’s thank him again for that today, and pray that in our gratitude we would increasingly learn to follow the good shepherd instead of turning away from him.

Isaiah 53:4-5

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.

Yesterday we saw that the Servant was ‘a man of suffering and familiar with pain’. Today we discover that this wasn’t simply a description of what happened to occur in his life. He wasn’t just a bit unfortunate, someone who attracted more than his share of bad luck. He willingly chose this path. He took up the pain and bore the suffering. Much of the time we endure pain and suffering because we have no other choice. We didn’t ask for the chronic illness, or the depression, or the accident that leaves us in plaster for months. But sometimes our suffering is chosen willingly – the discomfort of recovering from an operation to donate a kidney to a loved one, choosing to marry someone who already lives with suffering, knowing that something of their pain will become ours, too, or giving up comfort and security to move to a deprived area on a low salary to care for the needy. In those cases, the sacrifice will – we hope – be worth it, because it eases someone else’s pain. We share their sufferings with them, lightening their load. But I can’t think of a single example of a way in which any of us could bear someone else’s pain and suffering so completely that it was totally taken away from the other person.

Only the Servant has ever done that. He has completely taken the pain and suffering that our transgressions deserved. Yes, we still experience the pain and suffering that come from living in a broken world (until he takes us to be with him in the place where there will be no more tears). But those of us who are united to Jesus by faith are completely spared all of the pain of the judgement of our sin. Jesus hasn’t just shared it with us. He has taken it from us. Fully and completely. In place of punishment we have peace with God.

And this was no mere transaction on a balance sheet. Not a nice, neat, clean solution to a theoretical problem. It was real, and physical and brutal. He was punished, stricken, pierced, crushed and wounded. And he did it willingly. For us.

Let’s thank him for that today.

Isaiah 53:2b-3

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

When we were reading Chapter 49 I said that the Servant was visually unimpressive – if you’d walked past him in the street in 1st Century Palestine you wouldn’t have given him a second look. But actually, it’s worse than that. Today’s verse tells us that rather than being merely ignored, the Servant would be despised and looked down on. Why? Two reasons. Firstly, because he was not beautiful, and secondly, because he suffered pain.

Both of those things made him uncomfortable to be around, in his own day. And both of those things are still, at the very least, awkward today. We live in a society that worships physical beauty. Yes, there’s a lot of talk about loving yourself and your body, whatever your shape or size, but that doesn’t stop us being bombarded by messages encouraging us to pursue greater physical beauty. There’s the occasional marketing campaign that features ‘real women’ rather than airbrushed models, or models which a visible disability, but they’re still treated as revolutionary, rather than being the norm. Even though we know it’s not really true, we’re still shaped by the assumption that physical beauty matters. That life would be better if I was more attractive. And we easily assume that the effective, successful life, is marked by health and wholeness, rather than pain and suffering.

So, if we were in charge of selecting a man for this role of Servant, wouldn’t be want to pick someone who looks … well, attractive? Yet God very deliberately doesn’t do that. Jesus’ conception was utterly miraculous, so his appearance can’t have been the inevitable consequence of the combination of Mary and Joseph’s genes. However God did it, he created Jesus’ body deliberately and intentionally. If he’d wanted to make Jesus the most handsome man ever born, he could have done.

Similarly, when preparing the way for the Servant, surely God would want to remove every obstacle and difficulty that might interfere with his mission? Yet it turns out that the suffering and pain are essential to his mission. The coming of this Servant makes clear that - God’s eyes at least - physical beauty doesn’t count for much. And pain and suffering can accomplish things that health, wealth and happiness can’t. God values the obedience of the Servant more than his physique. The suffering and death of the Servant bring more lasting good into the world than the exams he might have passed, the certificates he might have received, or his contribution to his country’s GDP.

What a complete reversal of the values of our world! How wrong must our value judgements be, for us to look at the Servant and despise him.

Let’s pray that God would be teaching us more and more to value what he values, and to worship and honour the Servant who so many looked down on.