Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Isaiah 53:1

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?

1. The verse should probably be rendered,

Who believed that which was revealed to us,

And the arm of Jehovah to (lit. “on”) whom was it disclosed? The word which E.V. renders “report” is passive in form (lit. “a thing heard”); our report, therefore, is not “that which we reported” but ‘either “the report concerning us” (2Sa 4:4) or “that which was reported to us.” The last sense is alone admissible in this connexion, and the only question that remains is, What kind of report is referred to? Usually the word denotes a rumour circulated by the ordinary channels of intelligence (ch. Isa 37:7 &c.), and this meaning might be thought of here if we could suppose the words spoken after the elevation of the Servant. But this is objectionable, ( a) because the standpoint of the speakers is not subsequent to the glorification of the Servant, but prior to it (see above), ( b) the speakers, being Israelites, cannot readily be supposed to learn the Servant’s exaltation from rumour, and ( c) it would be necessary to render the verb “Who could have believed?” which although possible is not natural. The question implies a negative answer: “No one believed it.” It is better therefore to take the word in its religious sense of a Divine revelation (see on ch. Isa 28:9), a “thing heard” from Jehovah. “Our revelation” might of course be said by the prophet of a communication made directly to himself; but it might also be said by the people of a revelation which had reached them through the medium of the prophets. The reference will be to the prophecies bearing on the Servant’s glorious destiny, especially ch. Isa 42:1-4, Isa 49:1-6, Isa 50:4-9, and perhaps Isa 52:13-15.

The arm of the Lord is, as in ch. Isa 51:9, Isa 52:10 &c., a metaphor for Jehovah’s operation in history. It was He who raised up the Servant, and all through his tragic history God was working by him for the redemption of His people and the inbringing of eternal salvation. But this Divine power behind the Servant had not been “disclosed” to any of his contemporaries; they had neither perceived it for themselves nor believed it when declared to them, and so in the blindness and deafness of their unbelief they had misconceived him in the manner exhibited in Isa 53:2 ff.

The verse is cited, with reference to the rejection of the Gospel by the Jews, in Joh 12:38 and (in part) Rom 10:16.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

ch. Isa 53:1-9. Having thus indicated the subject of his discourse, the prophet now proceeds to describe the career of the Servant, and the impression he had made on his contemporaries. This is prefaced in Isa 53:1 by a confession or complaint of the universal unbelief which had led to his being so grievously misunderstood.

The speakers in this section are certainly not the heathen mentioned in Isa 52:15, but either all Israel or one Israelite in the name of all. The “nations” and “kings” are surprised by the Servant’s exaltation because they had not previously heard of it; those who now speak confess a deeper fault, they have heard but did not believe. It is generally assumed that there is a change of speaker in Isa 53:7-9, where the use of the 1st pers. plu. is discontinued, and where ( Isa 53:8) we come across the expression “ my people.” This assumption is to be avoided if possible, because Isa 53:7 ff. continue the narrative of the Servant’s sufferings, and it is unnatural to think that the story begun by one speaker should be completed by another unless there were some clear indication that this is the case. There appears to be no difficulty in the supposition that the prophet himself speaks throughout; although in Isa 53:2-6 he associates himself with his generation, the contemporaries of the Servant. There must be some reason for his thus merging his individual consciousness in that of the community; and the obvious reason is that in depicting the Servant as he appeared to men, he writes as a spectator along with others, and realises his solidarity with his nation. In Isa 53:7-9 the description simply becomes less subjective; the emphasis lies less on what men thought of the Servant, and more on what he was and endured; and when the prophet again has occasion to refer to Israel it is natural that he should do so as “my people.” Another thing to be noted is that the language is consistently retrospective. Historic tenses are employed throughout, the speaker looks back on the completed tragedy of the Servant’s career, and on the people’s former thoughts of him as things that belong to the past. On the other hand, the exaltation of the Servant is always spoken of (both in Isa 52:13-15, and in Isa 53:10-12) as something still future. The standpoint assumed here seems therefore to be intermediate between the death of the Servant and his exaltation; and the great moral change which is described as taking place in the mind of the people is not the result of the revelation of his glory, but is brought about by reflection on his unparalleled sufferings, and his patient demeanour under them, preparing the people to believe the prophecies which had hitherto seemed incredible.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Ch. Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12. The Servant’s Sacrifice and His Reward

This is the last and greatest, as well as the most difficult, of the four delineations of the Servant of Jehovah, and in several respects occupies a place apart. In the previous passages the Servant has been described as the ideal prophet or teacher, conscious of a world-wide mission in the service of God, which he prosecutes amid discouragement and persecution with inflexible purpose and the unfaltering assurance of ultimate success. There has been no hint that his activity was interrupted by death. Here the presentation is quite different. The conception of the Prophet is all but displaced by that of the Man of Sorrows, the meek and patient martyr, the sin-bearer. The passage is partly retrospective and partly prophetic. In so far as it is a retrospect there is no allusion to the prophetic activity of the servant; it is only after he has been raised from the dead that he is to assume the function of the great religious guide and authority of the world. But the most striking feature of the passage is the unparalleled sufferings of the Servant, and the effect they produce on the minds of his contemporaries. The tragedy of which they have been spectators makes an impression far more profound and convincing than any direct teaching could have done, compelling them to recognise the mission of the Servant, and at the same time producing penitence and confession of their own sin. The whole conception here given of the Servant of the Lord makes the prophecy the most remarkable anticipation in the Old Testament of the “sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.”

The passage may be divided into three parts:

(1) An introduction, briefly stating the import of all that follows, the coming exaltation of the Servant in contrast to his past abasement (Isa 52:13-15).

(2) A historical review of the Servant’s career, as he had appeared to his contemporaries in the days of his humiliation (Isa 53:1-9).

(3) An announcement of the glorious future and the astonishing success in store for him as the reward of his obedience unto death ( Isa 52:10-12).

The middle section may be further subdivided into three strophes, yielding an arrangement (recognised by most commentators) of the whole in five strophes of three verses each.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Who hath believed our report? – The main design of the prophet in all this portion of his prophecy is, undoubtedly, to state the fact that the Redeemer would be greatly exalted (see Isa 52:13; Isa 53:12). But in order to furnish a fair view of his exaltation, it was necessary also to exhibit the depth of his humiliation, and the intensity of his sorrows, and also the fact that he would be rejected by those to whom he was sent. He, therefore, in this verse, to use the language of Calvin, breaks in abruptly upon the order of his discourse, and exclaims that what he had said, and what he was about to say, would be scarcely credited by anyone. Prelimmary to his exaltation, and to the honors which would be conferred on him, he would be rejected and despised. The word report ( sh^emuah) denotes properly that which is heard, tidings, message, news. Margin, Hearing or doctrine. The Septuagint renders it, Akoe – Rumour, message. It refers to the annunciation, message, or communication which had been made respecting the Messiah. The speaker here is Isaiah, and the word our refers to the fact that the message of Isaiah and of the other prophets had been alike rejected. He groups himself with the other prophets, and says that the annunciation which they had made of the Redeemer had been disregarded The interrogative form is often assumed when it is designed to express a truth with emphasis; and the idea is, therefore, that the message in regard to the Messiah had been rejected, and that almost none had credited and embraced it.

And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? – The arm is that by which we execute a purpose, and is often used as the emblem of power (see the notes at Isa 33:2; Isa 40:10). Here it denotes the omnipotence or power of God, which would be exhibited through the Messiah. The sense is, Who has perceived the power evinced in the work of the Redeemer? To whom is that power manifested which is to be put forth through him, and in connection with his work? It refers not so much, as it seems to me, to his power in working miracles, as to the omnipotence evinced in rescuing sinners from destruction. In the New Testament, the gospel is not unfrequently called the power of God Rom 1:16; 1Co 1:18, for it is that by which God displays his power in saving people. The idea here is, that comparatively few would be brought under that power, and be benefited by it; that is, in the times, and under the preaching of the Messiah. It is to be remembered that the scene of this vision is laid in the midst of the work of the Redeemer. The prophet sees him a sufferer, despised and rejected. He sees that few come to him, and embrace him as their Saviour. He recalls the report and the announcement which he and other prophets had made respecting him; he remembers the record which had been made centuries before respecting the Messiah; and he asks with deep emotion, as if present when the Redeemer lived and preached, who had credited what he and the other prophets had said of him. The mass had rejected it all. The passage, therefore, had its fulfillment in the events connected with the ministry of the Redeemer, and in the fact that he was rejected by so many. The Redeemer was more successful in his work as a preacher than is commonly supposed, but still it is true that by the mass of the nation he was despised, and that the announcement which had been made of his true character and work was rejected.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Isa 53:1-12

Who hath believed our report?

—

The Messiah referred to in Isa 53:1-12

By some it has been supposed, in ancient times and in modern, that the prophet was referring to the sufferings of the nation of Israel–either of Israel as a whole or of the righteous section of the nation–and to the benefits that would accrue from those sufferings to the surrounding peoples, some of whom were contemptuous of Israel, all of whom may be described as ignorant of God. But to defend that opinion it is necessary to paraphrase and interpret some of the statements in a way that no sound rules of exposition will allow. Even Jewish historians are wont to represent the sufferings of their people as the consequence of sin, whereas these verses speak repeatedly of sufferings that are vicarious. St. Paul says in one place that the fall of the Jews is the riches of the world, and their loss the riches of the Gentiles; but he is so far from meaning that the Jews suffered in the stead of the Gentiles, that he proceeds at once to argue by implication: If the world has been blessed notwithstanding the unfaithfulness of the Jew, how much more would it have been blessed if Israel had been true? It is quite possible that the great figure of the Servant of Jehovah, standing in the front of all these verses, was designed to have more than a single interpretation, to be reverently approached from many sides, to be full of appeals to the patriotism and to the piety of the Israelite; but at the same time it is no mere abstract conception, but the figure of a living and separated Person, more perfect than human believer ever was, uniting in himself more richly than any other messenger, of God everything that was necessary for the salvation of man, and finally accomplishing what no mere prophet ever attempted. And some of the authorities of the synagogue even might be quoted in favour of the almost universal Christian opinion, that the Man of Sorrows of this chapter despised, and yet triumphant, is no other than the Messiah of Israel and the Saviour of the world, who over-trod the lowest levels of human pain and misery, and who hereafter will sit enthroned, on His head many crowns, and in His heart the satisfaction of assured and unlimited victory. (R.W. Moss, D.D.)

The Jewish nation a vicarious sufferer

Isa 53:1-12 has been supposed by many to refer to the Jewish nation as a whole, and not to Christ or any other individual. And, in truth, it is in many ways singularly applicable to Israel as a nation. As a nation Israel was despised and rejected, and bore the sins of many. This people was the chief medium through which the Eternal was made manifest on earth. Hence came the peculiarities and deficiencies of the Hebrew nature. The Jews were haunted by the Infinite and Eternal; and therefore they knew not the free and careless joyousness of Greece. The mountains are scarred and rent by storms and tempests almost unknown in the valleys. The deepest religion necessarily involves prolonged suffering. The near presence of the Infinite pierces and wounds the soul. To Greeks or Romans Israel was a sort of Moses, veiling even while revealing the terrific lineaments of Jehovah. The face of Israel did indeed shine with an unearthly glory after communing with God on the mountain; but it was a glory utterly uncongenial to the gaiety of joyous Athens. Most truly might Greeks and Romans say of the devout Jew, He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid, as it were, our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Yet was Israel a mighty benefactor to the human race. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. Salvation came by the Jews. They had more genuine moral inspiration than any others of the sons of men. To them alone was clearly disclosed the true Jacobs ladder connecting earth with heaven. To the Greeks the Infinite was a mere notion, a thing for the intellect to play with, or a kind of irreducible surd left after the keenest philosophical analysis. To the Hebrews, on the other hand, the Infinite was an appalling and soul-abasing reality, an ever-menacing guide, as the fiery flaming sword of the cherubims which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. It pleased the Lord to bruise Israel for the sake of the whole world. By being numbered with the transgressors, Israel found out the real righteousness. (A. Crawford, M.A.)

The Jewish nation was a type of Christ

The Jewish nation was a type of Christ, and of all natures at once spiritual and sympathetic throughout the ages. All real prophets in every age have in them much of the true Hebrew nature, with its depths and its limitations. (A. Crawford, M.A.)

The servant and Israel

Who believed what we heard, and to whom did the arm of the Lord reveal itself? Who believed the revelation given to us in regard to the Servant, and who perceived the operation of the Lord in His history! The speakers are Israel now believing, and confessing their former unbelief. (A. B. Davidson, D.D.)

Christ in Isaiah

As an artisan, laying a mosaic of complicated pattern and diverse colours, has before him a working drawing, and carefully fits the minute pieces of precious stone and enamel according to it, till the perfection of the design is revealed to all, so do the evangelists and apostles, with the working-drawing of Old Testament prophecy, and Old Testament types and shadows in the tabernacle services and ceremonies, in their hands, fit together the details of Christs life on earth, His atoning death and His resurrection, and say, Behold, this can be none other than the long looked-for Messiah. The central knop, or flower pattern, of the mosaic, from which all other details of the design radiated, was the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. (F. Sessions.)

The suffering Saviour

I. We are led to THE ANTICIPATED LOWLINESS OF GODS RIGHTEOUS SERVANT, the Messiah. He would be low in the esteem of men, even of those He comes to serve.

The Jews and Messianic prophecy

From the Jews wresting this text, observe–

1. That there is an evil disposition in men to turn off upon others that which nearly concerns themselves.

2. That it is no new thing in persons to vouch that for themselves which makes most against them. Thus the Jews do this chapter against the Gentiles.

3. When God, for the wickedness of a people, hardeneth their hearts, they are apt to mistake in that which is most plain.

4. From the prophets great admiration, observe, that when we can do no good upon a people, the most effectual way is to complain of it to God.

5. Those that profess the name of God may be much prejudiced against the entertainment of those truths and counsels that He makes known to them for their good.

6. It is a wonder they should not believe so plain a discovery of Christ, though by the just judgment of God they did not.

7. The first believing of Christ is a believing the report of Him; but afterwards there are experiences to confirm our belief (1Pe 2:3; Joh 4:42). (T. Manton, D.D.)

Christ preached, but rejected

I. JESUS CHRIST MAY BE CLEARLY REPRESENTED TO A PEOPLE, AND YET BUT FEW WON TO BELIEVE IN HIM.

II. THE GOSPEL IS THE ARM AND POWER OF GOD.

III. SO FEW BELIEVE, BECAUSE GODS ARM IS NOT REVEALED TO THEM; the power of the Word is not manifested by the Spirit. (T. Manton, D. D. )

Jewish prejudice against Christ

At the time of Christs being in the flesh there were divers prejudices against Him in the Jews.

1. An erroneous opinion of the Messiah.

2. A fond reverence of Moses and the prophets, as if it were derogatory to them to close with Christ (Joh 9:29).

3. Offence at His outward meanness (that is the scope of this chapter), and the persecution He met with. (T. Manton, D. D.)

Gentile prejudice against Christ

1. Pride in the understanding (1Co 1:23).

2. The meanness of the reporters–poor fishermen.

3. The hard conditions upon which they were to entertain Christ. (T. Manton, D. D.)

Christ rejected in our time

The hindrances to believing in Him are these:

1. Ignorance. Men hear of Christ, but are not acquainted with Him.

2. An easy slightness; men do not labour after faith.

3. A careless security. They think themselves well enough without Him.

4. A light esteem of Christ. As we do not see our own needs, so not His worth.

5. A presumptuous conceit that we have entertained Christ already. Many think every slight wish, every trivial hope, will serve the turn.

6. Hardness of heart.

7. Self-confidence.

8. Carnal fears. These hinder the soul from closing with that, mercy that is reported to be in Christ. They are of divers sorts.

(1) Fear of Gods anger, as if He were so displeased with us that certainly He did not intend Christ for us.

(2) Fear of being too bold with the promises.

(3) Fear of the sin of presumption.

9. Carnal reasonings from our sins.

10. Carnal apprehensions of Christ. (T. Manton, D. D.)

The credibility and importance of the Gospel report

I. WE WILL CONTEMPLATE THIS REPORT, AND INQUIRE WHETHER IT IS NOT WORTHY OF OUR ATTENTION AND BELIEF.

1. The report which we hear, is a most instructive report. It brings us information of many things which were before unknown, and which, without this information, never could have been known to the sons of men. That which had not been told us, we see. The Gospel for this reason is called a message, good tidings, and tidings of great joy. The leading truths of natural religion are agreeable to the dictates of reason; and perhaps might be, in some measure, discovered without revelation. At least they were known among those who had never enjoyed a written revelation, though, indeed, we cannot say how far these might be indebted to traditional information. But certainly those truths, which immediately relate to the recovery and salvation of sinners, human reason could never investigate.

2. The Gospel is a report from heaven. It was, in some degree, made known to the patriarchs, and afterwards more fully to the prophets But God has in these last days, spoken to us by His Son.

3. the Gospel is a credible report. Many reports come to us without evidence: we only hear them, but know not what is their foundation, or whether they have any. And yet even these reports pass not wholly unregarded. But, if any important intelligence is brought to us which is both rational in itself, and at the same time supported by a competent number of reputable witnesses, we may much rather judge it worthy of our attention and belief. With this evidence the Gospel comes. It is credible in its own nature. The doctrines of the Gospel, though beyond the discovery and above the comprehension of reason, are in no instance contrary to its dictates. They are all adapted to promote real virtue and righteousness. Besides this internal evidence, God has been pleased to give it the sanction of His own testimony. Errors have sometimes been introduced and propagated by the artful reasoning of interested men. But Christianity rests not on the basis of human reasoning, or a subtle intricate train of argumentation: it stands on the ground of plain facts, of which every man is able to judge. The life, miracles, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are the facts which support it. If these did really take place, the Gospel is true. Whether they did or not, men of common abilities were as competent to judge, as men of the profoundest learning. We, who live in the present age, have not, in every respect, the same evidence of the truth of the Gospel as they had, who were eye-witnesses of those facts. But we have their testimony, in the most authentic manner, conveyed to us. Some advantages we have, which they had not. We have the examination of preceding ages. We see Christianity still supporting itself against all the opposition of the world. We see the unwearied attempts of its enemies to subvert it, rendered fruitless and vain. We see many of the predictions contained in these records, already verified; and others, to all appearance, hastening on towards an accomplishment.

4. It is an interesting report. From the Gospel we learn that the human race have, by transgression, fallen under the Divine displeasure. This report corresponds with our own experience and observation. The Gospel brings us a joyful message.

5. This is a public report. It is what we have all heard, and heard often.

II. WE WILL CONSIDER THE COMPLAINT. Who hath believed our report? (J. Lathrop, D..D.)

Do the prophets believe?

Who hath believed our report? This inquiry has been read in various ways. Each of the ways has had its own accent and good lesson.

1. For example, the figure might be that of the prophets gathered together in conference and bemoaning in each others hearing that their sermons or prophecies had come to nothing. We have preached all this while, and nobody has believed; why preach any more? If this thing were of God it would result in great harvests: it results in barrenness, and we are disappointed prophets. That is one way. Many excellent remarks have been made under that construction of the inquiry.

2. But that is not the meaning of the prophecy. The Revised Version helps us to see it more clearly, by reading the word thus:–Who hath believed that which we have heard? The idea is that the prophets are not rebuking other people; the tremendous idea is that the prophets are interrogating themselves and saying, in effect at least, Have we believed our own prophecy? is there a believer in all the Church? is not the Church a nest of unbelievers? That puts a very different face upon the interrogation. We shall now come to great Gospels; when the prophets flagellate themselves we shall have some good preaching. We might put the inquiry, if not literally, yet spiritually and experimentally, thus:–Which of us, even the prophets, have believed? We have said the right thing; people might listen with entranced attention to such eloquence as ours: but is it red with the blood of trust, has it gone forth from us taking our souls with it? If not, we are as the voice of the charmer; men are saying of each of us, He hath a pleasant voice, what he says is said most tunefully, but the man himself is not behind it and in it and above it: it is a recitation, not a prophecy.

3. Who can find fault with the prophets? Not one of us, least of all myself. They had some hard things to, believe; men do not willingly believe in wildernesses and barren rocks, and declarations that have in them no poetry and on them no lustre from heaven, hard and perilous sayings. Who can believe this, that when the Anointed of the Lord shall come, the Chosen One, He shall be as a root out of a dry ground: He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him? It is incredible; if He is Gods own Son He will be more beautiful than the dawn of summer. But God will not flatter His servants; He says to each of them, even the loftiest in stature of soul, Go out and proclaim a Cross. It is always so with this Christ; He is all Cross at the first: but what a summer there is hidden in the clouds! and it will come as it were suddenly. The prophets worked their own way under the guidance of the Holy Spirit out of this darkness. Having: dwelt more largely upon the tragical aspect of the life of this great One, they say towards the close, He shall see His seed. That is a new tone; He shall prolong his days, that is a new tone; and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. Why, they have turned the corner; they are getting up into the sunshine, they are unfurling the flag on the mountain-top. He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied: His blood shall buy the universe. This is the other end; this the other aspect of the Gospel. You will never profitably read the Scriptures until you take the darkness with the light.

4. What is the application of this? Why are you wondering that other people do not believe? The voice says, Friend! didst thou believe thine own sermon? Was it alive with thine heart? (J. Parker, D.D.)

A heavy complaint and lamentation

I. TO WHOM IT WAS MADE. We find from parallel Scriptures that it is made to the Lord Himself (Joh 12:38; Rom 10:16).

II. WHOM IT RESPECTS. It respects the hearers of the Gospel in the prophets time, and in after times too.

III. THE MAKER OF THIS HEAVY LAMENTATION.

1. The unsucessfulness of the Gospel, and prevailing unbelief among them that heard it. Consider–

(1) What the Gospel is. A report. The word signifies a hearing, a thing to be heard and received by faith, as a voice is received and heard by the ear. Hence that expression, the hearing of faith (Gal 3:2).

(2) What faith is. It is a giving credit to the Gospel, and a trusting our souls to it, as on a word that cannot fail.

(3) How rare that faith is. Who hath believed! The report is brought to multitudes; but where is the man that really trusts it, as news from heaven, that may be relied on?

2. The great withdrawing of the power of God from ordinances. To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? This implies

(1) That there is a necessity of the mighty power of God being exerted on a man, to cause him to believe (Joh 6:44).

(2) That few, very few, felt this power.

(3) That hence so few believed. (T. Boston, M.A.)

The little success of the Gospel matter of lamentation

I. WHAT IS THAT SUCCESS WHICH THE GOSPEL SOMETIMES HATH? It is successful–

1. When sinners are thereby brought to faith in Christ (Rom 1:17).

2. When they are thereby brought to holiness of life (2Co 3:18).

II. WHAT IS THAT DIVINE POWER WHICH SOMETIMES COMES ALONG WITH GOSPEL-ORDINANCES?

1. A heart and life discovering power (1Co 14:24-25). The word comes, and the Lords arm comes with it, and opens the volume of a mans heart and the life, and it is as if the preacher were reading the secret history of a mans thoughts and actions (Heb 4:12).

2. A sharp, convincing power, whereby the sinner does not only see his sin, but sees the ill and danger of it, and is touched to the heart with it (Act 24:25).

3. A drawing and converting power (Joh 12:32; Psa 19:7).

4. A quickening power (Psa 119:50).

5. A clearing power, resolving doubts, removing mistakes and darkness in certain particulars, whereby one is retarded in their spiritual course Psa 19:7-8).

6. A comforting power (Psa 119:49-50).

7. A strengthening power. The Spirit, with the Word blowing on the dry bones, makes them stand on their feet like s great army.

8. A soul-elevating and heart-ravishing power (Luk 24:32).

III. THE REASONS OF THE DOCTRINE.

I. It must be a matter of lamentation to the godly in general. For–

(1) The honour of Christ is thereby overclouded.

(2) The glory of the glorious Gospel is thereby veiled.

(3) Souls are thereby lost, while salvation is come to their door.

(4) The godly themselves suffer loss, the thronger Christs family is, the better thriven are the children; and contrariwise. If there were more converting, there would be more confirming work too.

2. Particularly to godly ministers.

(1) Thereby their care and pains are much lost, and in vain.

(2) Their work is rendered more difficult and wearisome.

(3) The seals of their ministry are but small. (T. Boston, M. A.)

Evidences of non-success

1. The slighting of Gospel ordinances that so much prevails.

2. Little reformation of life under the dispensation of the Gospel.

3. Much formality in attendance on ordinances.

4. Little of the work of conversion or soul-exercise. (T. Boston, M. A.)

The Gospel-report

I. CONSIDER THE GOSPEL AS IT IS A REPORT. View it–

1. In the nature of a report in general.

(1) There is the subject of a report, or the thing that is reported, some design, action, or event, true or false. The subject of the Gospel-report is, a love-design in God for the salvation of sinners of mankind (2Ti 1:9-10). It is the report of an act of grace and kindness in God, in favours of them, whereby He has given them His Son for a Saviour (Joh 3:16; Isa 9:6), and eternal life in Him (1Jn 5:11). The report of the event of Christs dying for sinners.

(2) There is the place whence the report originally comes. And the place here is heaven. Hence the Gospel is called heavenly things (Joh 3:12), revealed from the bosom of the Father.

(3) The matter of a report is something unseen to them to whom the report is made. And so is the matter of the Gospel-report. It is an unseen God Joh 1:18); an unseen Saviour (1Pe 1:8); and unseen things 2Co 4:18), that are preached unto you by the Gospel. So the Gospel is an object of faith, not of sight (Heb 11:1). We receive it by hearing, not by seeing (Isa 55:3).

(4) There is a reporter or reporters. And in this case the report is made by many. The first-hand reporter is an eye-witness, Jesus Christ. Christ Himself was the raiser of the report of the Gospel (Heb 2:3). And who else could have been so? (Joh 1:18). What He reported He saw, and gives us His testimony of the truth of it on His eyesight (Joh 3:11). Hence He is proposed to us as the faithful and true Witness Rev 3:14), who was from eternity privy to the whole design revealed to us in the Gospel. The prophets and apostles, and ministers of the Gospel. They are the second-hand reporters.

(5) There is a manifestation of the thing by the report, to the parties to whom the report is made. So is the grace of God to poor sinners manifested to them by the Gospel (2Ti 1:9-10).

2. In the nature of a report to be trusted to, for some valuable end. And so it is–

(1) A true and faithful report, that one may safely trust (1Ti 1:15).

(2) An infallible report. A report may be true where there is no infallibility: but the report of the Gospel is an infallible truth (Act 1:3), for it is the Word of God that cannot lie (1Th 2:13). And the Spirit of the Lord demonstrates it to believers, as Divine truth (1Co 2:4).

(3) A good and comfortable report.

(4) A weighty report, even of the greatest weight, as concerning mans greatest possible interest (Isa 61:6).

II. CONSIDER FAITH AS IT IS A TRUSTING TO THIS REPORT. Faith is–

1. A trusting of the Gospel-report as true.

(1) In the general, with respect to the multitude whom it concerns. It is a faithful saying, Christ came to save sinners.

(2) In particular, with respect to oneself. Faith believes that there is a fulness in Christ for poor sinners, and for oneself in particular. Hence it appears–That there is an assurance in the nature of faith, whereby the believing person is sure of the truth of the doctrine of the Gospel, and that with respect to himself particularly (1Th 1:5). That there is a necessity of an inward illumination by the Spirit, in order to the faith of the Gospel (1Co 2:10-14).

2. A trusting to the Gospel-report as good. It implies–

(1) Not only a willingness, but a sincere desire to be delivered from sin, as well as from wrath.

(2) A renouncing of all other confidence for his salvation.

(3) A hearty approbation of the way of salvation manifested in the report of the Gospel (Mat 11:6).

(4) A betaking ones self entirely to that way of salvation, by trusting to it wholly for our own salvation.

(5) A confidence or trust, that He will save us from sin and wrath, according to His promise (Act 15:11).

III. CONSIDER THE REPORT OF THE GOSPEL, AND THE TRUSTING TO IT, CONJUNCTLY. The Gospel is a report from heaven–

1. Of salvation for poor sinners, from sin (Mat 1:21), and from the wrath of God (Joh 3:16), freely made over to you in the Word of promise. Faith trusts it as a true report, believing that God has said it; and trusts to it as good, laying our own salvation upon it.

2. Of a crucified Christ made over to sinners, as the device of Heaven for their salvation. The soul concludes, the Saviour is mine; and leans on Him for all the purchase of His death, for life and salvation to itself in particular 1Co 2:2).

3. Of a righteousness wherein we guilty ones may stand before a holy God Rom 1:17). And by faith one believes there is such a righteousness, that it is sufficient to cover him, and that it is held out to him to be trusted on for righteousness; and so the believer trusts it as his righteousness in the sight of God, disclaiming all other, and betaking himself to it alone Gal 2:16).

4. Of a pardon under the great seal of Heaven, in Christ, to all who will take it in Him (Act 13:38-39). The soul by faith believes this to be true, and applies it to itself, saying, This pardon is for me.

5. Of a Physician that cures infallibly all the diseases of the soul. The soul believes it, and applies it to its own case.

6. Of a feast for hungry souls, to which all are bid welcome, Christ Himself being the Maker and matter of it too. The soul weary of the husks of created things, and believing this report, accordingly falls a-feeding on Christ.

7. Of a victory won by Jesus Christ over sin, Satan, and death, and the world. The soul trusts to it for its victory over all these, as already foiled enemies (1Jn 5:4).

8. Of a peace purchased by the blood of Christ for poor sinners, and offered to them. Faith believes it; and the soul comes before God as a reconciled Father in Christ, brings in its supplications for supply before the throne. (T. Boston, M. A.)

The rarity of believing the Gospel-report

I. CONFIRM THIS POINT.

1. Take a view of the Church in all ages, and the entertainment the Gospel has met with among them to whom it came. It has been a despised and disbelieved Gospel.

(1) Under the patriarchal dispensation, from Adam to Moses. By Adam and Eve it was believed, and Adam preached it; but Cain slew Abel and headed an apostasy, etc.

(2) Under the Mosaic dispensation, they had the Gospel, though veiled with types and figures. But the body of the generation that came out of Egypt, believed not, but fell in the wilderness (Heb 4:2).

(3) Under the Christian dispensation (Joh 12:37-38; Rom 10:16). At the Reformation the Gospel had remarkable success; yet believers were but few comparatively; and there have been but few all along since that time.

2. Take a view of the Church, setting aside those whom the Scripture determines to be unbelievers; and we will soon see that but few do remain. Set aside–

(1) The grossly ignorant of Christ, and of the truths of the Gospel. How can they believe the Gospel, that know not what it is?

(2) The profane, who are Christians in name, because they live in a Christian country; but have not a shape of Christianity about them. Surely these do not believe the Gospel (Tit 1:16).

(3) The carnal and worldly, who make the world their chief good, mainly seeking that, and favouring it only. These undoubtedly are unbelievers Php 3:19-20).

(4) Mere moralists, all whose religion is confined to some pieces of the second table (Mat 5:20).

(5) Gross hypocrites. That Gospel that cleanses not a mans hands from unjust dealing, his mouth from lying, swearing and filthy speaking, is certainly not believed.

(6) Close hypocrites, whose outward conversation is blameless in the eye of the world, but in the meantime are inwardly strangers to God and Christ Rev 3:1).

(7) All unregenerate persons; for they are certainly unbelievers, as believers are regenerate. Set aside then all these, few remain who trust to the Gospel report.

II. THE REASONS WHY SO FEW BELIEVE THE REPORT OF THE GOSPEL.

1. There is a natural impotency in all (Joh 6:44). Believing the report of the Gospel is beyond the power of nature, Yea, everything in nature is against it, till the Spirit of the Lord overcome them into belief of the report of the Gospel.

2. The predominant power of lusts, to which the Gospel is an enemy. There our Lord lodges it (Joh 3:19).

3. There is a judicial blindness on many (2Co 4:3-4). (T. Boston, M. A.)

Divine power necessary for believing the Gospel report

There is no true believing or trusting to the report of the Gospel, but what is the effect of the working of a Divine power on the soul for that end.

I. EVINCE THE TRUTH OF THE DOCTRINE. Consider for it–

1. Express Scripture testimony (Joh 6:44).

2. The state that by nature we are in, dead in sin (Eph 2:1). Faith is the first vital act of the soul, quickened by the Spirit of life from Jesus Christ.

3. There can be no faith without knowledge: and the knowledge of spiritual things man is by nature incapable of (1Co 2:14).

4. Man is naturally under the power of Satan, a captive of the devil, who with his utmost efforts will hinder the work of faith (2Co 4:3-4). Such a case the Gospel finds men in; and it is the design of the Gospel to bring them out of it (Act 26:17-18).

5. Mans trust is by nature firmly preoccupied by those things which the Gospel calls them to renounce. He is wedded to other confidences naturally, which therefore he will hold by, till a power above nature carry him off from them–self-confidence, creature-confidence, law-confidence.

6. Man has a strong bias and bent against believing or trusting to the Gospel (Joh 5:40; Rom 10:3).

7. It is the product of the Holy Spirit, wherever it is.

II. WHAT IS THAT WORKING OF DIVINE POWER WHEREBY THE SOUL IS BROUGHT TO TRUST TO THE GOSPEL REPORT? There is a twofold work of Divine power on the soul for that end.

1. A mediate work, which is preparatory to it; whereof the Spirit is the author, and the instrument is the law.

(1) An awakening work.

(2) A humbling work, whereby the proud sinner is brought low to the dust: not only finding a need of salvation, but an absolute need of Christ for salvation. So he is broken off from self-confidence, creature-confidence, law-confidence.

2. An immediate work, whereby faith is produced in the soul; whereof the Spirit is the author, and the Gospel the instrument. It is–

(1) A quickening work, whereby the dead soul is called again to spiritual Eph 2:1).

(2) An illuminating work. There is a knowledge in faith. (T. Boston, M. A.)

The Monarch in disguise

There are four distinctive features predicted–

1. The lowliness, obscurity and sorrow of the coming Servant of God.

2. The putting forth of the arm of the Lord in Him and in His work.

3. The setting forth of this in a message or report.

4. The concealing, as it were, of the arm of the Lord, owing to the lowly appearance of this Servant. (C. Clemance, D.D.)

Preaching and hearing

I. THE GREAT SUBJECT OF PREACHING, and the preachers great errand, is to report concerning Jesus Christ–to bring good tidings concerning Him.

II. THE GREAT DUTY OF HEARERS is, to believe this report and, by virtue of it, to be brought to rest on Jesus Christ.

III. THE GREAT, THOUGH THE ORDINARY, SIN OF THE GENERALITY OF THE HEARERS OF THE GOSPEL is unbelief.

IV. THE GREAT COMPLAINT, WEIGHT AND GRIEF OF AN HONEST MINISTER OF THE GOSPEL is this–that his message is not taken off his hand; that Christ is not received, believed in and rested on. (J. Durham.)

The offer of Christ in the Gospel

I. The offering of Christ in the Gospel is WARRANT enough to believe in Him. Otherwise there had been no just ground of expostulation and complaint for not believing. The complaint is for the neglect of the duty they were called to.

II. They to whom Christ is offered in the Gospel are CALLED to believe. It is their duty to do it.

III. Saving faith is THE WAY AND MEANS by which those who have Christ offered to them in the Gospel come to get a right to Him, and to obtain the benefits that are reported of to be had from Him. (J. Durham.)

The necessity of faith

1. Look to all the promises, whether of pardon of sin, peace with God, joy in the Holy Ghost, holiness and conformity to God–there is no access to these, or to any of them, but by faith.

2. Look to the performance of any duty, or mortification of any lust or idol, and faith is necessary to that.

3. Whenever any duty is done, there is no acceptation of it without faith Heb 4:2; Heb 11:6). (J. Durham.)

A faithful ministers sorrow

It is most sad to a tender minister to see unbelief and unfruitfulness among the people he hath preached the Gospel to. There is a fourfold reason of this–

1. Respect to Christ Jesus his Master, in whose stead he comes to woo souls to Christ.

2. The respect he hath to peoples souls.

3. The respect he hath to the duty in hand.

4. Concern for his own joy and comfort (Php 2:16). (J. Durham.)

The prevalence of unbelief

I. THE CHARACTER HERE GIVEN OF THE GOSPEL. A report. Let us see–

1. In what respects it resembles a report. A report is the statement of things or facts done or occurring at some distance of time or place; of things which we ourselves have not seen, but of which an account has been brought to us by others, and to which our belief is demanded in proportion to the degree of credibility which attaches to those who bring us the account. Such is the Gospel.

2. In what respects this report differs from all other reports. This difference may be traced in the importance of the truths which it professes to communicate, no less than in the evidence by which it is confirmed.

II. THE QUESTION WHICH THE PROPHET ASKS IN REFERENCE TO IT, Who hath believed our report? This question is evidently the language of complaint, of surprise, and of grief. And has there not been always occasion for such language as this? (E. Cooper.)

Ministerial solicitude

Every minister of Jesus Christ, imbued with the spirit of his office, is anxious–

(1) To make a faithful report;

(2) Then, in many living witnesses, to behold the illustration of an apostles assertion, Faith cometh by hearing, etc.

I. THE REPORT WHICH THE MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL MAKE. The report of Isaiah is the saying of Paul (1Ti 1:15).

1. It demands and deserves your attention, for we bring it from heaven.

2. It is a report of universal interest, for it is to be made to all the world.

3. Our report is of the very highest importance, for it refers to the state of the soul.

4. It is a report of the strictest veracity, being confirmed by many credible witnesses.

II. The ANXIETY WHICH THE MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL FEEL.

1. This report is very generally neglected.

2. This neglect is the result of unbelief.

3. This neglect is, to those who make it, a subject of devout solicitude and of deep regret.

4. When this report is believed, it operates with Divine efficiency. What think you of our report? (Essex Congregational Remembrancer.)

And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?–

The arm of the Lord revealed

I. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE ARM OF THE LORD.

II. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE REVEALING OF THE ARM OF THE LORD.

III. THE SCOPE AND DEPENDENCE OF THESE WORDS ON THE FORMER. (J. Durham.)

The arm of the Lord

To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? It has been made bare these many centuries, and how few have seen it, or recognized it, or called it by its proper name! We have had continuity, and succession, and evolution, and development, and progress, and laws of nature; but not the arm of the Lord. (J. Parker, D.D.)

The might of the saving arm, and how to obtain it

(with Joh 11:40):–A lawyer whom I know took me to see the fire-proof strong-room inwhich he keeps valuable deeds and securities. It is excavated under the street, and a passage leads far into the interior, lined on either side with receptacles for the precious documents. On entering, he took up what appeared to be a candle, with a cord attached to it; the other end he deftly fastened to a switch at the entrance, by means of which the electricity which was waiting there poured up the wire hidden in the cord, glowed at the wick of the china candle, and we were able to pass to the end of the passage, uncoiling cord and wire as we went. That unlighted candle resembles the Christian worker apart from the power of the Holy Ghost. Faith may be compared to the switch by means of which the saving might of God pours into our life and ministry. It cannot be too strongly insisted on, that our faith is the absolute condition and measure of the exertion of Gods saving might. No faith, no blessing; little faith, little blessing; great faith, great blessing. The saving might of Gods glorious arm may be waiting close against us; but it is inoperative unless we are united to it by faith. The negative and positive sides of this great and important truth are presented in the texts before us: one of which complains that the arm of God is not revealed, because men have not believed the inspired report; the other affirms from the lips of the Master, that those who believe shall see the glory of God. (F. B. Meyer, B.A.)

The arm of God and human faith

(with Joh 11:40):–

I. THE ARM OF GOD. This expression is often used in the older Scriptures, and everywhere signifies the active, saving energy of the Most High. We first meet with it in His own address to Moses: I will redeem them with a stretched-out arm. Then, in the triumphant shout that broke from two million glad voices beside the Red Sea–and frequently in the book of Deuteronomy–we read of the stretched-out arm of Jehovah. It is a favourite phrase with the poets and prophets of Israel–the arm that redeems; the holy arm; the glorious arm; the bared arm of God. The conception is that, owing to the unbelief of Israel, it lies inoperative, hidden under the heavy folds of Oriental drapery; whereas it might be revealed, raising itself aloft in vigorous and effective effort. All that concerns us now is the relation between faith and the forth-putting of Gods saving might.

II. THE LIFE OF THE SON OF MAN. AS this chapter suggests, it seemed, from many points of view, a failure. The arm of the Lord was in Him, though hidden from all save the handful who believed.

III. A SPECIMEN CASE. Even though our Lord went to Bethany with the assurance that the arm of the Lord would certainly be made bare, yet He must of necessity have the co-operation and sympathy of some ones faith.

1. Such faith He discovered in Martha. Her admissions showed that faith was already within her soul, as a grain of mustard-seed, awaiting the summertide of Gods presence, the education of His grace. There are many earnest Christians whose energies are taxed to the uttermost by their ministry to others. They have no time to sit quietly at the feet of Christ, or mature great schemes of loving sympathy with His plans, as Mary did when she prepared her anointing-oil for her Lord s burial. And yet they are capable of a great faith. Christ will one day discover, reveal and educate that faith to great exploits.

2. He put a promise before her–Thy brother shall rise again. Faith feeds on promises.

3. He showed that its fulfilment might be expected and now. Jesus said, I AM the Resurrection and the Life. Here and now is the power which, on that day of which you speak, shall awaken the dead; do but believe, and you shall see that resurrection anticipated. Ponder the force of this I AM. It is the present tense of the Eternal.

4. He aroused her expectancy. For what other reason did He ask that the stone might be rolled away? She believed, and she beheld the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The one aim for each of us should be to bring Christ and the dead Lazarus together. Let us ask Christ, our Saviour, to work such faith in us; to develop it by every method of education and discipline; to mature it by his nurturing Spirit, until the arm of God is revealed in us and through us, and the glory of God is manifested before the gaze of men. At the same time, it is not well to concentrate our thought too much on faith, lest we hinder its growth. Look away from faith to the Object of faith, and faith will spring of itself. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

CHAPTER LIII

This chapter foretells the sufferings of the Messiah, the end

for which he was to die, and the advantages resulting to

mankind from that illustrious event. It begins with a complaint

of the infidelity of the Jews, 1;

the offence they took at his mean and humble appearance, 2;

and the contempt with which they treated him, 3.

The prophet then shows that the Messiah was to suffer for sins

not his own; but that our iniquities were laid on him, and the

punishment of them exacted of him, which is the meritorious

cause of our obtaining pardon and salvation, 4-6.

He shows the meekness and placid submission with which he

suffered a violent and unjust death, with the circumstances of

his dying with the wicked, and being buried with the great, 7-9;

and that, in consequence of his atonement, death, resurrection,

and intercession, he should procure pardon and salvation to the

multitudes, insure increasing prosperity to his Church, and

ultimately triumph over all his foes, 10, 11.

This chapter contains a beautiful summary of the most peculiar

and distinguishing doctrines of Christianity.

NOTES ON CHAP. LIII

That this chapter speaks of none but JESUS must be evident to every unprejudiced reader who has ever heard the history of his sufferings and death. The Jews have endeavoured to apply it to their sufferings in captivity; but, alas for their cause! they can make nothing out in this way. Allowing that it belongs to our blessed Lord, (and the best men and the best scholars agree in this,) then who can read Isa 53:4-6; Isa 53:8; Isa 53:10, without being convinced that his death was a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of mankind? On the first and second verses of this chapter I have received the following remarks from an unknown hand.

“Verse 1. Who hath believed our report?] The report of the prophets, of John the Baptist, and Christ’s own report of himself. The Jews did not receive the report, and for this reason he was not manifested to them as the promised Messiah. ‘He came unto his own, but his own received him not.’ Before the FATHER he grew up as a tender plant: but to the JEWS he was as a root out of a dry ground. ‘He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.’

“Verse 2. For he shall grow up] Supposes something to have preceded; as it might be asked, what or who shall ‘grow up before him,’ c. As the translation now stands, no correct answer can be given to this question. The translation then is wrong, the connexion broken, and the sense obscured. zeroa, translated the arm, from the root zara.

1. To sow, or plant also seed, c.

2. The limb which reaches from the shoulder to the hand, called the arm or more properly beginning at the shoulder and ending at the elbow.

The translator has given the wrong sense of the word. It would be very improper to say, the arm of the Lord should grow up before him; but by taking the word in its former sense, the connexion and metaphor would be restored, and the true sense given to the text. zera signifies, not only the seed of herbs, but children, offspring, or posterity. The same word we find Ge 3:15, where CHRIST is the Seed promised. See also Ge 22:17-18; Ge 26:4; Ge 28:14. Hence the SEED of the woman, the SEED promised to the patriarchs is, according to Isaiah, the Seed of the Lord, the Child born, and the Son given; and according to St. John, ‘the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ then, in this place, should be understood to mean JESUS CHRIST, and him alone. To speak here of the manifestation of the arm or power of God would be irregular; but to suppose the text to speak of the manifestation of Jesus Christ would be very proper, as the whole of the chapter is written concerning him, particularly his humiliation and sufferings, and the reception he should meet with from the Jewish nation.

“The first verse of this chapter is quoted Joh 12:38, and the former part of the same verse Ro 10:16. But no objection of importance can be brought forward from either of these quotations against the above explanation, as they are quoted to show the unbelief of the Jews in not receiving Christ as the promised Messiah.”

He hath no form nor comeliness – “He hath no form nor any beauty”]

, , , .

He hath no form, nor any beauty, that we should regard him; nor is his countenance such that we should desire him.”

Symmachus; the only one of the ancients that has translated it rightly.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

Who hath believed our report? the prophet having in the three last verses of the former chapter made a general report concerning the great and wonderful humiliation and exaltation of Christ, of which he intended more largely to discourse in this chapter, before he descended to particulars he thought fit to use this preface.

Who, not only of the Gentiles, but even of the Jews, will believe the truth-of what I have said and must say? Few or none. The generality of them will never receive nor believe in such a Messias as this. Thus this place is expounded by Christ himself, Joh 12:38, and by Paul, Rom 10:16. And this premonition was highly necessary, both to caution the Jews that they should not stumble at this stone, and to instruct the Gentiles that they should not be surprised, nor scandalized, nor seduced with their example.

The arm of the Lord; either,

1. The word of God, called the report in the former clause; the doctrine of the gospel, which is expressly called the power of God, 1Co 1:18, because of that admirable virtue and success which accompanied the preaching of it. Or,

2. The Messiah, who also is called the arm or power of God, 1Co 1:24; and that most fitly, because the almighty power of God was both seated in him, and declared and exercised by him in his powerful words and mighty deeds, as Simon for some great works wrought by him was called by the Samaritans the power of God, Act 8:10.

Revealed; not outwardly, for so Christ was revealed and preached to vast numbers, both of Jews and Gentiles, as is evident from this context, arid from divers other places of Scripture; but inwardly and with power to their minds and hearts, of which kind of revelation see Eph 1:17-19, and compare it with 2Co 4:4. Thus even Moses, though sufficiently revealed to the eyes and ears of the Jews, yet is said to be unrevealed or hid from their minds and hearts, 2Co 3:14,15. The sense of the place is, few or none of the Jews will believe the gospel, or receive their Messiah when he comes among them.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

1. reportliterally, “thething heard,” referring to which sense Paul says, “So,then, faith cometh by hearing” (Rom 10:16;Rom 10:17).

armpower (Isa40:10); exercised in miracles and in saving men (Rom 1:16;1Co 1:18). The prophet, as ifpresent during Messiah’s ministry on earth, is deeply moved to seehow few believed on Him (Isa 49:4;Mar 6:6; Mar 9:19;Act 1:15). Two reasons aregiven why all ought to have believed: (1) The “report”of the “ancient prophets.” (2) “The arm of Jehovah”exhibited in Messiah while on earth. In HORSLEY’Sview, this will be the penitent confession of the Jews, “How fewof our nation, in Messiah’s days, believed in Him!”

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

Who hath believed our report?…. Or “hearing” a. Not what we hear, but others hear from us; the doctrine of the Gospel, which is a report of the love, grace, and mercy of God in Christ; of Christ himself, his person, offices, obedience, sufferings, and death, and of free and full salvation by him: it is a good report, a true and faithful one, and to be believed, and yet there are always but few that give credit to it; there were but few in the times of the Prophet Isaiah that believed what he had before reported, or was about to report, concerning the Messiah; and but few in the times of Christ and his apostles, whom the prophet here represented; for to those times are the words applied,

Joh 12:38, the Jews had the report first made unto them, and saw the facts that were done, and yet believed not; when Gentile kings, and their subjects, listened with the most profound silence, and heard with the greatest attention and reverence, as in the latter part of the preceding chapter, to which some think this is opposed; wherefore some begin the text with the adversative particle “but”. According to the Septuagint and Arabic versions, the words are directed to God the Father, for they render them, “Lord, who hath believed”, c. and so they are quoted in the above places in the New Testament:

and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? meaning either the Gospel itself, the power of God unto salvation, hidden from the generality of men; for though externally, yet not internally revealed and made known; which to do is the Lord’s work, and is owing to his special grace: or Christ, who is the power of God, by whom all the works of creation, providence, grace, and salvation, are wrought; and by whom the blessings of grace are dispensed; and by whom the Lord upholds all things, and supports his people; and who was not revealed but to a very few, as the true Messiah, as God’s salvation, and in them the hope of glory: or else the powerful and efficacious grace of the Spirit, and the exertion and display of it, which is necessary to a true and spiritual believing the Gospel, and the report of it; which, unless it comes with the power and Spirit of God, is ineffectual.

a , , Sept.; “auditui nostro”, V. L. Pagninus, Montanus, Cocceius.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

But, says the second turn in Isa 53:1-3, the man of sorrows was despised among us, and the prophecy as to his future was not believed. We hear the first lamentation (the question is, From whose mouth does it come?) in Isa 53:1: “Who hath believed our preaching; and the arm of Jehovah, over whom has it been revealed?” “I was formerly mistaken,” says Hofmann ( Schriftbeweis, ii. 1, 159, 160), “as to the connection between Isa 53:1 and Isa 52:13-15, and thought that the Gentiles were the speakers in the former, simply because it was to them that the latter referred. But I see now that I was in error. It is affirmed of the heathen, that they have never heard before the things which they now see with their eyes. Consequently it cannot be they who exclaim, or in whose name the inquiry is made, Who hath believed our preaching?” Moreover, it cannot be they, both because the redemption itself and the exaltation of the Mediator of the redemption are made known to them from the midst of Israel as already accomplished facts, and also because according to Isa 52:15 (cf., Isa 49:7; Isa 42:4; Isa 51:5) they hear the things unheard of before, with amazement which passes into reverent awe, as the satisfaction of their own desires, in other words, with the glad obedience of faith. And we may also add, that the expression in Isa 53:8, “for the transgression of my people,” would be quite out of place in the mouths of Gentiles, and that, as a general rule, words attributed to Gentiles ought to be expressly introduced as theirs. Whenever we find a “we” introduced abruptly in the midst of a prophecy, it is always Israel that speaks, including the prophet himself (Isa 42:24; Isa 64:5; Isa 16:6; Isa 24:16, etc.). Hofmann therefore very properly rejects the view advocated by many, from Calvin down to Stier and Oehler, who suppose that it is the prophet himself who is speaking here in connection with the other heralds of salvation; “for,” as he says, “how does all the rest which is expressed in the 1st pers. plural tally with such a supposition?” If it is really Israel, which confesses in Isa 53:2. how blind it has been to the calling of the servant of Jehovah, which was formerly hidden in humiliation but is now manifested in glory; the mournful inquiry in Isa 53:1 must also proceed from the mouth of Israel. The references to this passage in Joh 12:37-38, and Rom 10:16, do not compel us to assign Isa 53:1 to the prophet and his comrades in office. It is Israel that speaks even in Isa 53:1. The nation, which acknowledges with penitence how shamefully it has mistaken its own Saviour, laments that it has put no faith in the tidings of the lofty and glorious calling of the servant of God. We need not assume, therefore, that there is any change of subject in Isa 53:2; and (what is still more decisive) it is necessary that we should not, if we would keep up any close connection between Isa 53:1 and Isa 52:15. The heathen receive with faith tidings of things which had never been heard of before; whereas Israel has to lament that it put no faith in the tidings which it had heard long, long before, not only with reference to the person and work of the servant of God, but with regard to his lowly origin and glorious end. (a noun after the form , , a different form from that of , which is derived from the adjective ) signifies the hearsay ( ), i.e., the tidings, more especially the prophetic announcement in Isa 28:9; and , according to the primary subjective force of the suffix, is equivalent to (cf., Jer 49:14), i.e., the hearsay which we have heard. There were some, indeed, who did not refuse to believe the tidings which Israel heard: (Rom 10:16); the number of the believers was vanishingly small, when compared with the unbelieving mass of the nation. And it is the latter, or rather its remnant which had eventually come to its senses, that here inquires, Who hath believed our preaching, i.e., the preaching that was common among us? The substance of the preaching, which had not been believed, was the exaltation of the servant of God from a state of deep degradation. This is a work performed by the “arm of Jehovah,” namely, His holy arm that has been made bare, and that now effects the salvation of His people, and of the nations generally, according to His own counsel (Isa 52:10; Isa 51:5). This arm works down from on high, exalted far above all created things; men have it above them, and it is made manifest to those who recognise it in what is passing around them. Who, asks Israel, has had any faith in the coming exaltation of the servant of God? who has recognised the omnipotence of Jehovah, which has set itself to effect his exaltation? All that follows is the confession of the Israel of the last times, to which this question is the introduction. We must not overlook the fact that this golden “passional” is also one of the greatest prophecies of the future conversion of the nation, which has rejected the servant of God, and allowed the Gentiles to be the first to recognise him. At last, though very late, it will feel remorse. And when this shall once take place, then and not till then will this chapter – which, to use an old epithet, will ever be carnificina Rabbinorum – receive its complete historical fulfilment.

Fuente: Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament

The Humiliation of the Messiah.

B. C. 706.

      1 Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?   2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.   3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

      The prophet, in the close of the former chapter, had foreseen and foretold the kind reception which the gospel of Christ should find among the Gentiles, that nations and their kings should bid it welcome, that those who had not seen him should believe in him; and though they had not any prophecies among them of gospel grace, which might raise their expectations, and dispose them to entertain it, yet upon the first notice of it they should give it its due weight and consideration. Now here he foretels, with wonder, the unbelief of the Jews, notwithstanding the previous notices they had of the coming of the Messiah in the Old Testament and the opportunity they had of being personally acquainted with him. Observe here,

      I. The contempt they put upon the gospel of Christ, v. 1. The unbelief of the Jews in our Saviour’s time is expressly said to be the fulfilling of this word, John xii. 38. And it is applied likewise to the little success which the apostles’ preaching met with among Jews and Gentiles, Rom. x. 16. Note, 1. Of the many that hear the report of the gospel there are few, very few, that believe it. It is reported openly and publicly, not whispered in a corner, or confined to the schools, but proclaimed to all; and it is so faithful a saying, and so well worthy of all acceptation, that one would think it should be universally received and believed. But it is quite otherwise; few believed the prophets who spoke before of Christ; when he came himself none of the rulers nor of the Pharisees followed him, and but here and there one of the common people; and, when the apostles carried this report all the world over, some in every place believed, but comparatively very few. To this day, of the many that profess to believe this report, there are few that cordially embrace it and submit to the power of it. 2. Therefore people believe not the report of the gospel, because the arm of the Lord is not revealed to them; they do not discern, nor will be brought to acknowledge, that divine power which goes along with the word. The arm of the Lord is made bare (as was said, ch. lii. 10) in the miracles that were wrought to confirm Christ’s doctrine, in the wonderful success of it, and its energy upon the conscience; though it is a still voice, it is a strong one; but they do not perceive this, nor do they experience in themselves that working of the Spirit which makes the word effectual. They believe not the gospel because, by rebelling against the light they had, they had forfeited the grace of God, which therefore he justly denied them and withheld from them, and for want of that they believed not. 3. This is a thing we ought to be much affected with; it is to be wondered at, and greatly lamented, and ministers may go to God and complain of it to him, as the prophet here. What a pity is it that such rich grace should be received in vain, that precious souls should perish at the pool’s side, because they will not step in and be healed!

      II. The contempt they put upon the person of Christ because of the meanness of his appearance, Isa 53:2; Isa 53:3. This seems to come in as a reason why they rejected his doctrine, because they were prejudiced against his person. When he was on earth many that heard him preach, and could not but approve of what they heard, would not give it any regard or entertainment, because it came from one that made so small a figure and had no external advantages to recommend him. Observe here,

      1. The low condition he submitted to, and how he abased and emptied himself. The entry he made into the world, and the character he wore in it, were no way agreeable to the ideas which the Jews had formed of the Messiah and their expectations concerning him, but quite the reverse. (1.) It was expected that his extraction would be very great and noble. He was to be the Son of David, of a family that had a name like to the names of the great men that were in the earth, 2 Sam. vii. 9. But he sprang out of this royal and illustrious family when it was reduced and sunk, and Joseph, that son of David, who was his supposed father, was but a poor carpenter, perhaps a ship-carpenter, for most of his relations were fishermen. This is here meant by his being a root out of a dry ground, his being born of a mean and despicable family, in the north, in Galilee, of a family out of which, like a dry and desert ground, nothing green, nothing great, was expected, in a country of such small repute that it was thought no good thing could come out of it. His mother, being a virgin, was as dry ground, yet from her he sprang who is not only fruit, but root. The seed on the stony ground had no root; but, though Christ grew out of a dry ground, he is both the root and the offspring of David, the root of the good olive. (2.) It was expected that he should make a public entry, and come in pomp and with observation; but, instead of that, he grew up before God, not before men. God had his eye upon him, but men regarded him not: He grew up as a tender plant, silently and insensibly, and without any noise, as the corn, that tender plant, grows up, we know not how, Mark iv. 27. Christ rose as a tender plant, which, one would have thought, might easily be crushed, or might be nipped in one frosty night. The gospel of Christ, in its beginning, was as a grain of mustard-seed, so inconsiderable did it seem, Mat 13:31; Mat 13:32. (3.) It was expected that he should have some uncommon beauty in his face and person, which should charm the eye, attract the heart, and raise the expectations of all that saw him. But there was nothing of this kind in him; not that he was in the least deformed or misshapen, but he had no form nor comeliness, nothing extraordinary, which one might have thought to meet with in the countenance of an incarnate deity. Those who saw him could not see that there was any beauty in him that they should desire him, nothing in him more than in another beloved, Cant. v. 9. Moses, when he was born, was exceedingly fair, to such a degree that it was looked upon as a happy presage, Act 7:20; Heb 11:23. David, when he was anointed, was of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to, 1 Sam. xvi. 12. But our Lord Jesus had nothing of that to recommend him. Or it may refer not so much to his person as to the manner of his appearing in the world, which had nothing in it of sensible glory. His gospel is preached, not with the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but with all plainness, agreeable to the subject. (4.) It was expected that he should live a pleasant life, and have a full enjoyment of all the delights of the sons and daughters of men, which would have invited all sorts to him; but, on the contrary, he was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. It was not only his last scene that was tragical, but his whole life was so, not only mean, but miserable,

——– but one continued chain Of labour, sorrow, and consuming pain.

SIR R. BLACKMORE.

      Thus, being made sin for us, he underwent the sentence sin had subjected us to, that we should eat in sorrow all the days of our life (Gen. iii. 17), and thereby relaxed much of the rigour and extremity of the sentence as to us. His condition was, upon many accounts, sorrowful. He was unsettled, had not where to lay his head, lived upon alms, was opposed and menaced, and endured the contradiction of sinners against himself. His spirit was tender, and he admitted the impressions of sorrow. We never read that he laughed, but often that he wept. Lentulus, in his epistle to the Roman senate concerning Jesus, says, “he was never seen to laugh;” and so worn and macerated was he with continual grief that when he was but a little above thirty years of age he was taken to be nearly fifty, John viii. 57. Grief was his intimate acquaintance; for he acquainted himself with the grievances of others, and sympathized with them, and he never set his own at a distance; for in his transfiguration he talked of his own decease, and in his triumph he wept over Jerusalem. Let us look unto him and mourn.

      2. The low opinion that men had of him, upon this account. Being generally apt to judge of persons and things by the sight of the eye, and according to outward appearance, they saw no beauty in him that they should desire him. There was a great deal of true beauty in him, the beauty of holiness and the beauty of goodness, enough to render him the desire of all nations; but the far greater part of those among whom he lived, and conversed, saw none of this beauty, for it was spiritually discerned. Carnal hearts see no excellency in the Lord Jesus, nothing that should induce them to desire an acquaintance with him or interest in him. Nay, he is not only not desired, but he is despised and rejected, abandoned and abhorred, a reproach of men, an abject, one that men were shy of keeping company with and had not any esteem for, a worm and no man. He was despised as a mean man, rejected as a bad man. He was the stone which the builders refused; they would not have him to reign over them. Men, who should have had so much reason as to understand things better, so much tenderness as not to trample upon a man in misery–men whom he came to seek and save rejected him: “We hid as it were our faces from him, looked another way, and his sufferings were as nothing to us; though never sorrow was like unto his sorrow. Nay, we not only behaved as having no concern for him, but as loathing him, and having him in detestation.” It may be read, He hid as it were his face from us, concealed the glory of his majesty, and drew a veil over it, and therefore he was despised and we esteemed him not, because we could not see through that veil. Christ having undertaken to make satisfaction to the justice of God for the injury man had done him in his honour by sin (and God cannot be injured except in his honour), he did it not only by divesting himself of the glories due to an incarnate deity, but by submitting himself to the disgraces due to the worst of men and malefactors; and thus by vilifying himself he glorified his Father: but this is a good reason why we should esteem him highly, and study to do him honour; let him be received by us whom men rejected.

Fuente: Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary

ISAIAH CHAPTER 53

Vs. 1-3: UNBELIEF AND REJECTION

1. For the most part, the message of the prophets, as that of the Servant (and later of His apostles), went unheeded, (vs. 1a; 2 Kings 7; Isa 6:9-12; Mat 21:31-32; Luk 22:68; Joh 3:11; Joh 10:24-26; Act 13:46; Act 18:6; Act 28:25-28; Rom 10:16-17; Rom 11:7-8; 1Th 2:14-16).

a. Isaiah is evidently speaking here as a representative of the covenant-nation (at the time of their future restoration) when they, in astonishment, reverent awe, and deep remorse, inquire, in essence: “Who would have BELIEVED that such an one was truly the Messiah?”

b. It is an admission that they formerly DID NOT BELIEVE!

2. The “arm of the Lord”, His strength, personified in the Christ, was revealed only to those whose ears were opened to His voice, and whose hearts were open to the exercise of His rightful lordship over their lives, (1b; Isa 51:9; Deu 4:33-35; Deu 5:15; Deu 26:8; 2Ch 32:7-8; Jer 17:5).

a. The figure is suggestive of the authority by which righteous judgment is executed, (Joh 5:22; Joh 5:27).

1) That “arm” was revealed in the incarnation, life, miracles, voluntary death, resurrection, and ascension of the Christ.

2) The same arm of strength that brings deliverance to His people will be a crushing force of destruction to their enemies.

b. It also suggests the power. by which He opens eyes to perceive, and hearts to understand, the word of the Lord, (Luk 24:25-32; Act 16:14).

1) If one believes the message concerning the Servant, it is because God has enabled him to do so, (Eph 2:8-10).

2) Every true believer bears evidence that the arm or strength of the Lord has been revealed, (Php_2:12-13).

3. Such as were moved only by APPEARANCE would never have recognized the reality and identity of His person and mission (vs. 2) – “form” referring, not so much to His personal appearance, but to the state of humiliation in which the nation viewed Him.

a. “As a “tender plant”, He grew to the maturity of a perfect manhood under the Father’s watchful, guiding, guarding, and loving eye.

b. The “dry ground” depicts Israel (an enslaved and degraded nation) as a spiritual desert that brought forth no fruit to the glory of God.

c. The mention of “root” (or “shoot”) suggests that it was from the long humiliated and cast down “stump” of the Davidic house and kingdom that the Servant came forth, (Isa 11:1; Eze 21:26-27; Luk 1:30-35; Mat 4:17; Luk 19:14).

d. To the debased and perverted senses of a fallen humanity (and this refers to Israel first), there was nothing so attractive about His appearance as to make Him desirable; there was “no beauty that we should desire him”, (vs. 2b).

e. Thus was He despised and rejected of men, (vs. 3; Isa 49:7; Psa 22:6-8; Mat 13:55; Mar 15:29-30; Luk 18:31-33; Luk 16:14; Joh 10:20).

1) He was a “man of sorrows” – sore afflictions, (vs. 3b).

“Man of Sorrows”! What a name!

For the Son of God Who came

Ruined sinners to reclaim!

HALLELUJAH! What a Saviour!

2) And He was intimately acquainted with grief – a grim companion to walk beside a man all His days! (vs. 3b).

3) As one from whom men hid their faces, he was shunned; nor was he esteemed, valued, or shown the slightest respect (Joh 1:10-11) by those who despised Him, (vs. 3c; Mar 10:33-34; contrast Isa 50:6).

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

1. Who will believe our report? This division, or rather dismemberment, of the chapter, ought to be disregarded; for it ought to have begun with the thirteenth verse of the former chapter, and these words ought to be connected with what goes before. (50) Here the Prophet pauses, as it were, in the middle of his discourse; for, having formerly said that the name of Christ would be everywhere proclaimed, and would be revealed to unknown nations, and yet would have so mean an aspect that it might appear as if these things were fabulous, he breaks off his discourse, and exclaims that “Nobody will believe those things.” At the same time, he describes his grief, that men are so unbelieving as to reject their salvation.

Thus, it is a holy complaint made by one who wished that Christ should be known by all, and who, notwithstanding of this, sees that there are few who believe the Gospel, and therefore groans and cries out, “Who hath believed our report?“ Let us therefore groan and complain along with the Prophet, and let us be distressed with grief when we see that our labor is unprofitable, and let us complain before God; for godly ministers must be deeply affected, if they wish to perform their work faithfully. Isaiah declares that there will be few that submit to the Gospel of Christ; for, when he exclaims, “Who will believe the preaching?” he means that of those who hear the Gospel scarcely a hundredth person will be a believer.

Nor does he merely speak of himself alone, but like one who represents all teachers. Although therefore God gives many ministers, few will hold by their doctrine; and what then will happen when there are no ministers? Do we wonder that the greatest blindness reigns there? If cultivated ground is unfruitful, what shall we look for from a soil that is uncultivated and barren? And yet it does not detract anything from the Gospel of Christ, that there are few disciples who receive it; nor does the small number of believers lessen its authority or obscure its infinite glory; but, on the contrary, the loftiness of the mystery is a reason why it scarcely obtains credit in the world. It is reckoned to be folly, because it exceeds all human capacities.

To whom (literally, on whom) is the arm of Jehovah revealed? In this second clause he points out the reason why the number of believers will be so small. It is, because no man can come to God but by an extraordinary revelation of the Spirit. To suppose that by the word “Arm” Christ is meant, is, in my opinion, a mistake. It assigns the cause why there are so few that believe; and that is, that they cannot attain it by the sagacity of their own understanding. This is a remarkable passage, and is quoted by John and Paul for that purpose. “Though Jesus,” said John, “had performed many miracles in their presence, they believed not in him, that the saying of Isaiah the Prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake,

“

Lord, who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” (Joh 12:37)

And Paul says, “But they do not all believe the Gospel; for Isaiah saith, Lord, who hath believed our report?“ (Rom 10:16) Both of them declare that there will be no reason to wonder, if that which was long ago foretold shall happen; and they do so for the purpose of removing offense which might have arisen from the revolt of that nation, which ought to have acknowledged Christ, but obstinately resisted him.

Isaiah does not include merely the men of his own time, but all posterity to the end of the world; for, so long as the reign of Christ shall endure, this must be fulfilled; and therefore believers ought to be fortified by this passage against such a scandal. These words refute the ignorance of those who think that faith is in the power of every person, because preaching is common to all. Though it is sufficiently evident that all are called to salvation, yet the Prophet expressly states that the external voice is of no avail, if it be not accompanied by a special gift of the Spirit. And whence proceeds the difference, but from the secret election of God, the cause of which is hidden in himself?

(50) “While most modern writers detach the three preceding verses and prefix them to this chapter, Hitzig goes to the opposite extreme of saying that the writer here begins afresh, without any visible connection with the previous context. Ewald more reasonably makes this a direct continuation, but observes a change of tone, from that of joyous confidence to that of penitent confession, on the part of the believing Jews, in reference to their former incredulity.” ­ Alexander.

Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary

THE PREVALENCE OF UNBELIEF

Isa. 53:1. Who hath believed our report?

I. THE DESCRIPTION HERE GIVEN OF THE GOSPEL. It is a report. A report is a statement made to us of facts existing, or of events that have occurred, at some distance of time or place, and which we ourselves have not witnessed. Reports we accept or reject according to the degree of credibility which attaches to those who bring them to us. The Gospel is a report. As such it surpasses all others

1. In the importance of the truths which it professes to communicate to us. Consider what they are: What God hath done to deliver us from the bondage and condemnation of sin; how we may approach Him with favour and acceptance; what He has prepared for His people in the world to come; how we may qualify ourselves to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. What communications can be compared with these for importance?

2. In the evidence by which it is confirmed. No other report was ever so authenticated as this. It has in its favour the testimony of friends and enemies, Jews and Gentiles. The statements of its first preachers were confirmed by miracles (Mar. 16:20). The predictions contained in their writings have been fulfilled: e.g., the dispersion of the Jews; the wide extension of Christs kingdom. We have the testimony of our own senses to the truth of this report. The Gospel professes, where it is received and obeyed, not only to ensure the possession of an eternal inheritance in heaven, but even on earth to work a great and glorious change in the hearts and characters of men, and to deliver them from the practice and power of sin. As a matter of fact, is not this change produced by the preaching of the Gospel? Might we not say to some of our acquaintances what Paul said to the Corinthians (1Co. 6:11)? Let us remember that every such instance of a moral change effected by the Gospel is a proof of its truth, a convincing evidence that it is indeed the power of God unto salvation, and an additional reason for believing that the promises which it makes concerning the life to come are equally worthy of credit (H. E. I. 11441148). Yet this report, so important and so completely authenticated, is extensively rejected.

II. THE QUESTION WHICH THE PROPHET ASKS IN REFERENCE TO IT. Who hath believed our report? There never has been an age in which this question might not have been asked. It may well be asked to-day. True, many nations are professedly Christian; true, the majority of our fellow-countrymen would consider it a grievous insult if we were to call them infidels. But to believe this report is not merely to assent to the truth of it. Belief in the truths it makes known to us implies such a reception of them into the heart as shall influence our conduct. The very nature of the report shows that such is the belief intended and required. They are not changes in which we have no concern, but changes in which consequences so momentous to ourselves depend, that it is impossible but that a hearty persuasion of their being true must lead us to act accordingly. If we do not so act, the inference is plain and just that we do not really believe the report. It is quite clear which of the Egyptians believed, and which of them rejected, the report Moses carried to them (Exo. 9:20-21). If a man were told that at a certain hour his house would be attacked, and his goods plundered; or that a certain part of a road along which he had to travel was infested by robbers, and he took no precautions to defend himself against the evil of which he was warned, would you not conclude that he gave no credit to the warning? Apply this test to the subject before us. Look round on society, and say whether it is not true that very few men really believe the report of the Gospel. Put on one side the openly irreligious, the self-righteous and the profane, the false and hypocritical professors of religion, all of whom, it is certain, do not believe the report, and what are the numbers that remain? Are they not few? few in comparison with those you have set aside. Do not call this inference uncharitable, it is Scriptural (Mat. 7:14). Instead of resisting a conclusion so clearly proved, make a practical use of it. Are there few that be saved? Then strive yourselves to enter in at the strait gate (Luk. 13:24).E. Cooper: Practical and Familiar Sermons, vol. vii. 6884.

Isaiah foresaw that his message concerning the Messiah would be received with unbelief, and our Lord and His apostles had sad experience of the correctness of the prophets anticipation (1Co. 1:23; 2Co. 6:8, &c.) Want of faith in, and obedience to, the heavenly message was not the sin only of those to whom it was first sent. The nature of man is still the same. Still he is naturally inclined to unbelief, to refuse the good and to choose the evil, and to turn away from the truth when it is presented to him. Therefore the ministers of the Gospel still have to complain of the grievous neglect it meets with.

I. THE NATURE AND SUBSTANCE OF THAT REPORT WHICH THE SERVANTS OF JESUS CHRIST MAKE KNOWN TO YOU.
It is the same which the inspired prophet proclaimedglad tidings of salvation in and through a suffering Redeemer. It sets before us, not temporal, but everlasting things; it deals with our eternal interests, and the way to heaven! It is a report so marvellous, that it fills heaven and earth with wonder; so true, that we may as well doubt our own existence as entertain a doubt respecting it; so interesting, that all the things of time and sense are, in comparison with it, but as the dust of the balance; and so joyous, that it is a certain and inexhaustible source of happiness to all who receive it (Simeon). It might be expected, then, that it would meet with universal attention. But when we look around and observe what manner of people the bulk of mankind are, we cannot but feel impressed with the sad truth that the religion of the crucified Saviour is of all objects the least attended to.

II. WHY IS IT THAT SO MANY WILL NOT BELIEVE OUR REPORT?

1. Some believe not because they are too much exalted in the pride of human reason; think too highly of themselves, are too full of worldly wisdom to submit to be taught of God. The humbling doctrines of the Cross are against the vanity of their minds, they will not receive them.

2. The love of this world causes many to disregard our report. The doctrine of the Cross is diametrically against all worldly desires. It admits of no divided hearts (Luk. 9:23; 2Co. 5:14-15; Gal. 6:14). But the children of this world are devoted to it. Their whole heart is set upon it, and all their hopes, pleasures, and pains spring from it. Therefore, when the servant of God delivers his report to them, he is dismissed with the words, Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee.

3. Another great cause of the disbelief of our report is the prevailing power of sin. The doctrine of a crucified Redeemer is a doctrine which is according to godliness (Tit. 2:11-12; Gal. 5:24). This is one main reason why we cannot prevail upon men to listen to the message from God which we deliver. The consciousness of guilt induces many to wish it were not as we testify. And when men wish earnestly, they soon bring themselves to believe. They persuade themselves, therefore, that heaven and hell are but names, and that the Gospel is no more than an empty sound (Joh. 3:19).

Thus, from one cause or another, the Saviour is still despised and rejected of men.

CONCLUSION.Can any one imagine for a moment that God will suffer the greatest of His blessings to be thus lightly esteemed? To such men the servants of God are commissioned to lift up the awful voice of warning, and to proclaim the punishment of disobedience (Heb. 2:3; 1Pe. 4:17; Hos. 12:2; Isa. 66:14-15; Jer. 13:16-17; H. E. I. 2438).Jonathan Walton, B.D.: Sermons, vol. ii. 410427.

1. Let us reflect on the great guilt of unbelievers in a Gospel land, and the awful condemnation to which they stand exposed.
2. If there are many who hear the report of the Gospel, and yet believe it not, each one should be solicitous for himself. We believe that the doom of those around us who neglect the Gospel will be awful, and we flatter ourselves that we shall escape it. But what is the ground of our hope?Some of you do not even pretend to an evidence of your present title to salvation, but you hope to obtain it by a future compliance with its conditions. But had not many who have perished in their sins, as strong resolutions of future repentance as you have? What will your intentions do for you?

3. We learn that the unsuccessfulness of the Gospel is not always to be imputed to the want of fidelity or ability in the preachers of it. It must often be ascribed to some other cause. The prophets of old, the apostles, yea, our Saviour complained, Who hath believed our report? Zeal and diligence in ministers are most important; but if you are unsaved, the probability is, that the fault lies, not in the ministers to whom you have listened, but in you.Joseph Lathrop, D.D.: Eighty Sermons, pp. 243247.

I. The Gospel is a message or report to man, upon matters of supreme importance.

1. The character and claims of God.
2. The character and the condition of mankind.
3. The method of salvation by the intervention of a Mediator.

II. The Gospel is communicated to man for the express purpose of being believed.

1. The Gospel is worthy of faith, on account of the evidence by which it is confirmed.
2. Faith in the report of the Gospel is the only medium by which it can be rendered available to our safety and final happiness.
3. Faith in the Gospel results from the operation of Divine power upon the soul.

III. It frequently becomes a matter of solemn inquiry as to the number of those by whom the Gospel has been embraced.

1. Observe the implication which this inquiry involvesthat there are but few persons comparatively to whom the testimony of the Gospel is presented, who cordially and truly embrace it. This implication was plainly truthful and correct, in connection with the prophet himself, in his own age. The same implication was correct, in regard to the ministry of the Lord Jesus, the apostles and preachers in the past and present age.
2. This being the nature of the implication, you must also observe the results which from that implication must be produced.
(1.) Compassion must be produced.
(2.) Exertion. Remember the obligation of faithful, and intense, and incessant exhortation lies also upon all and upon each of you; and if you lose your opportunity and sacrifice your influence in the world, when opportunity might be employed and influence might be exerted in the Church, and for Christ, and for souls, take heed how you answer for the deficiency, when blood shall be required at your hands.
(3.) Prayer. The influence of the Divine Spirit, to which we have adverted, is to be sought and is to be obtained by prayer.

CONCLUSION.If, amid these scenes of privilege, you die in your sins, and thus enter into a retributive eternity, you will know by your own history what it is to be a lost soul.The Preachers Treasury: pp. 109110.

I. The report here spoken of.

1. Its general contents.
2. Its great importance.

II. How we are required to believe it.

1. Practically, with our hearts.
2. Seasonably, without delay.
3. Perseveringly, without declension.

III. The effects of this belief.

1. It delivers from the burden of guilt, and the dominion of sin.
2. It blesses instantly.
3. It keeps constantly. It rewards eternally.Four Hundred Sketches, vol. ii. p. 89.

WHY SO FEW BELIEVE THE GOSPEL

Isa. 53:1. Who hath believed our report?

Generally the most powerful preaching of the Gospel has been with little fruit. So that Isaiah had this sad complaint, Who hath believed our report? Our Lord Jesus Christ had it also (Joh. 12:37). When it was so with sweet Isaiah in the Old Testament, and with our blessed Lord in the New, who spoke with such power and authority, you may see there is reason for us to inquire, Why it is that so few believe? i.e., believe to the salvation of the soul. It is with those causes only which are most common and operative that I would now deal frankly, speaking the truth in love.

I. LACK OF APPRECIATION AND CONSIDERATION OF THE GOSPEL.

1. You do not think yourselves in danger. You confess that you are sinners, but in your hearts you do not think so. In your own opinion, you are good friends with God already. You do not believe that you are the slaves of Satan, and that you are on your way to hell. You are like the Scribes and Pharisees who were well satisfied with themselves, and thought they had no need of a physician, and therefore never sought Christs help. His offer of help they angrily rejected (Joh. 8:33), and you resent any plain speaking concerning your real state.

2. Hence, also, you neither appreciate nor consider the glad tidings that are brought to you. You are not awake to the fact that the Gospel is the very thing you need to hear. You do not hear or read it as a merchant on the verge of ruin reads a cheque which a wealthy friend has sent to save him from bankruptcy. Thinking of yourselves as you do, you give no heed to it. Your sad lack in this matter is shown in three ways.

(1.) By the way in which you come to hear the Gospel. How few hunger and thirst for it, and come desiring to learn from it how you are to prepare to meet with God! You come, not to profit by it, but for some defective and worthless reason (Joh. 6:26).

(2.) By the way you behave when you are here. Many of you are inattentive; your thoughts are running after your trade, &c.; and some of you even sleep! Were you in any other meeting about ordinary business, how different your outward and inward conduct would be!
(3.) By the way you behave after you have heard the Word. In what unedifying conversation you will be engaged as soon as you have reached the door! When you have heard what plainly meets the needs of your soul, do you meditate upon it, and go to your knees with it before God, desiring Him to breathe upon it, and to make it a blessing to you?You know these things are true. Oh, take heed how you hear! As long as you take no heed how you hear, you cannot profit (H. E. I., 2575, 2576, 2604).

II. LACK OF REAL FAITH THAT THE GOSPEL IS FROM GOD. You resent the charge that you are practically infidels, but your conduct shows that it is unbelief, and not faith, that has possession of your heart. At the most, yours is what is called an historical faith, and that is worthless. [1611] Your conduct shows that you do not really believe what the Gospel teachesthat there is a holy, just, and powerful God, else you durst not live at enmity with Him; that your nature is corrupt, else you would seek regeneration and sanctification; that there will be a day of judgment, in which you must stand before God, else you would prepare for it; that the only way to peace with God is through Jesus Christ, and that there is no way to heaven but the way of holiness, else your whole life would be different from what it is.

[1611] Many say they believe there is a Saviour, and that He is God and man, and that such as believe on Him shall be saved, and on this they rest. It is such as these who think they have believed ever since they had any knowledge, because the Word was always, or very long since, received in the place where they lived for the Word of God, and they believe it to be so, and know no difference between believing the Word and believing on Christ holden forth in it; though, alas! many of you believe not this much, for if you were among the Jews ye might soon be brought to question the truth of the Gospel. But though ye had the real faith of the truth of the Word, take not that for saving faith, for as there is a real sorrow that is not the saving grace of repentance unto life, so there is a sort of real faith that hath a real object and a real being in the judgment, which yet is not a real closing with Christ, and so not saving faith; as suppose a man pursued by his enemy should see a strong castle door standing open, or one in hazard at sea should see dry land, yet if he should stand still while the enemy pursues him, or abide still in the sinking vessel, the sight of the castle door open, or of the dry land, would not save him. So it is not believing that there is a Saviour come into the world to save sinners, that will save, except there be a resting on Him as He is holden forth in the Word of the Gospel. Historical faith is only (as it were) a looking on the Saviour; but saving faith cleaves to Him and rests on Him. Historical faith looks on Christ, but acts not on Him, closes not with Him; and therefore such as have this only, and no more, sink and perish without getting good of Him.Durham.

See H. E. I. 19351942, 19571968.

III. LOVE OF THE WORLDof its wealth and its pleasures. This is given as a main cause (Mat. 13:22). More perish in this pit of worldly-mindedness than in the pit of vice. [1614] Many who are civil, and esteemed virtuous and frugal, perish here!

[1614] The operative cause against believing the Gospel is not oppression, nor stealing, but entanglement with and addictedness to the things of this present world; folks allowing themselves too much satisfaction in their riches and pelf, counting themselves as if all were well if they have it, and grieved if they want it; as if there were nothing but that to make happy, being wholly taken up about it, and leaving no room for the concerns of their souls, for prayer and seeking of God.Durham.

IV. IGNORANCE AS TO THE NATURE OF TRUE HAPPINESS. You do not look upon it as your happiness to have communion with God. Hence you are like those who were invited to the marriage of the kings son (Mat. 22:5). The offer of the Gospel has no weight with you. If a market of fine things at a cheap rate were proclaimed, ye would all run to it; but ye delight not in the Word of God, ye prize not the Gospel and the precious things it offers you. You deny this? Well, then,

1. How often have you thanked God for sending the Gospel to you? You say grace before meat; how often have you said grace for the Gospel?
2. How is it that you are so intermittent in your attendance at the preaching of it? Were a messenger sent you from some great man, how you would arrange all your affairs so as not to miss it! But to the sanctuary, where messages from God are delivered, you come rarely, or at the most only once on the Lords-day.
3. If you had reason to believe that you were heir to an earthly estate, how careful you would be to put yourself in possession of all the evidence of your right to it! But how much trouble have you taken to make sure that the inheritance of which the Gospel speaks to us shall ever be yours? Alas! it is too clear that you think happiness is to be found in earthly things, and not in the heavenly things the Gospel offers you.

V. STRUGGLING AGAINST CONSCIENCE. Some of you have been made sometimes to tremble as Felix did; but like him you have pushed off the appeal, and put off your decision to another time, and gone away to some company or recreation, that so you might stifle the conviction, and drive it out of your thoughts. So you have struggled against conscience awakened and alarmed by sickness, bereavement, &c.

VI. SAYING PEACE, PEACE, WHEN PEACE HAS NOT BEEN MADE. There are still in the world many Laodiceans (Rev. 3:17).

1. Some of you have attained to a sort of outside reformation, and you think on that account that you are well enough, and on good terms with God. But there must be more than reformation; there must be regeneration, a new heart! (H. E. I. 40694081).

2. Some of you pray, and you think something of that. But mere mechanical prayer is worthless (Mat. 6:7).

3. Some of you think you have faith enough, because you have historical faith. Alas! many of you have as much believing as keeps you from faith in Christ! [Like a man who believes that a certain life assurance company is a sound one, but does not insure his life with it, and yet feels that he has done all he ought to have done for the welfare of his family after his death! But in our secular life such folly is impossible.]
4. Some of you are satisfied because at times your heart has been tender, and then you formed good resolutions. But this is one of the rottenest of the props on which you could rest. Such tenderness of heart is transient, and mere resolutions, mere intentions, never profited any man.

VII. BEING SATISFIED WITH THE APPROVAL OF MEN. It is not the commendation of men, but the commendation of God that you should seek mainly after; and yet if you think that good men esteem you, you suppose you are good enough; like the foolish virgins who were so secure because the wise took them and retained them in their company. This is the ruin of many, especially when they look about them, and observe in others some sin from which they abstain (Luk. 18:11). Self-approval added to the approval of their fellow-men satisfies them, though they lack the one thing needful.

VIII. RESTING IN THE MEANS OF GRACE. The things through which all men should be saved ruin many. Where the Gospel is in any measure powerfully preached, there are many more secure and fearless than if they had it not; having the Gospel, they feel as if they were in no danger, and could believe it when they pleased. Against this danger our Lord has expressly warned us (Luk. 13:26). If you do this, ere long against you the door will be shut (Luk. 13:25). Thank God for the means of grace, but do not rest in them (H. E. I. 34263437).James Durham: Christ Crucified, pp. 5055.

COUNSELS AND CONSOLATIONS FOR DISAPPOINTED CHRISTIAN WORKERS

Isa. 53:1. Who hath believed our report, &c.

Is this really the language with which you are obliged to return from your attacks on the kingdom of darkness? I would fain hope that this is not the case with you all, nor altogether the case with any of you. But to whatever extent you may thus justly complain, I express my sympathy with you. Such disappointment is unquestionably a source of grief, for,

1. Here is labour lost, and in a task on which our heart was set.
2. Your labour is without one of the most natural and satisfactory tokens of your heavenly Fathers acceptance of it.
3. The spiritual wretchedness of men continues, notwithstanding all your efforts to relieve it.
4. Perpetual dishonour is done to God. Still His name is blasphemed, His glory disregarded, His law trampled on, His mercy despised; and can you, as a friend of God, look on such a scene, and not glow with a holy indignation?

To sympathy we add some considerations by which your feelings may be regulated and turned to advantage.

I. Your judgment respecting your success is probably, and almost certainly, fallacious.

1. Even if everything were known to us, it is much too soon for any judgment to be formed. The time during which the instructions we have given may operate to produce conviction and conversion is not yet terminated, so that calculation is quite set at defiance. As seed may lie buried long in dust, and yet ultimately vegetate, so knowledge communicated and disregarded now may have decisive influence hereafter, when some circumstance shall induce reflection upon it.
2. Your opportunity for exertion is not yet past; so that if what you have already done be not of itself effectual, it may become so in combination with what you or others may hereafter do.
3. We are far from knowing everything which has already occurred.

(1.) Some of those for whose good we have laboured are not under our observation at all, so that, if we have done them any good, we are not likely to know it until the day of God.
(2.) There is something in the commencement of piety often dubious or studiously concealed.We can never be entitled to affirm that we have had no success, until the arrival of the final day, when for the first time the volume of providential history will be laid open to our view.

II. But, suppose that your success is quite as small as you imagine it to be. What then? Make it a matter of serious examination.

1. Whether your exertions have been such as to authorise the expectation of success. Defects and improprieties may have attended them, which will sufficiently account for their inefficiency, without attributing it to the absence of the Divine blessing. Have you really been trying to convert sinners?

2. Whether, when you have striven to save a soul, you have used the Divinely appointed and adapted means. The only means is the Word of God, which throws light into the understanding, and makes it appeal to the conscience and to the heart upon spiritual grounds.

3. Whether, if you have used the right means, you have used them in a proper manner. Have you, according to the Scriptures, made clear the grounds of duty, the nature and evil of sin, the righteousness of Gods anger, and the method of fleeing from the wrath to come? Or, have your instructions been defective, inconsistent, or obscure? How much of solemnity, faithfulness, and tenderness have you carried into the work?

4. Whether your labours have been conducted in a right spirit towards God. Have you devoutly acknowledged the necessity of the Holy Spirits aid, and rendered due honour to His gracious agency? What has been your leading aim and impelling motive? Has it been your first and ardent desire to glorify God, by bearing a testimony for Him in His controversy with a rebellious world, and thus striving to reconcile sinners to Him?

When we think what means should be employed for the conversion of sinners, in what manner and in what spirit, we may find causes enough why we have not been successful, without ascribing it to the sovereignty of God.

III. Perhaps, after the most serious examination, you may be ready to hope that your labours have contained something on which your Heavenly Father might smile, and yet you do not see the blessing you have hoped for on your toil. Conclude, then, that the Lord has been pleased to withhold from you His blessing; and observe the lights in which this state of things may be regarded.

1. It is to be considered, undoubtedly, as an act of that holy, wise, and gracious sovereignty which the Most High is continually exercising in the administration of His affairs. You would not for a moment deny that He is entitled to such a sovereignty, or imagine that He can make an improper use of it. Submit unquestioningly and unmurmuringly to what may be His will in regard to the conversion of sinners by your instrumentality.
2. If you look through the history of His ways, you will find that many of His most honoured servants have partaken of similar discipline. What but unsuccessful was the ministry of Enoch, Noah, Elijah, Elisha, Jeremiah, and Isaiahyea, of our Lord Himself? Now, the servant is not above his Lord: it is enough, and should be enough even for you, that the servant be as His Lord.

3. You tremble for the cause of God, which you have desired to see prospering in your hands. But you need not do this. Your individual exertions constitute but a small fraction of the agency which is employed for the advancement of His kingdom, and is far too insignificant to affect materially the measure of its success. The blasting of a single field does not sensibly affect the harvest. The resources of the Almighty are sufficiently ample to secure the accomplishment of His purposes (Isa. 55:10-11).

4. No good work is really lost. If instruction and expostulation be not effectual to the conversion of the sinner, it is conducive to the glory of God, since it carries into operation that system of equitable and merciful probation which He has established in His government of mankind, and by the result of which, alike in the penitent and the impenitent, He will be eminently glorified. If sinners do not obey, we still bear a testimony for God, and not only uphold His rights and honours in the world now, but prepare for their fuller and more glorious manifestation hereafter.

5. God in His sovereignty is infinitely wise, and the ends which He brings to pass are, on the whole, the very best that can be attained. If any desirable end is passed by or frustrated, it is only that one more desirable may be secured. In this view, it may be truly affirmed that there is no failure, and no unsuccessfulness. And if He sees it good that an object should be produced by our labours differing somewhat from that which we have contemplated, a firm ground is laid for our acquiescence in His will.

6. We who labour shall not lose our reward. We may lose, indeed, what it would be unspeakably delightful to attain, namely, the rescue of sinners from the wrath to come; but still we shall gain something, even an appropriate and blessed recompense (2Co. 2:14-16).

IV. From whatever cause your want of success may have arisen, it is adapted to yield you instruction and benefit.

1. If you feel justified in referring it to Gods sovereign pleasure, you will find occasion for corresponding exercises of mind.

(1.) You must learn to blend ardent desire with silent submission, and to resign without a murmur an object for which you have striven with your utmost ardour.
(2.) The object upon which our hearts should be chiefly set is the glory of God. But we are too apt, either to confine our view to the salvation of men, or to attach to it a disproportionate value. Let our disappointments rectify this evil. Without at all diminishing our desire for the salvation of men, which is much too feeble, let them teach us that we ought to contemplate the glory of God as our chief end, and be willing in any way to promote it by our labours.The benefit of our learning these lessons effectually will not be confined to our personal experience, it will extend to our work. It is when we are annihilated before God that He may begin to exalt us; when we have learned to acquiesce in His will, He may grant us our own; when we come to seek first His glory, He may afford us more extensively the salvation of men.

2. If, on the other hand, we find reason to conclude that our want of success arises from our own defects, it is obvious that this is a loud call

(1) to humiliation; and
(2) to give all diligence in becoming better fitted for a work which we may not resign, and the issues of which are so unspeakably solemn.

V. Want of success in our labour ought not to induce either abandonment or despondency.

1. Never suffer yourselves to say, It is of no use to try any longer.
(1.) Under no circumstances ought you to desist from taking a part with God in His righteous controversy with mankind.
(2.) The object of saving men from everlasting destruction is clearly too important to be relinquished, while any possibility of accomplishing it remains.
2. As for despondency, it does endless mischief, and is utterly destitute of reason.
(1.) The Lords hand is not shortened that it cannot save. It maybe that He only looks for another resolved effort on your part, and for a little more exercise of faith and patience, before He pours out an abundant blessing. It is characteristic of His ways to try faith before He rewards it.
(2.) If you seem reduced to the necessity of despondency, that is just a reason why you should imbibe fresh hope. All your self-sufficiency having perished, now make another effort, more eminently in the name and strength of the Lord, and peradventure He will be with you.

(3). Despondency is inevitably mischievous. Under its influence, you will either set about nothing at all, or nothing heartily. And nothing is to be wrought by a despairing hand (1Co. 15:58; Gal. 6:9).John Howard Hinton, A.M.: The Active Christian, pp. 241264.

Fuente: The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary Edited by Joseph S. Exell

5. ATONE, CHAPTER 53
a. SHUNNED

TEXT: Isa. 53:1-3

1

Who had believed our message? and to whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed?

2

For he grew up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. 3 He was despised, and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not.

QUERIES

a.

What message was not believed?

b.

What is the dry ground from which He grew?

c.

Why was the Servant a man of sorrows?

PARAPHRASE

But when the Suffering Servant comes, who will have believed this message of the exaltation of the Servant from such a state of deep degradation? who will have recognized in this the victorious, powerful arm of Jehovah? It was the plan of God that His Servant take the form of man and grow up like a fragile, green plant sprouting from dry and sterile ground. In our eyes there was nothing in Him to make Him attractive as king or Messiah. We saw nothing in Him that made us want Him or want to follow Him as our leader. In fact, we despised Him and rejected Him; He suffered the sorrow of rejection and grief of our unbelief as well as our physical persecutions. We went out of our way to shun Him and ignore Him.

COMMENTS

Isa. 53:1 UNBELIEVING: Chapter 53 is still in the predictive present tense. It is as if the Servant has come, been rejected, slaughtered and the people of Israel are looking at it all in retrospect! The overall reaction of the nation to Jesus claims to be the Messiah was scoffing, mockery, rejection and persecution. He gained a few disciples, but at the arrest in Gethsemane, they all forsook Him and fled (Mar. 14:50). The nation, as a whole, could not believe that Jehovah was at work revealing His Arm in the itinerant Galilean carpenters son. It was especially difficult for any who had been attracted to Him during His life to believe that He was Gods Servant when they gathered at Golgotha and saw His humiliating death, (cf. Luk. 24:13-27). The believing, penitent Jews after their baptism (Act. 2:37, etc.) still marvelled than they could have been so unbelieving. They are represented here by the prophet as continually marvelling as they reflect on their blindness. Twice in the N.T. this very verse of Isaiahs prophecy is quoted as Jesus (Joh. 12:38) and Paul (Rom. 10:16) express shock that the Jews did not believe when Jehovahs Servant came to them.

Is there any question as to the identity of this Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53? Servant of Jehovah, ebed Yahweh in Hebrew is prophesied at least 20 times in Isaiah chapters 4053. Sometimes it refers to Cyrus, king of Persia; sometimes it refers to the nation of Israel (Isa. 41:8; Isa. 42:19); but most often it refers to the Messiah (Isa. 42:1-7; Isa. 49:1-9; Isa. 50:4-9; Isa. 52:13 to Isa. 53:12; Isa. 61:1-3). The Servant is the same person (not nation) previously described in Isa. 7:14; Isa. 9:6 ff; Isa. 11:1-5. He is also the Branch of Isa. 4:2; Isa. 11:1; Isa. 53:2; Jer. 23:5 ff; Jer. 33:15; Zec. 3:8; Zec. 6:12 ff. The inspired authors of the New Testament specifically confirm the following prophecies of the Servant are fulfilled in Jesus Christ; Isa. 42:1-4 fulfilled in Mat. 12:18-21; Isa. 52:13 to Isa. 53:12 fulfilled (or quoted) in Mat. 8:17; Luk. 22:37; Joh. 12:38; Act. 8:32 ff; Rom. 10:16. The Servants mission can only be fulfilled by Christ:

1.

Birth (Isa. 49:1; Isa. 53:2; Luk. 1:31-35)

2.

Anointing (Isa. 42:1; Isa. 48:16; Isa. 59:21; Isa. 61:1; Mat. 3:16; Luk. 4:18 ff)

3.

Ministry (Isa. 49:8-13; Act. 10:36-43)

4.

Rejection (Isa. 49:4-7; Isa. 53:1-3; Act. 3:13-18)

5.

Obedience (Isa. 40:4-7; Php. 2:5-11)

6.

New Covenant (Isa. 42:6; Isa. 49:8; Isa. 55:3; Mat. 26:26-29)

7.

Vicarious death (Isa. 53:4-12; 1Pe. 2:22-25)

8.

Resurrection (Isa. 53:10-12; Act. 2:24-36)

9.

Salvation Offered (Isa. 49:8; Isa. 61:2; Luk. 24:46-49)

10.

Mission to Gentiles (Isa. 42:1; Isa. 42:6 ff; Isa. 49:6; Isa. 49:12; Isa. 60:3; Isa. 60:9; Mat. 28:18-20)

11.

Glorification and Intercession Isa. 49:3; Isa. 53:12; Act. 2:33-36; Php. 2:5-11; Heb. 7:24 ff)

12.

Jesus came to serve. (Mat. 20:28; Joh. 12:13-20, etc.)

Isa. 53:2-3 UNCIVIL: What Jew in his right mind would ever have dreamed or imagined rejecting his Messiah or Jehovahs Servant in such an odious way as Isaiah predicts? Only the most shameful incivility prompts men to deliberately hide from another human being. Yet these verses vividly portray the scandalous hatred the Jews will manifest toward the Incarnate Servant. It is the life-story of the Servant from the cradle to the grave. The Servants entry into this world was so inglorious; born in Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2), of poor parentage, in a stable. When He grew up as a lad in Nazareth He was just like any other lad according to all outward appearances (Luk. 2:51-52) (with the one exception of confounding the scholars at Jerusalem, Luk. 2:41-50).

He grew up before him . . . means the Servant grew up in the eyes of Jehovah, or, by the foreordained plan of God, as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. Jehovah sent His Servant to the world through the Jews, despised and harassed people by the Roman world of Christs day. He grew up in Nazareth which was in Galilee (which means, circuit of the Gentiles). Can anything good come out of Nazareth? (Joh. 1:46) was the attitude toward that infamous village. That the Servant of Jehovah, the Messiah, should come from a carpenters family would be unthinkable to Jewish theology. A tender, green plant in dry parched ground is regarded with skepticism as to its origin and its survival. So Christ was looked upon.

Among all ancient peoples (even as among some modern advertisers) ideal physique, refined facial features, etc., were considered necessary prerequisites of future greatness, along with right parents, right birthplace, right schools, etc. These verses are not intended to describe Christs facial features or His physique. They are simply predicting that men would judge Him by that inauspicious human appearance and completely reject Him because of their presuppositions. When Jesus was only a baby, Simeon the aged prophet took Him in his arms and predicted He was the consolation of Israel and a light unto the Gentiles but that He would become a sign that is spoken against, (cf. Luk. 2:22-35). When He was arrested and mocked and tortured by the Sanhedrin, Pilate and Herod, there was no form or comeliness in Him that any of the nation desired Him to be king. Why would God plan it that His Servant come into the world in such untoward surroundings? In order to put men into the refiners fire. All who beheld His glory through eyes of faith and saw beyond the humiliation of the incarnation that He was the Son of God became sons of God. All who were blinded by their own carnal standards of comeliness and judged Jesus by them became sons of disobedience. God wanted to get at the heart of man, for that is what He judges, not outward appearances.

Jesus was seldom treated with indifference. When He spoke or acted, people either clamored after Him or plotted against Him. But even most of the clamoring of the multitudes was only superficial. It was motivated by fleshly hunger for more bread and fish or for instantaneous healing of sicknesses. The Sadducees and Pharisees hated the Servant and plotted His death because He stripped away their facade of orthodoxy and exposed their immoral and rebellious hearts. And, in the end, these pretentious theologians and greedy legalists seduced the carnal-minded multitudes to clamor for His crucifixion! He was despised and rejected of men; forsaken and shunned. The two Hebrew words makeoyoth and kholiy are literally, pain and sickness, but are translated, sorrows and grief. When people saw that His earthly life was characterized by trouble, pain, rejection, sorrow, poverty, humiliation, absolute honesty and purity, few wanted to have anything to do with Him. Misunderstood by alleven His select disciples and His own human familyHe was a man of sorrows (see comments on Isa. 49:4). How could Jesus have been a man of sorrows and yet speak so much of his joy? Because the object of His joy was beyond this world! (Heb. 12:1 ff). All men who live godly in this world will suffer persecution (2Ti. 3:12; Joh. 15:18 ff; Joh. 16:33), but they may also have joy if the object of their joy is beyond this world (Joh. 4:34; Joh. 15:11; Joh. 17:13, etc.).

What people turned away from the Servant of the Lord for when He was in human form on the earth they still turn away from Him for todayHis substitutionary atonement. Some are superficially in agreement with what they think is His pacifistic humanitarianism or His socialistic human-rights stance, but they absolutely will not surrender to the truth that Jesus had to die for their sin. This is what was so unacceptable to the self-righteous Pharisees of Jesus day. It remains a threat to the self-righteousness of men today!

QUIZ

1.

How extensive was the unbelief predicted by Isaiah?

2.

Who, alone, could fulfill the predictions of the Suffering Servant?

3.

Would it have been a normal thing for the Jews to reject their Messiah?

4.

Why did they reject the Servant-Messiah when He came?

5.

Why did God foreordain such an inauspicious incarnation for His Servant?

6.

What was the fundamental issue over which people turned away from Jesus?

Fuente: College Press Bible Study Textbook Series

LIII.

(1) Who hath believed our report? . . .The question has been variously interpreted as coming from the lips of the prophet or of Israel. The former view commends itself most, and the unusual plural is explained by his mentally associating with himself the other prophets, probably his own disciples, who were delivering the same message. The implied answer to the question may be either None, or, Not all. St. Paul (Rom. 10:16) adopts the latter.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

1. Who Who among this class of Israel. The question denotes a prophetic anticipation of a renewed lapse on the part of the Jews from a full faith in the true Messiah when he comes; and the “who” refers to this.

Hath believed our report Or, the doctrine received by us, the heralds, (Isa 52:15,) announcing the oncoming servant of Jehovah, the Messiah, now sadly marred in aspect this the lapsed ones of Israel will find difficult to understand and to receive.

Arm of the Lord A figure for that of which the arm is the symbol the almighty power of God, (Isa 52:10,) or the divine power inwardly revealed. The question is: Among whom is this taking place, and resulting in salvation? See Joh 12:28; Rom 10:16.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Sec. 3. MESSIAH AND THE GOSPEL, Isa 52:11 to Isa 55:13.

Thus far in this chapter is treated the case of an exalted Church passing, step by step, through suffering and deliverances into the purity of the typical holy Zion; from this point the view is turned again to the “Servant” of Jehovah, through whom the prophet has seen the Church to be redeemed. The portrait of a suffering servant is here filled out in detail, as a side-piece (Delitzsch) to the liberation and deliverance of Zion-Jerusalem already just depicted. He has conducted his people through suffering to glory.

This picture is to show, not only that Messiah’s earthly pathway, as our Mediator, is to be through intense, but voluntary, suffering, but also that it is in his heart also to suffer for and instead of, as well as with, his people.

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

‘Who could have believed what we have heard?

And who could have seen in this the arm of Yahweh?’

The blank astonishment of Isaiah, Israel and the world is here clearly expressed. To attribute what will happen to this One, by the arm of Yahweh, seems beyond belief. It will go against all that men had expected of the Davidic king and Servant. But note carefully this reference to the ‘arm of Yahweh’. The arm of Yahweh usually refers to Yahweh acting in power to bring about His purposes. And then men expected thunder, and lightning, and extraordinary happenings, not this trail of humiliation and death. And yet was ever greater power revealed than this? For this One Who comes is the Arm of Yahweh being expressed in all His power. None who stood before the cross could even have faintly conceived what was being accomplished there. It has been studied for over two thousand years, and yet we only have a faint conception of it. What happened there was so immense that no one can grasp it. All we can understand are the outskirts of His ways.

Note the use of ‘we’, constantly used with its equivalents through to Isa 53:6. It is applying all that is said to man’s situation. It includes Isaiah, it includes all who respond to the Servant, thus it may include the kings in Isa 52:13, and in the end the nations who respond.

In Isa 51:12 ‘the arm of Yahweh’ had been called on to awake and put on strength, to smite Rahab, but what is happening here appears to be the very opposite. Who could possibly have foreseen that such a One Who was to be so humiliated could shake the world to its very foundations as the Arm of Yahweh, and smite a greater than Rahab? But He did.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

The Suffering Servant – Comments – In Isa 53:1-12 we see the Messiah portrayed as a suffering servant, not a coming king. Although the Jews will reject Jesus, Isa 52:15 shows us that the Gentiles will receive Him.

Isa 53:1  Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?

Isa 53:1 “Who hath believed our report” Word Study on “report” Strong says the Hebrew word “report” ( ) (H8052) means, “something heard, an announcement.”

Comments The herald was sent forth from the throne of God with the glad tidings of salvation for Israel in Isa 52:7-8. The report is the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. God’s report cannot be understood with man’s reasoning (1 Corinthians 1-2), but by simple faith (Joh 3:1 f). The prophet cries out, “Who has faith in God’s Word?” As you look around in this world today, it is so hard to find someone who is actually trusting God at His Word.

Isa 53:1 “and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed” Comments The arm of the Lord represents His salvation. Jesus came preaching the Gospel and working signs and wonders. He healed and delivered people as a testimony of His divinity, so that we might believe in Him. God revealed His holy arm through the miracles of Jesus and in Jesus Himself (Isa 52:10, Joh 12:37-38). Once we believe in Him, the arm of the Lord symbolizes His strength when we lean upon the everlasting arms day by day. Can you find anyone who has experienced the true strength that God can give His children?

Isa 52:10, “The LORD hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”

Joh 12:37-38, “But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him: That the saying of Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

Isa 53:1 Comments – When we chose to believe God’s report, then He reveals His arm of salvation to us. We will not see His help until we turn to Him in faith believing His Word. Only by God’s spirit can we see and know Jesus as He truly is (1Co 2:14).

1Co 2:14, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Many people choose to believe the natural reports as opposed to God’s written report stated here (Exo 23:1).

Exo 23:1, “Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness.”

Isa 53:2  For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

Isa 53:2 “For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground” – Comments – “For he shall grow up before him” – Jesus took up on himself the form of man, and grew up in His physical stature, born of a woman. Jesus also grew up before the Lord in wisdom. He was in the Temple full of wisdom at the tender age of twelve (Luk 2:46). He increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man (Luk 2:52).

Luk 2:46, “And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Luk 2:52, “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”

“and as a root out of a dry ground” This dry ground is figurative of death. Luk 3:1 tells us that Jesus was born in Israel during a time of corruption and evil leadership. God sent Jesus into a world of darkness. Jesus was fresh, new life in the midst of death, and light in the midst of darkness (Mat 4:15-16).

Luk 3:1, “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene,”

Mat 4:15-16, “The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles; The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.”

Scripture References – Note similar verses:

2Sa 23:4, “And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain .”

Isa 11:1, “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots:”

Jer 23:5, “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.”

Eze 17:22-24, “Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will also take of the highest branch of the high cedar, and will set it; I will crop off from the top of his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon an high mountain and eminent: In the mountain of the height of Israel will I plant it: and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear fruit, and be a goodly cedar: and under it shall dwell all fowl of every wing; in the shadow of the branches thereof shall they dwell. And all the trees of the field shall know that I the LORD have brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I the LORD have spoken and have done it.”

Zec 6:12, “And speak unto him, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD:”

Isa 53:2 “he hath no form nor comeliness” Word Study on “form” The Enhanced Strong says the Hebrew word “form” is used 15 times in the Old Testament, being translated in the KJV as, “form 3, goodly 2, beautiful + 03303 2, favoured 2, comely 1, countenance 1, fair + 03303 1, goodly + 02896 1, resembled 1, visage 1.”

Word Study on “comeliness” The Enhanced Strong says the Hebrew word “comeliness” is used 30 times in the Old Testament, being translated in the KJV as, “glory 7, majesty 7, honour 5, beauty 4, comeliness 3, excellency 2, glorious 1, goodly 1.”

Comments Jesus came into this world without any of His rightful splendor and glory. He came in the humble form of a man (Php 2:6-7).

Php 2:6-7, “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:”

Isa 53:2 “and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him” – Comments – When Jesus began His earthy ministry, though He was King of Kings and Lord of Lords, He did not travel in pomp as a king, but as a normal man who dressed and walked like any other man.

Isa 53:3  He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Isa 53:3 Word Study on “esteem” Webster says the word “esteem” means “to set a high value on.”

Isa 53:3 Comments – The Jews did not esteem their Messiah; rather, the Jewish leaders despised Him (Joh 1:10).

Joh 1:10, “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.”

Isa 53:4  Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

Isa 53:4 “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” Word Study on “Surely” Strong says the Hebrew word “surely” ( ) (H403) literally means, “firmly,” and figuratively, “surely.” The Enhanced Strong says this word is used 18 times in the Old Testament, being translated in the KJV as, “surely 9, but 3, verily 2, truly 2, certainly 1, nevertheless 1.”

Comments – In Isa 53:1 God is questioning man’s faith in His report. Isa 53:4 begins with a declaration of certainty in His report. God’s wants us to know confidently that His report is true. That is, despite the fact that man rejected Jesus (Isa 53:1-3), Jesus still went to the Cross for their sins. The BBE comes close to idea, saying, “ But it was our pain he took, and our diseases were put on him: while to us he seemed as one diseased, on whom God’s punishment had come.”

Word Study on “he hath borne” Strong says the Hebrew word “borne” ( ) (H5375) is a primitive root meaning, “to lift, lift us, bear, carry.” The Enhanced Strong says this word is used 654 times in the Old Testament, and thus, being given a great variety of applications, both literal and figurative, it is translated in the KJV as, “(bare, lift, etc…) up 219, bear 115, take 58, bare 34, carry 30, (take, carry) away 22, borne 22, armourbearer 18, forgive 16, accept 12, exalt 8, regard 5, obtained 4, respect 3, misc 74.”

Comments – In the ministry of the Tabernacle, the concept of bearing something is refers to “bearing” sin (Exo 28:38; Exo 28:43).

Exo 28:38, “And it shall be upon Aaron’s forehead, that Aaron may bear the iniquity of the holy things, which the children of Israel shall hallow in all their holy gifts; and it shall be always upon his forehead, that they may be accepted before the LORD.”

Exo 28:43, “And they shall be upon Aaron, and upon his sons, when they come in unto the tabernacle of the congregation, or when they come near unto the altar to minister in the holy place; that they bear not iniquity, and die: it shall be a statute for ever unto him and his seed after him.”

In a type and figure of Christ, this word is use of the sin that the scapegoat is to bear for the people of God (Lev 16:22).

Lev 16:22, “And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.”

Word Study on “our griefs” Strong says the Hebrew word “griefs” ( ) (H2483) means, “a malady, anxiety, calamity, disease, grief, or sickness,” and comes from a primitive root ( ) (H2470), which literally means, “to be rubbed or worn,” and figuratively, “to be weak, sick afflicted.” The Enhanced Strong says it is used 28 times in the Old Testament, being translated in the KJV, “sickness 12, disease 7, grief 4, sick 1.”

Word Study on “carried” Strong says the Hebrew word “carried” ( ) (H5445) is a primitive root meaning, “to carry, to be burdensome.” The Enhanced Strong says this word is used 9 times in the Old Testament, being translated in the KJV, “carry 4, bear 3, labour 1, burden 1.”

Word Study on “sorrows” Strong says the Hebrew word “sorrows” ( ) (H4341) literally means, “anguish,” and figuratively, “affliction,” and comes from the root word ( ) (H3510) meaning, “to feel pain, to grieve.” The Enhanced Strong says this word is used 16 times in the Old Testament, being translated in the KJV, “sorrow 12, pain 2, grief 2.”

Comments The prophecy of Isa 53:4 was fulfilled by Jesus Christ in Mat 8:17.

Mat 8:16-17, “When the even was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses .”

A. B. Simpson writes, “Any person who will refer to such a familiar commentary as that of Albert Barnes on Isaiah, or any other Hebrew authority, will see that the two words here used denote respectively sickness and pain, and that the words for “bear” and “carry,” denote not mere sympathy, but an actual substitution and the removal utterly of the thing borne. Therefore, in the same full sense as He has borne our sins, Jesus Christ has SURELY BORNE AWAY and CARRIED OFF our sicknesses; yes, and even our PAINS, so that abiding in Him, we may be fully delivered from both sickness and pain.” [71]

[71] A. B. Simpson, The Gospel of Healing, 4 th ed. (New York: Christian Alliance Publishing Company, 1890), chapter 1: The Spiritual Foundation.

Jesus also sorrowed so that we would no longer have to sorrow. We now have hope of eternal life (1Th 4:13).

1Th 4:13, “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope .”

Isa 53:4 “yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” Comments – As Jesus was scourged, beaten and crucified, the Jews considered it divine punishment; but actually, Jesus was carrying our sicknesses and pains and our sins; yet, the Jews did not consider this divine truth at the time.

Isa 53:5  But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Isa 53:5 “he was bruised for our iniquities” – Comments – The Shroud of Turin, which is believed to be the actual burial cloth of the Lord Jesus Christ, reveals a face that has been badly bruised. One eye is swollen shut. The nose shows signs of being broken. [72]

[72] Grant R. Jeffery, “The Mysterious Shroud of Turin,” [on-line]; accessed 1 September 2009; available from http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/shroud.htm; Internet.

Isa 53:5 “the chastisement of our peace was upon him” Comments – Jesus was chastised to bring us peace (Rom 5:1).

Rom 5:1, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:”

Isa 53:5 “and with his stripes we are healed” Word Study on “stripes” Strong says the Hebrew word “stripes” ( ) (H2250) means, “bound (with stripes), a weal (a black-and-blue mark itself), a stripe, a wound.”

Comments – The Shroud of Turin, believed to be the actual burial cloth of the Lord Jesus Christ, reveals the backside of a man that had been severely scourged. Scientists are able to count about one hundred and twenty stripes, perhaps from the multiple tips used on a Roman whip. [73]

[73] Grant R. Jeffery, “The Mysterious Shroud of Turin,” [on-line]; accessed 1 September 2009; available from http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/shroud.htm; Internet.

Isa 53:6  All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Isa 53:6 “All we like sheep have gone astray” Comments – Believers have returned unto Jesus, the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls. Praise ye the Lord! Note 1Pe 2:25.

1Pe 2:25, “For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.”

Isa 53:6 “we have turned every one to his own way” Scripture Reference – Note:

Pro 14:12, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”

Isa 53:6 “and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” Comments – Isa 53:6 c describes the scapegoat in the Mosaic Law as a type and figure of Jesus’ death.

Scripture Reference – Note:

Heb 1:3, “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins , sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;”

Isa 53:6 Comments Everyone has sinned. Jesus paid for the sins of mankind.

Isa 53:7  He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

Isa 53:7 “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted” Comments Before His crucifixion, Jesus was mocked and beaten, put on trial and ridiculed (Luk 23:8-11). A crown of thorns was placed upon His head (Mat 27:29).

Luk 23:8-11, “And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him. Then he questioned with him in many words; but he answered him nothing. And the chief priests and scribes stood and vehemently accused him. And Herod with his men of war set him at nought, and mocked him, and arrayed him in a gorgeous robe, and sent him again to Pilate.”

Mat 27:29, “And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!”

Isa 53:7 “yet he opened not his mouthso he opened not his mouth” Comments – Isa 53:7 was fulfilled in that Jesus did not open His mouth before His accusers (Mat 27:11-14, Mar 15:2-5, Joh 18:28-40).

Mat 27:11-14, “And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest. And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he answered nothing. Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee? And he answered him to never a word ; insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.”

Mar 15:2-5, “And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto him, Thou sayest it. And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered nothing. And Pilate asked him again, saying, Answerest thou nothing? behold how many things they witness against thee. But Jesus yet answered nothing ; so that Pilate marvelled.”

Joh 18:28-40.

Isa 53:7 “and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb” Comments – The word “dumb means, “silent.” Jesus was God; He did not have to justify or defend His actions to any man (Mat 27:13).

Mat 27:13, “Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee? And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.”

Isa 53:7 Comments – Isa 53:7 helps us to understand that the sacrificial lamb in the Mosaic Law was a type and figure of Jesus’ death. This verse uses the characteristics of a lamb before its shearers, or before those who are about to slaughter it to describe our Saviour’s behaviour. Anyone who has ever slaughtered livestock knows how unwilling to die many of them are at this time, and they often struggle and have to be bound. However, a sheep does not resist his own slaughter. In the same way, Jesus did not resist those who condemned Him to death, nor did He resist those who led Him and bound Him to the Cross; for He died willing in behalf of our sins.

Isa 53:8  He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

Isa 53:8 “He was taken from prison and from judgment” – Comments – They took Him away by distress and judgment.

Isa 53:8 “for he was cut off out of the land of the living” Comments – This phrase refers to Jesus’ death on the Cross

Isa 53:9  And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

Isa 53:9 “he made his grave with the wicked” Comments – Jesus was crucified between two thieves (Mat 27:44).

Mat 27:44, “The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.”

Isa 53:9 “and with the rich in his death” Word Study on “death” – The Hebrew word for “death” here in the Hebrew is plural ( ) (H4194), the plural construct.

Comments – Joseph of Arimathaea, a wealthy man, placed Jesus in his own tomb (Mat 27:57-60, Joh 19:38).

Mat 27:57-60, “When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathaea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus’ disciple: He went to Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus. Then Pilate commanded the body to be delivered. And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, And laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.”

Joh 19:38, “And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave. He came therefore, and took the body of Jesus.”

Isa 53:10  Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.

Isa 53:10 “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him” – Comments – The Shroud of Turin, which is believed to be the actual burial cloth of the Lord Jesus Christ, reveals a face that has been badly bruised. One eye is swollen shut. The nose shows signs of being broken. [74]

[74] Grant R. Jeffery, “The Mysterious Shroud of Turin,” [on-line]; accessed 1 September 2009; available from http://www.grantjeffrey.com/article/shroud.htm; Internet.

Isa 53:10 “when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin” Scripture Reference – Note:

Heb 1:3, “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;”

Isa 53:10 “he shall see his seed” Comments – Souls are being saved.

Isa 53:10 “he shall prolong his days” Comments – There is eternal life in Him, so He will reign forever more.

Isa 53:10 “and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand” Comments – Jesus will fulfill God’s will and purpose and plan.

Isa 53:11  He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.

Isa 53:11 “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied” Comments – Isa 53:11 says, “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” This can be interpreted as the Father seeing the sacrificial suffering and death of Jesus Christ as sufficient for the payment of the sins of mankind. However, Dutch Sheets gives an interesting insight into Isa 53:11. He refers to the two times when Jesus Chris travailed in His spirit in prayer. The first time was when He groaned and wept just before He raised Lazarus from the dead (Joh 11:33-38). This passage of Scripture describes an occasion when Jesus was deeply troubled in His spirit and began to weep. We must be careful not to interpret this event in Jesus’ life as something that took place in His emotions; for it tells us that before Jesus wept, He “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.” We must interpret is as a work and manifestation of the Holy Spirit stirring inside of Him and breaking forth through weeping. We call it travailing in the Spirit. I remember watching one of my mentors in the early 1980’s having this similar experience. After the church service, the pastor and several of us gathered around in a circle and began to pray. Within a few minutes Jack Emerson began to tremble and groan, then fell to the floor and began to weep. We all waited while he regained his composure and strength and stood up. He later told some of us that this was not him weeping, but the moving of the Holy Spirit within him. When Jesus began to weep, the people around only saw it in the natural realm (Joh 11:36-37), but, it was this type travail and weeping in the Spirit that was necessary in order for this miracle to break forth and manifest as the resurrection of Lazarus. The second time was when He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane just before His arrest; for there Jesus said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,” (Mat 26:38). This is a description of Jesus experiencing a heavy weight in His Spirit and being moved into prayer for a release of this weight. Dutch Sheets says that this event was a fulfillment of Isa 53:11. [75]

[75] Dutch Sheets, Intercessory Prayer (Ventura, California: Regal Books, 1996), 129.

Isa 53:11 “by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many” – Comments – We will know Jesus in order to be saved.

Isa 53:12  Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Isa 53:12 “Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great” – Comments – God will deliver all into His hands, so that Jesus Christ has become heir of all things.

Isa 53:12 “he shall divide the spoil with the strong” – Comments – We are joint heirs (Col 2:15).

Col 2:15, “And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

Isa 53:12 “because he hath poured out his soul unto death:” – Comments – His death on the cross was the reason why Jesus has been exalted, by humbling Himself (Php 2:8-9, 1Pe 5:6).

Php 2:8-9, “And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:”

1Pe 5:6, “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time:”

Isa 53:12 “and he was numbered with the transgressors” Comments – This phrase is a reference to the two thieves (Mar 15:27-38, Luk 22:37).

Mar 15:27-28, And with him they crucify two thieves; the one on his right hand, and the other on his left. And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors .”

Luk 22:37, “For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors : for the things concerning me have an end.”

Isa 53:12 “and he bare the sin of many” Scripture Reference – Note:

Heb 1:3, “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins , sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high;”

Isa 53:12 “and made intercession for the transgressors.” Comments – Jesus prayed for those who crucified Him, and He now serves as our Great High Priest (Luk 23:34, Heb 7:25).

Luk 23:34, “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.”

Heb 7:25, “Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.”

Isa 53:12 Comments – Jesus spoiled principalities and powers (Col 2:15), and gave gifts into men (Eph 4:8). He divides the spoils with the church and we find our strength in his Name.

Eph 4:8, “Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.”

Col 2:15, “And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

Fuente: Everett’s Study Notes on the Holy Scriptures

The Passion of the Messiah Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12 reveals the sufferings of Christ Jesus on the Cross to the greatest degree of any place found in Holy Scriptures. When such a description of God’s great sacrifice is placed with a book of judgment against His children, we begin to see how great is God’s love towards them. Even while God was judging them, He was preparing to send His Only Begotten Son to Calvary in order to pay the penalty for their wicked sins. Such love is summed up in Joh 3:16.

Joh 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

I saw this tremendous truth found with this passage as was comforting our three-year old child. My wife had sent our child out of the kitchen because of her misbehavior. I heard her crying in the hallway and went to comfort her. Although I stood with my wife in the need for discipline, I felt a father’s love within me. I wanted restoration. The child had been banished from the kitchen and I was trying to bring restoration so that she could be reunited in fellowship with her mother and thus, reenter the kitchen. (February 2, 2004)

It is in this fullness of love that the God of Israel can both judge His people while preparing to send His Beloved Son to atone for their sins. The tremendous judgment in the book of Isaiah reveals God’s depth of holiness that is beyond our capacity to understand. But in the same way, His tremendous love in sending His Son is also beyond our ability to comprehend. Such a contrast of God’s holiness and love will only be understood as we spend eternity in Heaven getting to know our loving Heavenly Father and as we are taught of the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made in leaving Heaven to die on the Cross for the sins of a disobedient people.

Fuente: Everett’s Study Notes on the Holy Scriptures

v. 1. Who hath believed our report? Who puts faith in that which he hears from us, the messengers of the Lord? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? The evangelist of the Old Testament, in an ineffably sad strain, deplores the natural lack of interest in the great central message of salvation. The report is indeed made, it goes forth and may be heard, but the arm of the Lord, in the revelation of the mighty power of His grace, is hidden from the great majority of men. The way of salvation, through the suffering of the Messiah, does not appeal to their self-righteousness, to the vanity of their hearts.

v. 2. For He, the Servant of Jehovah, shall grow up before Him, the Lord, as a tender plant and as a root out of a dry ground, a shoot springing up from beneath a dead stump. He hath no form, no attractiveness, nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. In the midst of Israel’s spiritual wilderness and desolation, from the well-nigh dead stump of the house and family of David, the Messiah came forth, like a shoot springing up from the roots of a tree-stump. But this remarkable happening had little or no influence on the children of Israel. For He had no attractive form; there was nothing in Him to strike the eye of natural man and to draw him to the Servant of the Lord.

v. 3. He is despised and rejected of men, forsaken by them all, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, fully acquainted with sicknesses and the misery of this earthly life; and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised, and we esteemed Him not, ignoring Him, passing Him by. He stood all alone throughout His life, despised, rejected, forsaken of men, He who was acquainted with life’s sorrows, who alone could have compassion on men’s weakness. Men, in contempt of Him, turned the other way and ignored Him, just as they do to this day.

v. 4. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, the sufferings and pains which we should have endured; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted, bowed down with suffering.

v. 5. But He was wounded for our transgressions, for the crimes by which we had become guilty in the sight of God, He was bruised for our iniquities, for the debts which we had incurred; literally, “by His stripes healing to us. ”

v. 6. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and, in the mean time, while we were yet sinners and godless, the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. While mankind, as a whole, was indifferent to Him, rejected and despised Him, He was wonderfully active in our behalf. With emphasis it is stated, “Surely our griefs He has carried, the sufferings which we deserved He has borne in our stead. ” While we, all men, in the blindness of our self-righteousness, stood back and considered the Sufferer smitten, struck, and afflicted by God, He was taking upon Himself the blame for our crimes, the guilt of our iniquities. Our transgressions were charged to His account, and He was engaged in paying them off. In order that we might again be at peace with God, He took upon Him our chastisement; in order that we might not suffer the bruises and stripes which we had so richly merited, He permitted them to be laid upon Himself. Yea, while we were going astray in our own blindness and willfulness, every one turning to the way which suited his evil nature best, God laid even these crimes and all other iniquities upon Him. Such is the wonderful message of Christ’s vicarious suffering.

v. 7. He was oppressed, sorely ill-treated, and He was afflicted, He bowed Himself down, offering a willing back to the burden placed upon it; yet He opened not His mouth; He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth, not one cry of protest passing His lips.

v. 8. He was taken from prison and from judgment, through force and judicial sentence, and who shall declare His generation? For He was cut off out of the land of the living, that is, who of the people of His time deplored the fact that He was torn away out of the land of the living? the answer being: Practically not one. For the transgression of My people was He stricken, the curse of the judgment came upon Him.

v. 9. And He made His grave with the wicked and with the rich in His death, rather, “but with the rich He was in His death”; because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth. Christ is the true sacrificial Lamb brought to the slaughter, a sheep dumb before her shearers. But He attained to the object which He had in mind in this suffering, for which He came into this world; for misery and judgment exhausted themselves in His case. He fought His way through to an endless length of life. This involved, of course, that He was torn away from the land of the living. Because His vicarious obedience demanded this sacrifice, the curse came upon Him for His people’s crime. Yet in the very hour after His death He received recognition. Men had planned His interment with the wicked; they thought they could break His legs and treat Him like the criminals that were crucified with Him, casting His body into some convenient pit. Instead of that, however, He was with the rich in His death, buried like a wealthy man, in Joseph’s grave. And this because He had done no violence, and in His mouth there was no deceit: He was the Holy One of God.

v. 10. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief, laid sickness and sorrow upon Him. When Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, literally, “when His soul shall have been offered as a sacrifice of trespass,” He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. Here the mystery of the treatment accorded by God to the sinless Servant is set forth. His sufferings, His bruises, were divinely inflicted; He bore the sicknesses of mankind by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. His very soul, His life, was offered as a vicarious sacrifice of trespass, in voluntary surrender, a complete ransom. But now comes the fruit and the glory of the mystery; for the Servant, having died, sees His offspring, His spiritual children, born to Him as the result of the Gospel-message. Having died, He prolongs His days, for now He lives forevermore. Having died and being now once more alive, He carries into effect the divine purpose, His kingdom advancing throughout the world, through the effect of His power.

v. 11. He shall see the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied, feel satisfaction and true refreshment; by His knowledge shall My righteous Servant justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities.

v. 12. Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, apportion to Him the many, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong, the mighty ones becoming subject to Him, because He hath poured out His soul unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors, and He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors, being their Mediator even today. The work of redemption ends with the Servant’s satisfied contemplation of His atoning work, of the consequences of the travail of His soul. Now the knowledge of Him, that is, His Gospel, through which we learn to know Him as the Savior of the world, makes men righteous. It is a grand view of His work which He has before His eyes: the many made partakers of His work, of His atonement, since His sin-bearing is the basis of our righteousness. And, so the prophecy ends with a note of conquest and triumph. Not only has God apportioned to His Servant the many, but God’s power and that of His Servant are placed side by side, gathering men, even the mighty of the earth, as their spoil. The fact that He poured out His life in death, that He bore the sins of many, is now the everlasting foundation of His work as our Advocate with the Father; on the basis of that He makes continual intercession for us. Such is Christ’s work of vicarious atonement, as it was preached to the believers of the Old Testament, as we now know it to have been fulfilled.

Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann

EXPOSITION

THE PASSIONAL, OR THE GREAT PROPHECY OF THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST, AND OF HIS LATER EXALTATION. Polycarp the Lysian calls this chapter “the golden passional of the Old Testament evangelist.” Delitzsch says of it, “It is the centre of this wonderful book of consolation (ch. 40-66), and is the most central, the deepest, and the loftiest thing that the Old Testament prophecy, outstripping itself, has ever achieved”. Mr. Urwick remarks on it, “Here we seem to enter the holy of holies of Old Testament prophecythat sacred chamber wherein are pictured and foretold the sufferings of Christ and the glory which should follow”.

The Messianic interpretation of the chapter was universally acknowledged by the Jews until the time of Aben Ezra. It was also assumed as indisputable by the Christian Fathers. Almost all Christian expositors down to the commencement of the nineteenth century took the same view. It was only under the pressure of the Christian controversy that the later Jews abandoned the traditional interpretation, and applied the prophecy

(1) to Jeremiah;

(2) to Josiah;

(3) to the people of Israel.

In the present century a certain number of Christian commentators have adopted one or other of the late Jewish theories, either absolutely or with modifications. It is impossible to examine and refute their arguments here. We must be content to repeat what was urged in the introductory paragraph to Jer 42:1-22; namely:

(1) that the portraiture of “the Servant of the Lord” in this place has so strong an individuality and such marked personal features that it cannot possibly be a mere personified collectivewhether Israel, or faithful Israel, or ideal Israel, or the collective body of the prophets; and

(2) that it goes so infinitely beyond anything of which a mere man was ever capable, that it can only refer to the unique Manthe God-ManChrist. It is, moreover, applied directly to Christ in Mat 8:17; Mar 15:28; Luk 22:37; Joh 12:37, Joh 12:38; Act 8:32, Act 8:33; Rom 10:16; and 1Pe 2:24, 1Pe 2:25. The Messianic interpretation is maintained, among moderns, by Hengstenberg, Keil, Umbreit, (Ehler, Delitzsch, Kay, Cheyne, Henderson, Alexander, Urwick, and others.

Isa 53:1

Who hath believed? Isaiah felt that he spoke, mainly, to unbelieving ears (see above, Isa 28:9-15; Isa 29:10-15; Isa 30:9-11; Isa 42:23, etc.). The unbelief was likely to be intensified when so marvellous a prophecy was delivered as that which he was now commissioned to put forth. Still, of course, there is rhetorical exaggeration in the question, which seems to imply that no one would believe. Our report; literally, that which has been heard by us. But the word is used technically for a prophetic revelation (see Isa 28:9, Isa 28:19; Jer 49:14). Here it would seem to refer especially to the Messianic prophecies delivered by Isaiah. To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? The “arm of the Lord,” which has been “made bare in the eyes of all the nations” (Isa 52:10), yet requires the eye of faith to see it. Many Jews would not see the working of God’s providence in the victories of Cyrus, or in the decision to which he came to restore the Jews to their own country. Unbelief can always assign the most plainly providential arrangements to happy accident.

Isa 53:2

For he shall grow up; rather, now he grew up. The verbs are, all of them, in the past, or completed tense, until Isa 53:7, and are to be regarded as “perfects of prophetic certitude.” As Mr. Cheyne remarks, “All has been finished before the foundations of the world in the Divine counsels.” Before him; i.e. “before Jehovah”under the fostering care of Jehovah (comp. Luk 2:40, Luk 2:52). God the Father had his eye ever fixed upon the Son with watchfulness and tenderness and love. As a tender plant; literally, as a sapling, or as a sucker (comp. Job 8:16; Job 14:7; Job 15:30; Psa 80:12; Eze 17:4, Eze 17:22; Hos 14:6). The “branch” of Isa 11:1, Isa 11:10a different wordhas nearly the same meaning. The Messiah will be a fresh sprout from the stump of a tree that has been felled; i.e. from the destroyed Davidic monarchy. As a root (so Isa 11:10; Rev 5:5). The “sapling” from the house of David shall become the “root” out of which his Church will grow (comp. Joh 15:1-6). Out of a dry ground. Either out of the “dry ground” of a corrupt age and nation, or out of the arid soil of humanity. In the East it is not unusual to see a tall succulent plant growing from a soft which seems utterly devoid of moisture. Such plants have roots that strike deep, and draw their nourishment from a hidden source. He hath no form nor comeliness; rather, he had no form nor majesty. It is scarcely the prophet’s intention to describe the personal appearance of our Lord. What he means is that “the Servant” would have no splendid surroundings, no regal pomp nor splendournothing about him to attract men’s eyes, or make them think him anything extraordinary. It is impossible to suppose that there was not in his appearance something of winning grace and quiet majesty. but it was of a kind that was not adapted to draw the gaze of the multitude. And when we shall see him. Some connect this clause with the preceding, and translate, “He hath no form nor comeliness, that we should regard him; no beauty, that we should desire him” (Lowth, Vitringa, Gesenius, Ewald, Knobel, Henderson, Urwick. But Stier, Delitzsch, Kay, and Mr. Cheyne prefer the construction found in the Authorized Version). No beauty; literally, no sightliness; i.e. nothing to attract the eye or arrest it. The spiritual beauties of holy and sweet expression and majestic calm could only have ben spiritually discerned.

Isa 53:3

He is despised; rather, was despised (comp. Isa 49:7 and Psa 22:6). Men’s contempt was shown, partly in the little attention which they paid to his teaching, partly in their treatment of him on the night and day before the Crucifixion. Rejected of men; rather, perhaps, forsaken of men“one from whom men held themselves aloof” (Cheyne); comp. Job 19:14. Our Lord had at no time more than a “little flock” attached to him. Of these, after a time, “many went back, and walked no more with him” (Joh 6:66). Some, who believed on him, would only come to him by night (Joh 3:2). All the “rulers” and great men held aloof from him (Joh 7:48). At the end, even his apostles “forsook him, and fled” (Mat 26:56). A Man of sorrows. The word translated “sorrows” means also pains of any kind. But the beautiful rendering of our version may well stand, since there are many places where the word used certainly means “sorrow” and nothing else (see Exo 3:7; 2Ch 6:29; Psa 32:10; Psa 38:17; Ecc 1:18; Jer 30:15; Jer 45:3; Lam 1:12, Lam 1:18, etc.). Aquila well translates, The “sorrows” of Jesus appear on every page of the Gospels. Acquainted with grief; literally, with sickness; but as aeger and aegritudo are applied in Latin both to the mind and to the body, so kholi, the word here used, would seem to be in Hebrew (see Jer 6:7; Jer 10:19).The translation of the Authorized Version may therefore be retained. We hid as it were our faces from him; literally, and there was as it were the hiding of the face from him. Some suppose the hiding of God’s face to be intended; but the context, which describes the treatment of the Servant by his fellow-men, makes the meaning given in our version far preferable. Men turned their faces from him when they met him, would not see him, would not recognize him (comp. Job 19:13-17; Job 30:10). Despised. A repetition very characteristic of Isaiah (see Isa 1:7; Isa 3:12; Isa 4:3; Isa 6:11; Isa 14:25; Isa 15:8; Isa 17:12, Isa 17:13, etc.).

Isa 53:4

Surely he hath borne our griefs; or, surely they were our griefs which he bore. The pronouns are emphatic. Having set forth at length the fact of the Servant’s humiliation (Isa 53:2, Isa 53:3), the prophet hastens to declare the reason of it. Twelve times over within the space of nine verses he asserts. with the most emphatic reiteration, that all the Servant’s sufferings were vicarious, borne for him, to save him from the consequences of his sins, to enable him to escape punishment. The doctrine thus taught in the Old Testament is set forth! with equal distinctness in the New (Mat 20:28; Joh 11:50-52; Rom 3:25; Rom 5:6-8; Rom 8:3; 2Co 5:18-21; 2Co 8:9; Gal 3:13; Eph 1:7; 1Pe 2:24, etc.), and forms the hope, the trust, and the consolation of Christians. and carried our sorrows. The application which St. Matthew makes of this passage to our Lord’s miracles of healing (Mat 8:17) is certainly not the primary sense of the words, but may be regarded as a secondary application of them. Christ’s sufferings were the remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God. They who saw Christ suffer, instead of understanding that he was bearing the sins of others in a mediatorial capacity, imagined that he was suffering at God’s hands for his own sins. Hence they scoffed at him and reviled him, even in his greatest agonies (Mat 27:39-44). To one only, and him not one of God’s people, was it given to see the contrary, and to declare aloud, at the moment of the death, “Certainly this was a righteous Man” (Luk 23:47).

Isa 53:5

But he was wounded for our transgressions. This verse contains four asseverations of the great truth that all Christ’s sufferings were for us, and constituted the atonement for our sins. The form is varied, but the truth is one. Christ was “wounded” or “pierced”

(1) by the thorns;

(2) by the nails; and

(3) by the spear of the soldier.

The wounds inflicted by the nails caused his death, He was bruised; or, crushed (comp. Isa 3:15; Isa 19:10; Isa 57:15. Psa 72:4). “No stronger expression could be found in Hebrew to denote severity of sufferingsuffering unto death” (Urwick). The chastisement of our peace was upon him; i.e. “the chastisement which brought us peace,” which put a stop to the enmity between fallen man and an offended Godwhich made them once more at one (comp. Eph 2:15-17, “Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the Law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and came and preached peace to you which were afar off;” Col 1:20, “Having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself”). With his stripes we are healed; rather, we were healed. Besides the blows inflicted on him with the hand (Mat 26:27) and with the reed (Mat 27:30), our Lord was judicially scourged (Mat 27:26). Such scourging would leave the “stripe-marks” which are here spoken of.

Isa 53:6

All we like sheep have gone astray. “All we” means either the whole nation of Israel, which “went astray” in the wilderness of sin (Psa 107:4; Psa 119:176; Eze 34:6), or else the whole race of mankind, which had wandered from the right path, and needed atonement and redemption even mere than Israel itself We have turned every one to his own way. Collectively and individually, the whole world had sinned. There was “none that did good” absolutely”no, not one” (Psa 14:3). All had quitted “the way of the Lord” (Isa 40:3) to walk in their “own ways” (Isa 66:3). The Lord hath laid on him; literally, the Lord caused to light upon him. God the Father, as the primary Disposer of all things, lays upon the Son the burden, which the Son voluntarily accepts. He comes into the world to do the Father’s will. He prays to the Father, “Let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt“ (Mat 26:39). So St. John says that the Father “sent the Son to be the Propitiation for our sins” (1Jn 4:10). And St. Paul tells us that God (the Father) “made him to be sin for us who knew no sin” (2Co 5:21). It does not lessen the Son’s exceeding mercy and loving-kindness in accepting the burden, that it was laid upon him by the Father. The iniquity of us all (compare the initial “All we”). The redemption is as universal as the sin, at any rate potentially. Christ on the cross made “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.”

Isa 53:7

He was oppressed. As Israel under the Egyptian taskmasters (Exo 3:7). The cruel ill usage in the high priest’s house, and before Herod is, perhaps, specially pointed at. He was afflicted; rather, he abased himself (comp. Isa 31:4 and Exo 10:3). The position of the emphatic pronoun (hu‘) between the first participle and the second detaches the second clause from the first and conjoins it with the third. Otherwise the rendering of the Authorized Version might stand. Translate, He was oppressed, but he abased himself and opened not his mouth. The silence of Jesus before his judges (Mat 26:22, Mat 26:23; Mat 27:14), when he could so easily have vindicated himself from every charge, was a self-abasement. It seemed like an admission of guilt. He opened not his mouth (comp. Psa 38:13, Psa 38:14; Psa 39:2, Psa 39:9). The contrast of the Servant’s silence and passivity with men’s ordinary vehemence of self-assertion under ill usage is most striking. Who was ever silent but he under such extremity of provocation? He is brought as a lamb; rather, as the lamb. The Paschal lamb is, perhaps, intended, or, at any rate, the lamb of sacrifice. The prophet has often seen the dumb, innocent lamb led in silence to the altar, to be slain there, and thinks of that touching sight. It was probably the use of this imagery here which caused the Baptist to term our Lord “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (Joh 1:29). As a sheep before her shearers. A second image, a reflex of the first, somewhat weaker, as so often in Isaiah (Isa 1:22, Isa 1:30; Isa 5:18, Isa 5:24; Isa 8:14; Isa 10:24, Isa 10:27, Isa 10:34; Isa 11:8; Isa 13:14; Isa 24:13; Isa 25:7, etc.).

Isa 53:8

He was taken from prison and from judgment; rather, by oppression and a judgment was he taken away; i.e. (us Dr. Kay says) “by a violence which cloaked itself under the formalities of a legal process.” The Septuagint Version, which is quoted by Philip the deacon in the Acts (Isa 8:1-22 :33), must have been derived from quite a different text. It preserves, however, the right rendering of the verb, “was he taken away,” i.e. removed from the earth. Who shall declare his generation? literally, his generation who considereth? The meaning is obscure. Dr. Kay understands by “his generation,” his lifetime or his life, comparing Isa 38:12, “Mine age is departed,” where the same word is used and accompanied by a pronominal suffix. Mr. Urwick suggests that it includes

(1) his origin;

(2) his earthly life; and

(3) his everlasting reign in heaven.

Others (Delitzsch, Gesenius, Cheyne) take “his generation” to mean “the men of his generation,” and join the clause with what follows: “As for those of his generation, which of them considered that he was cut off,” etc.? He was cut off; i.e. taken away before his time, cut down like a flower (comp. Job 14:2; Lam 3:54; Eze 37:11). The land of the living. The present world, the earth (see Isa 38:11; and comp. Job 28:13; Psa 27:13; Psa 52:5; Psa 116:9; Psa 142:1-7 2; Jer 11:19). For the transgression of my people was he stricken. The sentiment is the same as in Isa 38:5, but with the difference that there it was suffering only, here it is death itself, which the Servant endures for man. “My people” may be either “God’s people” or “the prophet’s people,” according as the speaker is regarded as Isaiah or Jehovah. Jehovah certainly becomes the Speaker in verses 11, 12.

Isa 53:9

And he made his grave with the wicked; rather, they assigned him his grave with the wicked. The verb is used impersonally. Those who condemned Christ to be crucified with two malefactors on the common execution-ground”the place of a skull”meant his grave to be “with the wicked,” with whom it would naturally have been but for the interference of Joseph of Arimathaea. Crucified persons were buried with their crosses near the scene of their crucifixion by the Romans. And with the rich in his death; or, and (he was) with a rich one after his death. In the preceding clause, the word translated “the wicked” is plural, but in the present, the word translated “the rich” is singular. The expression translated “in his death” means “when he was dead,” “after death”. The words have a singularly exact fulfilment in the interment of our Lord (Mat 27:57-60). Because. The preposition used may mean either “because” or “although.” The ambiguity is, perhaps, intentional. He had done no violence; or, no wrong (see Gen 16:5; 1Ch 12:17; Job 19:7; Psa 35:11 (margin); Pro 26:6). The LXX. give while St. Peter renders the word used by (1Pe 2:22). The sinlessness of Christ is asserted by himself (Joh 8:46), and forms the main argument in the Epistle to the Hebrews for the superiority of the new covenant over the old (Heb 7:26-28; Heb 9:14). It is also witnessed to by St. Peter (1Pe 2:22), by St. Paul (2Co 5:21), and by St. John (1Jn 3:5). As no other man was ever without sin, it follows that the Servant of the present chapter must be Jesus.

Isa 53:10

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him (see the comment on Isa 53:6, ad fin.). The sufferings of Christ, proceeding from the “determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God” (Act 2:23), and being permitted by him; were in some sort his doing. It “pleased him,” moreover, that they should be undergone, for he saw with satisfaction the Son’s self-sacrifice, and he witnessed with joy man’s redemption and deliverance effected thereby. He hath put him to grief; rather, he dealt grievouslya sort of hendiadys. “He bruised him with a grievous bruising.” When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin. It is proposed (Ewald, Cheyne), by the alteration of a letter, to make the passage run thus: “When he shall make his soul an offering,” etc; and argued that “he who offers the Servant’s life as a sacrifice must be the Servant himself, and not Jehovah” (Cheyne). No doubt the Servant did offer his own life (see Mat 20:28,” He gave his soul a ransom for many”); but that fact does not preclude the possibility of the Father having also offered it. “Believest thou not,” said our Lord to Philip, “that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (Joh 14:10). This perienchoresis, as the ancient theologians called it, makes it possible to predicate of the Father almost all the actions which can be predicated of the Sonall, in fact, excepting those which belong to the Son’s humanity, or which involve obedience and subordination. As the Father had “laid on Christ the iniquity of us all” (Isa 53:6), as he had “bruised him and put him to grief,” so he might be said to have “made his soul an offering for sin.” All was settled in the Divine counsels from all eternity, and when the ideal became the actual, God the Father wrought with God the Son to effectuate it. “Offerings for sin,” or “guilt offerings,” were distinct from “sin offerings.” The object of the former was “satisfaction,” of the latter “expiation.” The Servant of Jehovah was, however, to be both. “As in Isa 53:5 the Divine Servant is represented as a Sin Offering, his death being an expiation, so hero he is described as a Guilt Offering, his death being a satisfaction “. He shall see his seed. The “seed” of a teacher of religion are his disciples. St. Paul speaks of Onesimus as one whom he had “begotten in his bends” (Phm 1:10). He calls himself by implication the “father” of his Corinthian converts (1Co 4:15). Both he and St. John address their disciples as “little children” (Gal 4:19; I Joh 2:1, Joh 2:18, Joh 2:25; Joh 3:7, Joh 3:18; Joh 4:4; Joh 5:21). It had long previously been promised that “a seed should serve” Messiah (Psa 22:30). Our Lord himself occasionally called his disciples his “children” (Mar 10:24; Joh 21:4). He has always “seen his seed” in his true followers. He shall prolong his days. A seeming contradiction to the statement (verse 8) that he should be “cut off” out of the land of the living; and the more surprising because his death is made the condition of this long life: “When thou shalt make his soul an offering [or, ‘sacrifice’] for sin,” then “he shall prolong his days.” But the resurrection of Christ, and his entrance upon an immortal life (Rom 6:9), after offering himself as a Sacrifice upon the cross, exactly meets the difficulty and solves the riddle (comp. Rev 1:18). The pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. “In his hand” means “by his instrumentality.” The “pleasure of the Lord” is God’s ultimate aim and end with respect to his universe. This would “prosper”i.e. be advanced, wrought out, rendered effectualby the instrumentality of Christ. “Taking the verse as a whole, it sets forth

(1) the origin,

(2) the nature, and

(3) the result of the Saviour’s sufferings.

Taking the last clause by itself, we have

(1) the Divine complacency in the purpose of human salvation; and

(2) the successful issue of that purpose as administered by the Messiah”.

Isa 53:11

He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied; rather, because of the travail of his soul he shall see, and be satisfied (comp. Php 2:7-11, “He made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a Name which is above every name: that at the Name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”). No crossno crown. First, suffering, then glory. Because Christ suffered, and was bruised, and put to grief, and made a sacrifice for sin; because of all this “travail of his soul,”therefore it was given him to see the happy results of his sufferingsthe formation of that Church which will live with him for ever in heaven (Rev 7:4-17), and therewith to be “satisfied.“ By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; i.e. “by his knowledge of the Divine counsels and purpose, which he will impart to his disciples, shall my righteous Servant justify many” (literally, the many), or, in other words, “turn them from sin to righteousness” (comp. Dan 12:3). Nothing is so effectual in turning men to righteousness as teaching them the true knowledge of Godhis nature, his purposes with regard to them, his feelings towards them. Christ, from his own knowledge, gave men this knowledge, and so did all that could be done to draw them to his Father. And his efforts were not without result. The fruit of his teaching has been the justification of manyay, of “the many,” as both Isaiah and St. Paul (Rom 5:19) testify. For he shall bear their iniquities; rather, and their iniquities he himself shall bear. The initial part of the clause is not “causal,” but merely connective. There are two main things which Christ does for his peoplehe makes them righteous by infusing into them of his own righteousness; and he bears the burden of their iniquities, taking them upon himself, ,and by his perpetual intercession obtaining God’s forgiveness of them. As Delitzsch says, “His continued taking of our trespasses upon himself is merely the constant presence and presentation of his atonement, which has been offered once for all. The dead yet living One, because of his one self-sacrifice, is an eternal Priest, who now lives to distribute the blessings which he has acquired”.

Isa 53:12

Therefore (see the comment on Isa 53:11, sub init.). Will I divide him a portion with the great; i.e. “I will place him among the great conquering ones of the earth”an accommodation to human modes of thought analogous to the frequent comparison of Christ’s kingdom with the kingdoms of the earth (Dan 2:44; Dan 7:9-14. etc.). The apostle goes deeper into the true nature of things when he says, “Therefore also hath God highly exalted him, and given him a Name which is above every name“ (Php 2:9). He shall divide the spoil with the strong. A repetition of the thought in the preceding clause (comp. Pro 16:19). Because he hath poured out his soul unto death. Christ not only died for man, but, as it were, “poured out his soul” with his own hand to the last drop. The expression emphasizes the duration and the voluntariness of Messiah’s sufferings. And he was numbered with the transgressors; rather, and he was reckoned with transgressors (see Luk 22:37, where our Lord applies the words to himself). Christ was condemned as a “blasphemer“ (Mat 26:65), crucified with malefactors (Luk 23:32), called “that deceiver” (Mat 27:63), and regarded generally by the Jews as accursed (Deu 21:23). And he bare the sin of many; rather, and himself bare the sin of many (compare the last clauses of Isa 53:6 and Isa 53:11; and see also Heb 9:27). And made intercession for the transgressors. The future is used, with van conversive, instead of the preterite, to mark that the act, though begun in the past, is inchoate only, and not completed. The “intercession for transgressors” was begun upon the cross with the compassionate words, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luk 23:34). But it has continued ever since, and will continue until the last day (see Rom 8:34; Heb 7:25).

HOMILETICS

Isa 53:2-11

The sufferings of Jesus.

It is the great object of Isaiah, in this chapter, to declare to his countrymen

(1) that the Messiah would be a suffering Messiah;

(2) that his sufferings would be vicarious; and

(3) that they would have a propitiatory or atoning character.

I. THE MESSIAH A SUFFERING MESSIAH. Hitherto Isaiah had looked upon the promised Redeemer on the side of his glories and his triumphs. His names were to be “Immanuel,” or “God with us” (Isa 7:14), “Wonderful,” “Counsellor,” “The Mighty God,” “The Everlasting Father,” “The Prince of Peace” (Isa 9:6). “Of the increase of his government and peace there was to be no end, upon the throne of David, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever” (Isa 9:7). “The Spirit of the Lord was to be upon him and with righteousness was he to judge the poor, and to reprove with equity for the meek of the earth, and to smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips to slay the wicked” (Isa 11:2-4). He was to “bring forth judgment to the Gentiles” (Isa 42:1); he was not to “fail nor be discouraged” (Isa 42:4); he was to be “upheld ever by God’s hand” (Isa 42:6); “the isles were to wait for his Law” (Isa 42:4). But now the prophet has to speak in another strain. Psalms probably written before his time (as Psa 2:1-12; Psa 22:1-31; Psa 31:1-24; Psa 40:1-17; Psa 49:1-20; etc.) had partially drawn aside the veil, and given indications that the career of the Deliverer would not be all glory or all triumph. But it was difficult to determine how far they were historical, how far prophetic. It was a part of Isaiah’s mission to reveal, in language that could scarcely be mistaken, the darker aspect of Messiah’s coming, the “contradiction of sinners” which he would encounter, and its consequences. Messiah was to be “despised,” “forsaken” (verse 8), “pierced,” “crushed,” made sore with “stripes” (verse 5), “oppressed” (verse 7), “cut off” before his time, “stricken” (verse 8), “dealt with grievously” (verse 10). He was to be condemned by an iniquitous “judgment” (verse 8), to be “brought as a lamb to the slaughter” (verse 7), to be “assigned his grave with the wicked” (verse 9), and “reckoned with transgressors” (verse 12). His earthly life was to be such as would be best summed up in the brief phrase, “A Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (verse 3).

II. THE SUFFERINGS OF MESSIAH VICARIOUS. Men make a difficulty about vicarious suffering; but half the suffering in the world is of this nature. Who that watches by a sick-bed, and supports and props the sufferer, and stays unmoved in a cramped position not to disturb the sick one’s snatch of slumber, but suffers to assuage or remove another’s pain? Who that, hungry himself, passes on to another the food that he might eat himself, but does the same? What mother but bears a thousand discomforts to shield her child from them? What soldier but tries to take himself the blow which he sees must otherwise prostrate his chief? How are the young, who rush into ruinous extravagance which would cripple them for life, saved but by a father or a guardian taking on him the grievous trouble of paying the debts incurred? What do not refined ladies undergo to rescue and recover those among their sisters who have fallen? Men’s and women’s kindness of heart is continually leading them to undergo vicarious suffering; nor is there often any other way by which the sufferings of our fellow-creatures can be removed. If I take the load that is galling another’s back and put it on my own, I do it with the full knowledge that my back will soon ache. If I transfer my wraps to a sick fellow-traveller on a wintry day, I am quite aware that the cold will clutch me instead of him. The vicarious character of Messiah’s sufferings is the direct subject of seven distinct assertions:

(1) “He hath borne our griefs;”

(2) “He hath “carried our sorrows;”

(3) “He was wounded for our transgressions;

(4) “He was bruised for our iniquities;”

(5) “The chastisement of our peace was upon him;”

(6) “With his stripes we are healed” (verses 4, 5);

(7) “For the transgression of my people was he stricken” (verse 8).

It is indirectly implied in four others:

(1) “The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all;”

(2) “Thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin;”

(3) “He shall bear their iniquities;”

(4) “He bare the sins of many” (verses 6, 10-12).

III. THE SUFFERINGS OF MESSIAH PROPITIATORY. The idea of propitiation is implied in the three passages where Messiah is said to have borne the sins of men. No otherwise can one man bear the sin of another than by doing something which propitiates him whom the sin has offended. But it is further distinctly asserted in verse 10, when it is said that the soul of the Servant should be “made an offering for sin.” As the whole notion of offering for sin was grounded on the idea of expiation, so it was now made plain that the real expiation, the real atonement, the real propitiation, to which the entire ritual system of the Israelitish nation pointed, was the offering up of that “righteous Servant” of the Lord, who, “having done no wrong,” having been guilty of no “guile,” nevertheless was made sin for man, and became a willing and meritorious Sacrifice. “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin” (Hos 10:4). It is impossible for sinful man to redeem his fellow-man (Psa 49:7, Psa 49:8). Only One who was without sin, “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners” (Hos 7:1-16 :26), could make atonement for others’ sins; only One who was perfectly pure himself could purify them; only One who needed none to intercede for him could intercede for his brethren. It is strange how men dislike, and kick against, and endeavour to explain away, the doctrine of vicarious suffering and substitution, and of atonement made for man by the blood of Christ. Yet why should this be? “The doctrine,” as Mr. Urwick says, “is in perfect keeping with all that the Jewish ceremonial embodied, and with the teaching alike of the Redeemer himself (Mat 20:28; Joh 10:11; Luk 22:20) and his apostles, St. Paul (Rom 3:24-26), St. Peter (1Pe 2:24, 1Pe 2:25), and St. John (1Jn 2:2). It satisfies the Divine holiness, and the demands of the sinner’s own conscience. It fully recognizes the reality of sin and its exceeding sinfulness, whereas all other attempted explanations tend to make light of sin, or at least to represent it more or less as a matter of human weakness, which a good-natured God will readily pass over and forgive without a ransom. It presents the way of salvation as simple and straightforward; all can understand it; whereas other attempted explanations of the efficacy of Christ’s redemptive work are cloudy, indefinite, mystified, abstruse, and difficult of apprehension even by the learned”.

HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON

Isa 53:4-6

The suffering Servant of Jehovah.

I. THE DESCRIPTION OF THE SUFFERING. It depicts, by simple force of language, its extreme intensitynot a suffering springing from internal weakness of nature, and so withering and dying like a lamp for want of oil, but “like a torch in its full flame bent and ruffled, and at length blown out by the breath of a north wind.” It was a diffused suffering, according to the expression of the psalmist, “like water in his bowels, or oil in his bones.” “In his person we may see grief in its height and supremacy, triumphant, crowned and arrayed in purple, grief reigning and doing the utmost that it was able.” In proportion to the fineness of the nature is the sensitiveness, and in proportion to the sensitiveness, the capacity for suffering. In these words, “stricken, pierced, afflicted, crushed, beaten with stripes,” we have a cumulation of strong touches in the picture. Add to this, “smitten of God.” The allusion is said to be to leprosy, regarded as a punishment for grievous sin (Num 12:9, Num 12:10; 2Ki 15:5; Psa 51:7). “The measure of every passion is the operation of the agent. We must not measure the Divine strokes by the proportion of those blows which are inflicted by the greatest and most exasperated mortal. Every blow inflicted by the fiercest tyrant can reach no further than the body, and the body is but the dwelling-place, not any part, of the soul. None can reach the conscience but he who made it. God is able, merely by letting a few drops of his wrath fall upon the guilty conscience, so to scald with a lively sense of sin, that the man shall live a continual terror to himself. His own breast shall echo peals of vengeance to him every hour. Suffering must needs be grievous when infinite justice passes sentence, and infinite power does execution” (South). An “unparalleled greatness” of suffering is, then, here indicated.

II. THE VICARIOUS NATURE OF THE SUFFERING. He bore our sicknesses; “the first of twelve distinct assertions in this one chapter of the vicarious character of the sufferings of the Servant.” They are “because of our rebellions” and of “our iniquities.” The punishment which is the means of “our peace” and welfare fell upon him; we have been healed through his stripes. The iniquity of all has been made to light upon him. “As the avenger of blood pursues the murderer, so punishment by an inner necessity overtakes the sinner (Psa 40:12; Num 32:23; cf. Deu 27:15). And inasmuch as the Servant, by Jehovah’s will, has made himself the Substitute of the Jewish nation, it follows that the punishment of the latter must fall upon him.” After all that has been written for ages upon this difficult subject of vicarious suffering or punishment, there remain difficulties not to be surmounted by our reason. How can punishment be transferred? How can the suffering due to the sinner be imposed upon an innocent person? How can any honest mind admit such a confusion of relation, even were it offered, as a means of escape from penalty? The answers to these questions are given in poetic metaphors, and analogies which do not reach to the heart of the matter, and forensic quibbles which are not lovely in connection with spiritual matters. For all that, there is something the heart of all men fixes upon as lovely, Divine, adorable, in the idea of a man laying down his life for his brethren, a patriot for his country. Much of this deep feeling enters into the old legends, often of a womanan Alkestis, a Makaria, an Hesione; often of a mana son of Mesa, King of Moab, a Menoikeus, a Curtius. If we begin to criticize, we lose the sense and spirit of these sweet stories. So with the great tradition of the Servant of Jehovah, and with the still greater tradition by which our lives and hearts have been formed.

III. APPLICATION. Every Christian thinks of Christ when he reads these beautiful words. Who but he can inspire us with the willingness to “crucify the flesh, with the affections and lusts”? “Nature, indeed, cannot, will not, prompt it; but Christianity, which rises many strains above nature, must and will. The best sacrifice to a crucified Saviour is a crucified lust, a bleeding heart, and a dying corruption. Let the ambitious man lay his pride in the dust, the covetous man deposit his treasures in the banks of charity and liberality, and let the voluptuous epicure renounce his cups and his whores,and this will be a present to Heaven better than a whole hecatomb; nor could the fruit of his body fall so grateful a sacrifice upon God’s altar as the sin of his soul” (South).J.

Isa 53:7-12

Patience and the Divine purpose.

In the picture of the Servant of Jehovah we have an exemplification of the force of quiet endurance which prevails over violence, even to victory.

I. AN EXAMPLE OF SUBMISSION TO WRONG. The slave-driver (Exo 3:7; Job 3:18), or the exactor of a tax or a debt (Deu 15:2, Deu 15:3; 2Ki 23:35), is the image of oppression in its urgency and its contumely And the silence of the suffering One eloquently speaks of his resignation (Psa 38:14; Psa 39:9). The gentle uncomplaining lamb may well set him forth “with power at his disposal, yet as meek as if he had no power; with consciousness of impending fate, yet calm as if ignorant of it” (cf. Jer 11:19; 1Pe 2:23). The idea of the Lamb of God in the New Testament rests in part upon this passage “The two or three who can win it may be called victors in life’s conflict; to them belongs the regnum et diadema tutum.“ His was the lot represented by our great poet as tempting in its extreme anguish to thoughts of suicide. But from another source the Servant obtains his quietus. He was not supported by the thought that the meaning of his sufferings was understood and laid to heart by his contemporaries. They did not see that for the rebellion of the people he was stricken. And even after death insult pursued his memory (cf. Jer 26:23). They buried his body, not amidst the remains of his departed friends, but with the wicked and the criminal, the proud deniers of God, or with the rich and haughty Gentiles. This was the last mark of an ignominy (Isa 14:19), and it was all undeserved. How mighty the contrast of appearances and results! The despised of men is in reality the eternally honoured of God.

II. THE DIVINE PURPOSE AND DECREE. There was no cruel accident or misunderstanding in all this; it was the result of Divine deliberate willthe pleasure of Jehovah. The Servant was to lay down his life as a guilt offering. He was to fulfil and crown the idea of all sacrifice in his own Person. Restitution was to be made for injured rights of property. Israel had become de-consecrated. Her life had been forfeited, and satisfaction must be rendered. And this is provided in the self-dedication of the Servant. And the result will be that he will become the Head of a spiritual posterity (cf. Psa 22:30). His piety will be rewarded by length of days. Both these are figures of highest blessing among the Hebrews (Gen 12:2; Deu 6:2; Psa 91:16; Psa 127:5; Psa 128:6; Pro 3:2; Pro 17:6). He will be promoted to a scene of high spiritual employment (Isa 52:13), the “pleasure of Jehovah” prospering under his conduct. His former spiritual agony and toil of spirit, his travail (Psa 110:1-7 :10; Job 3:10; Jer 20:18; Ecc 2:11-20; Ecc 4:4-6 for the word), will be abundantly compensated by the joy of contemplation of the progressing work of salvation, as the husbandman is satisfied with the sight of the harvest, for which he has “sown in tears.” On the foundation of his sacrifice and his teaching many will be redeemed from sin and become a righteous and a holy people. And so, without bloodshed and the din of battle, he will become a glorious Conqueror, and the spiritual kingdom of the Eternal will be among the world-subduing powers. All this because he humbled himself, because he was devoted, because he loved.

III. LESSONS. How mighty the power of patience! The hero of God is not clothed in purple, nor fed on sweets; “daily his own heart he eats.” His hope sets not with the setting of suns; his faith is earlier in its rising than the stars. Amidst all his seeming weakness he cannot be crushed; and the blows of his adversaries miss their aim. The spiritual element is immortal, indefeasible, finally victorious.

“They say, through patience, chalk

Becomes a ruby stone;

Ah, yes! but by the true heart’s blood

The chalk is crimson grown.”

Who was originally meant by the servant of Jehovah may remain obscure. We at least cannot but apply the representation to the Captain of salvation, the Leader and Finisher of faith, who endured the cross for the joy set before him. And also to every true servant of the Eternal, who feels that he was brought into the world to witness for the truth and devote himself in the cause of love.

“This is he who, felled by foes,
Sprang harmless up, refreshed by blows;
He to captivity was sold,
But him no prison-bars would hold;
Though they sealed him in a rock,
Mountain-chains he can unlock;
Thrown to lions for their meat,
The crouching lion kissed his feet;
Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,
But arched o’er him an honouring vault.
This is he men miscall fate,
Threading dark ways, arriving late,
But e’er coming in time to crown
The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.”

J.

HOMILIES BY W.M. STATHAM

Isa 53:2

The depraved eye.

“No beauty that we should desire him.” In this prophetic picture of the Christ the question arises, “Who hath believed our report?” What wonderful attestation history gives to this!”He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Whether the words, “he hath no form nor comeliness,” apply to the physical features of Christ, we cannot say; for the Jews had no “art.” They interpreted the words, “Thou shalt not make to thyself the likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath,” not as an injunction against “idols” alone, but against all statuary and all art. So, though we have the likenesses of the emperors on the Roman coins, and the Greek statues of Socrates and their wise men, we have no likeness of Christ or his apostles. But we do know the meaning of this, “There is no beauty that we should desire him.”

I. THE EYE ADMIRES ONLY WHAT THE HEART LOVES. The beauty that eye desired was quite different. It was superficial and carnal, not inward and spiritual.

II. THE WORLD DOES NOT ALTER ITS TASTE. The classic virtues of paganismpride, self-reliance, honourare more prized by men of the world than patience, gentleness, pity, forbearance, and charity. Christ is not beautiful to the proud, nor to the selfish, nor to the ambitions and the vain. Only the pure in heart admire and love him!W.M.S.

Isa 53:3

The rejected Saviour.

“He is desvised and rejected of men; a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” He! Who? The incarnate Lord, who has grown up in childhood as a “tender plant;” who is the one “living root,” while all others are the dry soil of a decrepit and degenerate humanity.

I. THIS REVEALS TO US WHAT THE HEBREW CHURCH WAS. Christ was the “touchstone” of that Church. Its conduct to him made manifest to what a condition they had come. Think of the contrast. Pharisaism was triumphantChrist was despised. The outward, the formal, the ritual, was preferred before the holy, the inward, and the spiritual. Christ was “rejected.” They had the first opportunity of welcoming the “Lord from heaven.” “To the Jew first.” How learned men may be in tradition! how well acquainted with the ‘Mishna’ and the ‘Gemara,’ and yet know ail of ancient revelation except its meaning! The great gates of prophecy open wide to lot the true King through; and then treat him as a Pretender, and crown him with thorns.

II. THIS REVEALS TO US WHAT CHRIST WAS ON THE HUMAN SIDE. “A Man of sorrows.” Think of his exquisite moral sensitiveness in a world of sin. Think of his tender human sympathies in a world of sorrow. “Acquainted with grief.” Not in one special form, but in all its spheres, that he might be a Brother born for adversity. Acquainted with it. So that he had daily fellowship with it; not passing through its transient experiences, but familiar with it as the companion of his life.W.M.S.

Isa 53:5

The Divine atonement.

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.” We shall never understand the atonement. From Anselm’s day to our own there have been ever-changing theories of it. But the fact remains; and, mysterious as it is, we learn that there was a Godward aspect of it, as well as a manward aspect. But into “the cup which my Father hath given me to drink” no man, no angel, can look.

I. THIS IS THE REVELATION OF DIVINE SACRIFICE. “He gave himself.” But he was more than wounded by the treatment of his character, and by the contempt of his claims, and by the forsakings of his own disciples. It is not enough to say that the pride of the Jew and the scorn of the Greek and the power of the Roman crucified him. He was “delivered up for our offences.” So here “the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”

II. THIS IS THE SUBJECT OF ETERNAL SONG. Heaven rings with the grateful acclaim, “Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.” And the presence of the redeemed there at all is distinctly stated to rest upon the sacrifice of Christ. Because “they have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, therefore are they before the throne of God.” This, at all events, has been the Catholic teaching of Christendom in all ages; and fill the hymnology of the Church in all its various branches. Roman and Anglican, Lutheran and Puritan, have united in a common adoration of the cross and passion, thus antedating the praises of eternity.W.M.S.

HOMILIES BY W. CLARKSON

Isa 53:2

The attractive and the unattractive in Jesus Christ.

The whole passage is exceedingly remarkable in that it ascribes to one man qualities and surroundings which are so opposed to one another that they seem to be positively inconsistent with each other. And the difficulty has been to find a reconciliation. But all perplexity disappears when they are referred to Jesus Christ; for in him were combined features of character and changes of circumstance which could not be united in any other child of man. We have here a very strong statement as to the unattractive and unpromising appearance of the Servant of Jehovah, and this has to agree and does agree with the power and the dignity which are afterwards predicted of him (Isa 53:10, Isa 53:12), and with the attractive power he has exercised in all ages of the world. We look at both.

I. THE UNATTRACTIVE IN JESUS CHRIST. He grew up as a tender twig or as a sprout that struggles for life in a dry ground; he lacked the beauty that draws attention, the comeliness which wins regard, in that:

1. He came of a fallen family.

2. He was a native of a despised and detested nation, probably the moat hated and contemned of all nations.

3. He was brought up in a disreputable village, and the reproach of its dishonour fell on him.

4. He was untrained in the learning which is held in the highest regard among men.

5. He made no pretence to be a deliverer of the kind popularly desired; he dispensed with military arms, officers, honours; he made no attempt to effect a political revolution; he disregarded and even shunned mere popular favour.

6. He taught truth which was above the appreciation and against the prejudices of his hearers; his thought was too profound for their understanding, his aims were too broad and liberal for their liking. His truth still cuts across the prejudices, passions, and lowest interests of men; and his purpose is to establish a kingdom which is far too spiritual to meet the sympathies of the selfish and the worldly. Nevertheless, he accomplished his purpose. That little shoot has become a strong tree, the strongest and fairest that has ever grown, the leaves of which are for the healing of all the nations. That One in whom was no beauty that men should desire him is proving to be “altogether lovely.”

II. THE ATTRACTIVE IN JESUS CHRIST. What is there in him that draws the eyes and wins the hearts of men?

1. Elements of attraction in his character. His patient dignity in moments of trial and provocation; his gentleness toward the young and the feeble; his interest in the unworthy and unbefriended; his magnanimity toward his enemies, his stainless purity of heart and life; his compassion for the suffering and the sorrowful, etc.

2. Elements of attraction in his gospel. He offers forgiveness of sin to those burdened with a sense of guilt; rest of heart to those who are spiritually weary; holy and fruitful activity to the earnest and energetic; an unfailing friendship to the troubled and the lonely; a heavenly home to the tired travellers along the path of life.C.

Isa 53:3

The Man of sorrows.

We feel that there is but One of our race to whom this title properly belongs; One who may wear it as a crown upon his brow, inasmuch as his sorrows do him higher honour than the most conspicuous success ever conferred on human spirit. It does belong to him, not in virtue of the fact that his outward career involved more cruel hardships than those ever borne before; but in virtue of the fact that his spirit was such as to make his endurance more grievous than that ever experienced by man. It was Jesus Christ’s capacity of sorrow that made all the difference. Capacity to endure rises with the greatness of the spiritual nature; the larger the nature, the greater the possibility and likelihood of suffering. When, therefore, we remember that Jesus Christ, as a perfect Man, had the fullest and keenest possible sensibility of nature, and when we remember that the Divine was so associated in him with the human as immeasurably to deepen and enlarge every faculty of his soul, we shall see that his capacity of sorrow was almost boundless.

I. THE SOURCES OF HIS SORROW. These were, among others:

1. The failure on the part of his own best friends to understand and appreciate him. “They who knew him best could hardly be said to know him;” they entered only a very little way into his purpose, and could not sympathize with him in his deeper disappointments; “he trod the wine-press alone.” But for his Father’s presence he often was absolutely alone (Joh 16:32).

2. The frailty and even the treachery of his disciples. Those who followed him and called him Master had but little care for his truth or love for himself. In a moment of simple perplexity of mind they fell away from him, and abandoned his cause (Joh 6:66). One of his disciples grieved his spirit by distinct denial, and another pierced his heart by utter and open treachery.

3. The malignity of his enemies. There are men who do not care that their brethren whose confidence they have tried to win are cherishing toward them the bitterest hatred; not such was he of the tender heart and loving spirit.

4. The rejection of the people. He was rejected of men. Several men and women, in most places whither he went, may have flocked to hear him; and the common people heard him gladly, we know. But he had to acknowledge to himself that his principles made no way, that his truth was not apprehended and loved, that citizens did not enrol themselves in his spiritual kingdom.

5. The near presence of human suffering and sorrow. By partaking of our humanity as he did, Jesus came into the closest contact with the pains, the privations, the deformities, the diseases, and the sorrows of mankind. And by the power of an intense and living sympathy he made these his own (Mat 8:17; Joh 11:33, Joh 11:35). He bore them on his own heart; they weighed upon his spirit as a heavy burden.

6. A deep sense of human sin,culminating in a sacrifice for it. If the near presence of sorrow grieved and troubled him, how much more that of human sin in all its forms! With our lesser purity, we cannot tell how painful to his heart was the sight of all the selfishness, hypocrisy, greed, worldliness, malignity, corruption which he beheld, most of it affecting the language and the bearing of devotion. Yet with all these sources of sorrow, there were not wanting

II. SPRINGS OF SACRED JOY IN THE HEART AND LIFE OF OUR LORD.

1. Unbroken communion with the heavenly Father.

2. The sincere attachment of many who, though they were imperfect disciples, yet trusted and loved him as their Teacher and Friend.

3. The gratitude of many whom he healed, and the deeper gratitude of many whom he saved.

4. The consciousness of faithful fulfilment of his great mission.

5. A calm, profound assurance of victory through death and shame (Joh 12:24, Joh 12:32). In the heart of the Man of sorrows were deep springs of joy, such as they who wounded him and triumphed over him knew not of. In our case, as in his, there may be the light of a blessed peace and even of heavenly joy in a soul that moves under darkest skies through a clouded life.C.

Isa 53:4, Isa 53:5

The Divine account of the sufferings of Christ.

In these words, which remain ever fresh and sacred, though they are so familiar to our hearts, we have

I. A SAD AND STRIKING PICTURE. It is the picture of the Servant of the Lord, wounded, bruised, chastened, stricken. We cannot fail to see in it the sufferings of the holy Saviour. We see him:

1. Wounded in body; not only a-hungered and athirst, not only weary with long-continued labours and without the promise of the soft pillow. of rest when the day was done, but suffering, beyond this, the laying on him the hard, rough hand of a brutal soldiery, the cruel smiting and scourging, the piercing of hand and foot with the remorseless nail, the pains and pangs of crucifixion. But beyond this, immeasurably more serious and more severe than this, we see him:

2. Wounded in spirit; bruised in soul by the shortcoming, the inconstancy, even the treachery of his own friends, by the superficiality and frailty of the outer band of his disciples, by the intense and inappeasable malignity of his enemies, by the sight of sickness and sorrow, by the pressure and burden of human sin; all this weight of evil crushing his holy and tender spirit.

II. A NATURAL BUT A FALSE CONCLUSION. “We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted,” i.e. on account of his own sins. It was natural that men should think thus; there are facts which go to support though they do not justify it.

1. It is true that sin and suffering are very closely and causally connected. All sinners are, as such, sufferers.

2. It is true that, as a rule, great sinners are great sufferers. It was not accidental that Antiochus Epiphanes, Herod the Great, Philip II. of Spain, and other men, who, like them, committed enormities of wrong-doing, endured terrible pains of body and fearful remorse of spirit. But it does not follow that a very great sufferer is a very great sinner. For it is also true

(1) that some of the purest and saintliest of mankind have been visited with severest bodily pains, or have passed through most trying troubles, or been called to endure heaviest afflictions.

(2) And that the great Teacher warned us against pushing this doctrine to a perversion of the truth (Luk 13:3).

(3) And we know that it was wholly inapplicable to the Lord himself. He who suffered mere than any other of the children of men was that one Son of man who “did no sin, and in whose mouth no guile was found;” he was the innocent, the pure, the just, the righteous One.

III. THE DIVINE ACCOUNT OF IT. “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows he was wounded for our transgressions,” etc. But is it credible or is it even possible that the innocent One would or could suffer for us the guilty ones? Why not? Being such a One as he isthe pitiful, compassionate, magnanimous One, it is exactly what we might expect he would do.

1. Involuntarily, we are continually bearing one another’s griefs. One sins and another suffers, beneath every sky and from generation to generation.

2. Voluntarily we suffer in one another’s stead. The father willingly suffers and strives that his son may not endure all the threatened consequences of his guilty folly; the mother eagerly endures greatest privations that her daughter may be spared the dishonour which is her due; the friend gladly shares, halves the trouble, the anxiety, the loss, into which his old companion has fallen. Just as men are magnanimous and noble-minded, so do they carry the sorrows of their fellows, so are they willingly wounded and bruised for the transgressions of their kindred and their friends. And if we, being evil, will do this, how much more our Father who is in heaven! if we, whose thoughts and ways are so comparatively low, how much more he whose thoughts and whose ways are as much higher than ours as the heavens are higher than the earth! It is just the very thing we should look for from the heavenly Father.

IV. THE PRACTICAL CONCLUSION. That we should, by a living faith in the Divine Redeemer, avail ourselves of the work he wrought when he suffered for us. Otherwise we shall not know the peace and rest of heart which he came to secure us.C.

Isa 53:6

Departure and distance from God.

These words, though very pictorial and poetical, indicate with great clearness the cardinal truths of religion and even of Christianity, and they express for us the thought and feeling common to all devout spirits. We see in them

I. THE HOME WHENCE WE HAVE DEPARTED. It is not stated, but it is clearly implied, that the fold or home whence we have gone astray is.

1. That of God, our Creator, our Father, our Divine Friend; it is that where he dwells, where he rules, where he sheds the sunshine of his presence and favour.

2. It is that of righteousness; of gratitude, of love, of reverence, of obedience, of submission.

3. It is that of peace; of spiritual order, rest, joy.

II. THE DIFFERENT PATHS WE HAVE PURSUED. “We have turned every one to his own way.” Sinful error takes many directions. Sometimes it wanders into unbelief and denial; sometimes into rebelliousness of spirit, disdainful rejection of Divine claim; at other times into a sinful indulgence, in one or other of its various forms; or again into a guilty negligence and unconcern, or a criminal procrastination of sacred duty; or yet again into a hollow and worthless formalism, which has the show of piety without the substance of it. But in these various paths of sin there is one thing which is common to all, viz. the setting up of the human will against the will of God. Every one of us has gone his own way. We have “followed the devices and desires of our own hearts.” We have determinately set our own inclination against the will of God. And herein we have

III. THE GUILT WHICH WE HAVE ALL INCURRED. “All we have gone astray.” Some men have wandered farther away from God than others; some have gone in an opposite direction to that of others; but all men have guiltily preferred their own way to the home and the fold of God. All have forsaken and disregarded and grieved him. And thus all have sinned; all, without exception; not only those who have fallen into gross and most shameful enormities, but they also who have kept to the proprieties of outward behaviour, and have observed the decencies and requirements of the religious life tall have withheld from God what is his due, and reserved to themselves what was not theirs to keep.

IV. THE PROVISION GOD HAS MADE FOR OUR RETURN. “The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” This does not signify that Jesus Christ bore the penalty due to all human sina part of that penalty it was absolutely impossible that the Innocent One should beat: It means that the redemptive work he wrought, and wrought by his submission to sorrow and death, avails for every child of man who will accept it; it means that in Christ is forgiveness of sin, acceptance with God, entrance into life eternal to every one who humbly but heartily receives him as Saviour and Lord.C.

Isa 53:7

The submissive spirit.

Those who have a high appreciation of the more minute scriptural correspondences will naturally find a reference here to the fact recorded in Mat 27:14. But we prefer to dwell on the submissiveness rather than the silence of our Lord, on the inward spirit rather than the outward incident.

I. THE SUBMISSIVENESS OF OUR SAVIOUR‘S SPIRIT. The unspoken word of repining or reproach was of real value, because, in him, it indicated the unquestioning spirit, the unresentful heart.

1. The spirit of acquiescence. There is a silent, sullen acceptance of fate which is removed from the spirit of obedient acquiescence as far as evil is distant from good. Our Lord’s was the obedient spirit, that which cheerfully and heartily consented to the ordination of God. With willing hand he raised the bitter draught to his lips, and in the spirit of filial readiness he uttered those strengthening words,” The cup which my Father has given me, shall I not drink it?” And in his attitude toward man there was not only the unresisting hand, but also:

2. The unresentful heart. He did indeed declaim against the conduct of the scribes and Pharisees in uncompromising language (Mat 23:1-39 but we detect no note of personal vindictiveness; he is affected and inspired throughout by pure indignation. When he is illegally and shamefully smitten there is no touch of unholy resentment in his reply, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil; but if well, why smitest thou me?” (Joh 18:23). And who, in this connection, can fail to remember the magnanimous prayer, breathed in the midst of the most excruciating pain, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”?

II. THE SUBMISSION WHICH CHRIST ASKS OF US. He demands of us:

1. Absolute trust in the wisdom and goodness of God: not only the thankful acceptance of what is pleasant and prosperous, and the unhesitating acceptance of what is mysterious and insoluble by our human understanding, but also the willing acceptance of what is painful, grievous, distressing to the heartthe cherishing in our soul of an absolute assurance that, however dark and troublous be the hour that is passing over us, God is leading us by the right way to the heavenly city.

2. A magnanimous attitude toward our fellow-men.

(1) The absence of a vindictive spirit, and of resentful action: “Love your enemies;” “Resist not evil,” etc. Proceedings taken against a viotation of human law in the spirit of justice are not inconsistent with the unrevengeful spirit of Christ.

(2) The exercise of the broadest charity; in our judgment of men, giving credit for the pure rather than the impure, the worthy rather than the unworthy, the public rather than the personal motive.

(3) The practice of peacemaking; interposing on all occasions that offer in the interest of peace.

(4) The readiness to forgive. “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses” (Mat 18:35).C.

Isa 53:8-10

The shortness but sufficiency of human life.

“Who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living.” “He shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days.” Here is a paradox in connection with our Master which finds a close correspondence in another connected with ourselves.

I. THE BREVITY AND PERPETUITY OF OUR LORD‘S CAREER. It was indeed true, as the prophet foresaw, that “he was cut off,” etc.; his days were few; his ministry was briefcounted by months rather than by years. There did not seem to be time enough in that short span, in a course so quickly run and so suddenly concluded, to accomplish anything great and far-reaching. But how wide has his influence proved! how long has his Name been known and his power been felt! How has he “prolonged his days” in the institutions he has founded which are existing now, in the truth he announced which is triumphing to-day over all other theories, in the spirit he communicated which is breathing still in the laws, the literature, the habits, the language of mankind! Who shall declare his generation? Does he not “see his seed” in the countless children of his grace who flock to his standard, who bless his Name, who call him Lord and Saviour and Friend! He who was so soon cut off from the land of the living is proving himself to be the One who hath immortality as no other son of man has had or ever will have.

II. THE SHORTNESS BUT THE SUFFICIENCY OF OUR MORTAL LIFE.

1. Our life below is very brief. Scripture abundantly asserts it; observation is continually confirming it; experience is painfully proving it. It is not only brief, so far as the actual number of our years is concerned when compared with some animal life or with angelic existence, or when contrasted with God’s eternity; but it is brief so far as our own consciousness is concerned. Its conclusion seems to come with great rapidity and unexpectedness. In the curiosity of childhood, the eagerness of youth, the ambition and activity of early manhood, the cares and anxieties of prime and of declining days, our life hurries on and passes away, and, before we are looking for it, there comes the last summons and the day of departure.

2. But, short as it is, it is sufficient. It is long enough for us to store our minds with heavenly wisdom; to become reconciled to God and to take our stand with the wise and holy; to grow into the likeness of our Divine Exemplar; to bear witness to the truth of Christ; to exert an influence which will never die. Our truest and best “seed” are not found in the children and grandchildren who are born to us, but in the spiritual results we have accomplished. We die and disappear, and the stone on which our name is carved is overthrown, and no man will speak of us again; but we, too, “shall prolong our days” in the holy and beautiful characters men will be forming and the useful lives they will be living, because of the witness we are bearing here and the work we are doing now.C.

Isa 53:12

The false accusation.

“He was numbered with the transgressors.” The fact that he who was the Author of all law and the Judge of all moral agents was himself classed with transgressors is most suggestive; it calls our attention to the truth

I. THAT A RIGHTEOUS MAN, though he is righteous, MAY BE CHARGED WITH WRONG. If Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, was accused of sin, how much more may we, who are only comparatively and imperfectly righteous, be so charged!

II. THAT A RIGHTEOUS MAN MAY, in virtue of his righteousness, BE ACCUSED OF WRONG. Jesus Christ was charged with blasphemy because he said what he said and acted as he did in pursuance of his great and beneficent mission; he was accused of fellowship with sin because he was bent on carrying his gospel of grace to the very worst of mankind (Luk 15:2). In the same way, a good man may lay himself open to the charge of transgression in virtue of his very excellency; a devout man, because of his devotion, to the charge of pietism or hypocrisy; a zealous man, because of his ardour, to the charge of fanaticism; a courageous man, to the charge of rashness; a trustful man, to the accusation of presumption, etc.

III. THAT THE FALSELY ACCUSED HAVE THREE GREAT CONSOLATIONS.

1. The approval of their own conscience.

2. The knowledge that they take rank with their great Leader, who was himself numbered with the transgressors, and with all the best of the good in every age and land (Mat 5:11, Mat 5:12).

3. The assurance that they have the commendation and the sympathy of their Divine Lord. Enemies may accuse us; brethren may fail us; notwithstanding, “the Lord stands with us, and strengthens us” (2Ti 4:16, 2Ti 4:17).C.

HOMILIES BY R. TUCK

Isa 53:1

Strange reception of Divine messages.

Cheyne translates, “Who believed that which we heard? and the arm of Jehovah, unto whom did it become manifest?” Immediate reference is to the attitude of the people towards Isaiah’s assurances of God’s restoring mercies, and towards his call to prepare themselves for returning to their own land. Further and fuller reference is to the failure of Messiah to win the general acceptance of the people, to whom he brought the glad tidings of God’s “so great love.” Divine messages are never widely welcomed. Only the few are ever found open-hearted, willing to heed when he is pleased to speak. Effort may be made to recognize the reasons for so strange a fact. They lie in men’s moral dispositions, and hindering circumstances or prejudices. The mention of two or three hindrances may suggest a complete analysis of men’s motives.

I. SOME MEN ARE SCEPTICAL. Their sphere is the strictly natural, and they find instant objection to every claim belonging to the supernatural. They are born doubters, and too often foster and culture their infirmity, as if it were a dignity or a gift. The special mistake such men make is to demand too much evidenceevidence of unsuitable character, and evidence such as they may be pleased to think would satisfy them. They want natural evidence for supernatural truths or facts, and wonder that no sign can be given them, and fancy themselves justified in refusing to believe. There is one very easy thing, that even a child can accomplish; it is thisfind excuses when we do not want to obey.

II. SOME MEN ARE MASTERFUL. They like to have life in their own control, and cannot do with God’s interfering by messages and commandments. Such men are sure to resist God’s messengers and ministers. The response to pastors, who point out to such men the will of God concerning their daily life, is still what it has ever been’ ‘Talk on your abstract things, but leave my life alone.“ God’s messages always, in one form or another, humble the pride of self: and this few men can bear, so they resist the messenger.

III. SOME MEN ARE EASYFUL. God calls to some doing, some duty. It may be putting away sin; it may be rendering some witness; it may be going the long journey back to Jerusalem, and helping to build the old wastes and raise the former desolations. And men prefer the comforts of Babylon, even if they are in slavery and know the defiling contacts of idolatry. Only meek, open, willing, and obedient souls “believe that which they hear, and see the arm of the Lord made manifest to them.” The best things are ever kept for meek souls.R.T.

Isa 53:3

Man’s disposition to reject his best blessings.

Philip the evangelist, from this, and the connected passage, preached unto the eunuch Jesus. This is sufficient reason for our associating it with Messiah. The chapter concerns the human life, the sorrowful experience, the shameful death, and the eternal triumph of the Son of God. The story of the Christ can be gathered up and expressed in a sentence,” He is despised and rejected of men; a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” The personification of heathen pride and fear, Herod sought to slay him as a babe. Representatives of the wealth and learning and religion of their age, scribes and Sadducees and Pharisees rejected him, that they might cleave to their traditions. The common people, moved sometimes by the goodness of his words and the graciousness of his deeds, heard him gladly, cast their garments in his way, and waved palm branches with hosannahs; but at another time they hurried him away to cast him headlong from an overhanging cliff, and shouted, “Crucify him!” Even the few who seemed to see his glory, on whom some beams of his Divine splendour rested, even they forsook him in the hour of his need, and fled, or sold him for mere silver, or denied him with oaths and curses. He passed on to Calvary amid rabble-shouts, “His blood be on us and on our children!” and there he hung, despised in the shame of the cross; despised as they passed him by, wagging their heads. Rejected as they cried, “We have no king but Caesar. and chose instead of him a murderer and thief. Now, the world has never known anything so passing strange as that despising and rejecting of God’s greatest and best gift to men. To realize the strangeness or’ this tact, consider

I. THE PERSON AND THE CREDENTIALS OF THE REJECTED ONE. The world has had many impostors, men with a genius for making claims which there were no facts to support. In the spheres of medicine, education, politics, and religion, there have been many who were found out at last, and rejected of men as untrue and unworthy. No man ever claimed such a position and such rights as Jesus did; but no man ever gave such abundant and satisfactory proof of his claims. He was a Divine Messenger, the appointed Agent for securing the reconciliation of man with God; he was even God himself, manifest in the flesh. But these claims were duly supported. Christ came at a time and in a manner which fitted precisely into the fore-given prophecies, which the people believed. There was perfect accordance between the claims he made and the life he lived, the spirit he manifested and the work he did. His character was so attractive as to win respect, yet so perfect as to excite wonder. He had the power over nature in its various moods, over disease in its various forms, and over death in its various stages, which can be associated only with the Divine Being. And yet he is “despised and rejected of men.” Divine, with Divine blessings to bestow; putting forth Divine power, doing a Divine work, and bringing down to men the Divine glory; yet, nevertheless, despised and rejected. Those times have passed away, but the credentials of Christ have only multiplied with the advancing ages. The moral miracles of conversion are far stronger proofs of Divine power than any physical miracles can be; and yet it is still true of many, “He is despised and rejected;” “They hide their faces from him.”

II. THE FITNESS OF CHRIST TO MEET THE DEEPEST HUMAN NEEDS. The needs of man as man; and the needs of man as fallen, sinful man. There are two things we can think of as left in our nature, relics of the old Eden-glorythe wish to know God, and the desire to find what is good. Wherever there is the conception of God there is the inquiry, “Who is he? What is he? Where is he?” The gods many of heathen lands are attempted answers to man’s cry after God. Christ met this want, and he alone has met it. In his Person he brings God down to the sphere of our human scenes, human thoughts, human language, He offers his earth-life to men and says to them, “Behold your God!” You see men pursuing all kinds of ends; they are seeking the supply of the great want of their nature, they are trying to find what is good. But the pure, the true, the self-denying, was never so set before men as in the earthly life of the Lord Jesus. Virtue then clothed herself in human garb. It is only half a truth to say, “He did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth,” for he was the positive embodiment of all truth and grace and goodness. And, further than this, Christ also met the conditions and needs of man as fallen and sinful. The “Fall” has left on man a sense of separation from God. We have not, now, a consciousness of near relations and happy fellowship with God; Christ came to restore it to us, by taking away the hindrances outside us and in us. When Jesus came to our world, the needs of fallen sinful man were being felt more pressingly than ever before; the world was anxiously looking for a Revealer and Redeemer. Jew and Gentile united in the out-looking: Jews from the helplessness of a ceremonial out of which the life and meaning had gone; Gentiles from the dissatisfaction of multiplying senseless idols. And yet, though Christ brought the supply of the deepest need men knew, the fact remains, “he was despised and rejected of men.” Humanity is usually keen in its endeavour to secure its own interests, but here it strangely, sadly fails. It it be asked why it fails here, we can only say, because Christ brings the humbling conviction of sin, and the pride of men resists. We are all willing to have our needs met and supplied; but we resist the idea that, as guilty, helpless sinners before God, we must ask for mercy, free, sovereign mercy.R.T.

Isa 53:4, Isa 53:5

Man’s thoughts of God’s Sufferer.

The prophet sets before us an unusual Sufferer, and bids us think what can be the explanation of such sufferings.

1. It might be punishment for sin; as was David’s bitter trial in the matter of Absalom.

2. It might be discipline of character; as was the suffering of Job. Neither of these will suffice for the case that Isaiah presents.

3. It might be vicarious, a burden-bearing for others. This only will suffice to explain the unusual woes of Messiah. Treating the subject more fully, we note

I. MAN‘S EXPLANATIONS OF THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST‘S SUFFERINGS. “We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”

1. Take the case of a man who was told of our Lord’s sufferings and death, but had no knowledge of his personal innocence. Such a man would know that God has established a direct connection between sin and suffering. Suffering is the universal and necessary consequence of sin. The association is plain in regard to our bodily nature. Disregard of the rules of health, exposure to changing seasons, or indulgence in unwholesome food, are certainly followed by bodily suffering and peril. Adam sinned, and at once suffering came, in the upwelling of passion, the hiding of God’s favour, and the loss of Eden. Cain sinned, and suffering came, as remorse and disgrace. David sinned, and his “bones waxed old through his roaring.” Such a man, then, would have good grounds for suspecting sin wherever he found suffering, and for arguing that there must be unusual sin if there is unusual suffering. Job’s friends argued thus; and, so far as surface-truth is concerned, they argued fairly enough. We cannot wonder if the man should say that Christ’s sufferings must be explained on the ground that Christ has sinned, and is bearing the natural and necessary consequences of his transgressions. To the casual observer there was nothing so extraordinary about Christ’s sufferings as to make his an exceptional case, requiring an exceptional explanation. He was condemned after trial by Pilate; he was only treated in accordance with the custom of the age; he made high pretensions, he called himself “King of the Jews,” and so, when he was condemned, the Roman soldiers taunted him, and Jewish fanatics insulted him. And such a man would have a further right to say that God’s hand of judgment was in his sufferings. Human laws, if they are to gain the respect of men, must be regarded as applications and adaptations of God’s law. When a man is convicted and punished by human law, we ought to feel that he is punished by God. Then, as Christ was delivered up to death by Pilate, the administrator of law, a man may fairly infer that Christ was “smitten of God.“ Thus Jewish bigots seem to have thought of the Nazarene malefactor. As they looked on that crucified group, why should they think differently of the central Sufferer? Why may they not say of all the three what the one robber said to the other, “We indeed suffer the due reward of our deeds”?

2. Take the case of a man who has some knowledge of Christ’s life, and some impression of his personal innocence. Such a man would regard Christ as strangely “afflicted;” his sufferings were calamities. The more he knew of the “blessed life” Jesus had lived, the more would he feel that such an early and such a humiliating death was inconceivably sadsomething to be mourned over, as was that death of Ulric Zwingle, when in the fulness of his power and influence. Calamity, that is, suffering of which the sufferer’s sin is not the immediate cause, is no uncommon thing in this world. The tower of Siloam fell, and buried beneath its ruins some of the people; but our Lord reminds us that those who perished were not sinners above all that dwelt at Jerusalem. The fall was, to them, a “visitation of God.“ In this way the man might fairly look upon the innocent Jesus, and say he fell a victim to the cruelty of his enemies. He attacked national vices, he aroused national hatred; he, like Socrates, fell through the wicked schemes of vile men. If the man knew that he was the Son of God, co-equal with the Father, then that life of humiliation and death of shame must take place among the mysteries that baffle human intelligence. It is the mystery which has been hid from ages and from generationsa mystery which God must unfold, or it never can be unfolded.

II. GOD‘S EXPLANATION OF THE SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST.

1. God maintains man’s view that the sufferings were his appointment. The special connection between Christ and God, in the work of human redemption, may be argued on these lines.

(1) Christ claimed to be a commissioned Agent (Joh 4:34; Joh 6:38; Joh 8:42).

(2) God himself bore witness to Christ as his Son and Messenger, expressing his relation to and interest in the work which Christ came to do (see testimonies at our Lord’s baptism and transfiguration).

(3) The witness of both the previous and the subsequent revelation is in favour of the connection (see Psa 40:7; 1Jn 4:14).

2. The sufferings of Christ bore no relation to his own personal guilt (see 2Co 5:21; 1Pe 2:22; 1Jn 3:5).

3. God distinctly affirms that Christ suffered as a Substitute, in place of guilty men, and that on him the burden and penalty of our transgressions rested. This is God’s answer to the supremely important question, “How can man be just with God?” (see Rom 4:25; 1Pe 3:18; Heb 9:28).R.T.

Isa 53:6

Where shall iniquity be laid?

Some chapters and verses of the Bible are so sacred to us that we almost fear to open and examine them; and yet those are the very portions that best reward a loving and reverent examination. This chapter is the gem of Isaiah’s writings. This verse is the conclusion to which the prophet comes, as he here views the long sad story of the Saviour’s sufferings. “The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” We consider

I. MAN‘S INIQUITY. The word means “unequalness;” man is never quite the same, never quite steady, he does not keep the straight line, and this indicates a wrong state of mind and heart. Man’s iniquity is:

(1) Affirmed in Scripture. “All flesh has corrupted his way; Who can say, I have made my heart clean?” (see Rom 3:1-31.).

(2) Universally acknowledged, both by individuals and nations in moments of alarm (see Nineveh, when alarmed by the preaching of Jonah). St. Paul, in Rom 1:1-32; apart from the special Divine revelation, convicts men of iniquity in view of the great, universal, natural laws of their own being and of human society. Personally, we are not prepared to deny this fact of human iniquity; though, to so many of us, it is only an intellectual conception without any moral power in it. We resort to various devices in order to keep off personal applications and convictions.

(1) We charge the evil on the race.

(2) We try to think of it as a mere disease or calamity.

(3) We procrastinate over the consideration of it.

It would be altogether wiser to face it, and try to realize it and deal with it.

(1) Observe that suggestive figure of the text, “sheep gone astray.” It brings to mind ignorance, wilfulness, helplessness, foolishness, as characteristics of the unrenewed man.

(2) Estimate the aggravations of human iniquity. If God were severe or unreasonable, bravery might half excuse rebellion; but our God is righteousness and love.

(3) Sin finds such manifold and dreadful forms in which to express itself (see list in Gal 5:19-24).

(4) Human iniquity has one dreadful root. It is wilful self-love and self-pleasing. “God is not in all their thoughts;” “Turned to his own way;” “The God in whom thy breath is thou hast not glorified.” Face, then, the fact of your own iniquity before God. Be true to yourself about it. AskOn whom can it be laid?

II. MAN BEARING HIS OWN INIQUITY. For a man may seriously and thoughtfully sayWhy cannot I bear my own iniquities, the burden of their penalty, and the work of securing deliverance from their power? Fairly consider, then, such things as these.

1. Iniquity grows, involving ever-increasing physical and spiritual penalties.

2. Iniquity sets going a train of evils by which even your best treasures may be consumed. Do what you will, can you stop them?

3. Iniquity, in its effects, is now seen only in part, and day by day; in the eternity we shall have to see it at once, and as a whole. Illustrate by the vision of a life of sin that comes to the drowning. Unless utterly blinded by pride and self worship, no man would ever dare to say, “I can bear my own burdens.” “Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much sope, yet is thine iniquity marked before me, saith the Lord.”

III. GOD BEARING MAN‘S INIQUITY FOR HIM. The person who bore was God’s Christ, and so it was really God bearing. This expression should be viewed in the light of the figure used in the textthe figure of the shepherd laying on the under-shepherd the duty of fetching the wandering sheep back, and setting it, free of evil, self-willed propensities, in the fold again. That work was the “burden” which he was called to bear. So God laid on Christ the work of delivering men from their iniquity, from its consequences, and from itself. “Himself bare our sicknesses, and carried our sorrows.” He took on him man’s deliverance from sin, and spent his time in illustrative healings of men’s bodily infirmities, and gave his life in the endeavour to save men from their sins. Illustrate by showing how the burden of the slave-woe was laid on Wilberforce; and that of the prison-woe was laid on Howard and Fry. Any man who is actively concerned for a degraded class really bears their sins. In giving Christ, God proposed the saving of men from their sins, and therefore his Son was named the significant name of Jesus. God laid the sin on Christ, as if he had said, “I charge you now with this supremely difficult, but most blessed work, of saving, everlastingly saving, sinful, wilful, ruined men.” Plead, in conclusion, with each one rims: Do you feel your iniquity? Is it your burden? Are you askingWhat can be done with it? where can it Toe laid? Then see, the living Christ is charged of God with that very burden; it has been laid upon him: it is laid upon him; he can be the living, delivering, saving Friend even to you.R.T.

Isa 53:7

The triumph of silence.

“Opened not his mouth.” A careful study of the fivefold examinations of our Lord, before Annas, before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate, before Herod, and before Pilate again, will bring very impressively to view the remarkable silences of our Lord. Sometimes he spoke, never more than brief sentences. But sometimes no word could be drawn from him, and the silence was either convincing or aggravating. It was, however, always the sign that our Lord had supreme command of himself, never for one brief moment, amid all those terrible scenes, losing his self-control. We notice two things.

I. WHEN A MAN‘S WORK IS TO ENDURE, THERE IS NO NEED FOR SPEECH. The enduring is the speech; and it can seldom be helped by any spoken words. Suffering for God has its own voice, and does not want any utterance by the lips. Illustrate from sufferers in our spheres who “possess their souls in patience.” “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Show that our Lord’s active work was now done; he was called to bear, endure, suffer,

II. WHEN A MAN MAY NOT SPEAK, HIS WORK IS DONE BY SILENCE. He shows to men an example of self-control, in the triumph he has won, which enables him to keep silence; and there are reproaches and convictions and humiliations in simple silence, that pierce to the dividing asunder of our souls as no spoken words can do. Sometimes we find absolutely unendurable the silence of those whose silence we feel to be reproof. Illustrate Christ’s power on Peter, on Herod, and on Pilate. There are many occasions, even in our lives, when we may “say nothing,” and so best serve God.R.T.

Isa 53:10

A soul-offering.

This prepares us to see that the real sacrifice for sin, which our Redeemer offered, was the full surrender of his will, his self, to God, which found expression, for us to apprehend it, in his bodily sufferings on the cross (see Hos 9:14).

I. SIN IS A SOUL–THING. It is not an act; it is a man acting.

II. PENALTY IS A SOUL–THING. “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”

III. SALVATION IS A SOUL–THING. Christ bore the soul-penalty; Christ brought life for dead souls. The infinite depth of Christ’s suffering lay hiddenin behindin the Redeemer’s soul, finding only once what seemed a suitable utterance in human language, and that a cry of immeasurable distress, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”R.T.

Isa 53:11

Satisfied for sore travail.

When the sufferings of our Lord are spoken of in Scripture, they are usually connected with his exaltation and glory. “When they testified of the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow;” “It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God;” “Ought not Messias to suffer these things, and to enter into his glory? For the suffering of death crowned with glory and honour! A witness of the sufferings of Christ, and a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed.” But the idea of this text is not so much the glory which our Lord himself shall reach through his work, as the benefits and blessings which, through him, shall come to men. Both may be included in the treatment of this theme.

I. OUR LORD‘S SATISFACTION IN THE PERSONAL RESULTS OF HIS WORK. He has, through it, the “Name which is above every name;” and the power which he can use for larger blessings, “giving repentance to Israel, and remission of sins.”

II. OUR LORD‘S SATISFACTION IN THE RESULTS OF HIS WORK IN ITS RELATION TO GOD. To see the lest, prodigal sons and daughters of God turning yearning eyes homewards, and saying “Abba, Father!” must be satisfaction indeed to him who came that, in his sonship, he might honour the Father.

III. OUR LORD‘S SATISFACTION IN THE DIRECT RESULTS OF HIS WORK FOR MEN. He came to save. He rejoices in every saved one: every “brand plucked from the burning.”

IV. OUR LORD‘S SATISFACTION IN THE INDIRECT RESULTS OF HIS WORK FOR MAN. To save a man from sin is to raise and ennoble a life, to give new tone to a family, to purify all the relationships of society, and to redeem a nation, and to save the world. Illustrate from what Christianity has done and is doing. But Christianity is an abstraction. The real blessing of humanity is the thousandfold varied influence of the men and women whom Christ has saved from wrath and sin. He has present satisfaction in a heaven full of white-robed saints, in a Church striving to keep its white garments unspotted from the world; and in the expectation of the time when the “creature also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.”R.T.

Fuente: The Complete Pulpit Commentary

Isa 53:1. Who hath believed our report? “Who, of the Jews, when the Messiah comes, will believe our report concerning him? Even they before whom the arm of the Lord, the virtue and power of God, is witnessed in his miracles.” The Targum on Isa 53:8 has it, “Who can declare the miracles which shall be done in his days?” St. John (xii. 38.) understands miracles by the arm of the Lord.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

2. THE LOWLINESS OF THE SERVANT AS THE LAMB THAT BEARS THE PEOPLES SIN

Isa 53:1-7

1Who hath believed our1 2report?

And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

2For 3he shall grow up before him as a tender plant,

And as a root out of a dry ground:
He hath no form nor comeliness; and when 4we shall see him,

There is no beauty that we should desire him.

35He is despised and rejected of men;

A man of sorrows, and 6acquainted with grief:

And7 8we hid as it were our faces from him;

He was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4Surely he hath borne our griefs,

And carried our sorrows:
Yet we did esteem him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.

5But he was 9wounded for our transgressions,

He was bruised for our iniquities:

The chastisement of our peace was upon him;

And with his 10stripes we are healed.

6All we like sheep have gone astray;

We have turned every one to his own way;
And the Lord 11hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

7He was oppressed, and he 12was afflicted,

13Yet he opened not his mouth:

14He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter,

And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb,
So he 15openeth not his mouth.

TEXTUAL AND GRAMMATICAL

See List for the recurrence of the words: Isa 53:3. (comp. Psa 15:4; Jer 22:28; Mal 1:7; Mal 1:12; Dan 11:21). Isa 53:4. . Isa 53:5. everywhere else comp. Gen 4:23; Exo 21:25. Isa 53:6 .

Isa 53:2. like the Latin forma with the special meaning of the beautiful form, comp. Jer 11:16; 1Sa 16:18. in parallelism with spoken of the nature of the environment. is neither the same as nor to be rendered: that we may see him, for the latter words express such an absence of and that the Servant would be altogether invisible. But is protasis of a hypothetical clause: and did we look at him, there was no such form that we would have had pleasure in him. Isa 53:3 gives the meaning of the figure used in Isa 53:2 a, and a nearer definition of the homely appearance of the Servant described in Isa 53:2 b. We may therefore regard Isa 53:3 as in apposition with the logical chief-subject of Isa 53:2, which is also at the same time the grammatical subject in the first clause of Isa 53:2 a.

Isa 53:3. , which is repeated by way of recapitulation in the last clause of the verse, forms the chief conception. Comp. Isa 49:7, Psa 22:6; Oba 1:2; Jer 49:15.In Delitzsch would take in the sense of viri spectabiles. This plural occurs again only Psa 141:4 and Pro 8:4. In the Psalm it is used of the wicked. In the Proverbs it is, indeed, used in parallelism with . But in our text the Prophet can hardly intend to say, that the Servant is forsaken only by men of respectability, but not by inferior people. He would represent him rather as forsaken of all, as appears from what follows and Isa 49:7. But it is very much a question whether may be taken in the sense of desertus. For Job 19:14 it is said , i.e., my neighbors have forsaken me. Therefore is not desertus but deserens. It has an active intransitive sense also in Psa 39:5 (let me know what a transitory thing I am) and in Eze 3:27 (he that hears let him hear; and he that forbeareth let him forbear). I therefore agree with Hengstenberg, who regards the expression as corresponding exactly to the from a man and from the sons of men, Isa 52:14. Then the plural would be chosen in order to intimate by the sound of the word the relation to the Isa 52:14 is desinens, therefore desinens hominum, i.e., he of men that ceases scil. to be a man. Thus the LXX. render it as regards the sense: ; Symm.: ; Vulg. novissimus virorum. The explanation of Hahn: avoidance of men (inf. const. as in Isa 49:7), if not exactly ungrammatical, is still very far-fetched. occurs in Isaiah only in Isa 53:3-4 of this chapter; in Isa 53:3 it has the feminine ending that never occurs elsewhere; in Isa 53:4 it has the common masc. plural ending (Gen 3:7; Psa 32:10). can, of course, mean the confidant of sickness, if be taken in the sense of Psa 31:12; Psa 55:14, etc., Isa 12:5, Rth 2:1; Pro 7:4 or Rth 3:2. But in the only passage where occurs beside the present (Deu 1:13; Deu 1:15) it means the acquaintance, not in the sense of familiarity, but the man known and respected by all, the vir illustris or insignis. The genitive construction resolves itself into the construction of the verb with the accusative of nearer definition. for = , , i.e., who is known in respect to sickness, as one may say sublatus faciem 2Ki 5:1. (LXX.) Deu 32:28. Psa 95:10, etc.The explanation scitus morbi (better edoctus morbum), i.e., as one put in the condition of knowing about sickness (Delitzsch) seems to me too uncertain and farfetched.If we were warranted in reading , as indeed 4 Codd. do, or in taking in the sense of , we must translate and explain as Hengstenberg does, according to Lev 14:45 : as one that hides the countenance from us. But this usage of is not sufficiently attested. It must therefore be taken as substantive (ad form. sanatio, vastatio (Olsh. 199 a) in the abstract sense of veiling. But the further question arises, whether the abstract meaning applies directly or indirectly, and whether the words are to be construed as an independent sentence, or are to be joined with . If be taken directly as abstract, i.e., if it be left in its abstract meaning, then one must connect the whole clause with . For, according to the veiling of the countenance from him, would be a sentence without a predicate, to gain which the words must lean on . But then their position before is surprising. One would expect , so that the second half of the verse would begin with as does the first. But comes after, and, as remarked above, it corresponds to the beginning the verse, as a sort of relative, recapitulating conclusion, therefore we must take the words as an independent clause, which is also demanded by the accents. Then we must take as the abstract for the concrete. Veiling the countenance from him would be=the object before which one veils the countenance. Thus would be the same as .

Isa 53:5. is opposed to Isa 53:4 b, and this in turn to the before Isa 53:4 a; so that here we have such a chain of adversative clauses as in Isa 51:12-13, where see. is part. Poal, passive to Isa 51:9.The expression is to be judged as Pro 1:3, i.e., chastisement, education to reason, to a reasonable being (Hitzig, Zoeckler); Pro 15:23, chastisement to wisdom. Pro 15:31 reproof to life. The construction is analogous to that of the participle in the construct state instead of the connection by a preposition.. One properly looks for a plural, which also occurs elsewhere (Psa 38:9; Pro 20:30). For one cannot suppose that the Prophet would speak only of one mark of a blow. We must then take the word collectively. Its meaning is vibex, wale, the marks left by a blow. healing is to us, is explained as passive of the causative Kal = to do healing. On this meaning is founded the construction of with the dative of the person (e.g. Num 12:13; 2Ki 20:5; 2Ki 20:8) and (more rarely) of the thing (Psa 103:3), which occurs along with the construction with the accusative (Isa 19:22; Isa 30:26; Isa 57:18-19, etc.). The word is found used impersonally (i.e., with indefinite subject) in Isa 6:10, where we translate: one brought him healing. Then is passive.

Isa 53:7. is, according to the accents, to be treated as a perfect and not as a participle. The perfect is used because it expresses here not a transaction accomplished successively, like the being led, but an accomplished, continuing state, the being dumb, standing dumb.

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

1. Having stated the theme in Isa 52:13-15, the Prophet introduces the people as speaking. They testify what was said by implication Isa 52:15 b, viz. that they have not believed the announcement of the prophets concerning the Servant that they have heard, and have not understood the revelation of the divine power imparted to them (Isa 53:1). Thus it came about that they treated as of no account the Servant of Jehovah who sprang up like a root-sprout out of dry ground (Isa 53:2-3). This mean-looking form of the Servant of God is explained by the punishment of our sins being laid on Him, that through His suffering we might find peace and healing (Isa 53:4-5). While we wearied ourselves in vain to find the way to salvation, Jehovah cast our guilt on Him (Isa 53:6); yet He bore it patiently like a sheep, that mutely suffers itself to be led to the slaughter or to shearing (Isa 53:7).

2. Who hath believedrevealed, Isa 53:1. At first sight that explanation (commended also by Joh 12:38; Rom 10:1616), seems to deserve the preference, that construes Isa 53:1 as the language of the Prophet, by which he expresses the consciousness of having said something incredible to the world. Yet on closer examination we admit that those are right who construe Isa 53:1 as the utterance of Israel. For 1) the perfect would be very surprising in the mouth of the Prophet. One looks for from him, whereas in the mouth of the people, who, according to Isa 53:2 sqq., have the historical appearance of the Servant before them, the perfect is quite in place. By this Israel gives confirmation that it has, indeed, not believed the prophetic pre- announcement, and assigns thereby, at the same time, the reason why, in His lowliness, it regarded the manifested Servant as of no account. 2) The word likewise is much more appropriate in the mouth of Israel than of the Prophet. The choice of the word is explained by , Isa 52:15. With reference to this they designate the prophetic announcement imparted to them as , as a thing heard. This is the fundamental meaning properly corresponding to the form of the word. The same underlies directly the meaning knowledge report (Isa 37:7). But as the something heard must at the same time be a something said, the word can, like the Greek , receive the meaning announcement, preaching, in which sense we have already had it, Isa 28:9; Isa 28:19. Yet in our text we do not need to have recourse to this meaning, as the original sense suffices perfectly. [The view presented here, taken in close connection with the explanation of Isa 52:15 given above, leads consistently to the following logical connection, viz. It is declared Isa 52:15 b: for they to whom it had not been told shall see, and those who had not heard shall consider. Thereupon the Jews are introduced saying: Who has believed our report (i.e., what was reported us, what we had heard)? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed (i.e., to whom has it been made plain that the Lord sent this Servant and had a hand in all that He was and did)? So connected the language of Isa 53:1 appears as an exclamation, which, with what follows, marks the contrast between those that heard and believed a revelation made to others (Isa 52:15), and those that did not believe that revelation, though it was their own (53:1, a thing heard by us). The language following (Isa 53:2 sqq.) proceeds, as the author says, to give the reason why the speakers did not believe, or rather it describes how they who were told did not believe what others did believe who were not the direct recipients of the prophetic announcement of what was to be. And the description is in terms that show how aggravated and perverse the unbelief was. Thus ver.1 is not simply an indirect statement that none believed, but a double intimation of how some believed, and others, the very ones of whom the contrary was to be expected, did not. This explanation is quite consistent with the facts of salvation, and these facts are so set forth by Isaiah himself and reiterated in the New Testament (comp. Isa 45:1-3; Rom 10:19-21; Rom 11:11-12). And this consideration gives great countenance to the view.Tr.]

The arm of the Lord is a metonymy for that of which the arm is the organ, viz. the almighty power of God (Isa 52:10). The arm of Jehovah is not only revealed to him who has seen its mighty efficiency a posteriori, but also to him who has recognized a priori what that arm can do. There is, therefore, an outward and an inward revelation of the divine power. The expression has the latter meaning here.

3. For He shall growesteemed Him not. Isa 53:2-3.Israel was ill-prepared to receive the Servant of God when He came. The Rabbins, who in polemics with Christians refer our chapter to the Jewish nation or to individual persons, must, indeed, admit that the ancient Synagogue, whose exegesis was as yet unaffected by these polemics, knew very well of a suffering Messiah (comp. the proofs of this in the writing of Constantin LEmpereur,D. Isaaci Abrabanelis et R. Mosis Alschechi,Comment. in Jesajae prophetiam 30, etc. Lugd., Batav., 1631, in Wuensche,l. c., and in McCaul,l. c., p. 14 sqq.). Yet all quotations from the writings of the ancient Synagogue given by the authors named prove at the same time that even the most ancient authorities acknowledged the suffering Messiah only very reluctantly and with all possible artful turns and distortions. As an example we may cite how Jonatan Ben Usiel, the Targumist, translates Isa 53:2-4; Isa 53:7. Isa 53:2. Et magnificabitur justus coram eo sicut surculi, qui florent, et sicut arbor, quae mittit radices suas juxta torrentes aquarum; sic multiplicabitur gens sancta in terra, quae indigebat eo. Non erit aspectus ejus sicut aspectus communis, nec timor ejus sicut idiotae, sed erit decor ejus decor sanctitatis, ut omnis, qui viderit eum, contempletur eum. Isa 53:3. Erit quidem contemtus, verum auferet gloriam omnium regum: erunt infirmi et dolentes quasi vir doloribus et infirmitatibus expositus. Et cum subtrahebat vultum majestatis a nobis, eramus despecti et in nihilum reputati. Isa 53:4. Propterea ipse deprecabitur pro peccatis nostris et delicta nostra propter eum dimittenter; et nos reputati sumus vulnerati, percussi a facie Domini et afflicti. Isa 53:7. Deprecatus est, ipse exauditus est, et antiquam aperiret os suum, acceptus est. Robustos populorum quasi agnum ad victimam tradet, et sicut ovem, quae tacet coram tondente se, et non erit, qui aperiat os suum in conspectu ejus et loquatur verbum. One sees that this paraphrase pretty much makes the text say the very opposite of what it intends. The insignificant sprig becomes the splendid, flourishing, holy nation; the homely look of the Servant becomes an aspectus non communis; Isa 53:3, it is indeed confessed that He will be despised, but at the same time He will deprive kings of their fame, and by withdrawing His countenance draw contempt to the nation. Isa 53:4. The substitutionary suffering is transformed into intercession, and those smitten by God are the Israelites. Isa 53:7. Finally, the Servant prays, and, before He opens His mouth, He is heard; the strong, however, among the nations He sacrifices like sheep, and no one dares to open His mouth before Him. Here the suffering Messiah is directly transformed into a victorious and triumphant Messiah. And it is not in a way that makes one say the translator must have had a different reading or have misunderstood. For that neither was the case appears partly from the fact that the other ancient versions agree exactly with the Masoretic text (see Lowthin loc.), and partly from the Paraphrast translating quite correctly when it suits him. But he simply substitutes a Messiah, such as He must be according to his fancy, for the one described in the text, by which he involuntarily testifies, that in his day men indeed found the information of the suffering Messiah in the prophetic writing, but would not understand it. With this agrees admirably the manner in which the disciples of Jesus received the announcement of His impending passion (Luk 9:45; Luk 18:34). Just on this account we say, that the people of Israel were badly prepared when the Servant of Jehovah appeared in the midst of them.

Thus the Servant came up like a sprout before him. is to be referred to Jehovah, Isa 53:1, and not to the subject of the interrogative clause in Isa 53:1. For the latter mode of expression, even if not exactly incorrect logically, would be very artificial. One would expect . The meaning of , however, is that the Servant of God so grew up before God according to His counsel and will. is properly the suckling (Isa 11:8), but is here used of the tender offshoot of a plant [precisely like the cognate English word sucker, by which Lowth translates it.J. A. Alex.]. is every where else used in the latter sense (Job 8:16; Job 14:7; Psa 80:12, etc.). The choice of the expression here is perhaps influenced by the Prophet having in mind the prophecy of Isa 11:1 sqq. There he spoke of the revirescence of the Davidic house reduced to an insignificant root-stock, and how this renewing would be by means of a rod of the stem of Jesse and a Branch from his roots. Although he does not use there the expression , and only by the way mentions the suckling that plays on the hole of the adder (Isa 11:8), still one sees that in general the Prophet transposes himself back into the sphere of thought of that prophecy. Hence, more plainly than , does recall that prophecy (comp.Isa 11:1-10). As a root can be said to mount up only in the sense of sending forth a sprout or shoot from itself, so is to be understood of the springing up of such a root-sprout (comp. , Dan 11:7). A root in dry ground has little hope of flourishing. This was exactly the situation of the Davidic royal house at the time Christ was born. When the carpenter Joseph was necessitated by the command of Csar Augustus (Luk 2:1) to betake himself from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the house of David and his kingdom were like a root out of dry ground; it had no form nor splendor, and as men looked on him there was no such form that they could have pleasure in him (see Text. and Gram.).

Isa 53:3 (see Text. and Gram.). By what means the Servant was brought to the state that He ceased to be a man, is said by the words: a man of suffering and noted for pain.And as one, before whom one veils the face, a despised one, whom we did not regard. According to Hahn, it is the countenance of Jehovah that is hid. It is true, so far as I know, that, often as there is mention of hiding the countenance as a sign of mourning (2Sa 19:4; Eze 12:6), or of anger (Isa 54:8; Isa 59:2, etc.), or of reverence (Exo 3:6) or in order not to be seen (Exod. 13:45), still our text gives the only instance of doing so in order not to see an object of disgust. Yet this is merely an accident. For the gesture is so natural, and so universal and necessary, for men that there is no need of seeking any confirmation of it in national custom. But the context is decidedly against the view of Hahn. For our passage only speaks of how the Servant of God appeared to men. The outward appearance of a man from whom God hides His face is by no means necessarily that of an ecce homo.

4. Surely he hath bornehis mouth.

Isa 53:4-7. The Prophet leads us from the outward appearance to what is inward. He shows that this pitiable form of the Servant is not an outside corresponding to His interior. It was not He that drew that woful fate on Himself by His own guilt, but, according to Gods will and for our salvation, He bears our guilt, and He bears it with the patience of a lamb., surely, is best construed here in its simple and natural adversative meaning as in Isa 49:4. As there the Servants hope in Gods righteousness is put in contrast with His apparent ill-success, so here to the outward appearance of sinfulness is opposed the inward truth of His innocence and love that suffers for others.This is done first by declaring the true ground of these sufferings. They are those that we ought properly to have borne. Therefore He took our pains on Himself ( comp. Mat 8:17; Lev 17:16; Lev 20:17; Lev 20:20, etc.), and bore our sufferings (Mat 8:17). When Matth. l. c., refers these words to the trouble that the Lord underwent in healing crowds of sick-folk of every sort, it is not thereby affirmed that only in that sense did He bear our sufferings and pains. For the evangelist certainly saw in the passion of the Lord the chiefest fulfilment of our prophecy, as well as did Christ Himself (Luk 22:37) and Philip (Act 8:28 sqq.) and Peter (1Pe 2:22 sqq.). But we learn from that citation in Matth., that we are not to refer our passage exclusively to the passion of the Lord. In the second half of Isa 53:4, the Prophet by no means repeats merely the thoughts to which the first half was set in antithesis. He adds an essentially new ingredient. For while Isa 53:3 only says: we esteemed Him as nothing, it is said in Isa 53:4 : but we esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. In has been justly detected an allusion to the plague of leprosy, which in Hebrew is especially called (Lev 13:3; Lev 13:9; Lev 13:20 sqq.; 2Ki 15:5). At the same time one involuntarily recalls Job, of whom his friends entertained the same opinion that the people of Israel express about the Servant of Jehovah (comp. Job 2:9; Job 4:7; Job 8:3, etc.). The position of God between smitten and afflicted intimates that both are referred to Gods doing. The Rabbins reproach Christians with proving from that the Messiah is both a smitten one and God. To this LEmpereur (p. 7 of the work named above at Isa 53:2-3) replies to Abrabanel and Alschech in defence of Christians, that they know very well how to distinguish between convenientia and regimen (i.e. st. absol. and st. constr.).Wuensche calls attention to the fact, that the thought that the Servant of God took on Himself our guilt occurs no less than twelve times in one chapt.: viz., 1) He bore our sickness, Isa 53:4 a; 2) He carried our griefs, Isa 53:4 a; 3) He was wounded for our transgressions, Isa 53:5 a; 4) He was pierced for our iniquities, Isa 53:5 a; 5) The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, Isa 53:5 b; 6) By His stripes we were healed, Isa 53:5 b; 7) Jehovah laid on Him the iniquity of us all, Isa 53:6 b; 8) For the transgression of my people He was stricken, Isa 53:8 b; 9) When thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, Isa 53:10 a; 10) And He will bear their iniquity Isa 53:11 b; 11) And was numbered with the transgressors, Isa 53:12 a; 12) He bore the sins of many, Isa 53:12 b. From this appears what eminent importance the Prophet attaches to this thought, and how he cannot leave off extolling this wonderful display of the self-denying love of the Servant of God to men.

Isa 53:5. The description of the Servant as pierced and crushed, plainly intimates that the Prophet thinks of Him as mortally hurt, which is, moreover, confirmed by He was cut off, etc. (Isa 53:8), and by the mention of His burial (Isa 53:9), and awakening to life (Isa 53:10), and finally by the unmistakable He hath poured out His soul unto death (Isa 53:12). ; as does not=, but is=, our sins and iniquities are not the direct origin of His being pierced and crushed, but only the indirect cause of it (Del.).As or , is very often used in the sense of to punish, and is used in particular of the punishments that God decrees against sin (comp. e.g., Lev 26:28; Psa 39:12; Jer 10:24; Jer 30:11), we must refer to the first half of the verse, and must regard this being pierced and crushed for the sake of sin as the punishment that rests on the Servant to the salvation of His people. For stands here evidently on the one hand in antithesis to the wounds and stripes, on the other parallel with , so that the sense is salvum esse, salus, healing, salvation, corresponding to the fundamental meaning of the word. The second half of the verse, like the first, consists of two members that are parallel in meaning.

Isa 53:6 explains how it comes, that the Servant of God, though innocent Himself, has yet to bear the guilt of men. All we, says Israel, like lost sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way. No distinction is observable here between true and apostate Israelites. There is rather an expression of universal sinfulness. Or did the Servant of God appear only for the apostate? Did, perhaps, the true worshippers of Jehovah need no expiation for their sins? That would be a contradiction of the universal Biblical view, that Paul so emphatically utters with special appeal to Old Testament passages (Rom 3:9 sqq., comp. Psa 14:3; Psa 53:4; Isa 59:2 sqq.). No, Israel so speaks in the name of all its members. And it seems to me, that Israel has not merely its Babylonian forsakenness in mind, but the total character of its moral status in all times. For it seems to me that the words, Isa 53:6 a, according to the whole context, are to be referred, not to the outward, but to the inward condition, the state of the heart. In fact it is of the sins of the people that the context speaks, which the Servant is to bear. Wherein these sins consist is stated Isa 53:6 a, viz., that the Israelites were all of them wandering sheep, that had forsaken their shepherd (comp. Num 27:17; 1Ki 22:17; 2Ch 18:16), and were going their own self-chosen way, that gratified the flesh, and the corresponding the Prophet utters with the greatest emphasis. Sinners they all are, even the prophets and the pious. Does not Isa 6:5 exclaim: woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips? Thus all of them may, in a certain sense, be more or less compared to sheep, that strayed away behind their shepherd (comp. Num 14:43, etc.), an went their own way (Isa 65:2; comp. Isa 42:24 and Isa 56:11, where the same words are used). Of course they were divided into misleaders and misled (comp. Jer 1:6-7; Eze 34:2 sqq.). In fact under some conditions the is ascribed to the Lord Himself (Isa 63:17).

Israel, therefore, has sinned, and the Servant of God is punished. How does that hang together? Did the Servant, perhaps, accidentally come into the domain of the evil that should come on Israel for the punishment of its sins? By no means. God intentionally laid on the Servant the guilt of Israel. means undoubtedly, to strike, to hit against one, impingere, obvenire, in a hostile as in a friendly sense. That is, of course, wonderful, that the sufferings that strike the Servant of God are such as properly ought to strike us, the wandering sheep, but which the hand of God diverts and suffers to fall on His head. If now the object of this procedure was not to make the just punishment strike the Servant for imputed guilt with the same inward necessity with which it would have struck the actually guilty, and, in fact, that these guilty ones under certain conditions might be free from punishment, then I see not how the Prophet could say: Jehovah laid on Him the iniquity of us all.By that it is surely not said that the Servant let Himself experience the violent death [occasioned] through [mens] enmity against God, but that God laid on Him the guilt of us all. What an injustice! Who without the least fault will let himself be loaded with the burden of anothers faults to his own ruin? Who does not at least protest against it with all his might by word and deed? The Servant of God does not protest. He is dumb. If the ideas and were meant to be regarded as of equal value and more rhetorical repetition, it must read . The placing of before and the participle gives the clause the character of a conditional clause and simultaneously makes prominent the subject. is urgere, premere. It is commonly used in respect to violent oppressors (comp. Isa 3:5; Isa 3:12; Isa 9:3 and the of the Israelites in Egypt, Exo 5:6 sqq.). In respect to this oppression the Servant maintains a passive attitude. Yet there is also a certain activity on His part, i.e., so far as He willingly submits Himself. This is expressed by . We can therefore translate: He was oppressed (the doing of another), while He (the doing of the Servant) willingly submitted Himself. Hence the Niph. is a pure passive Niph., while is reflexive. This willing submission is emphatically portrayed by a double figure. But because the silent suffering of the Servant (comp. 1Pe 2:23) would be made prominent, that is twice said of Him which is an index of the patience of the sheep both in the slaughter and the shearing, viz., He did not open His mouth.And indeed this phrase is put before as if it were a thesis, to be illustrated by examples, and then it follows at the close as designation of the general truth drawn from the special facts. , properly nomen unitatis as , designates here a single, and that a male sheep, such as was prescribed for sacrifice (Exo 12:5, etc.). is the grown mother-sheep, as lambs were not shorn. The figure of the dumb sheep occurs again Jer 11:19 also Psa 38:14-15 (Psa 38:13-14); Psa 39:10 (Psa 39:9)). In the New Testament several passages refer to the present one: Mat 26:63; Mat 27:14; Mar 14:61; Mar 15:5; Joh 1:29; Act 8:32.

Footnotes:

[1]Or, doctrine.

[2]Heb. hearing.

[3]he came up.

[4]we saw.

[5]Despised and ceasing to be man.

[6]noted for pain.

[7]Or, he hid as it were his face from vs.

[8]Heb. as an hiding of faces from him, or from us.

[9]Or, tormented.

[10]Heb. bruise.

[11]Heb. hath made the iniquities of us all to meet on him.

[12]wittingly bowed himself.

[13]And.

[14]As a lamb is brought to the slaughter.

[15]opened.

[16][There is no need of making it appear as if one must choose between the interpretation of John and Paul on the one hand and that of the Author and other commentators on the other. For as Delitzsch, in loc., says: The references to this passage in John and Romans do not compel us to assign ver.1 to the Prophet and his comrades in office.TR.]

3. THE EXALTATION OF THE SERVANT TO GLORY

Isa 53:8-12

8He was taken 17from 18prison and from judgment:

And who shall declare his generation?
For he was cut off out of the land of the living:
For the transgression of my people 19was he stricken.

9And 20he made his grave with the wicked,

And with 21the rich in his 22death;

Because he had done no violence,
Neither was any deceit in his mouth.

10Yet it pleased the Lord to 23bruise him;

He hath put him to grief:

24When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin,

He shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days,

And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

1125He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied:

By his knowledge shall 26my righteous servant justify many;

27For he shall bear their iniquities.

12Therefore will I 28divide him a portion with the great,

And he shall divide the spoil with the strong;

29Because he hath poured out his soul unto death:

And he was numbered with the transgressors;
And he bare the sin of many,
And 30made intercession for the transgressors.

TEXTUAL AND GRAMMATICAL

Isa 53:8. Pil. only recurs again Psa 143:5. Usually construed with , the word is found as here joined with the accusative of the thing Psa 145:5; with the accusative of the person addressed, as it seems, Pro 6:22., the here is causal, as in Isa 53:5.Since , according to Isa 44:15 (comp. Ewald, 247 d), can certainly be used as singular, all the explanations are superfluous that would refer it to the people of Israel and take in various senses as in apposition with the whole preceding clause, or with some single word of it. Hence we may follow the Masorets who separate from what precedes, and connect it with . Thus is to be explained according to Isa 53:5, and according to Isa 53:4.

Isa 53:9. There is not the least grammatical difficulty about translating with the indefinite subject they (comp. Isa 6:10; Isa 7:24; Isa 8:4; Isa 10:4; Isa 14:32; Isa 18:5; Isa 21:9; Isa 33:20; Isa 34:11; Isa 45:24). All the explanations that would make the subject to be the people or God or the Servant Himself are forced and unnecessary. The greatest difficulty is in . All the ancient versions express the idea death. LXX: . . Vulg.: et dabit impios pro sepultura et divitem pro morte sua, which Jerome and Theodoret, understand of giving over the Jews to the power of the Romans. Abenezra, first with a mentions the view, that here as Deu 33:29 is to be taken in the sense of aedificium super sepulcro erectum synonymous with . Among moderns, Beck, Ewald and Boettcher (De inferis 79 sqq.), have approved this view. It is doubtless the most satisfactory according to the context, and it seems almost demanded by the parallelism. But there are grammatical objections, for 1) the word must be pointed if it were derived from the height; 2) has nowhere the meaning grave mound, although the Greek , which means altar and grave mound, offers an interesting parallel. As long as the Masoretic pointing cannot be proved false we must derive from , though it may not give a satisfactory sense. The predicate and the object we must regard as applying also to the second member of the clause: and they gave with the wicked his grave, and with a rich man. On the other hand the qualification of time also extends backwards to the first member of the clause. For it does not suit to take as an independent clause: and He was with a rich man in His death, for then or must follow , nor does it suit to refer only to , because a corresponding designation of time is wanting in the first member of the clause. would then answer to the 2 Chron. 22:38 which denotes when He was dead, or to the , Lev 11:31-32; Num 6:7. The plural , however, has an analogy in Eze 28:10, where it is said: (comp. the like-meaning ibid. Isa 53:8, and Jer 16:4). is the state of death consisting of a number of particulars or degrees. Thus, as is well-known, the Hebrew is wont to designates relations of time and space. The plural is therefore the same as in life, the time of youth, age of young men, old age, state of blindness. , the rendering spite of is not grammatically supported. For all the passages that are cited in proof (Isa 38:15; Job 10:7; Job 16:17; 1Ki 16:7 comp. Ewald 217 i; 222 b), on closer examination demand the meaning because, on account of.

Isa 53:10. The construction , not taking as equivalent to or miswritten for , could not in itself seem strange. For it is no uncommon thing in Hebrew for a verb depending on another verb as object, instead of being subordinated in the infinitive, to be co-ordinated in the same verbal form. Comp. coepit inscripsit instead of coepit inscribere (Deu 1:5), pergam quaeram instead of pergam quaerere (Pro 23:35); comp. Lam 3:3; Hos 5:11; Isa 52:1; Jer 49:19; Zep 3:7; Lam 4:14.But there occurs here the modification that between the dependent and the governing verb there is inserted an infinitive, that on the one hand seems to make that co-ordinate verb superfluous, on the other contains what the other wants, viz.: the designation of the object, i.e., the suffix. We will accordingly have to take together, so that both words complete one another. The Hiph. as causative conjugation has for its object, by which the latter is defined in respect to manner. From may be assumed a secondary form after Jer 16:4; from this would be the Hiph. , and by rejecting the , like the form 2Ki 13:6 (Green, 164, 1). The meaning of is doluit, dolorem sensit. The Hiph. will accordingly mean to give a painful sensation, make painful. Thus we read Mic 6:13; I make painful the beating thee; Hos 7:5; the princes make painful heating from wine, i.e., they bring about painful heating from indulgence in wine. So we may here render ; He made painful the crushing Him, i.e., He crushed, beat Him in a painful way. is quando posueris. There can be no doubt about the imperf. having the meaning of the fut. exacti (Amo 6:9; Job 8:18; Job 22:13). As regards the meaning of , it is certain that it means guilt offering (comp. Umbreit, Die Suende, Beitrag zur Theol. d. A. T., 1853, p. 54 sq.). But one must not urge a sharp distinction between it and . We read immediately after , etc., certainly the Prophet does not speak here according to the rules of the theory of sacrifices. I think that the effort to accumulate the s sound, and to gain a likeness of sound with was not without its influence in the choice of the words in the little clause . is used in connection with offering a sacrifice Eze 20:28. Comp. the New Testament phrase Joh 10:12; Joh 10:15; Joh 10:17-18; Joh 13:37-38; Joh 15:13; 1Jn 3:16.

Isa 53:11. (see List), the I would not construe as causal with Delitzsch, for not the labor He endured, but the inmost being of the Servant is the ground of His exaltation (comp. Act 2:24). One will have to take either temporally (=statim post comp. Isa 24:22; Psa 73:20 and , e.g., Gen 41:1), or locallyto take out of the tribulation. specially favors the latter construction. is an instance of the same construction as that of explained at Isa 53:10 above. It is analogous to Isa 44:16.

Isa 53:12. For the expression there is only one parallel In the Old Testament, viz.: Job 39:17, where it is said of the ostrich: God gave it not a share in understanding. In this, is conceived of as a territory to be distributed in which God assigned not the ostrich a , a portion. Accordingly here, too, must be regarded as a region that God divides out: I will assign Him a on or in the region that consists in . But then the Servant would only be a partaker along with many equals. His whole reward would consist in His not being excluded from the partition. We must notice that in Job the Kal is used, while we have here the Piel. The later can have a causative meaning=make make, give a share, and the prefix can refer to this substantive idea and introduce just that wherein the consists. As is well-known is often used in making specifications (Gen 7:21; Gen 9:2; Gen 9:10, etc., comp. 7:4; 20:22).Against the explanation of (see Exeg. and Crit.), the grammatical objection may be raised perhaps, that the nota acc, as a rule stands only before the definite noun. But, on the other hand it is to be remembered that the definite article is often wanting, where the word as a general designation is already rendered definite by the sense (comp. Isa 1:4; Exo 21:28; Pro 13:21; Job 13:25). is Hiph., from (see List). The meaning of the Hiph., as of the Piel is evacuare, effundere, to empty, to pour out, flow out. The word is used again of the soul Psa 141:8. is taken by many here as Niph. tolerativum=He let Himself be numbered, although elsewhere this Niph. is used as simple Passive, Gen 13:16; 2Ch 5:6; Ecc 1:15. is, as to form, a departure from the dependence on , though as to substance the clauses and are just as much causal as both those that precede them. The Hebrew shuns long chains of subordinated clauses; it prefers parataxis to syntaxis (comp. Ewald, 339 a).

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

1. With Isa 53:8 comes a transition. The Prophet perceives that the Servant of God will be released from the distress, and that from then onward His continuance will be endless. These words stand first like a theme. But the Servant will not go on living on the earth among men that live there, for, on account of the sin of the people He is taken away out of the land of the living (Isa 53:8). They have buried Him, too, but honorably, because He never used violence nor deceit (Isa 53:9), and His destruction was only in consequence of the divine decree. When, now, the Lord will have made a sin-offering of the soul of His Servant, the latter will prove to be the head of a new generation, He will continue to live forever, and Jehovahs counsel will be accomplished by Him (Isa 53:10). After tribulation and necessity He will find His satisfaction; by His insight He will help many to righteousness and He will carry their guilt (Isa 53:11). Therefore Jehovah will assign to Him the great multitude, and He will divide the strong as spoilall this as reward for having given His life to death, having been reckoned among transgressors, having borne the sins of many, and continually praying for transgressors.

2. He was takenprosper in his hand. Isa 53:8-10. Having set forth, in what precedes, what and how the Servant will suffer, we are now told what kind of a turning of the scale shall happen after the suffering is accomplished. , found again only Psa 107:39; Pro 30:16, is undoubtedly coarctatio, restraint, oppression. Having a general meaning, the word can also mean imprisonment, but it does not mean exclusively confinement. conjoined with , can only mean judicial procedure. We may even take the two words as a sort of hendiadys. For oppression and judgment is just an oppressive, violent, unjust judicial procedure, unrighteous administration of justice, as Delitzsch says. I cannot see why should not mean He is taken away. It means the same as in Isa 49:24 (25). As there it is asked: can the prey be taken away from the strong? so here it is said that the Servant shall be taken away from the power of unrighteous oppression. This is one, the negative side of the transition. The positive side is stated in the words: and his generation who will think and declare? Every thing here depends on recognizing the theme-like character of the first part of Isa 53:8. Then the mention of his living on will not appear to be a premature thought. is manifestly, as to sense, an allusion to the theocratic promise, Exo 20:5-6; Deu 5:9-10, and in respect to the sound an allusion to Deu 7:9 (which keepeth covenant and mercyto a thousand generations). Whatever may be the fundamental meaning of , it any way means the , the generation, and that in various senses. From a temporal point of view, the members of the great chain to which one may compare the human race, or nation, are called with reference to the generations that succeed one another. Hence both past (comp. Isa 58:12; Isa 61:4) and future (comp. Exo 3:17; Exo 23:14, 31:41, etc.) generations are called . Thus there is mention of coming and going generations (Ecc 1:4), of another generation (Psa 119:13), of a first, second, third, etc., generation (Deu 23:3-4; Deu 23:9). Hence can mean also the present generation, contemporaries (Num 34:13, etc.). But because every such generation has a character common to it good or bad, the word acquires also an ethical meaning, and designates a generation as a whole of this or that kind. Hence the meaning, kind, race (Jer 2:31, etc.). But because a generation is always the product of another, or also of a head of a race, it involves necessarily the idea of descent, posterity. Hence to the people of Israel may be said your generations, i.e., your coming posterity (Lev 23:23), or: to you and your posterity ( , Num 9:10). But the total of the generations of posterity can be comprehended as a whole, and this whole be called . Comp. Psa 22:31, where in this sense stands between and ; Psa 71:18. And such is the meaning of the word here (LXX. , Vulg. generatio ejus). His generation are those descended from him conceived as a unit. This is the meaning of in Isa 53:10. Therefore the words: he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days is not empty repetition, but explication of the particular intimated in the theme of the discourse. According to the most ancient Old Testament representations, as found in the Pentateuch, there is no continued living in the world beyond. Hence, excepting long life on earth, posterity is for each person the highest wish and happiness. Without posterity, to die is the same as to be condemned. Numerous, measureless posterity means the same as everlasting life. Hence the lawgiver threatens those that transgress Jehovahs commandments with visitation on children in the third and fourth degree, thus extinction in the third or fourth generation. On the contrary he promises those that keep the commandments, that the Lord will be gracious to them to a thousand generations (Exo 20:5-6). The Prophets thought here connects with this representation, and hence he uses , and not . To him whom men thought to exterminate, the Lord promises , posterity, a race that shall descend from him, but of a peculiar kind, as appears from what follows (for he is taken away, etc.). Who is able to think out and declare the manner of this race?For the ideas to think and to declare both lie in . It is a poetic word, belonging to higher and choice style, that is used partly of meditative contemplation (Psa 55:18; Psa 77:4; Psa 77:7; Psa 77:13; Psa 119:15; Psa 119:23; Psa 119:27; Psa 119:48, etc.), partly of uttering the thoughts (Psa 69:13, comp. Pro 6:22).

When a man is dead he is past begetting posterity. But it is otherwise with this wonderful Servant of God. Hence the nature of His posterity is so inexplicable, because He will have it after He is cut off from the land of the living. (see List) is to cut, to hew, both to cut through (1Ki 3:25 sq.; 2Ki 6:2), and to cut off, to sunder (2Ch 26:21), always, however, with the secondary idea of cutting off sharp or smooth. Land of the living is the earth, the dwelling-place of men in the flesh (Deu 12:1; Deu 31:13; 1Ki 8:40), and stands in antithesis to Sheol, the dwelling of the departed, the shades (comp. Job 28:13; Psa 27:13; Jer 11:19; Eze 26:20; Eze 32:23 sqq.). Why He was so clean cut off from the land of the living the Prophet states in words that recall Isa 53:4-5. We have already remarked that the Prophet surprisingly often and certainly on purpose repeats the thought that the Servant must die for the sin of His people. On account of the sin of my people is a plague to Him. It must be remembered that (used especially Leviticus 13, 14 of the plague of leprosy) beside the meaning of divine punitive judgment, includes that of leprosy.The Prophet also gives intimation concerning the burial of the Servant. But it is obscure. One gets the impression as if the persons that attended the last stage of the Servants earthly history were confused in the Prophets view. We cannot be surprised if the Prophet sees forms and scenes whose nature and meaning he does not himself understand. But still his delineation always appears correct to those who are able to test it by the fulfilment. Here we might say that he saw the wicked, in whose company the Servant of God died, so near together with the rich man in whose grave he was laid, that he construes the relation of all these persons as fellowship with reference to the burial. Yet we do not know where the two malefactors were buried with whom the Lord was crucified. For that they were buried we may definitely conclude from Joh 19:31, and from what Josephus says of the care of the Jews for the burial even of those who were capitally punished (so as also to take down and bury those crucified before the setting of the sun, Bell. jud. iv. 5, 2). But if they were buried near the place of execution, then their grave was near to that of the Lord, and thus in general the Prophets representation appears correct. undoubtedly means with also in a local sense (comp. Gen 19:33; Lev 19:13; Job 2:13; Jdg 4:11; 1Ki 9:26). He is buried with a rich man that lies in the rich mans grave, as much as He is buried with the wicked, who has His grave near theirs. F. Philippi, whom Delitzsch quotes, has justly remarked that the honorable burial with a rich man makes the beginning of the glorifying (of the Servant) that begins with His death. He receives such a burial after severe suffering and a shameful death, because (see Text. and Gram.) He used no violence nor was guile in His mouth. Similar language is found Job 16:17. and are found conjoined as here, Zep 1:9. But Jehovah was pleased to smite Him painfully does not begin a new thought, but connects closely with what precedes, and forms a conclusion. When thou shalt have made His soul, begins a new chain of thought: the Servant is buried with a rich man because He had done no wrong, but only Jehovah had decreed to crush Him. The honor put upon the Servant therefore had its ground 1) in that He had done nothing bad, 2) in that His suffering was only in consequence of a divine decree. Guilt and punishment were in themselves something quite foreign to the sinless One; independent of that a divine decree would impose on Him the crushing load of sickness, of pain.

What is subject in the words ? As the suffix in can only relate to the Servant, He cannot be the subject, but only either soul or Jehovah. To take the people as subject (Hofmann) is forced and without ground in the context, though I cannot urge against the view that the people are here the speakers. For they cease to speak, Isa 53:6. From Isa 53:7-10 the Prophet speaks. If soul be taken for subject (as by most expositors: Maurer, Umbreit, Stier, Hengstenberg, V. F. Oehler, Ebrard, Delitzsch,etc.), several objections appear. First of all it is an unusual mode of expression to say the soul has brought a sin-offering. If that points to an antithesis in Himself, one cannot understand why just the soul should be elevated into antithesis to spirit or body. But if His soul is as much as to say, He Himself as contrasted with others, still it must be said what He offered in sacrifice. For if He brought any sort of offering that another also could bring, then that is nothing that deserves to be made prominent. But if it would be intimated that He sacrificed what others could not, viz., Himself, then that needs to be expressly said. Many, indeed, (Stier, Hahn,etc.), suppose that this idea is contained in the words themselves; for if the Servant, in so far as He is a living soul, makes a sacrifice, then He gives just Himself as a living soul away unto death. But that is by no means a necessary consequence. For then would only be another way of writing . But would these words imply that He offered Himself? V. F. Oehler urges this very tellingly against Hengstenberg, Stier, Hahn, but overlooks the fact that he condemns his own view. For he gets the soul as subject from the context, while the others would take it from the words themselves. But that just the chief thing remains unsaid, is against his view as it is against theirs. Or is the same as to set ones self, as Knobel would have, appealing to Eze 23:24; 1Sa 15:2; 1Ki 20:12? But in the places cited is used causatively=to make a station, take a station. And this causative use requires that an object beside that which is inherent be not named. How would one combine with that inherent object? In short, if is subject, then it is not said what the Servant brings as a sin-offering, and one cannot understand why the Prophet did not write simply .I believe (with Hofmann and Delitzsch in their earlier editions, and with Hitzig, but in another sense than his) that Jehovah is subject. The abrupt change of person need give no surprise. We have already had many examples of how common this is to the language in general, and to Isaiah in particular. Comp. Isa 2:6; Isa 14:30; Isa 33:2; Isa 33:6; Isa 41:1; Isa 42:20; Isa 45:8; Isa 45:21; Isa 52:14. Already in Isa 53:6, Jehovah laid on Him the iniquity of us all, says that Jehovah gave up His Servant that He might take on Himself the guilt and punishment of the sinful people. Essentially the same is said in the words He was pleased to smite Him painfully. For that this means here a smiting to death and not mere sickness as some would have it, is as certain as that the cause of this death was the sin of the people (Isa 53:8 ). But, it is replied, the expiation is offered to God, he does not perform it himself. That is true. But for this reason it is still possible that God may provide the beast of sacrifice, as in the case of Abraham, Gen 22:8; Gen 22:13. The Prophet, indeed, did not know how that could happen. But we, who see the prophecy in the light of its fulfilment, do know (Joh 3:16; 2Co 5:21). According to this exposition we can understand why the Prophet did not avoid the abrupt change of person. Had he written instead of , undoubtedly the Servant would have been taken for subject of the clause. Just that He would avoid, and therefore speaks of Jehovah in the second person in spite of His being before and afterwards spoken of in the third person.But death shall not swallow up the Servant of God. He shall be taken from oppression and judgment (Isa 53:8), and become the progenitor of a new race. For here the Prophet connects back with the thought of Isa 53:8, that was put first as the theme. Here, too, we learn what we are to understand by of Isa 53:8. Seed, posterity shall the Servant see.There underlies the expression, and also the following: He shall prolong His days, primarily the Old Testament representation of life, viz., that the life-necessity of the pious is satisfied by a long life on earth (comp. that thy days may be long Exo 20:12; Deu 4:40; Deu 22:7, etc.) and numerous posterity. But he that has these lives to see childrens children (Gen 50:23; Job 42:16; Psa 128:6). Yet, though the Prophets thought has this connection, it is in the nature of the Servant of God that the Old Testament letter must in Him be fulfilled in a higher sense. His posterity comes not by fleshly generation, but by a life-communication of another sort. How this will be the Prophet does not say. But we can perceive from who will think and declare, Isa 53:8, that he treats here of a life, and answering to it also, of a communication of life of a high and wonderful kind. But the Servant of God will do more than merely live and communicate life. He will also work and create. What was pleasing to God ( comp. Isa 44:28; Isa 46:10), His counsel and will, shall find its realization by the hand of the Servant (comp. Isa 54:17; Isa 48:15; Isa 55:11).

3. He shall seetransgressors, Isa 53:11-12. In Isa 52:13-15 God was the speaker; Isa 53:1-6, the people of Israel speak; 710 the Prophet speaks. The concluding word is put again into the mouth of God Himself. Also in their contents Isa 53:11-12, have a great resemblance to Isa 52:3-15 as we shall see. Only in Isa 52:13 and in Isa 53:11 is He that is the subject of the whole prophecy named by His honorable title, and both times the form is my Servant. This my expresses high honor. Not men, but God Himself, with His own mouth, applies to the Servant this honorable title here at the culmination of this prophecy relating to Him.

Isa 53:11 connects with what precedes, and continues the description of the ascent from lowliness to highness. The tribulation was night, in which one saw nothing (comp. Isa 50:10). The seeing shows that it grows light (see Text. and Gram. on ). It is possible that the Prophet combines both constructions [the temporal and the local meaning of , viz. after and away from out of the tribulation of His soul He shall see], which we are not able to reproduce in our language. Is cognitio sui or cognitio sua? I believe with most expositors that the former is meant. For the latter only Mal 2:7 can be quoted; and there it is doubtful whether we ought to render conservant or custodiunt cognitionem. As the lips are not the seat of knowledge, the latter is more probable, and then the sense would be: the mouth of the priest must reprove those that depart from right knowledge. But then is not doctrine, but knowledge. And so also in our text the assured meaning cognitio, therefore in the passive sense cognitio sui is to be preferred. Without knowledge, indeed, there is also no faith (Rom 10:14). is as a righteous man. is causative Hiph.: to prepare righteousness; hence the construction with . As the one that has the righteousness, He can be the means of others obtaining it. Here, also, the Prophet can hardly have understood the deep import of his words. For we cannot assume that he had a clear knowledge that the righteousness that avails with God would be alone in the possession of Him who acquired it by His blood (Rom 3:21-26)., to many, answers to the New Testament (e.g.Mat 20:28; comp. 1Ti 2:4; Rom 5:18, where for is simply ). It expresses the majority, the great mass, compared with which single exceptions vanish, and in so far it is almost the same as totality. , He will bear their iniquities, cannot relate to that bearing that consists in sufferings in the place of others (Isa 53:4). For we are here in the condition of glory. Hence to bear here can only relate to that priestly bearing that the Mediator accomplishes by the ever-continued presentation of His merit before God (Heb 7:25). It is identical with He will make intercession for the transgressor, Isa 53:12.

Isa 53:12. introduces a concluding inference from what precedes. But what was previously represented (Isa 52:14-15; Isa 53:8; Isa 53:10-11) as a suitable transition from bad to good appears now directly as a reward, and the situation of Isa 53:12, into which the Servant is translated as a reward for His suffering, appears as that of a ruler. For a great territory and glorious spoil are given Him. The first clause may be rendered: Therefore I will assign Him a part that shall consist of the many (see Text. and Gram.). Therefore the many themselves (taking the word in the same sense as in Isa 53:11), or the totality, shall make the region, in the assignment of which shall consist the Servants reward. The rendering: I give Him a part among the great, is not at all exactly conformed to the passage in Job. In Job marks the region on which or of which a share is given; but this explanation takes as marking the fellowship that the Servant is to share. If it be urged against our explanation that He that gets the whole cannot be said to get a part, it may be replied, that, in antithesis to the single parts, the whole, i.e. the highest power over all single parts, can be assigned to one. It is a result of this highest power when He that is entrusted with it on His part takes in hand the distribution of the individual parts of the spoil to His subjects. This is the meaning of the following words, which speak no more of a share that the Servant receives, but of the shares He distributes. This second clause has a parallel in Pro 16:19 : Better is it to be of an humble spirit with the lowly than to divide the spoil with the proud ( ). According to that we should translate here: and with strong men will He divide spoil. But against this are to be urged the same considerations that we urge above (see Text. and Gram.) concerning the first clause. Who equals the Servant of God in merit? Whose reward shall equal His? Who are the strong that, as His peers, may divide the spoil with Him? It is true that can mean: with the strong, and that in the sole parallel passage does mean with. But must it mean with? And that too when with gives an unsuitable meaning, and the sign of the accusative, on the contrary, a very suitable one? And the latter is the case when we remember that there is also living and human spoil (comp. Jdg 5:30; Zec 2:12-13). Prisoners may be used as slaves or sold. So here it can be said that the Servant of Jehovah will make booty of the strong, and distribute them among His own. But then the strong must be understood not only as belonging to the corporeal sphere, but also to the spiritual. The choice of expressions in these clauses ( and and ) are intended to recall the passages in the Pentateuch that promise to the Israelites victory over the many and mighty nations that inhabited Palestine before them (comp. Deu 4:38; Deu 7:1; Deu 7:17; Deu 9:7; Deu 11:23; Jos 23:9). [The Authors defence of his construction of the first two clauses of Isa 53:12 is enough to make one sensible of its difficulty, and prepare one to agree with J. A. Alex., when, after noticing the construction as presented by others, he says: It is better, therefore, to adopt the usual construction, sanctioned by Calvin, Gesenius and Ewald, which supposes Him (the Servant) to be described as equal to the greatest conquerors. If this is not enough, or if the sense is frigid, as Martini alleges, it is not the fault of the interpreter, who has no right to strengthen the expressions of his author by means of forced constructions. The simple meaning of the first clause is that He shall be triumphant; not that others shall be sharers of His victory, but that He shall be as gloriously successful in His enterprise as other victors ever were in theirs.Tr.]

[in lieu of this that, etc.] reaches back to what in Isa 53:11 has already served as a premise for the conclusion therefore, etc., with which Isa 53:12 begins. So that there is a succession of links here also (comp. on Isa 53:4-5). The Prophet would manifestly recapitulate by the words that follow what is of chief moment in the meritorious, representative suffering; a fresh proof of the high importance he attaches to this suffering. That the Servant was numbered with transgressors has not before been mentioned, although it is implied in the statements of Isa 53:5-8, and especially in they made His grave with the wicked, Isa 53:9. Comp. Mar 15:18; Luk 22:37.He bore the sin of many stands related to He bore our sickness, Isa 53:4, and the kindred expressions that follow, as the root to the fruits. One is reminded here of 2Co 5:21, and still more, even to the sound of the words, of Heb 9:28. In the last clause , Hiph., has the same sense of to pray, to intercede, that we had to maintain for the Kal in Isa 47:3 (comp. Isa 59:16). As in Isa 53:11, the enumeration of what the Servant will do as priest after His exaltation stops with He will bear their iniquities, so here the enumeration of what He did as a priest in His humiliation concludes with the mention of His work of intercession. But it is to be noted that it is not said , but . The reason for this seems to be that the Prophet understands the intercession in the same sense as at the end of Isa 53:11. He means the lasting intercession that the Mediator makes for us on the ground of His sacrificial death. This had indeed begun already in His state of humiliation; the very ones that put Him to death were the first for whom He prayed while dying (Luk 23:34). But since then He intercedes forever for us all. That He can do this is the abiding fruit of His once dying on the cross. Hence the Prophet concludes his enumeration with the imperfect.

Footnotes:

[17]Or, away by distress and judgment: but, etc.

[18]oppression.

[19]Heb. was the stroke upon him.

[20]they.

[21]a rich man, when he was dead.

[22]Heb. deaths.

[23]painfully break him to pieces.

[24]Or, when his soul shall make an offering.

[25]After the tribulation of his soul he shall, etc.

[26]the righteous One, my Servant cause righteousness to many.

[27]And.

[28]divide to him the many, And the strong will he divide as spoil.

[29]In lieu of his having.

[30]makes.

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

1. On Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12. This chapter, that has already silenced so many scoffers, and led so many honest doubters to believe, when they compared the prophecy with the fulfilment, and when the wonderful agreement with the history of the suffering, death and resurrection of our Redeemer shone upon them so glorious and clearthis master-piece from the armory of God, whose power unbelieving Israel even at this day fears so much that it has gone on omitting it from its yearly selections from the prophets for the weeks, but in doing so has given powerful testimony against itself and for the truth of the gospelthis chapter is a precious jewel of our Bible. Axenfeld, Der Proph. Jes., A Lecture, 1870, p. 60 sq.

2. On Isa 52:13. In the Midrasch Tanchuma, Fol. 53, c. 3, 1, 7 it reads: i.e., this is the King Messiah, He will be higher than Abraham, and raise Himself up more than Moses and be exalted above the angels of the ministry. On this Wuensche l. c. remarks p. Isaiah 42 : This passage is additionally important from the fact that it teaches the doctrine of the sublimity of the Messiah, so strongly opposed by the later Jews. He rises above all created being; even the angels of the ministry may not be compared with Him in respect to their dignity and rank.

3. On Isa 52:14. It is remarkable that the church in the times of persecution before Constantine, conceived of the bodily form of the Lord as ugly: (Clem. Alex. Paedag. III. 1. . Origen, C. Cels. VI.: ); the secularized church of the Middle Age conceived of Him as a form of ideal beauty (comp. the description of the form of Jesus in Nicephorus Callisti L. II. c. 7, and in the letter of the Pseudo-Lentulus, comp. Herz. R. Enc. VIII. p. 292 sqq., Delitzsch Jesus and Hillel, 1865, p. 4); the church of the Reformation took a middle course: It is quite possible that some may have been as beautiful in body as Christ. Perhaps some have even been more beautiful than Christ. For we do not read that the Jews wondered at the beauty of the Lord. Luther.

4. On Isa 53:4-5. Justin Martyr (Apol. I. c. 54) sees in Asklepios, the physician that healed all diseases, a type of Christ parallel to that of the Servant who bears our sickness. Edward Mueller, Parallels to the Messianic prophecies and types of the Old Testament from Greek antiquity (Jahrbb. f. Klass. Philol. v. Fleckeisen VIII. Supplem.-Bd. 1 Hft. p. 5).

5. On Isa 53:4-6. The peculiarity of V. Hofmanns doctrine of the atonement seems to me to have its root in this, that he distinguishes a two-fold wrath of God against sinful humanity, viz., how God is angry with sinful humanity that is destined to be brought back again into love-fellowship with Him, and how He is angry with those who refuse obedience to His work of salvation. (Schutzschriften fr eine neue Weise die alte Wahrheit zu Lehren III. Stck, Noerdlingen, 1859, p. 13 sq.). In both instances His anger is an enmity of the holy Living (One) against sin that delivers the sinner to death. But in the one case it delivers him to death in order to redeem him out of it, in the other case that he may remain in it. Had God not intended to save mankind, then the death to which He delivered those first created would have been complete and enduring. There appears to me to be a contradiction in this. For first it is said, that had God not intended to redeem mankind, then the first pair had been delivered to complete and enduring death. And then it is said, that the wrath of God does so deliver the one that is disobedient to His work of salvation over to death that he abides in it. Thus eternal death appears at one moment as punishment for sin in itself, and at another as punishment for rejecting the work of salvation. That God did not deliver over to complete and enduring death the first pair and their descendants was then merely because He had formed the purpose to redeem mankind. Therefore one would still think that what the Redeemer suffered made it possible for the divine righteousness to remit to men the complete and abiding death. Consequently, one might still think that Christ, by His death had given the divine righteousness an equivalent for the complete and abiding death of mankind. But, according to Hofmann, such is not the case. For he asserts that the wrath of God delivers to abiding death only those that refuse obedience to His work of salvation. For this reason Christ did not bear the torments of damnation. Indeed for this reason a redemption from eternal death is neither possible nor necessary. For those that do not accept the work of salvation cannot be redeemed from eternal death at all, while those that do accept need not to be redeemed, because eternal death belongs in fact only to those that do not accept the work of salvation. There we have I think a circulus vitiosus. In view of the redemption, the first pair and their descendants are not punished with the eternal death that their sin in itself deserves, but only with corporeal death. But the Redeemer does not die in order to redeem men from eternal death, for the latter is suddenly only the consequence of unbelief in the work of salvation. But the Redeemer dies to redeem men from that punishment which was laid on them as a mitigated sort in view of the redemption. For Christ was only subjected to that anger with which God was angry at those who were destined to a re-entrance into His fellowship of love, not to that which abides on those who are disobedient to the grace of God, l. c. p. 14. Consequently one would think Christ only redeemed us from bodily death. And yet from that we are not redeemed. Hofmann says, indeed: we do not abide in it (p. 51). It is true, the redeemed do not abide in it. But that is only for the reason that they are also redeemed from eternal death. For were the latter not the case, then the bodily death would only be a transit to what is worse, i.e., to eternal death. Therefore eternal death is the punishment, not only of not believing inredemption, but of sin in general. But Christ redeemed us from sin and its punishment generally, and not merely from what remained of the punishment that, with reference to the redemption, was from the first remitted to us.

6. On Isa 53:4. Hic est articulus justificationis, credere Christum pro nobis possum, sicut Paulus quoque dicit: Christus est foctus maledictum pro nobis. Neque enim satis est, nosse, quod Christus sit passus, sed, sicut hic dicit, credendum etiam est, quod nostros languores tulerit, quod non pro se, neque pro suis peccatis sit passus, sed pro nobis; quod illos morbos tulerit, illos dolores in se reciperit, quos nos oportuit pati. Atque hunc locum qui recte tenet, ille summam Christianismi tenet. Ex hoc enim loco Paulus tot epistolas, tot sententiarum et consolationum flumina hausit.Christianus quasi in alio mundo collocatus neque peccata neque merita aliqua nosse debet. Quodsi peccata se habere sentit, adspiciat ea, non qualia sint in sua persona, sed qualia sint in illa persona, in quam a Deo sunt conjecta, hoc est videat, qualia sint non in se nec in conscientia sua, sed in Christo, in qao expiata et devicta sunt. Sic fiet, ut habeat purum ac mundum cor ab omni peccato per fidem, quae credit, peccata sua in Christo victa et prostrata esse. Luther.

7. On Isa 53:4. We have many wrath and fire mirrors of the just God, how He thunders and lightens on account of sin; such as the flood, Genesis 7; Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis 19; Pharaoh and all his, Exodus 14. But what are all those to this, that God so dreadfully racked and smote His only begotten Son, the highest and infinite good, that a stone in the ground might have lamented, and even the hard rocks did rend asunder on account of it at the time of His suffering? Cramer.

8. On Isa 53:5. O mirabile genus medicinae, ubi medicus aegrotat, ut aegrotis sanitatem efferat.Medico occiso sanati sumus. Quis unquam audivit talia?Tota vita Christi crux fuit et martyrium, et tu quaeris gaudium?Omni diligentia atque vigilantia caveamus, ne vulneret diabolus quod sanavit Christus. Augustin. Est jucundissima consolatio: livores ipsius sunt nostrum emplastrum. Atqui nos meriti eramus livores et ipsi debebatur sanitas. Si quis ergo sanitatem optat, ille non suam castigationem et crucem consideret, sed tantum respiciat in Christum et credat, tum sanabitur, hoc est, habebit justitiam eternam. Luther.

9. On Isa 53:6. Sin isolates men, because its principle is egoism. Every one accordingly makes himself a centre, around which all must revolve. But by this we lose the true, all-controlling, right guiding centre, and are as stars that are become excentric, that must finally dash to pieces on one another.Redimit pretiose, pascit laute, ducit sollicite, collocat securi. Bernhard of Clairvaux.

10. On Isa 53:6. God laid on Him the sin of us all. That is the great enigma of the Christian doctrine of atonement. It is the point that for so many is a stone of stumbling, since it appears as if God outwardly and arbitrarily transfers the guilt of men to One, who, Himself innocent, has no inward, real relation whatever to the guilt of another. And this is verily one of the mysteries of Christian doctrine. The Lord says: Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit, Joh 12:24. And Paul says: Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ, were baptized into His death? And in the same connection he says: Knowing this that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed [justified: Marg.] from sin, Rom 6:3; Rom 6:6-7. It is true, Christ stood alone in death, and though he had the imputed sin, the organic connection of our sin with Him was wanting. But in the sequel He suddenly stands as the centre of a great complex of fruit. By baptism we are all baptized into Him, and in fact such as we are by nature, with our old Adam and all its sins. Yet now Paul says that our old man is crucified with Christ in baptism. Therefore he assumes that we men are in the sequel transposed into the communion of the death of Christ, and that our justification rests on the fact that we have actually died with Christ. Still it will be said that this itself is an enigma; that one can as little solve one riddle by another, as cast out one devil by another. But perhaps the new enigma still shows where we must direct our inquiring thoughts in order at last to find the solution.

11. On Isa 53:8. Innocent Lamb of God, yea, Thou shalt have seed; as long as the sun continues Thy name shall extend to posterity (Psa 72:17). Out of anguish and out of the judgment hast Thou come, and who will declare to the end the extent of Thy life? The lion that is of the tribe of Judah, the root of David has overcome, to open the book and to break its seven seals. Now they sing to Thee a new song, and Thine whom Thou hast bought with Thy blood say eternally: Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature (says the seer) which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. Tholuck.

12. On Isa 53:9. Sepeliri se passus est Dominus 1) ut sabbatum redemtionis responderet sabbato creationis, quod illius typus fuit; 2) ut testaretur, se non sed fuisse mortuum. Unde Tertullianus recte: non sepultus esset, nisi mortuus; 3) ut sepulcra nostra consecraret in contactu corporis ipsius sanctissimi sanctificata (Jes. 27:19; 57:2); 4) ut praefiguraret quietam nostram spiritualem ab operibus carnis (Heb 4:9-10). Foerster.

13. On Isa 53:9. Christ can boast both sorts of innocence, viz., causae and personae. For He suffers in the greatest innocence, and is above that innocent through and through in His whole person and nature, to the end that He might restore what He took not away (Psa 69:4). For we ought to have such an high priest (Heb 7:26).Cramer.

14. On Isa 53:10. Hujus sacrificii expiatorii quatuor sunt privilegia: 1) est propitiatio pro totius mundi peccatis (1Jn 2:2); 2) in hoc idem est (Ephes. Isa 5:2); 3) est unicum semelque tantum oblatum (Heb 7:27); 4) hoc unico sacrificio Christus consummavit in eternam eos, qui sanctificantur (Heb 10:14).Foerster.

15. On Isa 53:11. Christ makes righteous not by communicating His essential righteousness, but by communicating His merit. For He bears their sins. The means, however, by which this righteousness comes to us is His knowledge that consists in true saving faith. Plus est credere Christo, quam deliquisse saeculo.Ambrose. Justificat multos agnitione sui.Cramer.

16. On Isa 53:11. (). Plato Derep. L. II., 362, d. e., describes the righteous man, who, in purest and completest exercise of virtue, unconcerned about the opinion of the world and the outward effects of his conduct, on his own part only reaps infamy and shame, suffering and abuse of every sort for his righteousness, and yet, unswervingly pursuing his aim, most cruelly racked, and tormented, bound, robbed of eyesight by the rudest violence, remains ever true to himself, and at last suffers the most infamous and cruel death as the reward of his virtue, the death of the cross. Ed. Mueller, l. c., p. 11. Comp. Doellinger, Heidenthum und Christenthum, 1857, p. 300.

17. On Isa 53:12. Let even the hardest stone strive against the Lord Christ, all must still become vain pottery that dash themselves against Him, as it is written: Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder (Mat 21:24). And as Luther says: Therefore Christ says, also; Good people do not brush against me, let me be the rock, and do not get into conflict with me; for if not, then I say for certain, I am a stone, and will not be afraid of jugs because they have big bellies, and which, the more they are swelled out, are the easier shattered and the easier to hit. My good Saul, it will go hard for thee to kick against the goads, said the Lord Christ to Saul, and although he resisted, he had still to yield. For as it is written: even the strong shall he have for a prey.Tholuck.

HOMILETICAL HINTS

1. On Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12. The suffering of our glorified Lord Jesus, how I., it is not recognized; II., yet is carried out; III., glorified. Gotfried Arnold, Ev. Botschaft der Herrlichkeit Gottes, 4 Aufl., p. 338 sqq.

2. On Isa 53:1-5. Concerning the various reception of the word of the cross by men. C. F. Harttman, Passionspredigten, Heilbronn, 1872, p. 169.

3. On Isa 53:1. The mount Golgotha. 1) A scene for the display of unbelief and belief. The rulers of the people, the mass of the people, the one murderer give evidence of unbelief; the mother of Jesus and the other women, together with John, the Centurion, the thief were believing. But the greatest example of faith is given by the Son of God Himself, who is called a beginner and finisher of our faith. 2. A place where the arm of the Lord is revealed to us.Harttmann, l. c., p. 277.

4. On Isa 53:1. Concerning the reasons for the bad reception men give the word of the cross. 1) One cannot fruitfully consider it, if one does not recognize his own ruin. 2) It shows us our profound inability to help ourselves. 3) There is involved in it the obligation to die with Christ. 4) It is treated in such a frivolous and common-place manner.Harttmann, l. c., p. 169. The grand turning point in the race of Adam and the new Israel. Gaupp, Prakt. Theol., 1. Vol., p. 509. How the suffering and death of Christ are the greatest thing that has ever occurred in the history of the world. For 1) It is the greatest wonder; 2) it is a work of the last necessity; 3) it is a work of the highest love; 4) it is a work of the greatest blessing. Pfeiffer, in Manch. Gaben u. ein G. III. Jahrg., p. 248.

5. On Isa 53:4 sqq. How can the suffering of death by an innocent One, bring salvation to the guilty? 1) If the righteous One freely sacrifice Himself for the guilty. 2) If His sacrifice is an adequate payment for the guilt of the other. 3) If the guilty uses the freedom from punishment that has been obtained to the salvation of his soul. Herbig, in Manch. Gaben u. ein G., 1868, p. 256.

6. On Isa 53:4-5. Concerning the justifying and saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, that especially in a dying person must appear flourishing and strong. 1) How one must press on to it through conflict. 2) How it is afterwards full of power, life, peace, righteousness, salvation, blessedness. Rieger H. C. Superint. in Stuttgart, Funeral Sermons, 1870, p. 187.

7. On Isa 53:3 sqq. Christ assumed no temporal honor or reputation, but with words and works contradicted all that would have praised, honored, and celebrated Him. For He ever shunned the honor of this world, and gave not even the slightest cause for it (Joh 6:15). Yea, in great humility He allowed the greatest contempt and blasphemy to be uttered against Him; for the Jews reproached Him with being a Samaritan, that had a devil and that did His miracles by the power of Satan (Joh 8:48). Men treated His divine doctrine as blasphemy. He was pestered by murderous cunning, many lies and calumnies, finally betrayed, sold, denied, struck in the face, spit upon, crowned with thorns, scourged, wounded, condemned, forsaken by God and man, stripped naked as a malefactor, yea, hanged up as a curse (Gal 3:13), while every one mocked at Him, laughed at His prayers, cast lots for His clothes, gave Him gall and vinegar to drink in His dying extremity (Joh 19:29). Lastly, He died on the tree in the greatest infamy and contumely, His dead body was pierced and opened on the cross, and at last buried as a wicked person; yea, even after His innocent death. He was reproached with being a deceiver (Mat 27:63). Men also contradicted His resurrection. And so in life and death and after death He was full of contumely. Joh. Arndt, Wahr. Christenth. Buch 2, kap. 14.

8. On Isa 53:4-6. This text is the only medicine, and true, sure and approved theriac against that hurtful soul-poison, despair. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; and afterwards all we like sheep have gone astray, but the Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Thou hearest that He speaks of sins and iniquity; and that thou mayest not think He speaks of some particular people, and not of thee and me, the Holy Spirit lets the words go out strong, and lets this resound: He was wounded for our transgression, He was bruised for our iniquity. Item: God laid all our sin on Him. That means even that no man is excepted.

Now that this is true, that Christ, the Son of God, laden with the sin of all men, was on that account wounded and bruised, wilt thou regard God as so ungracious or so hard, that He will let a debt be paid Him twice? Or shall Christ have suffered such distress and death in vain? In fine; God laid thy sins on Christ; it follows that they no more rest on thee. God wounded Him for thy sins; it follows that thou shalt not bear the punishment. God smote Him for thy sake; it follows that thou shalt go free. Veit Dietrich.

9. On Isa 53:8-10. Is it not really a contradiction to say, that the Servant shall live long because He is taken out of the land of the living? And also, that He will have seed, when He shall have given His life an offering for sin? One sees here that the Prophet has some presentiment of the higher nature of Him whom he presents to us here as the Servant of Jehovah. According to the New Testament view, one must be cut off from the so called land of the living, but which is in truth the land of those devoted to death, in order to reach the land of true, of eternal life. Thus it is hereby intimated, that Christ will die in order to rise up again to everlasting life. Yea, even more! It is also intimated (Isa 53:10), that precisely by the giving up of His life He will accomplish, as it were, an act of generation, the result of which will be an immeasurably numerous and immortal posterity. For by His death He gives us eternal life (comp. Joh 12:24). The strange death of Christ: 1) By His death He laid down what was mortal in Him, and now appears wholly as the eternal living One; 2) by His death He gives life to them that were a prey to death.

10. On Isa 53:10. The death of Christ: 1) Who willed and decreed it? (God Himself: it pleased the Lord to bruise Him). 2) Why did God will it? (He must give His life an offering for sin). 3) What are His fruits? (He shall see seed and live long, etc.). After Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Prophet Isaiah.

11. On Isa 53:11-12. As the exaltation of Christ corresponds in general to His humiliation (comp. Php 2:5-11), so also it corresponds in particulars: 1) Because His soul was in tribulation, He will see His pleasures and be satisfied. 2) Because He bore the sins of many, so He, the righteous One will by His knowledge make many righteous. 3) Because He was made like the wicked, He shall have the great multitude for a prey and the strong for spoil.

Fuente: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical by Lange

DISCOURSE: 966
MENS NEGLECT OF THE GOSPEL

Isa 53:1. Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed!

WHEREVER we turn our eyes, we find much occasion for sorrow and lamentation. The miseries which sin has brought into the world, and which are daily multiplied by the follies and wickedness of man, have rendered this state a vale of tears, not only to those who most feel their weight, but to those, who, exempt from their pressure, are yet disposed to sympathize with their afflicted brethren. But there is one subject in particular, that affords matter for the deepest regret to every benevolent mind; it is, the unconcern, which men in general manifest for their eternal interests. This caused rivers of tears to flow down the eyes of David, and great horror to take hold upon him. It was on account of this, that Jesus, unmindful of the acclamations of surrounding multitudes, stopped to weep over the murderous Jerusalem. The Prophet Isaiah, laboured much to counteract this awful infatuation: but, except to a very few, who were as signs and wonders in the land, his efforts were unavailing; and he was constrained to take up this lamentation over them, Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
For the fuller understanding of these words we shall inquire, What is the report here referred to? and what reception it meets with in the world?

I.

What is the report here referred to?

When our Lord expounded the Scriptures to the two disciples in their way to Emmaus, he shewed them, that, according to the prophecies, Christ ought to have suffered, and by sufferings to enter into his glory [Note: Luk 24:26-27.]. Indeed, that was the general testimony of all the prophets [Note: 1Pe 1:11.]; and more especially is it opened to us in the chapter now under our consideration.

A more wonderful report never reached the ears of man. God was manifest in the flesh. The Son of God, Jehovahs Fellow [Note: Zec 12:7.], not only assumed our nature, but, in our nature, died; he became obedient unto death, even the accursed death of the cross. To this he submitted for our sake, and in our stead; to expiate our guilt, and, by the sacrifice of himself, to reconcile us unto God. Well might the Apostle say, Great is the mystery of godliness; for indeed it almost exceeds the bounds of credibility.

But, strange as this report may seem, there never was any other so well authenticated, or established by such a variety of evidence. A series of prophecies respecting it, respecting not only the general outlines, but even the minutest, and most contingent circumstances of it, has been given to the Church during the space of four thousand years. Every one of these has been fulfilled; and that too by the very persons who laboured to the utmost to destroy the credit of the report itself. The typical representations of it also were so numerous that no human foresight could have contrived them, nor could any human power have caused a combination of such various, and, to all appearance, contradictory circumstances in one event. Without noticing therefore the miracles wrought in confirmation of it, we may well affirm that it is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation.

With respect to its importance, never was there any other report so universally interesting as this: for it is not confined to a single state or kingdom, but to all the kingdoms of the earth, and to every individual from Adam to the latest of his posterity. Nor does any thing less than their eternal salvation depend upon it: they, who welcome it, will find acceptance with God; and they, who reject it, will be punished with everlasting destruction from his presence [Note: 2Th 1:8.]. It is, in short, that Gospel, which he that believeth shall be saved; and he that believeth not shall be damned [Note: Mar 16:16.].

And what tidings were ever so replete with joy? The most signal deliverances, the most complete victories, the most glorious acquisitions, enhanced by every thing that can be supposed to exhilarate the mind, are no more, in comparison of this, than a twinkling star to the meridian sun. Even the angelic hosts, when they came to announce the wonderful event, proclaimed it as glad tidings of great joy to all people. None ever believed the news, but he was instantly liberated from all his fears and sorrows, and filled with joy unspeakable and glorified [Note: 1Pe 1:8.].

Such then is the report referred to in the text: a report so marvellous, that it fills heaven and earth with wonder; so true, that we may as well doubt our own existence as entertain a doubt respecting it; so interesting, that all the concerns of time and sense are, in comparison of it, but as the dust of the balance; and so joyous, that it is a certain and inexhaustible source of happiness to all who receive it.

But that there are few who truly believe it, will appear whilst we shew,

II.

What reception it meets with in the world?

If the estimate which men form of themselves were true, we should rather have to ask, Who hath not believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord not been revealed? For all imagine themselves to be believers; and, because they have been baptized into the name of Christ, they conceive themselves to be possessed of real faith. But I must say with the Apostle, Examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves [Note: 2Co 13:5.]. To ascertain the point, I beg you to ask yourselves two questions, viz. How you obtained your faith? and, How it operates? Do not suppose that the faith of Christ is a bare assent to truths which you have been taught by your parents, or that it is that kind of conviction which is founded upon a consideration of evidence, such as you would feel respecting any common report which was substantiated to your satisfaction. True faith is the gift of God [Note: Eph 2:8.]. In my text, the believing of this report is identified with a revelation of Jehovahs arm to effect that faith: and true faith can result from nothing but the almighty power of God forming it in the soul. If ever you have believed, it must have been through the operation of divine grace [Note: Act 18:27.]; and that operation sought by fervent prayer In connexion with that question, ask yourselves further, How your faith operates? Where it is real, it works by love [Note: Gal 5:6.], and overcomes the world [Note: 1Jn 5:4.], and purifies the heart [Note: Act 15:9.]. See then, Brethren, whether your faith produce these effects; for, if it do not, it is but a dead faith, the faith of devils [Note: Jam 2:19.]. If you examine yourselves in this way, you will find that there is still the same occasion as ever for the complaint in my text. The prophet Isaiah adopted it in reference to those to whom he ministered. Our blessed Lord, notwithstanding he wrought so many miracles, was constrained to witness the same obstinate unbelief amongst his hearers [Note: Joh 12:37-38.]: and even the Apostle Paul, who was Gods instrument to plant so many churches, yet saw reason to declare that these words were still verified in his day [Note: Rom 10:16.]! And what must I say, my brethren? You can bear me witness that, from the first moment that I began to minister amongst you, this report has been faithfully delivered to you: but Who hath believed our report? In how few amongst you does it produce its proper effect, so as to demonstrate that Gods arm has indeed been revealed to you! Nay, I will even appeal to you, whether at this moment a true Believer, who shews forth his faith by his works, and lives altogether by faith in the Son of God, as having loved him, and given himself for him, be not at this very hour, just as in the prophets day, a sign and a wonder [Note: Isa 8:18.]. Yes, such characters are still as men wondered at [Note: Zec 3:8.]: nor is it so in this place only, but in every place where the truth is preached with fidelity and power. And this is a proof, that the report in my text is but little credited even in this Christian land.

Now then let me address myself,
1.

To those who think they believe

Justly does the Apostle say, All men have not faith [Note: 2 These. 3:2.]. And this he speaks, not of professed heathens, but of those who were joined to the Church of Christ. So, Brethren, I must say to you, All are not Israel who are of Israel [Note: Rom 9:6.]. I entreat you not to take for granted that you are right; but bring your faith to the test. Inquire carefully into its origin and operation: for, if your faith be not the faith of Gods elect, it will only deceive you to your ruin. You all know how the Jews deceived themselves, by indulging a vain confidence, that because they were the natural descendants of Abraham, they were in a state of acceptance with God. And be assured, that the same fatal error obtains to a vast extent amongst us. If called to give a reason of the hope that is in you, how many are there who could only refer us to their birth of Christian parents, and their baptism into the faith of Christ? But that is no other reason than what a Mohammedan or a Hindoo might give for his hopes, and his professions. If you would not perish with the unbelieving world, I charge you, before God, to dismiss from your minds all such delusive expectations, and to seek from God that true faith which alone can sanctify and save the soul.

2.

To those who really possess the faith of Christ.

Such, I doubt not, are to be found amongst you. Yes, some of you, I trust, can call God to witness, that you have again and again fled to Christ for refuge as to the hope set before you, and that you count all things out dung for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus the Lord. To you then I say, that God has conferred upon you the greatest gift that you can possess in this world. Crowns and kingdoms, in comparison of it, were no more than the dust upon the balance. In possessing real faith, you have obtained the forgiveness of all your sins. You have also within your own bosom a sanctifying principle, which shall progressively transform you into the very image of your God. And for you is reserved an inheritance that is incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. What then will you render to the Lord for these great benefits? This do: Consecrate yourselves to God so wholly and entirely, that when the question is asked, Who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed? all who witness your life and conversation may point to you, and say, That man carries his own evidence along with him: however I may doubt of others, I can entertain no doubt respecting him. This, my dear brethren, is what God expects from you. He expects that you should shine forth as lights in the world, and so hold forth the word of life, as to prove to all, that we have not laboured in vain, or run in vain [Note: Php 2:15-16.].

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

CONTENTS

This may very well be called the Chapter of Chapters, concerning the Lord Jesus Christ; in which the two great features of his character are drawn to the full: the sufferings of Christ; and the glory that should follow. The Prophet, under the Holy Ghost, most blessedly sets forth the Lord Jesus, under both.

Isa 53:1

The Gospel of Christ is a report, and full of glad tidings of good things; yet so very generally is it despised and scorned, that the question is here put, who hath believed it? Reader! when we consider who Christ is in himself, and how essentially necessary his salvation is to all men; it becomes a matter of wonder that all men, universally speaking, do not embrace it in transports of joy. But, on the other hand, when we consider how sunk and fallen our nature is, even to the total ignorance of our ruin, it becomes a matter of still greater wonder, that any should receive it. Nothing, indeed, but sovereign grace can accomplish it in the heart. It is the Lord, that must make his people willing in the day of his power; Psa 110:3 ; Phi 1:29 .

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

The Offence of the Cross

Isa 53:3 Gal 5:11

Around the Cross a certain romantic interest has gathered, but what the Cross really stands for is an offence, a stumbling-block and a scandal to men. The Prophet Isaiah, with his piercing vision, saw the truth. In his prophecy of Christ he tells us that men shall see no beauty in Him that they should desire Him. The offence of the Cross has not yet ceased. Why?

I. The Cross of Christ is the condemnation of the world. It was the condemnation of the world of Christ’s own time. As that Cross has come down through all the centuries it has passed its unfaltering judgment upon the vanities and prides, and hates and greeds, the self-indulgent pleasures and the lusts of men. Today the Cross visits our worldliness with the same condemnation.

II. The Cross of Christ is an offence because it sets forth an imperative ideal of life. Christ’s ideal of life was concentrated into the one act of His dying. Christ hung upon His cross from His cradle to His grave. That life of self-denial and self-crucifiction, in which He pleased not Himself whenever He endangered His pleasing of God, is the imperative ideal of life He lays upon men.

Are we not all conscious of our deeply seated offence at this imperative of the Cross? Are we not all pagans at heart? We all chafe at the restraint of a life like Christ’s. We refuse to give up what we know His Cross condemns.

III. The Cross of Christ is an offence because it claims to be the power of God unto salvation. It makes this claim without an alternative. It throws up our sinful state in clear relief, and demands from every man, as his first duty, to get right with God. From its sacrifice there comes the stem word that nothing else in life is to be put before this getting right with God, and that this reconciliation is to be attained only through the Cross.

What is it which sin has done and always will do?

1. The first effect of sin is an altered universe. The reaction against your sin is not only in your conscience and in your body. It is in the world which environs you. You know that in the moment of your sin you spoiled all. There is that sobering and chilling experience of ‘the moment after’. The story in the third chapter of Genesis sets that law of sin in a clear light. Adam and Eve found themselves in an altered world. But Christ’s Cross has redeemed the world. It will become God’s perfect poem again.

2. The second effect of sin is death. Whenever we sin something dies within us. The connexion of sin and death is constant, immediate, inescapable. But what is death? The Bible says, and, says always, from Genesis to Revelation, that had there been no sin there would have been no death. It has made death a tragedy, awful, terrifying, unbearable. But the Cross has annulled this penalty of death. ‘He died for us.’

3. A third effect of sin is an estranged God. I have set this down as third in order although it is really first in fact Yet the sense of the estrangement of the real and living God is the last of which we are conscious. It is not until we know and bewail the estrangement of God that we see and lament the effect of sin.

IV. When does the offence of the Cross cease? It ceases only when the soul is visited not merely by remorse but by repentance toward God, followed by a meek confession of one’s sin, issuing into a faith in Christ Jesus Who died to reconcile us to God, to give us a new life in our soul, and to make this world a possible Eden again.

W. M. Clow, The Cross in Christian Experience, p. 115.

References. LIII. 3. Archbishop Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lv. 1899, p. 394. S. Parkes Cadman, ibid. vol. lx. 1901, p. 180. R. J. Campbell, ibid. vol. lxxi. 1907, p. 145. J. J. Tayler, Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty, p. 202. J. A. Alexander, The Gospel of Jesus Christ, p. 446. “Plain Sermons” by contributors to the Tracts for the Times, vol. ii. p. 58. W. Brock, Penny Pulpit, vol. xii. No. 693, p. 213. W. J. Knox-Little, The Mystery of the Passion, p. 15. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No. 1099; vol. liii. No. 3033. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 102. LIII. 4. Archbishop Lang, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. 1901, p. 402. J. Baldwin Brown, The Divine Treatment of Sin, p. 51. F. D. Maurice, Christmas Day and Other Sermons, p. 266. George Tyrrell, Oil and Wine, p. 116. W. J. Knox-Little, Labour and Sorrow, p. 269. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Isaiah XLIX.-LXVI. p. 97. LIII. 5. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No. 834; vol. xviii. No. 1068; vol. xxxiii. No. 2000; vol. xliii. No. 2499; vol. 1. No. 2887. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Lessons for Daily Life, pp. 97, 305. F. B. Cowl, Straight Tracks, p. 100. F. E. Paget, Faculties and Difficulties for Belief and Unbelief, p. 172. C. G. Clark-Hunt, The Refuge of the Sacred Wounds, p. 17.

Thou Shalt Answer, Lord, for Me

Isa 53:6

‘The constant and characteristic effort of our Lord’s life,’ says Dr. Smith in his work on Isaiah, ‘was to assert and explain Himself as the Only.’ His contemporaries tried to make Him the First among them, but with that He was not satisfied. He pressed on to a singularity beyond, to be realized in suffering. In suffering men feel their oneness with their kind; through suffering He became like unto men, ‘but only in order to effect through suffering a timely and a singular service for them’. He did not feel as they did about pain. ‘Pain never drew from Him either of those two voices of guilt or of doubt. Pain never reminded Christ of His own past and made Him question God.’ Nor did He seek pain for any end in itself. To Him pain was not in itself meritorious, a thing to be gloried in or desired: He shrank from it. ‘And when He submitted and was in the agony, it was not in the feeling of it, or the impression it made on others, or the manner in which it drew men’s hearts to Him, or the seal it set on the truth that He found his end and satisfaction, but in something beyond it Jesus looked out of the travail of His soul and was satisfied.

I. Why is the Gospel the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth? Is it because it reveals the eternal purpose of the Divine love? Or because it refashions life by an influence exerted on man’s heart? Or because it breaks the chain that holds us to our past? St. Paul’s answer is: For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith that is, it unrolls the Divine righteousness and displays faith as its secret at each disclosure. God set forth Christ Jesus to be an expiatory offering through faith in His blood. This was to declare God’s righteousness, that He might be seen by all His creatures as at once jealous for the law and judicially acquitting the guilty.

II. It is this judicial aspect of the Atonement which the Apostles set in the forefront as sovereign and prime. The Cross has many relations, and we are coming to understand some of them better. Others are beyond our knowledge, for to understand the whole we must be able to comprehend all the love and agony of the infinite nature. But the history of the Church shows that there is no fact which believers understand so readily, and rest upon so firmly, as the meritorious Sacrifice. Their teachers may be perplexed, but they are not. Whoever rejects the Stone, it is to them the head of the corner; ‘it is still the tried Stone, the sure foundation, the Rock whereof Faith speaks, “Set me upon it, for it is higher than I”; Love’s sure abiding Pillar of remembrance, whereon Love’s secret is written and graven with a pen of iron for ever’. They delight in all statements, however naked and literal, that bring it into clear relief.

III. The desire to explain the Atonement may go too far. All help is welcome, but the fact itself is much more easily understood than many explanations of it. Its ‘Onlyness’ is the main thing. No analogy goes more than a little way. The Cross far transcends reason and experience. It is indeed inscrutable in its very nature, and must be trusted implicitly if at all. The human mind offers a dull and wearied resistance to explanations which, as it easily perceives, do not touch the central mystery. In the Epistles we have the fact set forth in a variety of phrases which have been found sufficient for the soul’s needs. Such explanation as these furnish must be used to the full. For, running to another extreme, evangelical preaching sometimes misses the mark by continual, exhausting demands for faith. The cry ‘Believe, believe,’ mocks and irritates when it is not accompanied by a setting forth of the ground on which faith may rest how God is just and the justifier of them who believe in Jesus.

W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten Minute Sermons, p. 227.

Manifestation of Suffering

Isa 53:6

No one ignorant of the nature, power, and guilt of sin can understand this text, but to the humbled sinner it is ‘good tidings of great joy,’ of which Christmas and the Epiphany speak to us.

I. For the Sacrifice is for His Salvation.

a. It gives him rest from the works of the law (Rom 8:1-4 ; Gal 3:10-13 ).

b. It brings reconciliation and communion with God (Rom 5:9-11 ).

c. It assures his heart with a triumphant confidence (Rom 8:32-34 ).

II. The Virtue of this Sacrifice is its Completeness (Joh 19:30 ; Heb 10:14 ).

a. The sinner has broken the holy law of God (Rom 3:20 ).

b. His own righteousness is of no avail (Isa 64:6 )

c. But Christ is a complete surety for the sinner (Heb 7:20-22 ); an accepted surety (2Co 5:21 ); and the sinner stands complete and accepted in Him (Eph 1:6 ; Col 2:10 ).

III. Shall we not Lay our Sin where the Lord hath Laid it on Him? (Lev 16:21 ).

a. Shall we dare to trifle with that sin, which cost Him such bitter suffering? (Zec 12:10 ; Heb 10:29 ).

b. Shall we allow self-righteousness to rob us of the precious hope of full redemption in Him? (Gal 2:21 ; Gal 3:12-13 ; Gal 5:2-4 ).

(c) Shall we not rise to the heavenly privilege of praise for this great work? (Rev 1:5 ).

References. LIII. 6. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii. No. 694; vol. xvi. No. 925. W. Hay M. H. Aitken, Mission Sermons (2nd Series), p. 112. W. Howell Evans, Sermons for the Church’s Year, p. 93. Ambrose Shepherd, The Gospel and Social Questions, p. 49. A. Maclaren, Paul’s Prayers, p. 168. LIII. 7. W. H. Hutchings, Sermon-Sketches, p. 105. G. S. Barrett, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p. 221. Rutherford Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, p. 69. “Plain Sermons “by contributors to the Tracts for the Times, vol. v. p. 86. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Isaiah, XLIX.-LXVI. p. 103. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1543. LIII. 10. Ibid. vol. iv. No. 173; vol. x. No. 561; vol. xxxvii. No. 2186; vol. li. No. 2963. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Isaiah XLIX.-LXVI. p. 108. G. W. Herbert, Notes of Sermons, p. 267. J. Martineau, Endeavours After the Christian Life, p. 54. A. Mursell, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxvii. 1890, p. 77.

The Travail of Christ’s Soul

Isa 53:11

The travail of His soul! The Prophet lays no particular emphasis upon Christ’s bodily suffering, because, though most visible, it was not the main part of His atoning sufferings. He emphasizes the inward mental spiritual agony, as that in which chiefly He bore our iniquities. Mental is in itself harder to bear than bodily pain. The soul, with its larger capacities, finer sensibilities, and chief place as governor of the body, is more sensitive. Bodily pain is narrower in its range and exhausts itself sooner. What physical agony can compare with the sharp sting of inward anguish?

Let us reverently note some of those things which we may conceive constituted for our Lord ‘the travail of His soul’.

We must not limit Christ’s atoning mental sufferings to His actual endurance on the cross, or forget what He endured before the last scenes of His ministry on earth. His closing sufferings were more intense, but in the death-sufferings we should not lose sight of the life-sufferings; for the whole period of His public ministry was a ‘temptation,’ and to Him temptation was suffering, as He met and fought it. It came upon Him from friend and foe.

I. He Endured the Contradiction of Sinners against Himself. What neglects and oppositions were heaped upon Him! Ignorant but well-meaning friends tried His patience, failed to understand His character or believe in His words, and sought to thwart His aims which they could not grasp (cf. St. Mat 16:8 seq., 16:23, 17:17; St. Luk 24:25 ). Enemies gainsaid Him, refused His counsel, despised His teaching, caricatured His doctrine, said all manner of evil against Him falsely, even calling Him Beelzebub. Such contradiction, with all the irritation, and sorrow, and pain, and heaviness it caused Him, no one has ever endured, and none can understand what a humiliation and grief it was for Him to put up with it from those whom He came to save, and over whose sinful souls, even as they blasphemed Him, His pitying heart yearned with boundless compassion.

II. The Sight and Contact of Human Sin and Misery as they lay Passive around Him must have Deeply Wounded His Soul. He was holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. He had all sources of personal happiness within Himself, yet He went down into the depths of society, into the depths of this fallen world, where only scenes of sin and misery could meet His eye, and tear His heart, and pain His purity. How must that native purity of His sinless humanity have been repelled and shocked as He, with His exquisite susceptibilities all instinct with holiness and love, beheld the sin, and selfishness and woe of the men among whom He dwelt!

III. His Foresight of the Doom Coming on God’s Chosen People caused Him Pain. His tears over Jerusalem, forsaken and doomed to utter desolation, expressed the real sorrow of His soul. He alone knew the wrath that His nation was treasuring up, and how hopeless was their position through rejecting His gracious efforts. He wept in the anguish and pity of His heart that such vengeance was in store for them, and that they themselves had made it for ever impossible for Him to avert it. Very acute such sorrow, venting itself in such tears, must have been to Him who came to ‘save the lost sheep of the house of Israel’; who carried the knowledge of that doom with Him through life, and found all his efforts to rescue them vain, and had at last to confess His impotence, and give them up in sorrowful despair.

IV. The Shadow of the Cross Projecting itself over His Life cast a Burden over His Spirit as He anticipated the end of His ministry. Ever and again that burden pressed Him to speak of it, especially as time went on. But it was always with Him in daily consciousness, ever growing heavier and more distinct, and straitening Him more and more until His baptism should be accomplished. What a weight He must have carried on His soul in the knowledge of the death He was to die! How hard it must have been for Him to labour on with this prospect before Him! His humanity might well and naturally shrink from such painful anticipations. He was fitted to enjoy life perfectly and abundantly as none else; to delight in all beautiful things in nature; to appreciate all Divine and human truth; to feel the impression of all that was pure and lovely and virtuous and of good report. Yet He denied Himself, put a restraint on these holy and heavenly natural instincts of His, and bent Himself to the task of obedience, though He knew it was to be obedience unto death, even the death of the cross. Truly ‘He learned obedience by the things which He suffered’.

The travail of soul during life culminated at death, assuming a distinctness and bitterness peculiarly great as that crisis arrived. All the past was intensified and concentrated, and additional elements of pain were experienced. Thus His friends forsook Him and fled. One denied Him. One betrayed Him. Did not this experience, to One who was so sympathetic and social Himself, and who then needed all the human sympathy and society which His friends could give Him, cause sorrow of soul of no ordinary kind?

V. Learn

a. The costliness of His redemption.

b. The evil and shamefulness of sin.

c. The reality of our Lord’s sympathy for all who are in the world as He was, and follow in His footsteps.

d. The greatness of the suffering of the impenitent.

Satisfied

Isa 53:11

Our text speaks to us of the ‘satisfaction’ the Lord will experience at the result of His great atoning work. Many a man is not satisfied with the fruit of all his labour; no man is indeed in this world ever satisfied with the results of his expenditure. But Christ is satisfied at every stage with the progress made. His satisfaction keeps pace with every enlarging vision of the travail of His soul. His satisfaction shall be full when the vision is complete. When the sons and daughters are all brought home, He will desire nothing more, and regret nothing. His delight is then perfect. He shall be satisfied with His people.

I. Satisfied with their Number. There will be a multitude that no man can number; the vast majority of the race: a mighty gathering, countless as the dewdrops from the womb of the morning (Psa 110:3 ); and as He casts His eye over the General Assembly and Church of Himself, the First-born, He will not murmur that He has not more. Sufficient reward will He deem them to be for His travail of soul.

II. With their Variety. All kindreds and nations shall be represented there; all varieties of generations, and ages, and climes, of culture, and temperament, and experience, of rank and degree in the social and the moral world, shall be brought together in perfect unity, to satisfy Him with the sight of their diversity in unity, and of the suitability of the ‘common salvation’.

III. With their Character and Attainments. All shall stand perfect and complete in all the Will of God; each, in his measure and degree, according to his capacity, filled with the Spirit, conformed to the image of the ‘First-born among many brethren,’ and partaking of the Divine nature, and beginning an eternal progress; so that He shall see them faultless and worthy of Himself, and have no greater joy than see them walking in the truth, and desire no greater perfection in them at any stage of their eternal history.

IV. With their Prospects. They shall have fullness of joy, pleasures for evermore, new reaches of duty, new anticipations of higher felicity in His presence; and, under His guidance, enlarged and ever-enlarging capacities. There will be no drawbacks and deductions with God Himself their portion, heaven their home, His truth their study, His service their duty, His presence their light and glory. He will ask nothing more for them. He shall be satisfied with what God has given to Him for them.

V. With their Praises. They shall thank Him, cast their crowns at His feet, fill heaven with His glory, and bless Him with full hearts and unfaltering lips as they never could on earth; and as they cry, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain!’ He shall be satisfied, and feel such adoring gratitude ample recompense for the travail of His soul. How great must be the number, variety, attainments, prospects, and thanks of Christ’s redeemed to satisfy Him for His sorrow, and make Him think that that was not too sharp and sore for what it has brought!

References. LIII. 11. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Isaiah XLIX.-LXVI. p. 108. T. Binney, Sermon Preached in the King’s Weigh-House Chapel, p. 1. W. P. Balfern, Glimpses of Jesus, p. 237. R. Waddy Moss, The Discipline of the Soul, p. 57. T. Monod, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p. 219. J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 153. LIII. 12. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii. No. 458; vol. xxiii. No. 1385; vol. xxxv. No. 2070. W. H. Hutchings, Sermon-Sketches (2nd Series), p. 44. J. B. Stedeford, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxvi. 1904, p. 133. R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, vol. ii. p. 173. W. Alexander, Verbum Crucis, p. 19. A. Maclaren, Exposition of Holy Scripture Isaiah XLIX.-LXVI. p. 117. Jesse Butt, The Soul’s Escape, p. 62. LIV. 1. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 649.

Fuente: Expositor’s Dictionary of Text by Robertson

The Predicted Saviour

Isa 53

We must be very careful how we allot the prophecies of Scripture and distribute the treasures of divine wisdom. It is comparatively easy to find intermediate occasions and personalities to whom we may confide these ineffable treasures, privileges, and honours. But we must have some regard to pro portion, to fitness, and to the spiritual poetry of the occasion. No man known to history, but one, can carry this chapter in all its verses and lines and particles. Here and there some other man may come in and partially appropriate a word, a hint, a suggestion; but has any man ever seized the whole chapter and said, “That is mine”? Did any man ever quote the prophecy of Isaiah, saying, The prophet was very bold, and pictured me in words to be found in the fifty-third chapter of his vision? He would be a bold man who would claim this chapter, saying, It belongs to me, it portrays me, it is an anticipation of my personality and function, my beauty and dignity, my purpose and priesthood. Decency would intervene and say, Do not attempt to wear the constellations, do not attempt to claim the sun as private property; you will be judged by your claims; take care that you bring yourself not into folly and contempt by suggesting that all heaven was made for your enjoyment and convenience. Yet there is one Man in history who would fit the occasion, seize it, bind it round his brows as a garland, and it would look in place on such a head; no one would say, Behold the fool! who could help exclaiming, Behold the Man! As a question of poetry this is so, as well as a question of history. It belongs to the poetic imagination to find out affinities and similarities and kinships, subtle and remote, but certain and unchangeable: and if we might dismiss historical criticism for the moment we should find a wondrous poetical realisation of this fifty-third chapter in the Son of Mary, the Son of God. There is no reason to reject the historical interpretation. The more it is considered the more appropriate it becomes. But even if for the moment we throw it aside we are constrained to say, The manger, the Cross, the Olivet from which he stepped into heaven, all these combine to find the happy and sacred realisation of the marvellous forecast in this unparalleled vision.

There are some interpretations against which we cannot quote chapter and verse. Yet we know them to be untrue. The indwelling Spirit says, Such and such an interpretation cannot be true. In what, then, is our refuge when such interpretations are pressed upon us? Not in any isolated verse, but in the whole Bible. Sometimes the whole Book is focused into one quotable text, and that text answers the interpretation that is false and writes upon it its character and its doom. There is a Biblical spirit, a Biblical genius, a sacred ministry of the whole Book. We have seen this so often that we have come to lay down the principle that now no man can forge words in the name of Jesus. Let us hear them: how will they dwell with other words we have received from him? Closet them for the night, and we will open the door in the morning and see which is Dagon, which is Ark, which is right, which is wrong. If any man said that Jesus Christ had commanded in some book just discovered that men were not to love one another, we know what answer we should return to the discoverer and his book. All this means that there is a spirit in the Bible; not only do we find chapter and verse with which to contest certain positions or affirm others, but the whole Book breathes a spirit which we may utilise in controversy and utilise as a test of orthodoxy and a test of sincerity. It is so pre-eminently in this case. If any man arose to claim this chapter those who are most familiar with the Bible would be the first to resent his pretensions and write their contempt upon the forehead of his imposture; chapter and verse might not be quoted, but the whole spirit of the Bible would be cited. Some things in literature, in poetry, in literary conception and proposition, are impossible; you need not open the credentials, there need be no display of certificate and testimonial and affidavit: we know by the spirit that certain pretensions and propositions are false; that they are of the nature of imposture; they carry their own condemnation. But when we read the life of Jesus Christ, and then read this chapter in the light of that life, every verse flames up into new meanings, every sentence a pinnacle heaven-pointing, every figure a flower grown in the eternal paradise. We might remit the discussion to critics, and release the theologians that they might perform other functions, so evident is the spirit of the chapter, so charged with the very spirit of Bethlehem and Calvary.

There is a tone of discouragement at the beginning which we recognise and approve. That tone is not confined to Christ’s ministry alone, but to every ministry subsidiary yet related to the priesthood of the Son of God. Who hath believed truth, who hath believed charity, who hath believed in Gospel virtue? The truth has always had a hard time in the world. Lies have been feasted, feted, crowned, and truth, like a mendicant, has had but a crust; yet not but a crust; let us rather say, a crust and a blessing, and in the blessing the feast was realised. “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” It has been made bare these many centuries, and how few have seen it, or recognised it, or called it by its proper name! We have had continuity, and succession, and evolution, and development, and progress, and laws of nature; but not “the arm of the Lord.” Men felt themselves more comfortable in talking about law than about the Lord; it was less pious, less disciplinary, less evangelical. Herein is one proof of the truth of the evangelical doctrine, that it makes men think before they dare utter some of its choicest words.

Does the prophet account for the non-success of this great minister of light, when he describes him as growing up before God as a tender plant, “and as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him”? Is there in that reading a tone which says, What else could have been expected? Men do not care for roots out of dry ground; men do not care for that which is without form and comeliness; men are charmed by beauty and are fascinated by excellence that is patent to the eye What else could have been looked for? Why did he not set the Son of man in the zenith at midday, dismissing the sun’s poor light, and for one day glorifying the whole firmament by this radiant personality? That was not the divine method of revelation. Why did he not grow up from the earth as the fairest flower in paradise, making all other flowers tremble, and enclose themselves, and shrink away in conscious inferiority? Then men would have gathered around this flower, ardent as a flame, beautiful as an undiscovered colour let down from heaven, and all the earth would be saved by one vision of beauty. This is not the way; divine Christianity is not an appeal to the eye; it is not an address to the senses; it is a spectre, a spirit, an invisible energy that makes for the heart, and that can only be seen by the vision of the soul. The Lord did not need to wait thousands of years to make a superior Adam with finer tint of flesh, with keener glance of eye, with subtler and more varied eloquence of tone; it did not take the Potter so long at his wheel to turn out an Adam so mechanically perfect. The second Adam took upon him the form of men. He took upon him the flesh that had no beauty of outline or feature: but now and again how it lightened within, and how the rugged edges of the flesh caught that spiritual radiance and made men turn aside because of the intolerable glory! It was not a beauty of form, it was the beauty of expression. It was not the beauty of statuary, it was the beauty of life. It is the purpose of God to disappoint the senses. He has victimised the eyes, and the ears, and the hands of men. Does he delight in our disappointment? Does he like to see us come to view the marvellous spectacle, and exclaim, How disappointing! Is it by a larger circuit he sweeps round upon our attention and our confidence that he may hold our homage for ever?

There is a conception of suffering in the third verse which no man could have invented! Alas, coming upon it after long familiarity with its weird music, we may not see it to be so. Let us think ourselves back in time and in affairs. The words are these: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” Yet he was to win the world, and save it, and rule over it. He had not an occasional sorrow, a spasmodic pain, a transient agony; he was “a man of sorrows:” they were multiplied to him; they were his familiar acquaintances; they held night and day counsel together; the sorrows wrought upon him so that there was no place for formal beauty; his face was dug as with an iron instrument, ploughed, scarred; the agony of the heart wrote its story in the melancholy of the face. He came to save the world, yet he was despised and rejected of men, spat upon, buffeted, turned away from the door at midnight, never blessed, never cared for; he came unto his own, and his own received him not; and yet he came from heaven! He was “acquainted with grief” which we can never be. We have our little griefs, our tiny bubble woes, that rise and burst upon the stream of daily existence; but this Man was “acquainted with grief:” they hailed one another; they understood one another; grim grief nestled in his heart as in a chosen dwelling-place, and he found mysterious consolation through the ministry of grief; he found joy in melancholy; he found heaven on earth; he saw in the black root the possible flower; he was despised and rejected of men “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.” He would be a bold man who claimed this verse, if he were other than the Son of God. And that any man could have foreseen all this, and invented all this, and made of this supreme woe an effort in blank verse, is impossible to believe. The prophet must have really seen this in some vision-rapture; he must have been present at the outpouring of this contempt, in some high inspiration, in some miracle of introspection and prospection; he must: have been enabled to spring across the centuries and spend one day with the Son of man. We have said that some things are: impossible: amongst those things we rank the forecast of this; deepest misery. All men have their trouble, all men have their touch of grief, all men have their portion of disappointment; but: no man can take up these expressions in the fulness of their meaning, and say they are exhausted in human experience.

What is the interpretation? It comes in the fourth verse: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows,”

That “surely” means Now we see it: there can be but one explanation of all this rejection, contempt, sorrow, and grief: surely, certainly; yes, that is it. The word is not a bare adverb, it is an exclamation of the soul, the outburst of a sublime discovery. Then there comes the correction of an error: “Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” That was the common reading of Christ’s life. God will not have him. If any prophets would have him they might take him down from the Cross, but not a prophet rose to mitigate his agony. If God would have him for a Son why did he not extract the nails, and heal the wound, and extract the spear, and in throwing it down transfix the murderer who first used it? But God would none of him; he turned away, and in his turning made the heavens black; he expressed satisfaction at the result of the tragedy, and the earth applauded the divine complacency in rocking and earthquake and darkness sympathetic.

Then comes the realisation of the right meaning:

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” ( Isa 53:5 ).

What do these words mean? No man can tell. The best explanation of them is to hide them in the heart, brood over them, and use them when the night is darkest and when the great accusing, avenging law insists upon body and soul and all that makes us men. Some sermons are preached in the nighttime that cannot be preached in daylight; some expectations are whispered to the soul when no one can overhear. The tragedy of the Cross makes an infinite impression; it dwells within us like a memory that will hardly condescend to accept the embodiment of words; it looks upon us when we are blind with tears; it says something to us when we exclaim, “What shall we do to be saved?” It is not to be mechanically written about, or formally preached, or set forth by dainty choice of dainty words. There is a region where words are useless, where images are hardly available, where choicest metaphor feels itself a trespasser. There are regions which we can only look at, and at whose closed doors we can only wait until it pleaseth the indwelling Spirit to set them ajar a little, that through the hospitable rent we may hear somewhat of the nature of explanatory or consolatory music. Beware of every attempt to write a bock upon Christ’s agony. Beware lest in chaptering and sectioning a book, and making in some sort a printer’s trick of the story, we should crucify the Son of God afresh. Men see the Cross in its saving aspect probably only once, probably in one flashing moment, but they never forget the spectacle; it recurs when they need it, and that vision leaves the whole life whiter than snow, whiter than wool, creates in the life a hunger and a thirst after things divine and heavenly, and makes the man a new creature, so that heaven’s own stars are but baubles after having seen a universe compared with which they are dim specks of colour. All proportions, all distances, all values are changed, changed as in the twinkling of an eye. We are often cursed by our intelligence. We are often impoverished, in a religious sense, by our grammatical cleverness. God is not a God of etymology and syntax; else salvation would be of grammar, not of grace; of clever interpretation, not of absolute, implicit, filial acceptance and obedience. Have we had the vision? Was there a day when all heaven shone with new light, and all earth became transformed with ineffable beauty? Was there a day when we felt love towards all men and could have saved all men that very day, and have brought them into heaven at once a great missionary experience, a great evangelistic realisation of the value of men? That was the day when the Son of man found that which was lost, and brought it home rejoicing. Never let that day drop out of your memory.

Here is a view of human nature which no man could have invented: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.” There is an experimental tone in that declaration. The man knows what he is talking about It does not become any scribe to incriminate the whole human race without having sure ground under his feet. All history corroborates this criticism; all history sitting in the judgment-seat agrees with this finding. If there is a man who has not gone astray, let him stand up. If there is a man who has never been self-convicted not within some narrow lines of mechanical observance, but within the great circle of human sympathy and human duty let him say so, and let him adduce the proofs, and let him say so in the hearing of those who know his life most intimately; if he will not say so himself let some sponsor stand up and say it for him; sound the trumpet of challenge; call loudly for the witness, and your answer will be silence.

“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth” ( Isa 53:7 ).

That is our Christ; that is God’s Son; that is the Saviour of the world. We know that he was oppressed, and that he was afflicted; we know that he said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death;” we know that he sweat as it were great drops of blood; we have read that in history; we compare the prophecy and the history, and they are one. Isaiah might have been the reporter as he concealed himself within the shadows of Gethsemane.

But the matter does not end here. Providence does not lead to darkness. God has never started on a journey the destination in view being insignificance, blankness, poverty, desolation. On this night a morning will rise: “He shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied,” or, according to another version, “because of his agony he shall see and shall be refreshed;” he is to have a portion divided with the great; he is to divide the spoil with the strong: because he hath poured out his soul unto death; he is to be throned above the riches of the universe; he endured the Cross, despising the shame; he looked beyond to the smiling, welcoming heaven, not as a place of selfish rest, but as a gathering place in which he should hold eternal fellowship with immortal spirits. “He that goeth forth bearing seed” omit the word “precious,” for it adds nothing to the value of the text, and is properly omitted in the best translations, “he that goeth forth bearing seed” the epithet is in the substantive; the substantive is too grand for adjective or term of qualification, “He that goeth forth bearing seed” shall come again, his face all laughter, his voice all song, his arms too small and weak to hold the infinite sheaves. In this faith we stand, in this prospect we labour. The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. To-day there is little hope; today there is darkness enough. It would seem as if the multitude had gone out to do evil, and as if fools counted more in number than wise men; it would seem as if still Jesus Christ was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. But in reality it is not so. It is never so dark, according to the proverb, as before the dawn; it is then that the darkness is deepest simply because the dawn is nearest. O day of the Lord, come! O expected light, tip with some foregleaming the hills cf darkness! One ray would make us glad. One glimpse of light would make all thy praying ones spring up from their knees as if their prayers had been answered in a sentence. But our impatience must not rule us; our impetuosity must be held in check; our whole aspiration must be content with the words, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is done in heaven.” Yet we will say in our daily prayers, “Thy kingdom come,” as the spring comes and vanishes winter, as the summer comes and explains the vernal breeze and life, as the harvest comes to crown the year’s toil and travail with richest colour and richest fruit, with abundance worthy of a king. We live under a great scheme of providence: how dark sometimes; at other times how bright! How hard to dig the grave! How awful to lose the one life we cared for! How sad to be impoverished at a stroke! And yet it is in the midst of the desolateness that Christ says he will glorify those who believe in God, he will bring to fulness of honour, yea, even to coronation, those who have clung to God, and those who have clung most tenderly when the night was darkest

Prayer

Almighty God, in thee alone do we put our trust. Our whole heart goes out towards thee in eager love. We have committed ourselves unto thee, and thou art able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before the throne. This gospel have we received from thy Son Jesus Christ. We owe all we are and have that is good to him. His blood cleanseth from all sin. His grace establishes the heart and causes it to grow in all holiness and sacred power. Unto him that loved us, and hath washed us from our sins in his own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and his Father; unto him be dominion and majesty evermore. We bless thee for thy house. The tabernacle of God is with men upon the earth. Thou dost keep us in the right way by the declaration of thy testimonies and the continual revelation of thy truth; by the mighty energy of thy Holy Spirit, and by visiting our hearts in times of anxiety and distress. Thy ministry towards us is a ministry of salvation. Thou art always seeking to train us toward thyself. Thou dost lift up our life towards the light, and towards the higher and wider spaces. Thou dost give liberty to the captive an infinite, a glorious, liberty, requiring eternity for its unfoldment. May we in thy house see thyself. We would look upon thy goodness; we know we cannot bear the lustre of thy glory. Help us to feel thy grace, to hear the still small voice of animation and of comfort, assuring us that the Lord reigneth and that the end of all things is good. We bless thee for all light, truth, peace, hope. These are the great gifts of God. Every day do thou enrich us with them. Then, at the last, we shall not die, but languish into life. This is the gospel of thy Son; this is life, this is immortality, this is heaven. We bless thee that we must die to live, and that living in thy light we can never die. We bless thee for the mystery of love; for the marvel and the miracle of continual grace. Amen.

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

XXVII

THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST IN ISAIAH

The relation between the New Testament Christ and prophecy is that the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. To him give all the prophets witness. All the scriptures, the law, the prophets, and the psalms, testify of him. And we are fools, and slow of heart to credit adequate testimony when we distrust any part of the inspired evidence.

Of the ancient prophets Isaiah was perhaps the most notable witness of the coming Messiah. An orderly combination of his many messianic utterances amounts to more than a mere sketch, indeed, rather to a series of almost life-sized portraits. As a striking background for these successive portraits the prophet discloses the world’s need of a Saviour, and across this horrible background of gloom the prophet sketches in startling strokes of light the image of a coming Redeemer.

In Isa 2:2-4 we have the first picture of him in Isaiah, that of the effect of his work, rather than of the Messiah himself. This is the establishment of the mountain of the Lord’s house on the top of the mountains, the coming of the nations to it and the resultant millennial glory.

In Isa 4:2-6 is another gleam from the messianic age in which the person of the Messiah comes more into view in the figure of a branch of Jehovah, beautiful and glorious. In sketching the effects of his work here the prophet adds a few strokes of millennial glory as a consummation of his ministry.

In Isa 7:14 he delineates him as a little child born of a virgin, whose coming is the light of the world. He is outlined on the canvas in lowest humanity and highest divinity, “God with us.” In this incarnation he is the seed of the woman and not of the man.

The prophet sees him as a child upon whom the government shall rest and whose name is “Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa 9:6 ). This passage shows the divinity of Christ and the universal peace he is to bring to the world. In these names we have the divine wisdom, the divine power, the divine fatherhood, and the divine peace.

In Isa 11:1-9 the prophet sees the Messiah as a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, i.e., of lowly origin, but possessing the Holy Spirit without measure who equips him for his work, and his administration wrought with skill and justice, the result of which is the introduction of universal and perfect peace. Here the child is presented as a teacher. And such a teacher! On him rests the seven spirits of God. The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge, and the fear of the Lord. He judges not according to appearances and reproves not according to rumors. With righteousness he judges the poor and reproves with equality in behalf of the meek. His words smite a guilty world like thunderbolts and his very breath slays iniquity. Righteousness and faithfulness are his girdle. He uplifts an infallible standard of morals.

In Isa 40:3-8 appears John the Baptist, whom Isaiah saw as a voice crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for the coming King.

In Isa 11:2 ; Isa 42:1 ; Isa 61:1-3 the prophet saw the Messiah as a worker in the power of the Spirit, in whom he was anointed at his baptism. This was the beginning of his ministry which was wrought through the power of the Holy Spirit. At no time in his ministry did our Lord claim that he wrought except in the power of the Holy Spirit who was given to him without measure.

In Isa 35:1-10 the Messiah is described as a miracle worker. In his presence the desert blossoms as a rose and springs burst out of dry ground. The banks of the Jordan rejoice. The lame man leaps like a hart, the dumb sing and the blind behold visions. The New Testament abounds in illustrations of fulfilment. These signs Christ presented to John the Baptist as his messianic credentials (Mat 11:1-4 ).

The passage (Isa 42:1-4 ) gives us a flashlight on the character of the Messiah. In the New Testament it is expressly applied to Christ whom the prophet sees as the meek and lowly Saviour, dealing gently with the blacksliding child of his grace. In Isa 22:22 we have him presented as bearing the key of the house of David, with full power to open and shut. This refers to his authority over all things in heaven and upon earth. By this authority he gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter one for the Jews and the other for the Gentiles who used one on the day of Pentecost and the other at the house of Cornelius, declaring in each case the terms of entrance into the kingdom of God. This authority of the Messiah is referred to again in Revelation:

And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying. Fear not: I am the first and the last, and the Living one; and I was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore and I have the keys of death and of Hades. Rev 7:17

And to the angel of the church in Philadelphis write: These things saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David, he that openeth and none shall shut, and shutteth and none openeth. Rev 3:7

In Isa 32:1-8 we have a great messianic passage portraying the work of Christ as a king ruling in righteousness, in whom men find a hiding place from the wind and the tempest. He is a stream in a dry place and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

In Isa 28:14-18 the Messiah is presented to w as a foundation stone in a threefold idea:

1. A tried foundation stone. This is the work of the master mason and indicates the preparation of the atone for its particular function.

2. An elect or precious foundation stone. This indicates that the stone was selected and appointed. It was not self-appointed but divinely appointed and is therefore safe.

3. A cornerstone, or sure foundation stone. Here it is a foundation of salvation, as presented in Mat 16:18 . It is Christ the Rock, and not Peter. See Paul’s foundation in 1 Corinthians:

According to the grace of God which was given unto me; as a wise masterbuilder I laid a foundation; and another buildeth thereon. But let each man take heed how he buildeth thereon. For other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 1Co 3:10-11 .

In Isa 49:1-6 he is presented as a polished shaft, kept close in the quiver. The idea is that he is a mighty sword. In Revelation, Christ is presented to John as having a sharp, twoedged sword proceeding out of his mouth.

In Isa 50:2 ; Isa 52:9 f.; Isa 59:16-21 ; Isa 62:11 we have the idea of the salvation of Jehovah. The idea is that salvation originated with God and that man in his impotency could neither devise the plan of salvation nor aid in securing it. These passages are expressions of the pity with which God looks down on a lost world. The redemption, or salvation, here means both temporal and spiritual salvation salvation from enemies and salvation from sin.

In Isa 9:1 f. we have him presented as a great light to the people of Zebulun and Naphtali. In Isa 49:6 we have him presented as a light to the Gentiles and salvation to the end of the earth: “Yea, he saith, It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.”

In Isa 8:14-15 Isaiah presents him as a stone of stumbling: “And he shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And many shall stumble thereon, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.”

The prophet’s vision of his maltreatment and rejection are found in Isa 50:4-9 ; Isa 52:13-53:12 . In this we have the vision of him giving his “back to the smiters, and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair.” We see a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. His visage is so marred it startled all nations. He is a vicarious sacrifice. The chastisement of the peace of others is on him. The iniquity of others is put on him. It pleases the Father to bruise him until he has poured out his soul unto death as an offering for sin.

The teaching of Isaiah on the election of the Jews is his teaching concerning the “holy remnant,” a favorite expression of the prophet. See Isa 1:9 ; Isa 10:20-22 ; Isa 11:11 ; Isa 11:16 ; Isa 37:4 ; Isa 37:31-32 ; Isa 46:3 . This coincides with Paul’s teaching in Romans 9-11.

In Isa 32:15 we find Isaiah’s teaching on the pouring out of the Holy Spirit: “Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be esteemed as a forest,” and in Isa 44:3 : “For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and streams upon the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring.”

In Isa 11:10 he is said to be the ensign of the nations: “And it shall come to pass in that day, that the root of Jesse, that standeth for an ensign of the peoples unto him shall the nations seek; and his resting place shall be glorious.”

Isa 19:18-25 ; Isa 54:1-3 ; Isa 60:1-22 teach the enlargement of the church. The great invitation and promise are found in Isa 55 .

The Messiah in judgments is found in Isa 63:1-6 . Here we behold an avenger. He comes up out of Edom with dyed garments from Bozra. All his raiment is stained with the blood of his enemies whom he has trampled in his vengeance as grapes are crushed in the winevat and the restoration of the Jews is set forth in Isa 11:11-12 ; Isa 60:9-15 ; Isa 66:20 . Under the prophet’s graphic pencil or glowing brush we behold the establishment and growth of his kingdom unlike all other kingdoms, a kingdom within men, a kingdom whose principles are justice, righteousness, and equity and whose graces are faith, hope, love, and joy, an undying and ever-growing kingdom. Its prevalence is like the rising waters of Noah’s flood; “And the waters prevailed and increased mightily upon the earth. And the water prevailed mightily, mightily upon the earth; and all the high mountains, that are under the whole heavens, were covered.”

So this kingdom grows under the brush of the prophetic limner until its shores are illimitable. War ceases. Gannenta rolled in the blood of battle become fuel for fire. Conflagration is quenched. Famine outlawed. Pestilence banished. None are left to molest or make afraid. Peace flows like a river. The wolf dwells with the lamb. The leopard lies down with the kid. The calf and the young lion walk forth together and a little child is leading them. The cow and the bear feed in one pasture and their young ones are bedfellows. The sucking child safely plays over the hole of the asp, and weaned children put their hands in the adder’s den. In all the holy realms none hurt nor destroy, because the earth is as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the fathomless ocean is full of water. Rapturous vision! Sublime and ineffable consummation! Was it only a dream?

In many passages the prophet turns in the gleams from the millennial age, but one of the clearest and best on the millennium, which is in line with the preceding paragraph, Isa 11:6-9 : “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together: and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea.”

The prophet’s vision of the destruction of death is given in Isa 25:8 : “He hath swallowed up death for ever; and the Lord Jehovah will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the reproach of his people will he take away from all the earth: for Jehovah hath spoken it,” and in Isa 26:19 : “Thy dead shall live; my dead bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust; for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast forth the dead.”

The clearest outlines of the prophet’s vision of “Paradise Regained” are to be found in Isa 25:8 , and in two passages in chapter Isa 66 : Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all ye that love her: rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn over her; that ye may suck and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations; that ye may milk out, and be delighted with the abundance of her glory. For thus saith Jehovah, Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream: and ye shall suck thereof; ye shall be borne upon the side, and shall be dandled upon the knees, as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem. And ye shall see it, and your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like the tender grass: and the hands of Jehovah shall be known toward his servants ; and he will have indignation against his enemies. Isa 66:10-14

For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make shall remain before me, saith Jehovah, so shall your seed and your name remain. And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another, shall all flesh come to worship before me, saith Jehovah. Isa 66:22-23

QUESTIONS

1. What is the relation between the New Testament Christ and prophecy?

2. What can you say of Isaiah as a witness of the Messiah?

3. What can you say of Isaiah’s pictures of the Messiah and their background?

4. Following in the order of Christ’s manifestation, what is the first picture of him in Isaiah?

5. What is the second messianic glimpse in Isaiah?

6. What is Isaiah’s picture of the incarnation?

7. What is Isaiah’s picture of the divine child?

8. What is Isaiah’s vision of his descent, his relation to the Holy Spirit, his administration of justice, and the results of his reign?

9. What is Isaiah’s vision of the Messiah’s herald?

10. What is the prophet’s vision of his anointing?

11. What is the prophet’s vision of him as a miracle worker?

12. What is the prophet’s vision of the character of the Messiah?

13. What is the prophet’s vision of him as the key bearer?

14. What is the prophet’s vision of him as a king and a hiding place?

15. What is the prophet’s vision of the Messiah as a foundation stone?

16. What is the prophet’s vision of him as a polished shaft?

17. In what passages do we find the idea of the salvation of Jehovah, and what the significance of the idea?

18. What is Isaiah’s vision of the Messiah as a light?

19. Where does Isaiah present him as a stone of stumbling?

20. What is the prophet’s vision of his maltreatment and rejection?

21. What is the teaching of Isaiah on the election of the Jews?

22. Where do we find Isaiah’s teaching on the pouring out of the Holy Spirit?

23. Where is he said to be the ensign of the nations?

24. What passages teach the enlargement of the church?

25. Where is the great invitation and promise?

26. Where is the Messiah in judgment?

27. What passages show the restoration of the Jews?

28. What is the prophet’s vision of the Messiah’s kingdom?

29. What is the prophet’s vision of the millennium?

30. What is the prophet’s vision of the destruction of death?

31. What is the prophet’s vision of “Paradise Regained?”

Fuente: B.H. Carroll’s An Interpretation of the English Bible

XXII

THE BOOK OF ISAIAH PART 14

Isa 52:13-54:17

The special theme of this section is the priestly office of the Servant and the happy results of his priestly work to Zion. Some have called it the “Great Passional.” Polycarp calls this section “the golden passional of the Old Testament Evangelist.” Delitzsch says, “It is the center of this wonderful book of consolation (Isaiah 40-66), and is the most central, the deepest, and the loftiest thing that the Old Testament prophecy, outstripping itself, has ever achieved.” Another has said, “Here we seem to enter the holy of holies of the Old Testament prophecy, that sacred chamber wherein are pictured and foretold the sufferings of Christ and the glory which should follow.” This section contains the very heart of the gospel and the preacher who leaves it out of his preaching is a preacher of “airy nothings.” The success or failure of the preacher is determined as he relates his preaching to the truth of this great passage.

There are several different interpretations of Isa 52:13-53:12 :

1. The earliest Jewish authorities, even down to Aben Ezra, A.D.1150, stood for the messianic interpretation of this passage. Their later writers abandoned this explanation on account of its bearing on the Christian controversy. It was assumed as indisputable by the Christian Fathers, and almost all Christian expositors down to the commencement of the nineteenth century took the same view.

2. The later Jews under the pressure of the Christian controversy abandoned the traditional interpretation and applied this prophecy to Jeremiah, Josiah, or to the people of Israel.

3. In the present century a number of Christian commentators have adopted one or the other of the later Jewish theories, either absolutely or with modifications.

The argument for the messianic theory and against the later Jewish theories is as follows:

1. The portraiture of the “Servant of Jehovah” here has so strong an individuality and such marked personal features that it cannot be a mere personified collection, whether Israel, faithful Israel, or ideal Israel, or the collective body of the prophets.

2. That it could not be the nation at large appears from the fact that the calamities which Israel suffered are always spoken of as sent upon them for their own sins.

3. That it could not refer to their prophets or righteous men, who made expiation for the nation’s guilt, appears from the following considerations: (1) Such a position is against the whole tenor of Scriptures. (2) Their most righteous in their prayers did not plead their own merit but Jehovah’s righteousness and mercy. (3) Many parts of this section are manifestly such as cannot be applied to either the nation or any body of men inside of it.

4. It goes so infinitely beyond anything of which a mere man was ever capable, that it can only refer to the unique man, the God-man, Christ Jesus our Lord.

The proof from the New Testament that this is the true interpretation is abundant. Passages from this section are quoted in Mat 8:17 ; Luk 22:37 ; Joh 12:37-38 ; Act 7:32-33 ; Rom 10:16 ‘and 1Pe 2:24-25 , all of which are unmistakably applied to Christ. This ought to settle the question once for all that this passage is distinctly messianic.

This great passage divides itself into five paragraphs of three verses each, as follows: (1) Isa 52:13-15 , the introduction, a general view of the whole subject; (2) Isa 53:1-3 , the prevailing unbelief and his unpromising appearance; (3) Isa 53:4-6 , a substitute for sinners; (4) Isa 53:7-9 , his submissiveness and his purity; (5) Isa 53:10-12 , the glorious success of his completed propitiation and also his intercession.

We have the general view of the whole subject presented in Isa 52:13-15 . This passage is a prelude to Isa 53 and is closely connected with it. In these three verses we have, (1) the Servant’s exaltations, (2) his humiliation preceding, (3) the far-reaching blessings which shall result to the whole world. This includes the whole of his redemptive work, stated generally. In Phi 2:5-11 we have our Lord’s humiliation, exaltation, and success, in which there is a graphic picture of his suffering on the cross. The prophet here gets three views of the Servant of Jehovah: First, he sees him exalted, lifted up, very high; secondly, he sits at the foot of the cross and there sees the Lord as he hung upon the accursed tree, after he had been buffeted, crowned with thorns, smitten, scourged, crucified, his face covered with bruises and with blood, and his frame and features distorted with agony, so that “his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men,” but the picture changes and, thirdly, the prophet sees this suffering Christ as he startles many nations and receives honor at the hands of kings. This is a brief view of a preview or introduction to the more clearly outlined picture in the next chapter.

The first question in Isa 53:1 “Who hath believed our report?” seems to sound a discouraging note from the standpoint of the prophet. The messengers have gone forth to publish peace (Isa 52:7 ), and many nations have received the tidings with reverence (Isa 52:15 ), but Israel in the midst of whom this wondrous work of atonement has been effected, refused to believe the message. While the immediate reference is doubtless to Isa 52:7 this complaint is applicable to the whole revelation of the prophet. He had brought them the good tidings concerning “Immanuel,” the “Prince of Peace,” the “Rod out of the stem of Jesse,” the “Sure Foundation,” the “Righteous King,” and the “revealed glory of the Lord.” He surely felt that he spoke, mainly, to unbelieving ears, and this unbelief was likely to be intensified when so marvelous a prophecy was delivered as that which he was now to put forth. There is, of course, a rhetorical exaggeration in the question, which seems to imply that no one would believe.

The prophet’s second question, “To whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed” raises the question of the recognition of Jehovah’s displays of power in behalf of Israel. He has made bare his holy arm before all the nations and the ends of the earth are made to see the salvation of Jehovah, but where is the spiritual discernment of these things in Israel? Many Jews had failed to recognize Jehovah’s marvelous dealings with them and the nations around because of their unbelief. But there is a more far-reaching application of these questions to Israel, as indicated by Paul in Rom 10:16 . They did not recognize the “Arm of Jehovah,” the Lord Jesus Christ, as their Messiah. His mighty works were not recognized by them as attestations of the One that was to come, but with blinded eyes they rejected him, as the prophet here foresaw.

Here it is said that he grew up as a “tender plant” before Jehovah, i.e., the Messiah was a fresh sprout from the stump of a tree that had been felled, the tree of the Davidic monarchy. Yet he was before Jehovah with his loving favor upon him. He was also as a “root growing up out of dry ground,” just like the tall succulent plant in the east, growing from the soil utterly devoid of moisture. The roots of such plants in the desert are full of fluid, though the surrounding air is very dry. The “dry ground” here refers to the corrupt age and nation, and the arid soil of humanity in general.

“He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we see him there is no beauty that we should desire him.” He had no regal pomp nor splendor, nothing to attract the multitudes, but his attractive qualities were to the spiritual rather than to the carnal. The spiritual beauties of a holy, sweet expression and a majestic calmness could only have been spiritually discerned. “He was despised”; men had contempt for his teaching and verily they hated him because his teaching and life were BO contrary to them. “He was rejected,” by the Jewish nation and was not reckoned with men by them. “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”; his whole ministry illustrates this. His sorrows appear on every page of the Gospels. Men hid their faces from him when they met him, because they saw only the external expression of sorrow and grief. Thus he is pictured as a “tender plant, a root growing up out of dry ground, without comeliness, no beauty, despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” men hiding their faces from him as one despised and not esteemed.

In Isa 52:4-11 we have the very heart of the vicarious work of our Lord, but there are other expressions in the passage that bear on this phase of his work. So we will consider them all together. There are eleven of these unmistakable expressions of our Lord’s vicarious sufferings: (1) “He hath borne our griefs”; (2) “he hath carried our sorrows”; (3) “he was wounded for our transgressions”; (4) “he was bruised for our iniquities”; (5) “the chastisement of our peace was upon him”; (6) “with his stripes we are healed”; (7) “Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”; (8) “he was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people”; (9) “when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin”; (10) “he shall bear their iniquities”; (11) “yet he bare the sins of many.”

In the ninth item above, the sacrificial nature of these sufferings is directly stated. To a people whose approach to God was limited throughout by the indispensable condition of the expiatory offering, all these sayings were calculated to suggest to them that in such a one they might realize all their hopes of righteousness. The terms, “iniquities,” “transgressions” and “sins” which occur here, gather around the work of the high priest on the ‘”day of atonement,” and indicate the priestly work of Christ, which is the theme of this section. This doctrine thus taught in the Old Testament is set forth with equal distinctness in the New Testament, and forms the hope, the trust, and the consolation of all Christians.

While thus suffering for a lost world his suffering was regarded by those who witnessed it as a smiting from God for his own sin. Hence they scoffed at him and reviled him in his greatest agonies. To one only, and him not one of God’s people, was it given to see the contrary, who declared aloud, “Certainly this was a righteous man” (Luk 23:47 ).

The prophet here shows that he was oppressed and afflicted, though he did not open his mouth. Like the Passover lamb led to the slaughter, he was dumb, which has a remarkable fulfilment in the deportment of our Lord under trial.

He was taken away by oppression and judgment, i.e., by a violence which cloaked itself under the formalities of a legal process. The people of his generation considered that this stroke fell upon him, not because of the transgression of God’s people, but thought that the stroke came because of his own sins.

His innocence and purity are set forth in Isa 52:9 . The prophet shows that the intent of the executioners was to make his grave with the wicked, as was the case of all criminals who were crucified on the “Hill of Skull” and buried in a grave in the midst, but through the providence of Jehovah he had the rich man’s tomb because there was no violence done by him nor was any deceit found in his mouth. “Violence” here refers to his overt acts and “deceit” refers to the inward state of the heart. He was free from both the guilt of sin and the bondage of sin. He was pure both in life and in character.

It may be truly said that God bruised Christ and put him to grief, the explanation of which is found in Act 2:23 : “Him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay.” The crucifixion of Christ was not an after-thought with God. It was divinely decreed, and permissively carried out by the hands of wicked men. He was put to death by the divine stroke, on the charge of sin.

But how shall we sufficiently realize all the significance of earth’s greatest tragedy? Even when we beggar language we but bring somewhat nearer the heights and depths of its import. If all the crises in human affairs since Adam first hesitated over the tender of forbidden fruit in the hand of his wife to the present crisis in the affairs of the Oriental nations could pool their hazards, they would not surpass the momentous issues involved when he said, “Now is the crisis of this world.” Indeed there has never been and never will be but this one real crisis for this world. Since that time we use only relative terms when we talk about a crisis.

If all the cups of woe ever pressed to shrinking human lips since the first sad pair were banished from Eden to the wailing over the victims of the Eastland disaster were condensed into one measure of gall and wormwood, they would not exceed the bitterness enforced on our great substitute when he cried out in Gethsemane’s bloody sweat: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” If all the floods from Noah’s deluge to the last Mississippi overflow could merge their waters into one swollen tide of horror, we might not compare it with his baptism of suffering forecast by the prophets: “All thy billows have rolled over me. Deep calleth unto deep at the voice of thy waterspouts.” If all the fires since sulphur and brimstone were rained on Sodom and Gomorrah to the burning of San Francisco were combined into one lurid conflagration “painting hell on the sky,” its devouring flame could not be so intense and searing as the fire of which he speaks: “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” If all the wars since Abraham dispersed the foray of Chedorlaorner to the strife by land and sea now raging in the Orient were massed into one universal conflict, the shock of arms would make but on echo of his fight with principalities and powers in the realm of the Spirit and of death from which he emerged “leading captivity captive” and with head-crushed Satan chained to his chariot wheels. If all the darkness since in creation’s dawn, “darkness was upon the face of the deep,” to the Egyptian darkness which might be felt and thence to the sun’s latest eclipse, or Byron’s poetic dream, was woven into one funeral pall of gloom, it might not equal that “hour of the power of darkness” which enveloped his cross. If all the loneliness of the exiled since Cain as a fugitive went away from the presence of God to Croly’s Wandering Jew , or to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe , were merged into one desert of solitude, it could not be compared to his isolation when “of the people there were none With him,” and when he cried: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” If all the tragedies since Cain slew his brother Abel, to the last victim of the Inquisition were grouped into one horrible auto de fe, this concentrated martyrdom of all time should not measure the vicarious expiation of him who died as a felon at the hand of God. Yes, “His soul, being made an offering for sin,” because “He bear the sin of many,” was poured out unto death.

And because “the chastisement of our peace was laid on him” it pleased the Father to bruise him and to put him to grief, “for he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him,” and because when “found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, therefore hath God highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of beings in heaven and beings on earth and beings under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

The outcome of it all (Isa 52:10-12 ), and its bearing on the evangelization of the world are as follows: (1) “He shall see his seed,” i.e., his disciples, who are said in the Scriptures to be the begotten of the teacher, as Paul speaking of Onesimus, “whom I have begotten in my bonds.” (2) “He shall prolong his days,” i.e., he shall continue to live by the resurrection and thus extend the time of his work in the salvation of men. (3) “The pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand,” i.e., God’s ultimate aim and end with respect to the universe shall be accomplished through him as the instrumentality. (4) “He shall see the travail of his soul and be satisfied,” i.e., because of the travail of his soul he shall be satisfied. This is exactly parallel to Phi 2:5-11 which emphasized the thought, “No cross No crown.” (See the author’s sermon on this theme, Evangelistic Sermons, p. 15.) (5) “Shall justify many,” i.e., shall turn many from sin unto righteousness, which corresponds to Paul’s great discussion in Rom 5:18-19 . (6) “A portion with the great,” i.e., he shall be a great conqueror, shall have a great kingdom and overcome the strong, making the kingdoms of this world his own, or it may refer to his mighty champions of evangelism with whom he will divide the possessions.

These are not contingent promises. All their preceding conditions have been fully met. Hence they are absolute promises made by the Almighty Father to his divine Son. Every attribute of deity is pledged to their literal and complete fulfilment. We might doubt the stability of the material heavens, the indestructibility of matter, and the persistence of the law of gravitation, but these promises lie beyond the realm of question and peradventure.

The imperiousness of the “shall see” is the ground of positiveness in the “shall come,” applied to all sinners given to our Lord by the Father. And the “shall be satisfied” guarantees and necessitates the salvation of all the elect. And though a thousand portents forebode a dissolution of the earth before his satisfaction be complete, it cannot be prematurely dissolved, for the messianic days of salvation shall be prolonged until his purposes be fully accomplished. Some Christians, indeed, consulting their own selfish desires to be relieved at once from trouble may cry out: “Come on, Lord Jesus, come quickly the time of the second advent is at hand do not tarry do not be slack concerning thy promise to come quickly.”

But the Lord, unwilling that any of his elect should perish and unsatisfied until they shall repent and live) prolongs his days. We may not propound to a weary and cowardly church the question, “Are you satisfied?” The church might consult its selfish greed and fear and stop the good work of salvation too soon. We may not carry the question to death and hell, “Are you satisfied?” But only one may answer that question, our Lord himself. Men must be saved and saved and saved until he is satisfied men of all grades of personal guilt, men of all nations and tribes and tongues. Poor, outcast, wandering Israel must be saved. We may be assured he will not be satisfied until the redeemed constitute a host that no man can number, a host whose hallelujah will be louder than mighty thunderings, louder than the voice of many waters. If the “great” and the “strong” of this context refer to Satan, we may be sure Christ will not be content with the present division of these spoils. Though Satan’s goods be now at peace the stronger than he will bind him and despoil him. But if “strong” and “great” refer to Christ’s mighty champions of evangelism, it is equally sure he will make their portion far greater than their present possession. Thus the context illumines the text and makes it reasonable.

The last clause of Isa 52:12 gives us the intercessory work of Christ as priest. It began when he said on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” But it has continued ever since and will continue until lie leaves the mediatorial throne and returns to this world to wind up the affairs of time and turn over the kingdom to the Father.

The special theme of Isa 54 is the vast growth and blessedness of Zion, as the result of the Servant’s work. From Isa 54:1-3 , at Nottingham, England, May 30, 1792, William Carey sounded forth that bugle note of modern missions, “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God,” which waked a sleeping world and whose echoes yet linger on every shore of time.

The mighty mandates of this passage stagger all reason, all probability, all philosophy, indeed everything but superhuman faith. And even superhuman faith must have some solid foundation on which to rest, otherwise it becomes blind credulity As the great commission, to disciple all nations and preach the gospel to every creature, rested upon the preceding assurance, “All power in heaven and in earth is given unto me,” and the succeeding assurance, “Lo, I am with you all the days even unto the end of the world,” so these mighty mandates must have a substantial predicate. That predicate lies in the context.

The verses immediately preceding the text declare: “When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul unto death; and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” This passage rests on that context.

There is no break in the thread of continuity between Isaiah 53-54.Isa 54 is unthinkable without Isa 53 . Yes, let it be affirmed with uplifted hand and eyes and heart: This passage enjoins impossibilities apart from the awful tragedy set forth in the preceding context. But on that predicate of vicarious atonement all it enjoins is both easy and delightful.

There are seven of these mandates, as follows:

1. The barren are commanded to rejoice in heart over unborn children promised of God contrary to nature. In its spiritual application this does not refer to the active, working, fruit-bearing churches. The reason of their joy is evident and every way rational. They have not been barren hitherto. The call is to the barren churches, whose members so far have been as fig trees producing nothing but leaves. It implies a marvelous gift of faith to them, for the heart cannot break forth in praise over a blessing promised, unless it believe the promise. Yea, for such praise the faith must be the very substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. At such a promise the barren Sarai once laughed in derision until through faith she became Sarah and laughed now with joy and even named her child “Laughter.”

2. They are commanded not merely to rejoice in heart, but to provide instant, and abundant house room for the coming of these multitudinous children of promise: “Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thy habitations.” This injunction reminds us of the vision of Zechariah: A young man went forth with a measuring line to lay off the site of the messianic Jerusalem. But an angel from God appears with the injunction: “Run, speak to that young man.” Tell him, “Jerusalem shall be immeasurable. It shall expand until it takes in all the neighboring towns and villages. Let him roll up his insignificant tape line. That cannot measure this enlarged city of promise. No walls can enclose it. It shall be as big as the country itself.”

3. In making provision for this enlargement there must be no regard for the cost. No miserly calculations. No selfish economy shall restrict the outlay: “Spare not; lengthen thy cords and strengthen thy stakes.”

4. Enlargement shall be in every direction: “For thou shalt break forth upon thy right hand and thy left.” The heresy that giving to one object, or working in one direction precludes other gifts and objects must die out of the heart.

5. This enlargement in all directions must be without foreboding as to the outcome. The heart must not dread the humiliation of possible failure, for says the passage: “Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed.”

6. There must be no premature dread of the possible character and destiny of the numerous progeny after they have come: “For all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children.”

7. This great enlargement must be undertaken in absolute fearlessness of any fighting opposition or talking opposition. For, “No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that riseth against thee thou shalt condemn.”

The imagery here employed is very suggestive and impressive to those of us familiar with tent life. We know that a little squad needs but a little tent, and it needs only a small place with small curtains, short cords and weak tent pins. But when we lay off a wide space, that means a big tent and broad curtains and long ropes and strong, deeply driven stakes to anchor it securely against storms. Then, with a little tent we need only a short central tent pole, but with a big tent we need a tent pole like the mast of a ship. This pole is the center of unity. When we suddenly and greatly increase our tent our tent pole must either grow to fit the new conditions or we must get out a new one.

We are commanded to sing not to croak sing for blessings past, sing more for blessings promised, sing if we suffer, as Paul and Silas at midnight in the jail at Philippi. Rejoice that God has counted us worthy to suffer for his name and cause. Let faith that never staggers at the magnitude of commands and promises fire our heart to expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God. Let us learn to make large prayers, prayers for mighty favors. Let us open our mouths wide and God will fill them. It ministers to the self-respect of a people to cut out a big piece of work for them to do. Let us heed these words adapted from Whittier: What Hell may be, we know not; this we know: We cannot lose the presence of the Lord: One arm, Humility, takes hold upon His dear Humanity; the other, Love, Clasps his Divinity. So where we go He goes; and better fire-walled Hell with Him Than golden-gated Paradise without.

QUESTIONS

1. What is the special theme of this section and how does it rank in importance with other scripture?

2. What is the different interpretations of Isa 52:13-53:12 ?

3. What is the argument for the messianic theory and against the later Jewish theories?

4. What is the proof from the New Testament that this is the true interpretation?

5. Give an analysis of Isa 52:13-53:12 .

6. What is the general view of the whole subject as presented in Isa 52:13-15 ?

7. What is the import of the prophet’s double question in Isa 53:1 ?

8. Explain his unpromising appearance.

9. What is the proof from this passage that Christ was made a substitute for sinners?

10. While thus suffering for a lost world how was this suffering regarded by those who witnessed it?

11. How, according to this prophecy, did he deport himself under such trials?

12. What is the meaning of Isa 53:8 ?

13. How is his innocence and purity set forth in Isa 53:9 ?

14. How may it be truly said that God bruised Christ and put him to grief, and what the significance of this great tragedy?

15. What is the outcome of it all (Isa 10:12 ) and what its bearing on the evangelization of the world?

16. When was the last clause of Isa 10:12 , “and made intercession for the transgressors,” fulfilled?

17. What is the special theme of Isa 54 ?

18. What great sermon was preached from Isa 54:1-3 , and what of its lasting effect?

19. What can you say of this passage, and what its relation to the preceding chapter?

20. What are the mandates enjoined in Isa 54 and what their application?

21. What can you say of the imagery here employed?

22. What is the chief note of exhortation in this chapter?

Fuente: B.H. Carroll’s An Interpretation of the English Bible

Isa 53:1 Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?

Ver. 1. Who hath believed our retort? ] q.d., The Gentiles, some of them, even of their potentates, have believed our report concerning the Messiah: Isa 52:13-15 but, Lord, how few Jews will give credit to what we have said? Albeit this chapter may not unfitly be called “The Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Isaiah”; a and things are here set down so plainly that Augustine thinks they need no exposition; yet those buzzards, the later Rabbis, cannot, or rather will not, see that the prophet speaketh here all along concerning Christ; but do strangely writhe, wring, and wrest his words to a wrong sense, applying them, some to Moses, some to Ezra, some to Joshua, the son of Josadak, &c. John Isaac, indeed, the Jew, confesseth of himself, as hath been said before, that by pondering upon this chapter he was converted to the Christian religion. The like we read of some few others in Andreas Bayna and Cornelius a Lapide. But the Jews themselves will tell you, falsely and maliciously, that such pretended proselytes are not of them, but poor Christians hired by us to impersonate their part. Such a thick veil is still before their eyes, such a hard hoof upon their hearts, till God pleases, by his own holy arm made bare, to remove it. “They could not” – that is, they would not – “believe.” Joh 12:39 “They have not all” – nay, scarce any in comparison – “obeyed the gospel,” Rom 10:16 but blasphemously call it Avengelaion, a volume of vanity, scorning to be saved by a crucified God, although by mighty miracles wrought among them he showed himself to be the Son of God, and an arm to save all who believe in his name. Joh 12:37

And to whom is the arm of the Lord? ] i.e., His gospel, which is his power to salvation, Rom 1:16 and is hid only to them that perish. 2Co 4:3

a Lib. i. De Consens. Evang., cap. 31.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Isaiah Chapter 53

Here we have the confession and wondering complaint over the unbelief of men, yea, over their own unbelief; for Israel, now broken down in sense of sin, acknowledge that it was not merely those without who heeded little the report of the Messiah, but that they too themselves had been hard and rebellious against Him. “Who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender sapling, and as a root out of dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we see him, [there is] no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and shunned of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom they hide [their] faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he [it is] hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he [was] wounded for our transgressions, [he was] bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace [was] upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (vv. 1-6).

The close of the last chapter (vv. 13-15) gave us Jehovah’s contemplation of His Anointed, once put to shame, and now on the summit of glory before every eye. His deity introduced His humiliation in Isa 50 , here His humiliation leads to His glory: expiation was the divine aim in that humiliation. Then in Isa 53 His people trace, in view of Him, their past and most guilty blindness, as they think of His wondrous humiliation, their misjudgement of His life and death, and their present perception of its cause in their sins and misery from which He had come to save them. When they had of old beheld His path of shame and sufferings from first to last, they understood neither the grace which brought Him down so low nor the glories that should follow. They now justly feel and own (vers. 1-3) the power of unbelief in the chosen people: a far more humbling fact in them than among the nations sitting in darkness and the shadow of death. Israel had ample testimony; yet what scepticism! The very humiliation of the Messiah which should have endeared Him only drew out aversion. They misread Himself utterly, as if He were under ban like another Gehazi or Uzziah. But now (vers. 4-6) being taught of God, they avow before Him and men that underneath all that humiliation, and, as they wrongly thought, personal obnoxiousness or liability to God’s judgement a deeper work was being done: first, the fullest identification with their burden on His own heart, as He went up and down the land, Immanuel’s land, entering into the weight of all that He healed (v. 4); and finally atonement before Him (v. 5). They had regarded Him, on the contrary, as an object of God’s displeasure, and justly cast out and trampled on. But it was a total misconception of all His marvellous grace, a negligent oversight of their own deep necessities, both in the life that now is, and yet more for that which is to come. Hence Mat 8:17 justly applies the first part of verse 4 to the Lord, as He relieved the afflictions of the Jews, and healed their diseases in His ministry, never bringing in bare power merely, but bearing all in spirit before God, while He cured them; as 1Pe 2:24 , 1Pe 2:25 applies verse 5 to His work for our sins on the cross. This recognition of the truth opens the mouth in lowly confession of sin; as the heart will then feel its past evil ways, and each judges himself before God.

In vers. 7-9 Jehovah expresses His delight in the moral beauty which shone in the suffering One, affirming on His part the explanation of the enigma of the cross, though up to His death of shame man was allowed his way in disposing of Jesus. “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and was as a sheep dumb before her shearers, and he opened not his mouth. He was taken from detention and from judgement: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living; for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And they made his grave with the wicked, but [he was] with the rich in his death,* because he had done no violence, neither [was there] guile in his mouth” (vv. 7-9). The plague stroke was upon Him for the transgression of the people of Jehovah. It was not the outward fact simply of a rejected Messiah to which He was pleased to submit, the awful proof of man’s and Israel’s moral state; but there is this divine key, and the far more wondrous meeting of a more hidden and a deeper need, even expiation. Yet even in His ignominious death God wrought so that by His resurrection from among the dead He should have honour unexpectedly.

*The phrase used here is most expressive and points to the intensive and exceptional death of the Holy Sufferer as concentrating many – countless – deaths in that one. Henderson takes the phrase to mean “after his death.”

Israel then reiterate the blessed truth with their Amen, pursuing the glorious consequences as far as it is theirs to see them. “Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him; he hath put [him] to grief: when thou shalt make his soul (or, when his soul shall have been made) an offering for sin, he shall see a seed, he shall prolong [his] days, and the pleasure of Jehovah shall prosper in his hand” (v. 10). Here the atoning work, in the suffering of the Lord for sin, is dwelt on with its issue as far as was suitable then to speak. It is blessedly true that the death and blood-shedding of the Saviour must be for propitiation; but it is as false a thought as any that the enemy of souls ever insinuated that this propitiation or atonement is or could be, according to God and His word, without His sufferings specifically, yea, that suffering which was the deepest expression of God’s judgement of our iniquities, when He Who knew no sin was made sin for us and forsaken of God. His blood and death when viewed as expiatory, and not as the evidence simply of man’s wickedness, are the blood and death of Him Who really bore our sins in His own body on the tree, and endured the to us unfathomable judgement of God, when not the Jews only but God hid His face from Him. Can a Christian slight this divine abandonment of Him Who suffered, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God? He may, but only as he may be guilty of grievous, not to say fatal, error.* God’s part in atonement is and must be the deepest.

*It is notorious that Jesuit preachers are wont to draw moving pictures, as of the physical torments of the lost, so of the external sufferings of our blessed Lord (i.e. the human rather than the divine side) Nor does one deny the substantial truth of what they reason is obvious. Unspiritual themselves, they appeal to that which strikes the senses and can excite the feelings or the fears of their least spiritual auditors. But men of a different stamp have always recognized that the word of God reveals a far deeper truth, not of what was before the eye or by the hand of man, merely, but of what passed unseen between God and Christ in that awful hour. So, to take an instance from one of the better sort, Archbishop Leighton rightly distinguishes this: “In that outside of His sufferings there was an analogy with the end and main work which was ordered by the Lord with regard unto that, being a death declared accursed by the law, as the Apostle Paul observes, and so declaring Him that was God blessed for ever to have been made a curse, that is accounted as accursed for us, that we might be blessed in Him, ‘in whom,’ according to the promise, all the nations of the earth are blessed. But that wherein lay the strength and main stress of His sufferings was this invisible weight that none could see that gazed on Him; but He felt more than all the rest. In this are three things: 1. The weight of sin. 2. she transferring of it upon Christ. 3.His bearing of it.

“1. He bare sin as a heavy burden: so the word of bearing in general, , and those two words, particularly used by the prophet to which these allude are the bearing of some great mass or load, and that sin is. For it hath the wrath of an offended God hanging on it, indissolubly tied to it; of which who can bear the least? . . . Yea, to consider in the present subject where use may best read what it is, it was a heavy load to Christ, where the psalmist, speaking in the person of Christ, complains heavily, ‘Innumerable evils have compassed me about. Mine iniquities’ (not His, as done by Him, but yet His by His undertaking to pay for them), they ‘have taken hold of me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of my head: therefore my heart faileth me.’ And sure that which pressed Him so sore, who upholds heaven and earth, no other in heaven or earth could have sustained or surmounted, but would have sunk or perished under it. Was it, think you, the pain of that common outside of His death though very painful, that drew such a word from Him, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me? Or was it the fear of it beforehand, that pressed a sweat of blood from Him? No, it was this burden of sin, the first of which was committed in the garden of Eden, that then began to be laid upon Him, and fastened upon His shoulders in the garden of Gethsemane, ten thousand times heavier than the cross which He was caused to bear that might be for a while turned over to another, but this could not. This was the cup He trembled more at, than that gall and vinegar after to be offered Him by His crucifiers or any other part of His external sufferings. It was the bitter cup of wrath due to sin that is rather put into His hand and caused Him to drink the very same thing that is here called the bearing our sins in his body.’ . . . Jesus Christ is both the great high priest and the great sacrifice in one. And this seems to be here implied in these words, ‘Himself bare our sins in his own body’; which the legal priest did not: so ‘He made his soul an offering for sin.’ He offered up Himself, His whole self. In the history of the Gospel it is said, His soul was heavy and chiefly suffered; but the bearing in His body and offering it, that is oftenest mentioned as the visible part of the sacrifice, and in His way of offering!, not excluding the other. Thus we are exhorted to give our bodies in opposition to the bodies of beasts, and they are therefore called a living sacrifice, which they are not without the soul. Thus His bearing in His body imports the bearing in His soul too.” – The Works of R. Leighton, Jerment’s edition, 1805, i. 370-376 It may be added that this was a point of objection by Cardinal Bellarmine to Calvin who maintained the same doctrine as is carped at now-a-days, and not merely by rationalist speculators, such as Mr. F. D. Maurice and his friends. It seems rather a peculiar mind which could cite 1Pe 3:18 in a paragraph designed to prove that reconciliation or atonement is never in connection with Christ’s sufferings specifically. It is false that the statement they oppose separates His sufferings from His blood and death; on the contrary while distinguishing the other points, the object was to insist on the inseparableness of His sufferings with His blood and death for atonement. The admission that they are not separated in the Spirit’s mind for atonement is the true thesis, which is yielded. But it is wrong to say, “the two are never separated.” It is merely inattention to scripture (which distinguishes them), and it claims no answer.]

The chapter closes with Jehovah’s confirmation, repeating the glorious results of both grace and government, and in each case connecting them with the work of salvation. “From (or, of) the travail of his soul shall he see, he shall be satisfied; by his knowledge shall my righteous servant instruct the many in righteousness; and he shall bear their iniquities” (v. 11). Such seems the simple, true, and exact sense of the verse which has been lost sight of often by translators, and still more by preachers, as well as (through a very different influence) by Jews. There is no need of importing an evangelical sense, which really misleads as if by the knowledge of Himself,” meant the knowledge respecting or concerning the Messiah.* The broad facts in the Lord’s history are before us: His ministry, when through His knowledge He instructed the mass in righteousness; His death when He bore their iniquities on the tree. The order is quite clear and sound; and there is no need for taking the copulative in a causal sense, or in any other than its own strict meaning.

*Even Dr. Henderson, who is often free enough from popular prejudice gives this straining of the phrase.

It was thus the Lord taught on the mount as well as in other places and times during His sojourn on earth. Then came another and mightier work which could be shared by none. Others might suffer in love or in righteousness; He not merely in both, but He alone for the sins of others at God’s hand, as we were expressly told in the verse before. But the Spirit never tires of the wondrous fact, and loves to present it on all sides, from God to man, and from man to God. Dan 12:3 proves irrefutably that the Hebrew will bear the sense of “instruct in righteousness” as well as of “justify”: which of the two senses depends on the contextual necessity. There indeed it must mean the former; for, first, teachers cannot “justify” in the forensic sense (which is the true doctrinal force of the word, when thus employed as to the soul of a believer); and, secondly, as it is there a question of the many (the apostate mass of the Jews, which is the technical value of the words in Daniel), it must mean “instruct in,” rather than “bring to, righteousness,” for they do not bring them. Hence I doubt not it means similarly in Isaiah, though it may be here not so clear that “the many” has the same force. Still the burden of proof would lie on such as contend for a difference in the usage of the two prophets. To most minds their coincidence lends a mutual confirmation.

But sinful souls need far more than instruction, were it ever so perfect, as the Lord’s surely must be. Hence it is added, “And he shall bear their iniquities.” He suffers for them according to the scriptures, and His suffering for sin is efficacious. The change to “for” was due to the supposition that justification was meant in the previous clause, for which His bearing iniquities was the ground. Abstractly this is true, as all believers admit, according to abundant scripture; but the question here is, whether the text does not convey another truth, apt to be overlooked, in its plain unforced meaning with emphasis on “He.”

Jehovah closes His answer with the assured triumph that awaits Messiah, based as it is, for Him alone of conquerors, on His sacrificial death so long misread, and His gracious use of it on behalf of the transgressors with whom malice had confounded Him. “Therefore will I assign him [a portion] with the great (or, many), and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out (or, bared) his soul unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors; and he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (v. 12).

The notion of the later Jews, (represented by Dr. Philippson for instance), that it is Jacob as a whole is a mere subterfuge, or that Israel’s sufferings conduce to the happiness of the nations. “They are become the martyrs of the acknowledgment of the ONE, and by their exaltation the nations will be directed with the strength of conviction to the sole and only God. This view of the prophet is truly sublime…. The doubts, therefore, which the Jewish commentators (Redak and Abarbanel) have raised here, that this procedure would be opposed to the justice of God, which must allow every one to bear the punishment of what he has himself committed, can only be applied to individuals, while the prophet had in view the whole development of mankind.” Now the fact is admitted, even by the Rabbis who brought in the idea, that the ancient Jews referred the suffering but righteous Servant of the passage to the Messiah, and this is the admission not of some but of the elders with one mouth. However, not any such confessions are cited as authorities in the least, but scripture only. Here all is light. The “we” of this section, as elsewhere is unquestionably Jewish, not Gentile; as unquestionably distinct from the One Whose position and relation to God they confess had been so fatally misconceived. To understand the “we” of the Gentiles is an impossibility; to take both “we” and “he” as Israel, or the prophetic body, is too absurd and self-contradictory. “He” is a real individual Who suffers from and for Israel, instead of being the same.

Then also, to notice another plea, the interchange of tenses is no more difficult here than elsewhere. It is habitual with the prophets, and with Isaiah no less than others. That Israel was viewed as the servant is true; and Israel failed as such. Then comes Messiah the Servant, Who glorifies God, yet suffers and dies, but, as here we learn, it was for Israel, though not for Israel only; and then Israel, sifted and repentant and believing in Him, are viewed in consequence as servants for His glory by-and by. Such is the scope of these later chapters of Isaiah.

But the idea of Israel being here meant by the suffering One is as false morally as exegetically. For it supposes that the Gentiles will yet acknowledge that Israel had to bear this hard fate solely for their redemption out of their sinful state (vv. 4-6); so that Israel through the patience which they exhibit notwithstanding all their sufferings, since they never departed from the only God, shall be placed on a yet higher eminence (vv. 7-9). Assuredly the Gentiles will yet confess their sins, not only their sins against God, but their cruel persecution and jealousy and envy of Israel. Assuredly they will yet trust with the real faith that is to be, but alas! is not yet, Israel’s. But a more flagrant mistake was never made than that Israel can take the ground of unswerving righteousness like the suffering Messiah here. Take alone the very first chapter of Isaiah: we see there Israel suffering; but is it for righteousness? Is it not for their own appalling sins? And if it be said that such they were of old but that all is changed when we arrive at a later day such as in Isa 53 , I answer let them see their divinely-painted portrait in its neighbourhood, in Isa. 57-59, and let them say where is the conscience which can so trifle with the word of God and the facts of their own hearts and ways.

No; reading Isa 53 we find ourselves in the midst of sacrificial imagery, of atonement for sin, of intercession for sinners; and these sins are pre-eminently Israel’s, as will be the blessedness. We heartily admit this last, and rejoice and give God thanks for the grace He will yet extend to His ancient people. But they by grace will justly prove its genuineness by the confession of their own sins, above all against their own Messiah, not in self-righteousness pretending to have been a suffering Messiah themselves for the Gentiles. There is indeed vicarious suffering here, a holy substitute atoning for the guilty before God; but it is Messiah for Israel expressly, though not exclusively. For His death embraces every creature to be delivered from evil; and from first to last, not even the most distant hint of Israel suffering for the Gentiles. Jews suffered from them far, far too much; but they will never suffer for them. Jesus, the only spotless Lamb of God, Immanuel, died for that nation, for Israel, though – thanks be to God – for us also (Joh 11:51 , Joh 11:52 ). Worthily therefore is He now exalted, and we are in living union with Him Who sits on the throne of God. This however is not the point here, but His exaltation over the earth and the nations when Israel come to own their sins in the recognition of their suffering but then glorified Messiah. Thus it falls in with the general bearing of Old Testament prophecy, though it contains also the most luminous testimony to His humiliation and atoning work.

The language of the last verse presents no real difficulty save to those who read the first clause in connection with the gospel; whereas it looks on to the day of the world-kingdom of the Lord and of His Christ, when He will come forth before every eye as the Lord of lords and King of kings, sharing with others the fruits of His victory. What gave occasion to the mistake is that the ground laid in the later clauses is His humiliation, atoning death, and intercession. This beyond doubt is the basis and the boast of Christianity. Only it is an inexcusable error to confine it to us who are now called from Gentiles as well as from Jews. The day hastens when the fullness shall have come in; and so Israel shall be saved. Then will this vision (Isa 52:13 – Isa 53:12 ) be fulfilled, and not as a whole till then.

Fuente: William Kelly Major Works (New Testament)

Isaiah

THE ARM OF THE LORD

Isa 53:1 .

In the second Isaiah there are numerous references to ‘the arm of the Lord.’ It is a natural symbol of the active energy of Jehovah, and is analogous to the other symbol of ‘the Face of Jehovah,’ which is also found in this book, in so far as it emphasises the notion of power in manifestation, though ‘the Face’ has a wider range and may be explained as equivalent to that part of the divine Nature which is turned to men. The latter symbol will then be substantially parallel with ‘the Name.’ But there are traces of a tendency to conceive of ‘the arm of the Lord’ as personified, for instance, where we read Isa 63:12 that Jehovah ‘caused His glorious arm to go at the right hand of Moses.’ Moses was not the true leader, but was himself led and sustained by the divine Power, dimly conceived as a person, ever by his side to sustain and direct. There seems to be a similar imperfect consciousness of personification in the words of the text, especially when taken in their close connection with the immediately following prophecy of the suffering servant. It would be doing violence to the gradual development of Revelation, like tearing asunder the just-opening petals of a rose, to read into this question of the sad prophet full-blown Christian truth, but it would be missing a clear anticipation of that truth to fail to recognise the forecasting of it that is here.

I. We have here a prophetic forecast that the arm of the Lord is a person.

The strict monotheism of the Old Testament does not preclude some very remarkable phenomena in its modes of conception and speech as to the divine Nature. We hear of the ‘angel of His face,’ and again of ‘the angel in whom is His Name.’ We hear of ‘the angel’ to whom divine worship is addressed and who speaks, as we may say, in a divine dialect and does divine acts. We meet, too, with the personification of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, to which are ascribed characteristics and are attributed acts scarcely distinguishable from divine, and eminently associated in the creative work. Our text points in the same direction as these representations. They all tend in the direction of preparing for the full Christian truth of the personal ‘Power of God.’ What was shown by glimpses ‘at sundry times and in divers manners,’ with many gaps in the showing and much left all unshown, is perfectly revealed in the Son. The New Testament, by its teaching as to ‘the Eternal Word,’ endorses, clears, and expands all these earlier dimmer adumbrations. That Word is the agent of the divine energy, and the conception of power as being exercised by the Word is even loftier than that of it as put forth by ‘the arm,’ by as much as intelligent and intelligible utterance is more spiritual and higher than force of muscle. The apostolic designation of Jesus as ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ blends the two ideas of these two symbols. The conception of Jesus Christ as the arm of the Lord, when united with that of the Eternal Word, points to a threefold sphere and manner of His operations, as the personal manifestation of the active power of God. In the beginning, the arm of the Lord stretched out the heavens as a tent to dwell in, and without Him ‘was not anything made that was made.’ In His Incarnation, He carried into execution all God’s purposes and fulfilled His whole will. From His throne He wields divine power, and rules the universe. ‘The help that is done on earth, He doeth it all Himself,’ and He works in the midst of humanity that redeeming work which none but He can effect.

II. We have here a prophetic paradox that the mightiest revelation of the arm of the Lord is in weakness.

The words of the text stand in closest connection with the great picture of the Suffering Servant which follows, and the pathetic figure portrayed there is the revealing of the arm of the Lord. The close bringing together of the ideas of majesty and power and of humiliation, suffering, and weakness, would be a paradox to the first hearers of the prophecy. Its solution lies in the historical manifestation of Jesus. Looking on Him, we see that the growing up of that root out of a dry ground was the revelation of the great power of God. In Jesus’ lowly humanity God’s power is made perfect in man’s weakness, in another and not less true sense than that in which the apostle spoke. There we see divine power in its noblest form, in its grandest operation, in its widest sweep, in its loftiest purpose. That humble man, lowly and poor, despised and rejected in life, hanging faint and pallid on the Roman cross, and dying in the dark, seems a strange manifestation of the ‘glory’ of God, but the Cross is indeed His throne, and sublime as are the other forms in which Omnipotence clothes itself, this is, to human eyes and hearts, the highest of them all. In Jesus the arm of the Lord is revealed in its grandest operation. Creation and the continual sustaining of a universe are great, but redemption is greater. It is infinitely more to say, ‘He giveth power to the faint,’ than to say, ‘For that He is strong in might, not one faileth,’ and to principalities and powers in heavenly places who have gazed on the grand operations of divine power for ages, new lessons of what it can effect are taught by the redemption of sinful men. The divine power that is enshrined in Jesus’ weakness is power in its widest sweep, for it is to every one that believeth, and in its loftiest purpose, for it is ‘unto salvation.’

III. We have here a prophetic lament that the power revealed to all is unseen by many.

The text is a wail over darkened eyes, blind at noonday. The prophet’s radiant anticipations of the Servant’s exaltation, and of God’s holy arm being made bare in the eyes of all nations, are clouded over by the thought of the incredulity of the multitude to ‘our report.’ Jehovah had indeed ‘made bare His arm,’ as a warrior throws back his loose robe, when he would strike. But what was the use of that, if dull eyes would not look? The ‘report’ had been loudly proclaimed, but what was the use of that, if ears were obstinately stopped? Alas, alas! nothing that God can do secures that men shall see what He shows, or listen to what He speaks. The mystery of mysteries is that men can, the tragedy of tragedies is that they will, make any possible revelation of none effect, so far as they are concerned.

The Arm is revealed, but only by those who have ‘believed our report’ does the prophet deem it to be actually beheld. Faith is the individual condition on which the perfected revelation becomes a revelation to me. The ‘salvation of our God’ is shown in splendour to ‘all the ends of the earth,’ but only they who exercise faith in Jesus, who is the power of God, will see that far-shining light. If we are not of those who ‘believe the report,’ we shall, notwithstanding that ‘He hath made bare His holy arm,’ be of those who grope at noonday as in the dark.

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

NASB (UPDATED) TEXT: Isa 53:1-3

1Who has believed our message?

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

2For 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.

3He 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.

Isa 53:1 Who has believed our message The speaker (PLURAL) is uncertain, but possibly (1) the faithful Jewish remnant or (2) the prophets. It is obvious that very few understood the concept of a suffering Messiah (cf. Joh 12:38; Rom 10:16)! However, one day the kings of the earth will understand (cf. Isa 52:15 and Php 2:6-11)!

For believed (BDB 52, KB 63, Hiphil PERFECT) see Special Topic: Believe, Trust, Faith, and Faithfulness in the OT .

arm of the LORD This is an anthropomorphic phrase (cf. Isa 51:9; Isa 52:9-10; Deu 5:15, see Special Topic: God Described As Human (anthropomorphism) ) for YHWH’s actions, here involving the ministry of the Servant.

Isa 53:2 like a tender shoot This (BDB 413) refers to His inconspicuous beginnings. It has some connotative relationship with the Messianic term Branch (BDB 666, cf. Isa 4:2; Isa 11:1; Isa 11:10). Both are used together in Isa 11:1.

SPECIAL TOPIC: JESUS THE NAZARENE

He has no stately form or majesty

That we should look upon Him Jesus was not physically unusual or attractive. He did not stand out in a crowd in any way (i.e., He could melt into the crowd, cf. Joh 8:59; Joh 12:36).

Isa 53:3 He was despised This VERB (BDB 102, KB 117, Niphal PARTICIPLE) is used as a title, The Despised One in Isa 49:7. The Qal PASSIVE PARTICIPLE is used in Psa 22:6, which Christians believe describes Jesus’ crucifixion (cf. Mat 27:35; Mat 27:39; Mat 27:43; Mat 27:46; Mar 15:29; Mar 15:34; Luk 23:34; Joh 19:24; Joh 20:25).

So many of the texts in this section of Isaiah are used in the NT. Isaiah clearly reveals God’s redemptive plan for all humans (see Special Topic: YHWH’s Eternal Redemptive Plan ).

The last two lines of Isa 53:3 have been interpreted in several ways.

1. some of the rabbis said the Messiah would have leprosy (cf. Isa 53:11)

2. some relate it to Isa 52:14 and see it referring to the beatings Jesus received at the hands of Herod’s and Pilate’s guards

3. some relate it to Jesus’ words in Mat 26:31; Mar 14:27 (from Zec 13:7) or Joh 16:32

sorrows This word (BDB 456) can mean

1. physical pain – Exo 3:7

2. emotional pain – Psa 38:17-18; Jer 45:3

It is used in this context (Isa 52:13-14) of the Servant suffering on behalf of Israel (cf. Isa 52:8) and all mankind (cf. Isa 52:6).

Fuente: You Can Understand the Bible: Study Guide Commentary Series by Bob Utley

Who. ? Figure of speech Erotesis. The questions are asked by the prophet, and the answer is “no one” or few. Quoted in Joh 12:38 and Rom 10:16.

hath believed = put faith in. Hebrew ‘aman. App-69. The tenses are Past (the prophetic Perfect).

report = hearing. Put by Figure of speech Metonymy (of Adjunct), for the subject-matter, which was heard.

arm. Put by Figure of speech Metonymy (of Cause), for what was wrought by it. Compare Isa 51:9; Isa 52:10.

the Lord. Hebrew. Jehovah. App-4.

revealed = made bare: i.e. revealed.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

By Chuck Smith

When men made chapter and verse divisions, they did make mistakes. The Word of God is divinely inspired; it’s inerrant. But men, for the sake of helping us to find scriptures and to memorize passages, divided the Bible into chapter and verses. And it’s a very convenient way to reference. However, many times they made the divisions in the wrong place, and in our reading we are prone to read to an end of a chapter and then quit until the next reading. And sometimes the thought carries right through, so that in the dividing of the chapters, they should have ended chapter 52 with verse Isa 53:12 . And they should have started chapter 53 with verse Isa 52:13 , because the last three verses here definitely fit in with Isa 53:1-12 . And so that we might see the relationship with 53, we will begin our study of chapter 53 with verse Isa 52:13 of 52.

As God now speaks about His servant, His only begotten Son, “who was in the form of God, and thought it not something to be grasped to be equal with God: and yet He humbled Himself and took on the likeness of man or the form of man and came in likeness of man. And being humbled, He came as a servant” ( Php 2:6-8 ). And so Jesus said, “I came not to do My own will but the will of the One who sent Me” ( Joh 6:38 ). And in the garden He said, “Not My will, Thy will be done” ( Luk 22:42 ), as He submitted as a servant unto the Father.

Now Isaiah begins to prophesy here concerning God’s servant that was to come.

Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled ( Isa 52:13 ),

The Hebrew word extolled is the word lifted up. It is the very same word that Jesus used in the New Testament when talking to His disciples said, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me” ( Joh 12:32 ). Now Jesus when He was referring to being lifted up was referring to the death that He was to die upon the cross, as He would be lifted up upon a cross. “And I, if I be lifted up.” And the idea is being lifted up on a cross, I will draw all men unto Me. Now that scripture has been carelessly interpreted by many people as just lifting up Jesus. If you’ll just lift up Jesus, He’ll draw all men to Him, you see. So in your ministry, just lift up Jesus, and they even have choruses, “Let’s lift Him higher, let’s lift Him higher. That all the world may see.” Well, whoever wrote that chorus doesn’t have a real understanding of scripture, because they have taken it out of its context. In the context, the gospel writer said, “This said He signifying the manner of death that He was going to die” ( Joh 12:33 ). That is, signifying the cross, lifted up on a cross.

And so here the cross is predicted, prophesied in Isaiah. “He shall be exalted and lifted up, and be very high.”

As many were astonished at thee; his visage [or face] was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men ( Isa 52:14 ):

In the Hebrew this reads more literally, “His face was so marred that He could not be recognized as a man or as a human being.”

Now we are told in the gospel that they covered His face and they began to buffet Him. That is, with His face covered they began to hit Him. Now as a general rule our bodies have an automatic reflex kind of an action, when we see a blow coming we give with the blow so it cushions the blow. You don’t get the full brunt of it. If you don’t cushion the blow, a surprise blow that you don’t see coming, that’s where you get hurt. You guys that watch the Monday night football, you know that. When a quarterback gets blindsided, he’s in trouble. If he can see the guy coming, you just sort of, you reflex action to it and you sort of go with it. And you may get bounced all over, but you’re reacting and coordinating with it and thus it’s a lot easier to take. But if you don’t see that big tackle barreling in on you, and he hits you without your having any ability to defend yourself by the feigning that a person does, that’s when you get the broken bones. And that’s when you get laid out of the game. Those blindsides are the really thing that will put you out.

Now with Jesus as they covered His face and began to buffet Him, no way to feign or to give with the blow, and thus His face must have been horribly disfigured. Here Isaiah declares that it was so shocking. “As many as looked upon you was shocked when they saw how marred your face was. So marred that you could not be recognized as a man, as a human being.”

So shall he sprinkle many nations; the kings shall shut their mouths at him: for that which had not been told them they shall see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider. But who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: now he has no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him ( Isa 52:15 , Isa 53:1-2 ).

Interesting prophecies concerning Jesus Christ. He has no beautiful form or comeliness. There is no beauty there that we should desire. In other words, we’ll not be attracted to Him by the physical beauty. So often we have in our minds sort of a mental picture of what a person may look like. And we sort of automatically do this even though we haven’t seen a person.

I get this all the time where I go into areas where people have been listening on the radio. And I’ll go into an area to speak and all they’ve heard is my voice. And it is interesting to watch their shocked expressions when they see me. Because they have envisioned usually something far different than what I look like. But somehow we always create sort of a mental image. It’s an ambiguous kind of an image, but yet there is sort of a mental image of what the person must look like who has a voice like that. And it so often is very shocking when you see the person that you’ve been listening to. I was shocked when I first met Dr. McGee and I didn’t think he would look like that at all with that southern voice. I expected to see some tall, Texan type of a guy, and it was just a surprise to me. And I suppose he was just as surprised to see me and to see what I look like.

So we have in our mind sort of a mental image of what Jesus is going to look like and we sort of imagine just being enthralled with the physical beauty of Christ. But as many as looked upon Him were astonished because really, there is no form or comeliness that is really attractive when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. It isn’t for the beautiful form that we will be attracted. And I think that this is, I think that this is rather great that it will not be the beautiful form that we’re attracted to. Because face it, the majority of the people are ugly. Very few beautiful people, really beautiful people. Most of us are in the category of we can get by. But it isn’t our looks that really attract people.

Now if He were one of those beautiful persons, then it would be more difficult for us to identify with Him. But the fact that it isn’t the beauty of His form that is attractive or draws us to Him means that each of us can identify with Him, because it is that spiritual beauty and the love that just draws us so much that we care not what the form may look like.

Now when John was in heaven and he saw the scroll in the right hand of Him who sits upon the throne, and he heard the angel proclaim with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to take the scroll and loose the seals?” And as he observed that no one was found worthy in heaven and earth to take the scroll or to loose the seals, he began to weep. And one of the elders said unto John, “Don’t weep, John. Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah hath prevailed to take the scroll and to loose the seals.” And John said, “And I turned and I saw Him as a lamb that hath been slaughtered” ( Rev 5:2-6 ). No beauty that we should desire Him.

John’s first glimpse of Christ in heaven, he saw Him as a lamb that had been slaughtered. Not as some tremendously physical, robust, handsome creature that we all sort of envision Jesus to be. But perhaps the Lord still bears the marks of His suffering for you. He did bear those marks after the resurrection. For you remember Thomas said, “Except I can put my fingers into His hand and thrust my hand into His side, I won’t believe” ( Joh 20:25 ). And so the next time Jesus showed Himself to the disciples, Thomas being present, He said, “Okay, Thomas, go ahead. Put your finger in My hand. Put your hand in My side.” The marks were still there. It said, “And they shall look on Him whom they have pierced” ( Zec 12:10 ). And they shall say unto Him, “What are the meaning of these wounds in Your hands?” Yet future, still bearing them; the marks of His love for you.

So as many as saw Him were astonished. “He has no form nor comeliness.” That is, really an attractive, desirable or attracting feature. “When we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.”

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief ( Isa 53:3 ):

Now you probably have in your mind mental pictures of what Paul must have looked like. I read the epistles of Paul and I think of him as a giant. Surely he’s a spiritual giant. I read in one of the apocrypha books, one of the early writings, a description of Paul the apostle. And it describes him as a skinny little runt about five feet tall with a horribly large hooked nose and eyes that were red, swollen and constantly running, and it gave this horrible… And I was upset because that’s not how I pictured Paul at all. I’m in love with Paul. My, what this man has given to us of his great depth of understanding and background. And I so love the writings of Paul that I’ve been drawn to him. He is one of those that I’m looking forward to just really spending some time with in the future. And yet, without seeing the physical person, it is possible to be in love with an individual and yet not be physically attracted. And yet, it is interesting how so often today we only associate love with physical attraction, and not with the person themselves. And that’s rather tragic. And that’s why so many marriages are miserable, because the person has married the face but there’s nothing behind the face. There’s no depth of character. There’s just the face and that’s it.

One of the most miserable dates I ever had in my life was with a girl with a pretty face. Oh, I was excited. I thought, “Man alive, this is going to be great!” My sister worked with her sister, and as they talked… “My brother,” “Oh, my sister… ” “Well, my sister thinks your brother is cute,” or something. And that’s all I needed. So you call up and you make a date. Most miserable night. She had a beautiful face, but man, she was a dud. I mean, just a dull evening. No conversation, nothing. And people make mistakes many times in relationships because we relate on the physical, rather than upon the true nature of a person.

Now, “He is despised and rejected of men; He is a man of sorrows, He’s acquainted with grief.”

and we hid as it were our faces from him ( Isa 53:3 );

Perhaps in shock and in horror. Have you ever looked at something that was so shocking you couldn’t look; you turned your face? You couldn’t stand to look at it. It was so horrible. It may be that that will be your first response when you see the marks of the suffering that He bore for you. You look and you can’t even… He doesn’t even look like a human being. You just sort of cringe at it.

he was despised ( Isa 53:3 ),

He’s rejected.

and we didn’t esteem him ( Isa 53:3 ).

But surely in that suffering, in that death,

He bore our griefs, and he carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions ( Isa 53:4-5 ),

Now this is why it is so ridiculous to try to hold the Jews responsible for the death of Jesus Christ and to blame them and to persecute them as has been the history of the church; persecute them for the death of Jesus Christ. That’s sheer unscriptural idiocy. They are no more responsible for the death of Jesus Christ than you or I. We are all equally responsible for His death. For He was wounded for our transgressions. It was my sin that put Him on the cross. It was my sin that brought Him that suffering and that beating and that shame and that reproach. I’m guilty! And we shouldn’t seek to blame someone else for our own guilt and to persecute someone else for that for which we are ourselves responsible. Surely He hath borne our griefs, carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions.

he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed ( Isa 53:5 ).

So we are the ones responsible for the suffering and the death of Jesus Christ, because He suffered and died for me that He might bring me the forgiveness of my sins. That He might bring me into fellowship with God. You see, God created man in the beginning for fellowship. That was the purpose of God when He created man-that God might be able to fellowship with man. But when man turned his back upon God and sinned, fellowship with God was broken. And fellowship with God who is holy and righteous cannot be restored until something is done about my sin. And that is why Jesus came that He might take the guilt of my sin. That He might bear my iniquities, my transgressions, my guilt, die in my place in order that through His death I can now come to God and have fellowship with God.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on Jesus Christ the iniquities of us all ( Isa 53:6 ).

You remember Jesus cried on the cross, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Crying out the twenty-second psalm, and in the verse Isa 53:3 the answer is given, “For Thou art holy, O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Thy people.” God forsook His Son when your sin was placed upon Him. For that’s the effect of sin. It’s being forsaken of God. Being separated from God. And when your sin was placed upon Jesus Christ, He was separated from the Father. And thus the cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” But He was forsaken of God in order that you won’t have to be forsaken by God. “For God laid on Him the iniquities of us all.”

He was oppressed, he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth ( Isa 53:7 ):

You remember before Pilate, Pilate marvelled that He didn’t answer. He said, “Answerest Thou not me? Don’t You know that I have power to free Thee, the power to put Thee to death?” Jesus said, “You don’t have any power except that which My Father gives you. But don’t worry, those that turned Me over to you have the greater sin than you do. I know you’re troubled, Pilate.” He didn’t know what he had on his hands and he did his best to free Him. But, “He opened not His mouth.”

he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth ( Isa 53:7 ).

All of the accusations. “Hear not all these things they accuse Thee of? What do You say for Yourself?” Jesus didn’t answer.

He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off ( Isa 53:8 )

You see, without any children, who’s going to declare His generation?

He was cut off out of the land of the living ( Isa 53:8 ):

Now that’s an interesting phrase, “Cut off out of the land of the living.” You remember that Daniel prophesies, “From the time the commandment goes forth to restore and rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of the Messiah the Prince will be seven sevens and sixty-two sevens, three score and two sevens. And the wall shall be built again in troublous times, and after the three score and two sevens shall the Messiah be cut off. But not for Himself, but for the people” ( Dan 9:25-26 ). For He’s cut off. He’ll be crucified. Out of the land of the living. And God cries out,

for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death ( Isa 53:8-9 );

You remember Joseph of Arimathaea, a very rich man, came and begged Pilate for the body of Jesus that he might bury it. And here it is. He’s with the rich in His death.

because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when he shall make his soul an offering for sin ( Isa 53:9-10 ),

So Christ became the sin offering for us. According to the will of God because God loved us.

he shall see his seed, and prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied ( Isa 53:10-11 ):

That is, He travailed in order that you might be born again. And in seeing your redemption, in seeing you in fellowship with God, He’s satisfied. He looks upon Him and says it was worth it all because of the redemption that He is able to offer to us. That fellowship that He can bring to us with the Father. And so, “He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.”

and by his knowledge ( Isa 53:11 )

That is, by the knowledge of Jesus Christ.

my righteous servant shall justify many ( Isa 53:11 );

So how many of us tonight have been justified before God through the knowledge of Jesus Christ? So God declares, “By his knowledge shall My righteous servant justify many.”

for he shall bear their iniquities ( Isa 53:11 ).

Now all of this written 700 years before Christ was born. That is why when Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost and talked to the people who were involved in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, he said unto them, “Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was proved to be of God by the signs and the wonders which He did while He was still living with you, whom you according to the predeterminate counsel and foreknowledge of God with your wicked hands have crucified and slain” ( Act 2:22-23 ). But when he talks about the crucifixion, he speaks about the predetermined counsel and the foreknowledge of God. God knew it. God had planned it in order that He might demonstrate to you how much He loves you. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us, and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins” ( 1Jn 4:10 ). Paul said, “For a righteous man some might dare to die: for a good man peradventure some would even give their lives. But herein is God’s love manifested, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly” ( Rom 5:7-8 ). He bore your iniquities. He bore your sins.

Therefore [the Father says] will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong ( Isa 53:12 );

“Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and if sons, then heirs, joint-heirs with Jesus Christ” ( Rom 8:16-17 ), as He divides the spoil with the strong.

because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors ( Isa 53:12 );

Two thieves on either, one on either side. “He was numbered with the transgressors.”

and he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors ( Isa 53:11 ).

You remember even as they were nailing Him, He said, “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do” ( Luk 23:34 ). Interceding for the transgressors. All of these things prophesied in advance. All of them fulfilled through the death of Jesus Christ. Surely it sets Him alone in history as the only man who could ever qualify to be the Messiah, the suffering servant. If Jesus is not the Messiah, there is no Messiah. No other man can qualify. But Jesus has qualified in all 300 points of prophecy that spoke about His life, His ministry, His death. And here in Isaiah, outstanding example of clear-cut prophecy. And if it doesn’t refer to Jesus Christ, it can’t refer to any other person in history. He stands alone as the only One who has fulfilled these things. And to reject Him after the basis of this kind of evidence is to sin against your own conscience and to sin against the truth, which becomes even a greater evil. “

Fuente: Through the Bible Commentary

Mr. Moody was once asked whether his creed was in print. In his own prompt way, he replied, Yes, sir; you will find it in the fifty-third of Isaiah. A condensed Bible is in this chapter. You have the whole gospel here.

Isa 53:1. Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?

Nobody ever does believe either prophets or preachers except through the work of Gods Spirit and grace. The Lords arm must be revealed, or else the truth proclaimed by his servants will never be accepted. All the prophets speak in these words of Isaiah, as if they all stood together, and lifted up this wail, Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?

Isa 53:2. For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

This is Israels King, the long-promised Messiah; yet when he comes to Bethlehem, see what a tender plant he is! Look at the house of David, almost extinct; and see what a root out of a dry ground is The stem of Jesses rod. When Jesus comes before the sons of men, dressed in the garb of a peasant, a poor man, a sorrowful man, a man who had not where to lay his head, notice how men say, by their actions, if not in words, There is no beauty that we should desire him.

Isa 53:3. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

We rightly sing,

Rejected and despised of men,

Behold a man of woe!

And grief his close companion still Through all his life below!

We held him as condemnd of heaven,

An outcast from his God;

While for our sins he groand, he bled,

Beneath his Fathers rod.

His own people, ay, his own chosen ones, turned away from him; and you and I did so till Gods grace changed our hearts, and opened our eyes. But why was he despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief? Why was the Prince of Israel such a suffering man? He had no sin for which to be chastened. There was no evil in his nature that needed to be fetched out with the rod of correction. Oh, no! The answer is very different:

Isa 53:4-5. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

What a joyous note there is in that sorrowful line, With his stripes we are healed! Glory be to God, we are healed of our soul-sickness, cured of the disease of sin, by this strange surgery, not by stripes upon ourselves, but by stripes upon our Lord!

Isa 53:6. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

The general sin of the race, the special sin of the individual, all gathered, heap upon heap, mountain upon mountain, and laid by God on Christ. We sometimes sing,

I lay my sins on Jesus,

The spotless Lamb of God;

He bears them all and frees us From the accursed load.

I bring my guilt to Jesus,

To wash my crimson stains White in his blood most precious,

Till not a spot remains;

and I will find no fault with that hymn; but the real laying of sin upon Jesus was effected by God himself: The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Isa 53:7. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

He never pleaded for himself. At the earthly judgment-seat, he said not a word for himself, so that even Pilate marvelled greatly. Oh, the eloquence of that silence! Truly it was golden. Omnipotence restrained omnipotence. Christ held himself in as with bit and bridle. As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

Isa 53:8-9. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

Therefore he was allowed to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea. He was no felon, whose body must be cast out to the kites and jackals; but He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

Isa 53:10. Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.

Wicked men slew our Lord, and their crime was the blackest in the worlds history; but, unconsciously, they were carrying out the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. It pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief. Christ died for others, but he lives again; and through him a godly seed shall live for ever and ever: When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He is made to prosper because he died.

Isa 53:11. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied:

His death-pangs were birth-pangs: the travail of his soul. He sees the multitude that shall be born through his death, and he is content.

Isa 53:11. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many;

Dear hearer, will he justify you? Do you know him? If you know him so as to trust him, he has justified you; you are a justified man tonight. Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many.

Isa 53:11. For he shall bear their iniquities.

They kick against this doctrine nowadays. They cannot bear it; yet it is the very marrow of the gospel, Christ bearing sin that was not his own, that we might be covered with a righteousness which is not our own, but comes from him. Paul, by the Spirit, put this great truth thus, For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

Isa 53:12. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Thanks be unto God for this great sacrifice!

Fuente: Spurgeon’s Verse Expositions of the Bible

Isa 53:1-3

Isa 53:1-3

JESUS CHRIST; GOD’S SERVANT

We should not be surprised at this title assigned to the Holy Messiah in the Sacred Scriptures, because there is a magnificent profusion of names and titles bestowed upon the Son of God by the inspired writers of the Bible. A mere glance at these cannot fail to impress any thoughtful student.

NAMES AND TITLES: Isaiah prophetically referred to Jesus as Immanuel (Isa 7:13); Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isa 9:6); God’s Servant (Isa 52:13). Moses referred to him as The Seed of Woman (Gen 3:15); The Seed (singular) of Abraham (Gen 28:14, and Gal 3:16); Shiloh (Gen 49:10); The Star out of Jacob, The Scepter out of Israel (Num 24:17); That Prophet Like Unto Moses (Deu 18:15); The Son of David (2Sa 7:12; 2Sa 7:14); The Lord of David, The Priest Forever After the Order of Melchizedek (Psalms 110, 4); The Judge of Israel, The Ruler in Israel Whose Goings Forth are Known of Old, from Everlasting (Mic 5:2-4); The King of Israel (Zec 9:9); The Sun of Righteousness (Mal 4:2); The Son of David, The Son of Abraham (Mat 1:1); The Dayspring from on High (Luk 1:78); Saviour, Christ, The Lord (Luk 2:11); Jesus (Luk 2:21); Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews (Mat 27:37); Jesus Christ the Son of God (Mar 1:1); Son of God Most High (Mar 5:7); God (10 New Testament references use this title for Christ; see Joh 1:1; Joh 1:18; Joh 20:24, etc), My Beloved Son (Mat 3:17); Christ Jesus (Rom 8:1-2); Christ Jesus our Lord (1Ti 1:12); our Lord Jesus Christ, The Blessed and Only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords (1Ti 6:14-15); The Rock (1Co 10:4); The Rose of Sharon, The Lily of the Valley (Son 2:1); The Bright and Morning Star, The Root of David (Rev 22:16); The Firstborn of the Kings of the Earth (Psa 89:27; Heb 12:23); the Day Star (2Pe 1:19); Our High Priest, Our Surety, Our Advocate, Our Intercessor (Hebrews 7); Christ Our Righteousness (Romans); The Mediator of the New Covenant (1Ti 2:5); Head Over All Things, Head of the Church Which is His Body (Eph 1:22); The Good Shepherd (Joh 10:11); The Bread of Life, The Water of Life, The Living Water, The Way, The Truth, The Life, The Light of the World, The True Vine, The Resurrection and the Life (from the Gospel of John), The Apostle and High Priest of our Confession (Heb 3:1); The Chief Shepherd (1Pe 5:4); The Shepherd and Bishop of our Souls (1Pe 1:25); The Branch (Zec 3:8; Zec 6:12); The Author of Eternal Salvation (Heb 3:9); The Author and Finisher (Perfecter) of our Faith (Heb 12:2); The Son of Man (Dan 7:15); The Alpha and the Omega (Rev 1:11, KJV); The Living One (Rev 1:18, ASV); and The Amen (Rev 2:14), etc.

Of course, the above list is by no means all of the names and titles the Scriptures associate with the Saviour and Redeemer of mankind; but these are sufficient to indicate the comprehensive extent of them.

This chapter is concerned solely with the prophecies relating to that Ideal Servant, the True Israel of God, the Seed Singular of Abraham, who alone would bring the promise of redemption to fallen and sinful humanity and provide a way for the renewal of their lost fellowship with God. In Him is the life eternal, and “No man cometh unto God” except through Him (Joh 14:6).

We shall not engage in any defense of the interpretation of this chapter, which by unanimous consent of all scholars, Jewish and Gentile alike, was understood as descriptive of the sufferings of Christ for the first 1,150 years of the Christian era, at which time, Jewish writers began efforts to ascribe it to some other; and since then a very few so-called “Christian” writers have accepted some of the Jewish postulations. However, this defection of nominally Christian commentators to the Jewish interpretation is absolutely unworthy of any study whatever. The true interpretation is so obvious, so unanswerable, so absolutely certain, that it is a waste of time to explore allegations of Satan and his followers to the contrary.

The whole song of the servant includes the last three verses of Isaiah 52 and twelve verses of this chapter (Isaiah 53).

“It is unusually symmetrical. There are five paragraphs of three verses each. It begins and ends with the Servant’s exaltation (first and fifth stanzas); and set within this is the story of Christ’s rejection in sections two and four, which in turn frame the centerpiece (stanza 3, Isa 53:4-6), where the atoning significance is expounded. God and man, reconciled, share the telling. Note the `my’ and `our’ of the outer sections (one and five) and the `we’ and `our’ of Isa 53:1-6.

“The word `our’ in Isa 53:1 raises the question of who the proclaimers are. Hailey gave the same answer to this that Kidner gave in the quotation above: “The message is to be identified as the messianic message of God through Isaiah.”

Isa 53:1-3

THE SECOND STANZA

“Who hath believed our message? and to whom hath the arm of Jehovah been revealed? For he grew up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not.”

As Cheyne pointed out, there is a peculiarity in these three verses that one word in each of the three verses is quoted in the second half of each verse. “Thus: in (1), the word is `who,’ `whom’; in (2) the word is `he’; and in (3) the word is `despised.'”

In this paragraph, the surpassing glory of the Lord Jesus Christ is hidden behind obscurity, poverty, humiliation, misery, and shame; and this is the great example that “God’s thoughts and God’s ways are as much higher than those of men as the heavens are higher than the earth,” as Isaiah would more fully elaborate in Isa 55:8.

In Isa 53:1, the language suggests that “no one” believed the report, or hearkened to the Word of God; but the apostle Paul’s word shows that the statements here are hyperbole; for he said, “Not all hearkened to the good tidings” (Rom 10:16). Those who hearkened were the apostles of the New Testament Church and those who followed their leadership. Nevertheless, the very small percentage of the Old Israel who believed and obeyed the Son of God fully justified the hyperbole. A similar use of this figure of speech is seen in Luk 7:29-30, as compared with Mat 3:5.

“As a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground …” (Isa 53:2), Here are given the conditions of Jesus’ earthly environment which seem to be revealed as the reason why he had no comeliness or beauty that would cause him to be desired by men.

We cannot believe that the physical unattractiveness or ugliness of the Son of God are meant by the lack of beauty or comeliness on his part. The tremendous attractiveness of Jesus for the great women of that era who knew him absolutely denies any denial of the power and magnetism of his personality (Luk 7:37-38; Luk 8:1-4, etc.) Likewise the appeal that Jesus had for the rugged fishermen of Galilee, and the authority of his strong right arm with the whips when he drove the money changers out of the temple; none of these facts will harmonize with an unattractive countenance or any form of personal “ugliness.” No! What is meant is that none of the trappings of wealth, office, social status, or any other such things which are so honored among men, belonged to Jesus.

“As a root out of dry ground …” (Isa 53:2). What is the “dry ground” here? “This refers to a corrupt age and nation, and the arid soil of mankind.” Both the nation of Israel and all of the nations of the pre-Christian Gentile world were at this time judicially hardened by God Himself; and nothing could have seemed more impossible to the citizens of that dissolute age than the fact that God’s Holy Messiah would be born to humble parents in some obscure village, and that the salvation of all the world would be available through that Child alone!

The lack of beauty and comeliness spoken of here has been the occasion of all kinds of derogatory statements about Christ. For example, Wardle stated that the passage means: “He was despised, pain-stricken and diseased, so that men turned away from him in revulsion.” No word in all the Bible justifies such a statement as this. The emphasis upon the lack of beauty and comeliness refers not at all to the physical appearance of Jesus except during those terrible scenes of Holy Week, during which he was denied sleep, beaten unmercifully by a Roman chastisement, mocked some six times in all, crowned with a crown of thorns, tortured to death on the Cross, compelled to carry the cross till he fainted, being struck in the face with a reed, reviled and spit upon! This was the time when his visage was marred, and the last vestiges of his physical beauty perished under the venomous, inhuman treatment of Satan and his sons who put him to death.

“Despised and rejected of men …” (Isa 53:3). Archer rendered this as, “Lacking men of distinction as his supporters. This harmonizes with the fact that a tax collector and common fishermen were among his apostles, whereas distinguished persons like the rich young ruler turned away from him. “Men still persist in avoiding facing the `real Jesus,’ preferring what they call `the historical Jesus’ who would not trouble them with the Cross.

Isa 53:1 UNBELIEVING: Chapter 53 is still in the predictive present tense. It is as if the Servant has come, been rejected, slaughtered and the people of Israel are looking at it all in retrospect! The overall reaction of the nation to Jesus claims to be the Messiah was scoffing, mockery, rejection and persecution. He gained a few disciples, but at the arrest in Gethsemane, they all forsook Him and fled (Mar 14:50). The nation, as a whole, could not believe that Jehovah was at work revealing His Arm in the itinerant Galilean carpenters son. It was especially difficult for any who had been attracted to Him during His life to believe that He was Gods Servant when they gathered at Golgotha and saw His humiliating death, (cf. Luk 24:13-27). The believing, penitent Jews after their baptism (Act 2:37, etc.) still marvelled than they could have been so unbelieving. They are represented here by the prophet as continually marvelling as they reflect on their blindness. Twice in the N.T. this very verse of Isaiahs prophecy is quoted as Jesus (Joh 12:38) and Paul (Rom 10:16) express shock that the Jews did not believe when Jehovahs Servant came to them.

Is there any question as to the identity of this Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53? Servant of Jehovah, ebed Yahweh in Hebrew is prophesied at least 20 times in Isaiah chapters 40-53. Sometimes it refers to Cyrus, king of Persia; sometimes it refers to the nation of Israel (Isa 41:8; Isa 42:19); but most often it refers to the Messiah (Isa 42:1-7; Isa 49:1-9; Isa 50:4-9; Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12; Isa 61:1-3). The Servant is the same person (not nation) previously described in Isa 7:14; Isa 9:6 ff; Isa 11:1-5. He is also the Branch of Isa 4:2; Isa 11:1; Isa 53:2; Jer 23:5 ff; Jer 33:15; Zec 3:8; Zec 6:12 ff. The inspired authors of the New Testament specifically confirm the following prophecies of the Servant are fulfilled in Jesus Christ; Isa 42:1-4 fulfilled in Mat 12:18-21; Isa 52:13 to Isa 53:12 fulfilled (or quoted) in Mat 8:17; Luk 22:37; Joh 12:38; Act 8:32 ff; Rom 10:16. The Servants mission can only be fulfilled by Christ:

1. Birth (Isa 49:1; Isa 53:2; Luk 1:31-35)

2. Anointing (Isa 42:1; Isa 48:16; Isa 59:21; Isa 61:1; Mat 3:16; Luk 4:18 ff)

3. Ministry (Isa 49:8-13; Act 10:36-43)

4. Rejection (Isa 49:4-7; Isa 53:1-3; Act 3:13-18)

5. Obedience (Isa 40:4-7; Php 2:5-11)

6. New Covenant (Isa 42:6; Isa 49:8; Isa 55:3; Mat 26:26-29)

7. Vicarious death (Isa 53:4-12; 1Pe 2:22-25)

8. Resurrection (Isa 53:10-12; Act 2:24-36)

9. Salvation Offered (Isa 49:8; Isa 61:2; Luk 24:46-49)

10. Mission to Gentiles (Isa 42:1; Isa 42:6 ff; Isa 49:6; Isa 49:12; Isa 60:3; Isa 60:9; Mat 28:18-20)

11. Glorification and Intercession Isa 49:3; Isa 53:12; Act 2:33-36; Php 2:5-11; Heb 7:24 ff)

12. Jesus came to serve. (Mat 20:28; Joh 12:13-20, etc.)

Isa 53:2-3 UNCIVIL: What Jew in his right mind would ever have dreamed or imagined rejecting his Messiah or Jehovahs Servant in such an odious way as Isaiah predicts? Only the most shameful incivility prompts men to deliberately hide from another human being. Yet these verses vividly portray the scandalous hatred the Jews will manifest toward the Incarnate Servant. It is the life-story of the Servant from the cradle to the grave. The Servants entry into this world was so inglorious; born in Bethlehem (Mic 5:2), of poor parentage, in a stable. When He grew up as a lad in Nazareth He was just like any other lad according to all outward appearances (Luk 2:51-52) (with the one exception of confounding the scholars at Jerusalem, Luk 2:41-50).

He grew up before him . . . means the Servant grew up in the eyes of Jehovah, or, by the foreordained plan of God, as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. Jehovah sent His Servant to the world through the Jews, despised and harassed people by the Roman world of Christs day. He grew up in Nazareth which was in Galilee (which means, circuit of the Gentiles). Can anything good come out of Nazareth? (Joh 1:46) was the attitude toward that infamous village. That the Servant of Jehovah, the Messiah, should come from a carpenters family would be unthinkable to Jewish theology. A tender, green plant in dry parched ground is regarded with skepticism as to its origin and its survival. So Christ was looked upon.

Among all ancient peoples (even as among some modern advertisers) ideal physique, refined facial features, etc., were considered necessary prerequisites of future greatness, along with right parents, right birthplace, right schools, etc. These verses are not intended to describe Christs facial features or His physique. They are simply predicting that men would judge Him by that inauspicious human appearance and completely reject Him because of their presuppositions. When Jesus was only a baby, Simeon the aged prophet took Him in his arms and predicted He was the consolation of Israel and a light unto the Gentiles but that He would become a sign that is spoken against, (cf. Luk 2:22-35). When He was arrested and mocked and tortured by the Sanhedrin, Pilate and Herod, there was no form or comeliness in Him that any of the nation desired Him to be king. Why would God plan it that His Servant come into the world in such untoward surroundings? In order to put men into the refiners fire. All who beheld His glory through eyes of faith and saw beyond the humiliation of the incarnation that He was the Son of God became sons of God. All who were blinded by their own carnal standards of comeliness and judged Jesus by them became sons of disobedience. God wanted to get at the heart of man, for that is what He judges, not outward appearances.

Jesus was seldom treated with indifference. When He spoke or acted, people either clamored after Him or plotted against Him. But even most of the clamoring of the multitudes was only superficial. It was motivated by fleshly hunger for more bread and fish or for instantaneous healing of sicknesses. The Sadducees and Pharisees hated the Servant and plotted His death because He stripped away their facade of orthodoxy and exposed their immoral and rebellious hearts. And, in the end, these pretentious theologians and greedy legalists seduced the carnal-minded multitudes to clamor for His crucifixion! He was despised and rejected of men; forsaken and shunned. The two Hebrew words makeoyoth and kholiy are literally, pain and sickness, but are translated, sorrows and grief. When people saw that His earthly life was characterized by trouble, pain, rejection, sorrow, poverty, humiliation, absolute honesty and purity, few wanted to have anything to do with Him. Misunderstood by all-even His select disciples and His own human family-He was a man of sorrows (see comments on Isa 49:4). How could Jesus have been a man of sorrows and yet speak so much of his joy? Because the object of His joy was beyond this world! (Heb 12:1 ff). All men who live godly in this world will suffer persecution (2Ti 3:12; Joh 15:18 ff; Joh 16:33), but they may also have joy if the object of their joy is beyond this world (Joh 4:34; Joh 15:11; Joh 17:13, etc.).

What people turned away from the Servant of the Lord for when He was in human form on the earth they still turn away from Him for today-His substitutionary atonement. Some are superficially in agreement with what they think is His pacifistic humanitarianism or His socialistic human-rights stance, but they absolutely will not surrender to the truth that Jesus had to die for their sin. This is what was so unacceptable to the self-righteous Pharisees of Jesus day. It remains a threat to the self-righteousness of men today!

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

the Rejected and Suffering Redeemer

Isa 53:1-12

The common lot of man may be summed up in three words: suffering, sin, and death. Our Lord, the Divine Servant, presents a notable exception to the rest of the race-not in His sufferings, Isa 53:3; not in His death, for He died many deaths in one, Isa 53:9, r.v. margin, but in His perfect innocence and goodness. His sufferings were due to sins not His own, Rom 5:8. We must make His soul our guilt offering, Isa 53:10, r.v. margin. It is the same word as is used in Lev 5:1-16. There is no need to summon the aid of another. Do it for yourself!

Jesus shall one day be satisfied. In the glory that shall accrue to the Father; in the redemption of untold myriads; in the character of the redeemed; in the destruction of the results of the Fall, we shall hear His sigh of content and see the triumph on His face. We shall witness His transference of the kingdom to the Father, 1Co 15:24. We shall behold the satisfactory termination of the mystery of evil. If He is satisfied, we shall be!

Fuente: F.B. Meyer’s Through the Bible Commentary

EXPOSITORY NOTES ON

THE PROPHET ISAIAH

By

Harry A. Ironside, Litt.D.

Copyright @ 1952

edited for 3BSB by Baptist Bible Believer in the spirit of the Colportage ministry of a century ago

ISAIAH CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

THE SUFFERING SAVIOUR

THE inspired writer gives us a graphic pen-portrait of the suffering Saviour and tells us of the glorious work He was to undertake in order that the sin question might be settled forever to the perfect satisfaction of GOD, the infinitely Holy One.

This great Messianic prophecy is referred to a number of times in the New Testament, and in each instance is applied directly to our Lord JESUS CHRIST, as in Mat 8:17; Act 8:32-35; and 1Pe 2:21-25.

CHRIST is here presented as the sinless Substitute for sinful men, to whom our sins were imputed that divine righteousness might be imputed to us who believe in Him. His lowly life, His rejection by His own people, His voluntary subjection to the suffering of the Cross, His atoning sacrifice, His glorious resurrection and the triumph of His Gospel in the salvation of a great host of sinners are all foretold here in a clear and concise way. None but GOD Himself could have given us this remarkable delineation of the character and work of the Lord JESUS so long before He came into the world.

Isaiah wrote this prophecy some seven hundred years before JESUS was born in Bethlehem in order to fulfill all that was written of Him. GOD foreknew all that His Son was to endure, and He gave this message to Isaiah to hand on to the future generations.

This wonderful passage begins with the 13th verse of chapter fifty-two: “Behold, My Servant,” for the One whom it describes is the same Person of whom he continues to speak in chapter fifty-three.

This is Hebrew poetry in blank verse. It is in sections of three stanzas each. The first one (chapter 52:13-15) introduces the Servant of the Lord whose glory must be equal to the shame He endured.

“Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. As many were astonied [astonished] at thee; his visage was so marred more than any

man, and his form more than the sons of men: So shall he sprinkle many nations; the kings shall shut their mouths at him: for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which they had not heard shall they consider” (verses 13-15).

Hebrew scholars tell us that the word “sprinkle” here is from the same root as that for “astonied,” so that it could also say, “As many were astonished at Him, so shall He astonish many nations.”

Then chapter fifty-three presents GOD’s servant, the suffering Saviour.

“Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (verses 1-3).

To the question, “Who hath believed our report?” Paul the apostle calls our attention in Rom 10:16 as evidencing the incredulity of Israel, the very people who had waited for the coming of their Messiah for centuries, but who, when He came, fulfilled their own Scriptures in rejecting Him. They failed to see in JESUS “the arm of the Lord” stretched forth for their salvation, as in the case of the great bulk of mankind today.

Christians often say that in their unconverted days, the Lord was to them as a root out of a dry ground, but now He is the altogether lovely one. But the expression does not imply lack of comeliness or beauty, but that the Lord JESUS CHRIST grew up before GOD as a sprout, a root. This is the Man whose name is “the Branch,” a root out of the dry ground of formalistic Israel, the one lovely plant that the Lord gazed down upon with such approval that He could open the heavens above Him and say, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

This was what the blessed Lord was to GOD – a tender plant, a plant of renown and beauty, growing out of the dry ground of Israel and of humanity in general. To GOD He was precious beyond words, but to unbelieving men He had no form, no comeliness, no beauty; that is, men did not recognize the moral loveliness that He ever exhibited. Some Christian teachers have misunderstood the expression, “He hath no form nor comeliness,” and have believed that the Lord JESUS CHRIST as man was positively repulsive in appearance, so that no one would like to look upon Him. But that is not in accordance with other scriptures.

In Psa 45:2 it is written of our blessed Lord, “Thou art fairer than the children of men,” and we have every reason to believe that the Lord JESUS CHRIST, being the only sinless child that was ever born into the world, came here with a perfect human body and spotlessly beautiful. And as He grew up as a young man and later matured, He would be of lovely, splendid appearance, but those who listened to His teaching but loved their sins, and were angered by Him, saw in Him no beauty that they should desire Him.

It is not a question of physical characteristics; because of the sufferings He endured, His visage became marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men. But as Man here

on earth, the Second Man, the Last Adam, He was as to His human form, face, and features absolutely perfect. But men looked upon Him with scorn and disdain because His teaching interfered with the lives that they loved to live. They say, “When we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.”

So the prophet goes on to say:

“He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (verse 3).

All this was fulfilled in the days of our Lord’s ministry here on earth. Before that there is no hint that he was despised and rejected. The little that we are told of Him is that “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man.” Before His ministry began, He must have been acceptable wherever He went; He was evidently a reader in the Nazareth synagogue because He went there and publicly began to read from this very book of Isaiah, so that He was in favor in the eyes of His townsmen.

It was when He went out on His great mission that men turned away from Him – despised and rejected Him – “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised and we esteemed Him not. [Yet He was suffering in our place. Rejected, despised, He endured patiently all the shame put upon Him. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted (verse 4).

Men looked upon the sorrows He endured as divine judgments for His own sins, deserved because of what He was in Himself, as though GOD was angry with Him, whereas He was but entering into our griefs and the sorrows that sin had brought upon the race of mankind. All through His lowly life He saw what misery sin had caused. Men said He had a devil, and called Him a Samaritan – made Him out as a deceiver, and considered that the sufferings that He endured were deserved.

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (verses 5, 6).

This brings us to the Cross, where He endured vicariously the judgment that our sins deserved in order that through His stripes we might be healed. There on the tree He was the great sin offering and the peace offering, too – there He “made peace through the blood of His Cross” (Col 1:20).

Surely here is substitutionary atonement. Sometimes people object to this on the ground that the word “substitution” is not found in the Bible, but when one is in the place of another, when one is taking what another deserves, that is substitution, and here we have the plain, definite statement, “He hath borne our griefs . . . He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities,” the chastisement whereby our peace was made fell upon Him with

the result: “With His stripes we are healed.”

In verse six GOD, as it were, balances the books of the world-two debit entries and one credit entry. The two debit entries: “All we like sheep have gone astray” – there is the whole fallen human race; “we have turned everyone to his own way” – there is each individual’s own personal sin; and then the credit entry that clears it all on the books of GOD if men would but receive it: “The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

Here we have the entire story of the Bible epitomized: Man’s ruin both by nature and practice, and GOD’s marvelous and all-sufficient remedy. The verse begins with all and ends with all. An anxious soul was directed to this passage and found peace. Afterward he said, “I bent low down and went in at the first all. I stood up straight and came out at the last.” The first is the acknowledgment of our deep need. The second shows how fully that need has been met in the Cross of CHRIST. How happy to be numbered among those who have put in their claim and found salvation through the atoning work which there took place!

To me verse six is the most wonderful text in the Bible. I have been trying to preach for sixty years and that is the first text I ever preached on. I was just a boy fourteen years old, and out on the street in Los Angeles with the Salvation Army, I started speaking on that verse, meaning to take five minutes, but a half-hour later the captain leaned over and said, “Boy, we should have been in the Hall twenty minutes ago. You’ll have to tell us the rest some other time.” I have been trying to tell the rest all through the years since, but it is a text I never get beyond.

The mock trial of the Lord is next foretold.

“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken” (verses 7, 8).

Taken from one place to another His case was heard but there was no one to speak for Him. It was all contrary to law, yet GOD permitted it. He said nothing for Himself. Pilate wondered greatly at His silence. Herod tried to make Him speak, yet brought as a lamb to be slain and like a sheep dumb before her shearers, so He opened not His mouth. With no word of complaint He gave Himself into the hands of wicked men to be crucified because there was no other way whereby guilty sinners could be saved.

Then the question comes in: “Who shall declare His generation?” or “Who shall declare His manner of life?” How careful GOD was to see that His manner of life was declared! Through false evidence he was condemned to die as a felon, as though guilty of sedition against Caesar, head of Imperial Rome; but GOD saw to it that His manner of life was fully declared, so that actually He was justified before His judges.

Pilate’s wife sent him the message, “Have thou nothing to do with that just Man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of Him.” Pilate himself publicly took water

and washed his hands, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just Person.”

Then as He hung upon that Cross, left to die as a felon, a thief by His side turned to his fellow and said, “Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly . . . but this Man hath done nothing amiss.”

GOD saw to it that this declaration was made even on the very cross, “This Man hath done nothing amiss.”

Yet He was allowed to suffer. Why? Because He was the great Sin Offering. “He was taken from prison and from judgment and who shall declare His generation? for He was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was He stricken.” He was hurried from one judgment scene to another until, at last, He was nailed to the Cross, there to endure all that our sins deserved.

“And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities” (verses 9-11).

They “made His grave with the wicked.” This was man’s intention. They would have cast His precious body out to be devoured by vultures or jackals, or burned in the fires that destroyed the refuse of the city in the valley of Hinnom. But GOD saw to it that He lay “with the rich in His death,” as a testimony to His absolute holiness and perfection of spirit.

What a wonderful epitome of the whole story of the life and death and mock trial and condemnation of our Lord JESUS is here! The four accounts of the crucifixion taken together give us the full meaning of the work of the Cross. JESUS is presented as enduring the shame and physical anguish inflicted upon Him by man for three awful hours. In that period He gave no evidence of perturbation of spirit. He was in perfect communion with the Father, and manifested a tender concern for others, but there was no word of self-pity or commiseration for His own sufferings. But in the last three hours He was enduring the terrible ordeal of bearing the judgment our sins deserved. His cry of loneliness is the key to the deeper suffering of those hours when GOD, the righteous Judge, had to abandon Him to the inward spiritual suffering as the Surety for sinners. It was then His soul – not merely His body – was made an offering for sin.

Observe, it was the Lord, GOD Himself, who dealt with CHRIST in judgment when He hung upon the tree. It was not His physical sufferings alone that made propitiation for sin, but what He endured in His inmost being when His holy, spotless soul became the great Sin Offering. In other words, it was not what man did to Him that made reconciliation for iniquity, but what He endured at the hand of GOD, leading to Immanuel’s orphaned cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

He was forsaken that we might be received into the divine favor. Because of this, in resurrection,

“He shall see His seed . . . and . . . be satisfied.” GOD has raised up JESUS CHRIST from the dead and made Him the head of the new creation, made up of all who are saved through the work He accomplished on the Cross. Thus both His death and resurrection are depicted here.

The word “travail” refers to but one kind of suffering – birth pangs. JESUS travailed in His soul that millions might be born of the Word and Spirit of GOD to His eternal joy and satisfaction. The Gospel is based upon what He endured on that Cross, and this message goes out to all who have ears to hear.

“Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors” (verse 12).

Instead of the offering of His body as a sin offering ending His days, He shall prolong His days. And He shall come back from the grave in resurrection life. How wonderful is that promise, “Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong.

Evidently the strong one here refers to Satan as man’s great enemy. The Lord JESUS said, “No man can enter into a strong man’s house . . . except he first bind the strong man.” He used that expression as typical of Satan himself, a wonderful encouragement here for those who try to preach the Gospel. “He shall divide the spoil with the strong.” Many people have an idea that there will be far more people in hell than in heaven, but GOD’s Word does not warrant that. Someone at once thinks of the question of the disciples, “Are there few that be saved?” But that was a question which the Lord did not answer by saying, “Yes, there are only a few that will be saved.” He said, “Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” In other words, Be in earnest about it, because many will strive to enter when it will be too late.

But what is the testimony of the Scriptures? Will there be few saved? There will be far more in heaven than will ever be in hell, because all the little ones will be in heaven – all the millions who have died in immaturity before coming to the years of accountability – they will all be in heaven. JESUS said, “It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish,” and all those who have been mentally defective and never have been capable of accepting or rejecting CHRIST will all be covered by His Blood. And then in addition, all those who have turned to Him in repentance and trust in Him as Saviour. So he divides “the spoil with the strong.” GOD rewards the Lord JESUS according to His own thoughts of that which His Son has accomplished. Men may think lightly of His glorious work but GOD never does.

~ end of chapter 53 ~

http://www.baptistbiblebelievers.com/

***

Fuente: Commentaries on the New Testament and Prophets

Isa 53:2

“Religion is a weariness.” Such is the judgment commonly passed, often avowed, concerning the greatest of blessings which Almighty God has bestowed upon us. And when God gave the blessing, He at the same time foretold that such would be the judgment of the world upon it, even as manifested in the gracious person of Him whom He sent to give it to us. Not that this prediction excuses our deadness to it; this dislike of the religion given by God Himself-this distaste for its very name-must obviously be an insult to the Giver. Consider human life in some of its stages and conditions, in order to impress upon you the fact of this contrariety between ourselves and our Maker.

I. “Religion is a weariness.” So feel even children before they can well express their meaning. Consider their amusements, their enjoyments, what they hope, what they desire, what they scheme, and what they dream about themselves in time future, when they grow up; and say what place religion holds in their hearts. Watch the reluctance with which they turn to religious duties, to saying their prayers or reading the Bible, and then judge.

II. Take next the case of young persons when they first enter into life. Is not religion associated in their minds with gloom, melancholy, and weariness? When men find their pleasure and satisfaction lie in society which proscribes religion, and when they deliberately and habitually prefer those amusements which have necessarily nothing to do with religion, such persons cannot view religion as God views it.

III. Passing to the more active occupations of life, we find that here too religion is confessedly felt to be wearisome; it is out of place. The transactions of worldly business find a way directly to the heart; they rouse, they influence. The name of religion, on the other hand, is weak and unimportant; it contains no spell to kindle the feelings of man, to make the heart beat with anxiety, and to produce activity and perseverance.

IV. The natural contrariety between man and his Maker is still more strikingly shown by the confessions of men of the world who have given some thought to the subject, and viewed society with somewhat of a philosophical spirit. Such men treat the demands of religion with disrespect and negligence, on the ground of their being unnatural.

V. That religion is in itself a weariness is seen even in the conduct of the better sort of persons who really, on the whole, are under the influence of its spirit. So dull and uninviting is calm and practical religion, that religious persons are ever exposed to the temptation of looking out for excitements of one sort or other, to make it pleasurable to them.

VI. “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.” It is not His loss that we love Him not; it is our loss. He is all-blessed, whatever becomes of us. He is not less blessed because we are far from Him. Woe unto us, if in the day in which He comes from heaven, we see nothing desirable or gracious in His wounds; but instead, have made for ourselves an ideal blessedness, different from that which will be manifested to us in Him.

Plain Sermons by Contributors to “Tracts for the Times” vol. v., p. 9 (see also J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii., p. 13).

References: Isa 53:2.-Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii., No. 1075; R. Milman, The Love of the Atonement, pp. 34, 46, 59, 66, 83, 91, 102. Isa 53:2, Isa 53:3.-Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. ii., p. 277.

Isa 53:3

This was one of the marks by which Israel was to know his Christ. He was to be a Man of sorrows. The power by which He was to draw men to Himself, the charm by which He was to keep men near Himself, was not to be the charm of cheerfulness, not the pleasantness of His speech or the gladness of His character; it was to be just the opposite of this; it was to be His acquaintance with grief.

I. His own personal life was a sorrowful one. He was away from home, from His Father’s presence. He was a Stranger in a strange land. From His childhood He was full of thoughts which He could not utter, because, if uttered, they were not understood. He was a lonely man. His sympathy with others by no means implied their sympathy with Him.

II. But His sorrows, like His labours, were for others. (1) Jesus Christ sorrowed over bodily suffering; (2) He sorrowed over mental suffering; (3) He sorrowed over spiritual suffering.

III. He was a Man of sorrows also, and chiefly, in relation to sin. (1) He had to see sin; (2) He had to bear sin.

IV. The subject teaches (1) that if it is as a Man of sorrows that Jesus Christ comes to us, it must be, first of all, as a memento of the fitness of sorrow to our condition as sinful men. (2) Again, only a Man of sorrows could be a Saviour for all men, and for the whole of life. (3) Sorrow, however deep, has its solaces and its compensations. (a) Whatever it be, it is of the nature of sorrow to bring a man nearer to truth, nearer to reality, nearer therefore to hope. (b) Sorrow makes a man more useful. It gives him a new experience and a new sympathy.

V. The question remains, How do we stand, we ourselves, in reference to this Saviour?

C. J. Vaughan, Christ the Light of the World, p. 88.

Isa 53:3

I. In trying to bring into view some of the leading sorrows of our Lord’s life, it is impossible not to begin with one which lay at the bottom of them all-that, namely, which arose from His close contact with the sin and defilement of this fallen and guilty world. The fact of our Lord’s becoming a man involved the necessity of His living in immediate contact with what of all things in the universe was the most repulsive, hateful, and horrible to His soul. No doubt there were many beautiful things in the world, and even in men’s lives, that could not but interest Him; but there was an awful drawback in the case of all. It was a world in arms against its Lord, a world divorced from its God.

II. The sorrow of unrequited love. “He came to His own and His own received Him not.” There is something very sad in the repulse of a generous love and a love that seeks truly and disinterestedly the welfare of those loved; and we learn from Scripture that the rejection of His loving offers cut very deeply into the heart of Jesus.

III. A third grief arose from what is called, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the contradiction of sinners against Himself. He had to endure a great amount of keen, active opposition, often of a peculiarly trying kind. Looking at the number and variety of His enemies, He might have said, “They compassed Me about like bees.” Hardly ever did He undertake an unembarrassed journey, or spend an easy hour. The contradiction of sinners became only more intense the longer He laboured. And it was the more trying because it was so successful.

IV. Among the sorrows of Jesus we notice, next, those which came from the infirmities of His own disciples. (1) There were vexations arising from their want of understanding, want of sympathy with Him in the great purposes of His life. (2) There were disappointments arising from their want of faith and of the courage of faith.

V. The last of the special griefs of Jesus was the sorrow of His last conflict; the grief, so peculiar and so intense, of what He often called His hour. It is apparent, from all the records of His life, that our blessed Lord looked forward to His last span of life as one of peculiar horror. At this solemn crisis of His life, more than at any other part of it, it was His lot to feel the position of the sinbearer and the scapegoat-the position of one who stood in the sinner’s place and bore the sinner’s doom. It was then that God said, “Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and against the man that is My fellow.”

W. G. Blaikie, Glimpses of the Inner Life of Our Lord, p. 151.

I. There is an instance in Scripture, but we believe it stands alone, of Christ feeling and displaying gladness of spirit. A solitary exception there is to the melancholy description, “A Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;” and by examining the exception we may get clearer views of the general character of Christ’s sufferings. “In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit”-an hour in which there had been given Him such proofs of the prevalent power of His name as assured Him that through His sacrifice the kingdom of Satan would be finally demolished. In that hour the Saviour forgot the load of His griefs, and beheld Himself through His sacrifice exalted as a conqueror. For a moment He saw “the travail of His soul and was satisfied.”

II. Christ seems to make it matter of thanksgiving that the Gospel had been “hid from the wise and prudent and revealed only to babes.” And surprise might naturally be felt at this. Could the joy of the Redeemer have sprung from the thought that any were to perish? Is it not strange that an instance like this-an instance in which gladness is associated with anything so fearful as the everlasting destruction of the proud and self-sufficient-that this should be the single recorded exception to the accuracy of the melancholy description set forth in our text? It cannot be that Christ gave thanks because His gospel was hid from the wise and prudent; but He rejoices that though God had hid these things from the wise and prudent, He had nevertheless revealed them unto babes. Why might not the Saviour give thanks that the propagation of His gospel was to be such as would secure the honour of His Father? When with prophetic glance He looked onward to the struggle of His Church, and saw that in every land and in every age there would flow in multitudes of the mean and illiterate, while those excluded would be, for the most part, the mighty and the learned-excluded only because too proud to enter; and when He thought how God would prevent the glorying of any flesh in His presence by thus choosing the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and the foolish things to confound the wise, and thus out of the mouths of babes and sucklings perfecting praise,-we know not why He might not, in perfect consistence with that love which embraced every child of man, rejoice in the prospect on which He gazed-ay, though this rejoicing was the single exception to that intense, that ever overpressing sadness which is indicated in the emphatic and plaintive description of our text-“A Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”

H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2331.

References: Isa 53:3.-W. Brock, Penny Pulpit, No. 693; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 79; D. Davies, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxvii., p. 53; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1099; Homiletic Magazine, vol. xiii., p. 336; J. Keble, Sermons for Holy Week, p. 102; R. Milman, The Love of the Atonement, pp. 117, 138, 150, 171, 183, 202.

Isa 53:3-4

I. Consider first the humiliation of our blessed Lord. Not only did He suffer extreme pain in body, but also in mind. The divinity of our Lord does not mitigate the intensity of His sufferings. A man’s sorrows are mercifully shortened by his ignorance, short-sightedness, and infirmity; but Christ knew all, even the depth of sin in every heart; He foresaw all, even to the hour of death for each single soul for which He was suffering, even to the Day of Judgment, even to the endless misery of those who would crucify Him afresh. We see in Him no sign of a Divine power superseding human feeling and destroying it, nor anything of the hard indifference and pride of an earthly hero; but that which is most human and tender-pitiful and unswerving patience. In His parting with friends, in His meeting death, in His fear and trust, in His considerate-ness for others, He did and suffered all with the feelings and affections of man.

II. Notice the glory transparent through His humiliation. The result of these sufferings is salvation to others and glory to Himself. There appears even in His hours of deepest distress a character of unearthly greatness. At His first word, “I am He,” the multitude goes backward and falls with a shock upon the ground. Just now He leant on disciples for support; again He shelters them from harm, saying, “If ye seek Me, let these go their way.” Just now He stooped to take comfort of an angel’s hand; again by His Divine authority He keeps back whole legions of angels, lest they should interrupt His work. Likewise His death-though death is a very sign of human weakness-displays His power. He lays His life down freely, as He took it up; so that, in the sweet words of St. Bernard, we may truly say, “Who of us so gently boweth his head when he desires to sleep? To die is indeed of the weakness of man, but to die thus is of the power of God.”

C. W. Furse, Sermons Preached at Richmond, p. 208.

Isa 53:4

Jesus Christ is the comforter we need, for-

I. He is an afflicted Man, the most afflicted of all the human race, a Man of sorrows. If He wishes to sympathise He has only to recall the past. We cannot take a single step in our gloomy path without finding some traces of Him. We cannot light upon an affliction through which He has not passed before us. He knows what sorrow is, and this is why He can comfort. We have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities.

II. Jesus Christ has not only shared our sorrows, He has redeemed our sins. Observe, that He truly represents humanity, not merely because He is its ideal type, but also because He has entered into full communion with its sufferings and made Himself partaker of its destiny. He has thrown Himself into the midst of the battle-field; He has in some sort covered us with His body, and so the chastisement which we deserved has fallen on Him. It is precisely because He is the only man on earth who, as a representative of our race, endured a punishment which He did not deserve, and did not add a fresh sin to a fresh pain, that His suffering rises to the height of a redeeming sacrifice. This redemption was completed on the Cross. It would not have been enough for the Son of man to have been pierced with all the sorrows of humanity except the last. It would not have been enough for Him to have endured all the consequences of man’s rebellion except the last. Death is the wages of sin, and the striking sign of God’s condemnation resting on a guilty world. These wages have been received for us by Him who did not deserve them, because He freely made Himself a partaker of our misery in order to save us. Our comforter is the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. In all our distresses, therefore, and in all our shipwrecks, there is but one shelter, and that is the Cross.

E. de Pressens, The Mystery of Suffering, p. 16 (see also Pulpit Analyst, vol. iii., p. 205).

References: Isa 53:4.-J. Baldwin Brown, The Divine Mysteries, p. 5; C. Clemance, To the Light Through* the Cross, p. 35. Isa 53:4, Isa 53:5.-R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiv., p. 8. Isa 53:4-6.-Homiletic Magazine, vol. x., p. 200. Isa 53:5.-Bishop Moorhouse, The Expectation of the Christ, p. 63; Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 249; Ibid., Sermons, vol. xiv., No. 834, vol. xviii., No. 1068; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 91; Pulpit Analyst, vol. i., p. 702. Isa 53:5, Isa 53:6.-C. Clemance, To the Light Through the Cross, p. 46. Isa 53:6.-A. Watson, Sermons for Sundays, Festivals, and Fasts, 2nd series, vol. ii., p. 68; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii., No. 694, vol. xvi., No. 925; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 94; W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons, vol. ii., p. 112; C. Clemance, To the Light Through the Cross, p. 195.

Isa 53:7

St. Peter makes it almost a description of the Christian, that he loves Him whom he has not seen; speaking of Christ, he says, “Whom having not seen, ye love.” Unless we have a true love of Christ, we are not His true disciples; and we cannot love Him unless we have heartfelt gratitude to Him; and we cannot duly feel gratitude unless we feel keenly what He suffered for us. No one who will but solemnly think over the history of those sufferings, as drawn out for us in the Gospels, but will gradually gain, through God’s grace, a sense of them, will in a measure realise them, will in a measure be as if he saw them, will feel towards them as being not merely a tale written in a book, but as a true history, as a series of events which took place.

I. Our Lord is called a lamb in the text, that is, He was as defenceless and as innocent as a lamb is. Since, then, Scripture compares Him to this inoffensive and unprotected animal, we may, without presumption or irreverence, take the image as a means of conveying to our minds those feelings which our Lord’s sufferings should excite in us. Consider how very horrible it is to read the accounts which sometimes meet us of cruelties exercised on brute animals. What is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes? (1) They have done no harm; (2) they have no power of resistance; it is the cowardice and tyranny of which they are the victims which makes their sufferings so especially touching. He who is higher than the angels deigned to humble Himself even to the state of the brute creation, as the Psalm says, “I am a worm, and no man; a very scorn of men, and the outcast of the people.”

II. Take another example, and you will see the same thing still more strikingly. How overpowered should we be, not at the sight only, but at the very hearing, of cruelties shown to a little child-and why so? For the same two reasons, because it was so innocent, and because it was so unable to defend itself. We feel the horror of this, and yet we can bear to read of Christ’s sufferings without horror. There is an additional circumstance of cruelty to affect us in Christ’s history, which no instance of a brute animal’s or of a child’s sufferings can have; our Lord was not only guiltless and defenceless, but He had come among His persecutors in love.

III. Suppose that some aged and venerable person whom we have known as long as we could recollect anything, and loved and reverenced,-suppose such a one rudely seized by fierce men, made a laughing-stock, struck, spit on, scourged, and at last exposed with all his wounds to the gaze of a rude multitude who came and jeered him: what would be our feelings? But what is all this to the suffering of the holy Jesus, which we can bear to read of as a matter of course. A spirit of grief and lamentation is expressly mentioned in Scripture as a characteristic of those who turn to Christ. If then we do not sorrow, have we turned to Him?

Plain Sermons by Contributors to “Tracts for the Times” vol. v., p. 86 (see also J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii., p. 133).

References: Isa 53:7.-Outline Sermons to Children, p. 94; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi., No. 1543; G. S. Barrett, Old Testament Outlines, p. 221. Isa 53:7, Isa 53:8.-C. Clemance, To the Light Through the Cross, p. 57. Isa 53:9.-Homiletic Magazine, vol. xiv., p. 286. Isa 53:10.-J. Parsons, Christian World Pulpit, vol. i., p. 440; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv., No. 173, vol. x., No. 561; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 93; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. x., p. 147; Preacher’s Monthly, vol. x., p. 352; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1966; C. Clemance, To the Light Through the Cross, pp. 100, 106,115, 123, 130.

Isa 53:11

I. The travail of His soul. This seems to be a short expression to indicate the whole of Christ’s humiliation, more especially in its inner and more spiritual aspect. We may take note of some of the ingredients that entered into the cup, although we cannot measure the degree of their bitterness:-(1) He who was from all eternity the beloved of His Father put His glory off and put on our nature. (2) He severed Himself from the company of the holy, who loved and worshipped Him, for the company of the unholy, who in feeble friendship vexed, or in open enmity crucified Him. (3) “He who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (4) He met personally with the person of the wicked one in our quarrel. (5) His heart was often sore vexed by ignorance, selfishness, unfaithfulness, even of His own selected disciples. (6) The people for whose sake He came into the world-the Israel among whom He was born and bred-would none of Him. (7) The office of the priesthood, which He loved and honoured as God’s institute to hold up the promise of redemption, was by those who held it prostituted to reject the counsel of God. (8) But alone, and above all, incomprehensible to us, yet awful, both for the part that we know and the part that we know not, is the desertion by the Father and the final descent of wrath, due to sin, on the Redeemer’s soul.

II. The fruit that results from the travail of His soul. It is not to the sufferings in themselves that the Redeemer looks. Herein appears the greatness of His love. He looks over and past the travail of His soul, and fixes His regards on the results that it secures. The fruit is that twofold gain which was celebrated in the angels’ song at the birth of Christ, “Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to the children of men.” It is not merely the deliverance of a lost world from the doom that it deserved, it is the honour given to God by that deliverance. The means and end are linked together as the stalk and the grain in the cornfield; by the redemption of sinners God is glorified; and this double blessing is the fruit springing out of His soul’s travail to which the risen Redeemer looks back yet with joy.

III. The satisfaction which the Saviour experiences in the results of the travail of His soul. He does not pass by, when His saving effort has been put forth, as if that were all; He lingers on the spot, and looks and longs to see men actually saved through His suffering for sin. “His delights were with the sons of men” from the past eternity, in anticipation of His saving work; and now that the work is completed, He is not content that His suffering should be fruitless. More than weary benighted watchers wait for the dawning of the day; the Lord who suffered for us longs and looks for the multitudes coming to Himself for life, as the fruits of His dying.

W. Arnot, The Anchor of the Soul, p. 52.

I. Mark the singularity and greatness which these words would seem to teach us to attach to Christ. “He shall see of the travail of His soul.” These words imply a distinction between Christ and the Church, a distinction between Him and all the saved from among men. He, looking upon men, shall see the travail of His soul; they, looking to Him, shall behold the Source of their spiritual existence.

II. The passage indicates Christ’s peculiar work, and attaches pre-eminent importance to that. The expression, “the travail of His soul,” implies that all the glory of the Church, all in the salvation of sinners, the perfection of the faithful, whatever, in the consequences of His undertaking connected either with God or man, can be regarded as a source of satisfaction to Messiah-all is to be attributed to the fact that “His soul was made an offering for sin.”

III. The next idea which the text warrants is the greatness of the results which are to flow from the Redeemer’s sufferings. “He shall be satisfied.”

IV. Consider the grounds of the Saviour’s satisfaction, the results of His work to the world and man: (1) in the inconceivable number of the saved; (2) in the inconceivable perfection of their character.

T. Binney, Sermons in King’s Weighhouse Chapel, 2nd series, p. 1.

References: Isa 53:11.-Pulpit Analyst, vol. ii., p. 512; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. x., p. 146. Isa 53:12.-J. Keble, Sermons for Holy Week, p. 153; C. Clemance, To the Light Through the Cross, pp. 134, 149; T. Monod, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xv., p. 327; Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii., No. 458, vol. xxiii., No. 1385; Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 90. Isa 54:1.-Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi., No. 649; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 243; Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. x., p. 18. Isa 54:1-7.-Homiletic Quarterly, vol. iv., p. 531.

Fuente: The Sermon Bible

CHAPTER 53

The Sinbearer and His Victory

1. The marred visage and His exaltation (Isa 52:13-15) 2. His life and His rejection by the nation (Isa 53:1-3) 3. The work of the Sinbearer: smitten, afflicted and bruised (Isa 53:4-6) 4. His submission and His deliverance (Isa 53:7-9) 5. His glorious reward (Isa 53:10-12) In Messianic predictions, at the close the reader will find hints on this great chapter. We do not repeat them here. The New Testament fully bears witness to this great vision of the cross of Christ, the vicarious suffering of the Son of God and its blessed results. To reject them as meaning Christ and His work of atonement is equivalent to the rejection of the revelation of the New Testament and especially the rejection of the Person of our Lord. The chapter is one of the greatest in this book. After chapter 52 the Servant of Jehovah is no longer mentioned. He is seen in the next section as the King coming with power and executing the judgments of God.

Fuente: Gaebelein’s Annotated Bible (Commentary)

Who: Joh 1:7, Joh 1:12, Joh 12:38, Rom 10:16, Rom 10:17

report: or, doctrine, Heb. hearing

the: Isa 51:9, Isa 52:10, Isa 62:8, Rom 1:16, 1Co 1:18, 1Co 1:24, Eph 1:18, Eph 1:19

revealed: Isa 40:5, Mat 11:25, Mat 16:17, Rom 1:17, Rom 1:18

Reciprocal: Gen 49:1 – Gather Psa 71:18 – strength Isa 28:9 – doctrine Jer 6:10 – To whom Hab 3:2 – speech Mat 2:23 – He shall Mat 20:18 – and the Mat 26:24 – Son of man goeth Mat 26:54 – General Mar 4:15 – these Mar 9:12 – he must Mar 14:21 – goeth Mar 14:49 – but Luk 2:12 – General Luk 2:40 – the child Luk 9:22 – General Luk 13:19 – and it Luk 18:31 – and Luk 22:22 – truly Luk 24:26 – General Luk 24:27 – and all Luk 24:44 – in the prophets Joh 3:11 – ye Joh 3:32 – and no Joh 5:38 – for Joh 5:40 – ye will not Joh 9:18 – General Joh 15:20 – if they have kept Act 3:18 – all Act 5:24 – this Act 11:21 – the hand Act 26:23 – Christ 1Co 1:20 – is the wise 1Co 15:3 – according 1Pe 1:11 – the sufferings 1Pe 1:12 – it 1Jo 5:10 – hath made

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

The Substitution of the Saviour

A Study of Isa 53:1-12

INTRODUCTORY WORDS

The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is called the Great Calvary Chapter. The chapter, however, goes back of Calvary describing both the childhood and ministry of Christ. Then in the conclusion of its message, Isaiah fifty-three passes beyond Calvary, setting forth the wonderful future when Christ’s soul shall be satisfied.

1. The query of the opening verse. Before the Prophet leads to the discussion of the Cross itself, he cries out, “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” Here are two questions:

(1) The first question. When the Prophet says, “Who hath believed our report,” the Holy Spirit is suggesting that the Lord Jesus would not be received and accepted of men.

It does seem that a report backed, as was the report concerning the Lord Jesus would have been believed. However, such was not the case.

(2) The second question. When the Prophet asked, “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” he made plain that the power of the Lord would be circumscribed by the unbelief of the people. In Isa 51:9, we read, “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days.” The Lord answered Israel’s plea by saying, “Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city. * * Shake thyself from the dust; * * loose thyself from the bands of thy neck.”

The truth is, that the Lord’s arm is not shortened that it cannot save. He is strong and able to deliver. It was Israel’s sin, which made it impossible for Christ to work.

2. The doctrine of substitution. We can scan with our eye the chapter as a whole. In Isa 53:4 there are two words, “our griefs,” “our sorrows.” In Isa 53:5 we will find, “our transgressions,” “our iniquities,” “our peace.” Each of these expressions carries with it the thought of substitution either in life or in death. He hath borne our griefs; carried our sorrows; He was wounded for our transgressions; bruised for our iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace was upon Him.

In Isa 53:6, “The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” In Isa 53:8, “For the transgression of My people was He stricken.” In Isa 53:10, His soul was made “an offering for sin.” In Isa 53:11, we read, “He shall bear their iniquities.” In Isa 53:12, “He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

I. THE CHILDHOOD OF CHRIST (Isa 53:2)

The verse before us suggests several things:

1. That Christ sprang a root out of dry ground. We know that Jesus was the root and offspring of David. He is also called, the Stem of Jesse. It was Nathanael who said, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” The Prophet goes Nathanael one better, and seems to say, Can any good thing come out of a nation which has gone from God? Israel in her shame and unbelief was no fit ground from which such marvelous fruit as the Son of God should spring. Israel was “a dry ground.” And yet, Christ after the flesh sprang from that nation.

2. That Christ grew up before the Father as a tender plant. The Lord Jesus, when an infant in His mother’s arms, needed to be succored and protected against the wiles of the enemy. Satan stood ready to devour Him as soon as He was born. The decree of Caesar is sufficient proof that the enemy sought the life of the infant Christ. The massacre of the infants is described by God, as Rachel weeping for her children, and could not be comforted, because they were not.

The Lord Jesus Christ, the helpless Babe, was to God a “tender plant.” Joseph was warned in a dream by an angel, saying, “Arise, and take the young Child and His mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word.”

3. That Christ had no form nor comeliness, and no beauty. There are some who place this Scripture exclusively at the Cross saying that it was in the hour of His death, that He was without form and comeliness. This is partly upheld by Isa 52:14, which reads, “As many were astonied at Thee; His visage was so marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men.”

We are sure that Christ in His dying agony upon the Cross lost all beauty and comeliness of form. We are not sure, however, that He was beautiful and comely as a child, or a youth, or a man. In Jesus Christ there seemed to be nothing in which the world, humanly, boasts. Men boast the great city in which they were born,-Jesus was born in Bethlehem and brought up in Nazareth. The world boasts in learning and letters,-of Christ it was asked, “How knoweth this Man letters having never learned?” Men dote upon being born in homes of the great and the noble,-Christ was born into the home of a carpenter. Men delight in affluence and wealth,-of Christ we read, He “had not where to lay His head.” Men are considered great who make great political strides, and become leaders in the affairs of state,-Jesus Christ never touched that realm whatsoever: He was not great as a philanthropist, as a statesman, as a poet, as a writer, as a musician, as a warrior, nor as anything else in common with the usually estimated greatness of men. For this cause we read, “When we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.”

II. THE MANHOOD OF CHRIST (Isa 53:3)

The Holy Spirit, in the Prophet, leads us from the rejection that greeted Christ as the Babe when there was no room in the inn, to the sorrows that surrounded Him in life. If the truth were known, we believe that Christ was more or less despised and rejected in the days of His boyhood and youth. There is a verse in the Psalms that seems to suggest this. The verse reads: “I am become a stranger unto My brethren, and an alien unto My mother’s children” (Psa 69:8). No wonder that shame covered His face, as He bore these reproaches.

As Christ entered His ministry He seemed to become suddenly popular, owing to the miracles that He wrought, and the benefits that He brought to the common people. His popularity was not for long however; soon the high priest and his colleagues became filled with envy. They began to sow seeds of hatred among the people. The people began to hide their faces from Christ. The very ones who had eaten of His loaves and fishes; the very ones who had been recipients of the blessings of His miracles, began to join the rabble against Him, “He was despised, and [they] esteemed Him not.”

Surely the way of Christ, from the cradle to the tomb, was paved with ungrateful rejection, until, in death, He was covered with shame and spitting.

III. CHRIST BEARING THE GRIEFS AND SORROWS OF OTHERS (Isa 53:4)

There are those who carry this verse into the agonies of the Calvary experience, and urge that on the Cross Christ bore our sicknesses and our pains, and therefore we should never be sick. We do not deny that Christ’s Calvary work included redemption from the whole sweep and sway of sin. The whole entail of Satan’s work is destined to be undone by the virtue of the Cross. We do know that we see not yet all of the blessings of Calvary realized, even where faith brings salvation to the heart and life. It is not until the New Jerusalem comes down from God out of Heaven that we read, “There shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Thus, in this life, we are subjects of those things which pass away only when the full fruition of Christ’s Calvary work is brought in. However, we may rejoice in this at least, that if sickness or pain face us now, we have the promise of healing in answer to the “prayer of faith.”

IV. CHRIST’S CALVARY WORK (Isa 53:5)

How wonderful it all is: “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.” Matthew did not include this portion in his statement of Christ’s casting out of demons and healing during His earth life. The words, to us, lead on to Christ’s Calvary work. We see Him now as God’s substitutionary sacrifice, dying upon the Cross, the Just for the unjust. God is laying upon Him our sins; God is giving to our substitute the stripes that are due to us.

What matchless grace! What wondrous love! Christ bearing our sins; receiving our stripes; and we going free, healed! When Christ said that He came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, He used the same simile, saying, “They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.”

In Jer 8:20 we read: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Then in Jer 8:22, we read: “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of My people recovered?” Here again is healing used as a simile.

Thus we take it, that this is the healing from sin. Christ died, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.

V. SUBSTITUTION SUGGESTED BY THE SIMILE OF THE “SHEEP” (Isa 53:6-7)

1. Observe in Isa 53:6, the picture of the sinner under the simile of a sheep:” All we like sheep have gone astray.” The sheep is the most careless of creatures in wandering away. It passes from green turf to turf, heedless of the way it is going. When lost it is seemingly senseless of its whereabouts, and moves hither and thither without any knowledge of its direction or destiny.

Not only that-a sheep likewise takes its own way. It is willful in its wanderings. Never did animal need a shepherd and leader more than a sheep needs one.

2. Observe now, in Isa 53:7, that Christ “is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.” The sinner is likened to a sheep in its wanderings; the Saviour is likened unto a lamb in His being brought to the slaughter, and to a sheep in His being shorn of His glory and power as He was stripped for death.

Christ was oppressed and afflicted; He was led before Caiaphas and Annas; He was carried before Pilate and Herod. He was struck, spitten upon, and rebuffed. He was delivered to the smiters; He was goaded along the way by the weight of His Cross; He was nailed to the Cross with dull blows; He was numbered with the transgressors and malefactors as He died. Yet like a lamb and like a sheep He suffered on in meek submission to the madness of His despisers.

VI. CHRIST’S DEATH AND BURIAL (Isa 53:8-9)

As Christ died, He commended His spirit to the Father. He had fathomed the depths of sin’s woe, and paid, to its last farthing, sin’s penalty. Then, the Father seemed to say, “Hands off.” He took His Son away from man’s prison and judgment by which man had taken Him away and cut Him off from the living.

In the hour of Christ’s seeming defeat-God cries out, “For the transgression of My people was He stricken.” God is defending the reason for the Calvary anguish of His Son, and establishing the fact that His death was substitutionary and not forced by the madness of man.

Man seemed intent upon leaving Christ’s body to rot on the hill of Golgotha, as the bodies of malefactors were left. But once more God seemed to say, “‘Hands off,” and with the rich was His entombment: for Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus took down the body of the Lord and laid it in Joseph’s tomb. In the midst of His death how blessed to hear God say, “Because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth.” Our Christ once more is God’s Lamb, and this time He is a Lamb without blemish, without spot. The holy One of God; the sinless Son.

VII. THE OBJECTIVE OF CHRIST’S DELIVERANCE TO DEATH (Isa 53:10)

God bruised the Lord Jesus. God put Him to grief. God made His soul an offering for sin. Let us read it this way: God was pleased to bruise Him and put Him to grief, because in so doing God made His soul an offering for sin.

Away forever with the thought that Christ died as a helpless victim to man’s over-powering wrath, and super-abounding strength. Away with the thought that Christ died under pressure of persecution, and under the sway of Satan’s tyranny. Jesus Christ could have baffled His enemies at any moment of His march along the via dolorosa. He could have spoken one word and have slain every foe. The same Jesus, who went like a lamb to the slaughter, will, when He comes again, destroy the antichrist with the brightness of His coming and with the breath of His lips.

Jesus died because He was God’s offering for sin. He died that God through His death might be just, and yet the justifier of those who believe. He died that God might put “righteousness” into our salvation, and be Himself “righteous” in doing so.

VIII. CHRIST’S RESURRECTION AND REWARD (Isa 53:10, l.c., and 11, 12)

The Prophet proclaimed that Christ would see His seed, and prolong His days. The Prophet, seeing Christ taken away, had cried, “And who shall declare His generation?” Now the Lord answers his cry-“He shall see His seed.”

It was in dying that the childless Christ travailed in pain and brought to birth countless children through His grace. It was in being cut off from the land of the living, that Christ brought salvation and life for evermore in the land where there shall be no cutting off, no death.

Isa 53:11 describes the suffering Saviour as He becomes the singing and satisfied Saviour. “He shall see of the travail of His soul, and be satisfied.” Sometimes we grieve that so few are saved. Sometimes we mourn because so few are willing to accept the Giver of life and light. However, the Lord will be satisfied. When He comes down the skies He will come with a shout. In the eternal ages, countless millions of saints, with the ranking of sons, will rejoice Him as they praise the Lamb who died.

Isa 53:12 is most marvelous. It proclaims that Christ will share His joy and the victories of His Calvary work with His saints. “He shall divide the spoil with the strong; because He hath poured out His soul unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors; and He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.”

This gives an enlarged view of His sufferings. He died, and in dying, He spoiled principalities and powers. He died, and in dying and bearing the sins of many, He brought to life the many. He lives and lives a victor, a conqueror over death and hell, with the keys of both in His hands. He lives a victor and as a victor He divides the spoils of victory with His own. Every obtainment of the Cross which is His, is ours. He leads us in the train of His triumph. He makes us, in Him, more than conquerors.

AN ILLUSTRATION

This message would not be complete without we made an appeal to the sinner to trust the finished work of Christ. We do this in our illustration.

The Bible speaks of the “wrath of God,” as well as the “love of God” (Mat 3:7). The Lord Jesus used the expression (Joh 3:36). We cannot tell all that it means, but Christ assures us that all unbelievers shall experience it. Let me urge my readers, if you are not delivered from the wrath to come, to flee from it at once, by faith in the Saviour’s Atonement. There is only one place of safety, and that is in Christ. As when the prairie is on fire, the traveler’s safety is to fire the grass in front of him and then stand where the fire has been, so that when the fire comes up it has nothing upon which to feed, and the traveler is safe because he stands where the fire has done its work; so the soul that rests on Christ’s finished work, and hides in Him, stands where the fire of God’s judgment against sin has fed, and is saved and knows that “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”

Fuente: Neighbour’s Wells of Living Water

Isa 53:1. Who hath believed our report? The prophet having, in the last three verses of the former chapter, made a general report concerning the great and wonderful humiliation and exaltation of the Messiah, of which he intended to discourse more largely in this chapter, thought fit, before he descended to particulars, to use this preface. Who, not only of the Gentiles, but even of the Jews, will believe the truth of what I have said, and must further say? Few or none. The generality of them will never receive, nor believe in, such a Messiah as this. Thus this place is expounded by Christ himself, Joh 12:38, and by St. Paul, Rom 10:16. And this premonition was highly necessary, both to caution the Jews that they should not stumble at this stone, and to instruct the Gentiles that they should not be surprised nor seduced with their example. And to whom Hebrew, , because, or, in behalf of whom, namely, to deliver them from the guilt and dominion of their sins, and other spiritual enemies; is the arm That is, the power; of the Lord revealed? This is only revealed, or displayed, for the deliverance of those who, with a lively and divine faith; believe the report: for the gospel is the power of God unto salvation only to him that believeth, Rom 1:16.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Isa 53:1. Who hath believed our report; and to whom is (the Messiah) the mighty arm of the Lord revealed? This complaint of the servants is but the plaintive echo of their Masters voice. He had said in the Spirit, I have laboured in vain, and spent my strength for nought; yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work is with my God. But he spake not in despair; his righteousness sustained him. Though Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, and my God shall be my strength. He was answered with the Fathers voice, It is a light thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will give thee for a light to the gentiles, that thou mayest be for salvation to the ends of the earth: Isa 49:4; Isa 49:6. Ministers of Jesus, learn here to bewail your barrenness, and want of success in the ear of heaven, and the consolations of the Saviour shall be your consolation. The final songs of angels shall heal the sorrows of the saints. The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ. Rev 11:15.

Nor should it escape remark, that the heralds of the gospel preached a crucified Redeemer, Messiah, the arm of the Lord, Christ the wisdom, and Christ the power of God, whose own arm brought salvation. Of the people there was none with him, none to uphold. Their ministry had three characters: they made a full report of the glory and grace of Christ; they required faith, a full consent of heart, that men should believe their report; and that their converts should receive the seal of God in the regeneration of their hearts.

Isa 53:2. He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. At the time of our Saviours birth, a misguided and blind theology directed the comments of the rabbins, that the Messiah should fill the throne of David, and abide for ever. Whereas the prophets had other ideas, just the reverse of those who expected a worldly kingdom. David had said, Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the earth, (as a root out of a dry ground) and righteousness shall look down from heaven. Rejoice, oh daughter of Zion, thy king cometh unto thee. He is just, and having salvation; lowly, riding upon an asss colt. He is not of the order of belligerent kings. He shall break the bow of Ephraim, and turn away the battle-horse from Jerusalem; he shall publish peace to the heathen, and make wars to cease to the ends of the earth.

Isa 53:3. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. What was the Saviours life on earth? It was a life sought as soon as he was born! Expatriated in infancy, concealed at Nazareth, in the retreats of Galilee. What were the scenes of his public ministry? Stretching out his hands all the day long to a gainsaying and disobedient people. A man of sorrows, weeping in Galilee, weeping in Bethany, weeping over Jerusalem, weeping in the temple. We say nothing of his agony in the garden, when the sorrows of death compassed him about; those were scenes of anguish surpassing the comprehension of man. Was there any sorrow like to his sorrow?

And we hid as it were our faces from him. As though his very name had utterly disgraced us; as though his crimes had appalled us. He was despised, spit upon and buffeted, and we esteemed him not. When the bacchanalians were suppressed at Rome, an orator advised their relatives not to know them. So the Saviour was treated by his own nation.

Isa 53:4. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. The Chaldaic reads, Surely he shall pray for our sins; and our iniquities shall be forgiven for his sake. The style is highly ceremonial. The priest bare the iniquity of the people; it was laid by confessions on the head of the victim, as is repeated below. On the subject, that the Messiah was to be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, Dr. Lightfoot quotes the Talmud, where one asks, What is the name of the Messiah. Some answered, Leprous, and the Messiah sitting in the gate of the city. It was asked again, By what token may he be known? Answer. He sitteth among the diseased poor. Where else should the physician be, but with the sick?

Isa 53:5. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. The sufferings of the Redeemer were vicarious. About forty of those are named in the prophets. The kings of the earth took counsel against the Lord, and against his anointed. He that ate bread at his table, lifted up the heel against him. He was sold for money. He hid not his face from shame and spitting. He gave his back to the smiters, and his cheeks to those that plucked off the hair. They pierced his hands and his feet, nailing him to the cross. They elevated him, as Moses elevated the serpent in the wilderness. The rulers wagged their heads, and cried, Aha, aha! They mocked him as a prophet, and a Saviour of others. His very bones were dislocated, and might be counted while extended on the cross. They offered him the stupifying potion of vinegar and gall. The sword awoke against the shepherd, and pierced Jehovahs fellow. The mind, fainting at the scene, can only be revived by his conquering voice, when he cried, It is finished, and gave up the ghost.

Isa 53:6. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all, making him the vicarious sacrifice for a guilty race. When the Redeemer was before the council of the Jews, it was their aim to convict him of blasphemy; but unable to do it, the highpriest, contrary to all law, adjured him by the living God to say whether he were the Christ. He confessed, and denied not, saying, Hereafter ye shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven. On hearing this, Caiaphas rent his robe, laid the guilt of blasphemy on the Redeemers head, and condemned him as worthy of death. Thus the Lord of glory was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Thus it was, he, , who himself bare our sins in his own body on the tree, redeemed us from the curse of the law, by being made a curse for us.

Isa 53:7. He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. Perfect in every active and passive grace, he offered himself without spot to God. He was silent, for we were guilty; defence being of no avail with wolves predetermined to destroy. He was taken from prison and from judgment, dragged from one tribunal to another. He was distressed, he was afflicted; in his humiliation his judgment was taken away, and no one appeared in his defence.

Isa 53:8. Who shall declare his generation; for he was cut off; was crucified in haste, as the paschal lamb was eaten. For the transgression of my people was he stricken. The manner of the Hebrews was, as in oriental nations, when the more distinguished criminals were executed, to publish their pedigree; as Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah. Jos 7:1. Lev 24:11. But who shall declare the generation of Him, whom the Lord possessed in the beginning of his ways, before his works of old. Who from the womb of the morning, has the dew of his youth; and whose goings forth were of old, from everlasting. Pro 8:22. Mic 5:2. He is the true Melchizedek, without beginning of days or end of life. Heb 7:3. Who shall declare his generation, of whom it is said, Thou art my Son, to-day have I begotten thee. Heb 5:4. St. Paul, who repeatedly cites this text, disdains to attempt exposition, in reply to an infidel philosophy.

The above is the true sense of the primitive church. Irenus, speaking against the errors of the Gnostics, says, Propheta quidem ait de eo, generationem ejus quis enarabit? Vos autem generationem ejus ex Patre divinantes, et Verbi hominem per linguam factam prolationem transferentes in Verbum Dei, juste detegimini nobis, quod neque humana, nec divina noveritis, &c.

To declare the generation, the dignity, the essence, and nature of Christ, no language is adequate; in regard of which the Holy Ghost says in the prophets, His generation who shall declare? For no man knoweth the Son but the Father. Christ is that light which shone before the world; that intellectual and essential wisdom that was before all ages. The living God, the Word who was in the beginning with the Father; whom the Father alone can fully and perfectly comprehend. Him who is prior to every creature and production, whether visible or invisible, the first and only- begotten Son of God. The great Captain of all the celestial intelligences in the deathless hosts of heaven; the Angel of the great council, the consummator of all the Fathers secret pleasure, the maker and framer of all things in unison with the Father; who, after the Father, is the cause and maker of all things, the true and only-begotten Son of God; yea, Lord and God; the sovereign of all creatures, receiving dominion and power from the Father, together with divinity, power, and honour.Hist. Ecclesiastes lib. 1. cap. 2.

How noble and ingenuous are these declarations, compared with the artifices and evasions of our new translators, who say in succession, Who shall declare the wickedness of the age in which the Saviour lived? Our dignitaries, our rational divines, have the effrontery to ask this question! The age in which he lived was the serpents age, a generation of vipers. Inspired men use the interrogative forms of speech for things which cannot be uttered. Where shall the ungodly and the sinner appearwho shall be able to standwho shall declare his generation? It is unutterable, it is ineffable, it is eternal.

Isa 53:9. He made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death. The Versions vary; the Hebrew being brief, is rather obscure. The Vulgate reads, Et dabit impios pro sepultura, et divitem pro morte sua. The comments are, I will make thy death like that of Samson, a final stroke at principalities and powers. I will make Jerusalem the grave of its inhabitants, and destroy Pilate and the proud council of the Jews by the Romans, both root and branch. But others read, His grave was appointed with the wicked, but with the rich man was his tomb. In this view the text is a luminous prophecy of all that occurred in his burial. His glory, and his illustrious virtues, procured him this honourable sepulchre. He had done no violence against the Romans, neither was deceit before the council found in his mouth.

Isa 53:10. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. Our redemption is constantly ascribed to the good pleasure of the Father: he spared not his own Son, but freely delivered him up for us all. He hath put him to grief; to such grief as no one besides ever endured, and such as no finite mind can comprehend. His soul was made an offering for sin, not his body only; and hence that bitter exclamation in Gethsemane, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.

He shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. When great kings and conquerors die, their sun goes down, the monuments decay, and their histories recede. But with the death of Christ the sun rose to set no more. Immortality and life were demonstrated; righteousness was published to the gentiles, and the world invited from all the darkness of crime and misery, to life and righteousness in the Lord. Rejoice then, ye heavens; be glad, oh earth; and let the nations stretch out their hands to the Lord.

The clouds of death being chased away, a flood of evangelical light broke in upon the prophets mind. He saw the rejected stone made the head of the corner; he saw the Redeemers enemies put under his feet, and the nations converted to the Lord. He saw the joys of earth swell the joys of heaven.

Isa 53:11. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied. Faint are the joys of a woman when a son and heir is born, compared with those of Christ. His triumph over principalities and powers on the cross, his removal of guilt by the sacrifice of himself, his opening life and righteousness to a guilty world, the conversion of nations unnumbered in multitude, filled his mind with unutterable delight. Father, behold me, and the children whom thou hast given me. A progeny ransomed from Satan, sin, and death, now made heirs of righteousness and eternal joy. Filled with the glorious designations of Deity, he despised the cross, endured the shame, and took his session on the mediatorial throne.

By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities. Surely these are glad tidings to sinners. The unsearchable riches of the knowledge of Christ are obtained by hearing the gospel, their sin is removed by an all sufficient sacrifice, and the gift of righteousness is poured into the heart. Who is he that condemneth? It is God that justifieth, it is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again. The creditor has no claims, the holiness of God has no impeachment; rebels are reconciled in a way perfectly honourable to the divine government, and sinners are made saints and sons of God. Haste then, haste to embrace the righteousness of God our Redeemer.

Isa 53:12. Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong. The prophet Daniel illustrates this text by adding, after the succession of the four great empires, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman, But the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, yea, for ever and ever. The Messiahs kingdom shall not be left to other people; the Father having said, I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Psa 2:8.

Because he hath poured out his soul unto death, laying down his life for us. St. Paul, alluding to this passage, says, Because he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that he is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. And if his mediatorial glory surpass that of angels, what must his divine and essential glory be?

He was numbered with the transgressors. He was classed with them in the criminal courts, and associated with them when crucified on Calvary. And he bare the sin of many. rabbim, the multitudes. One victim died, bearing the sins of the whole nation, as in Isa 53:6, and Rom 5:15; Rom 5:18. And made intercession for the transgressors: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. The Saviour stands between the offended God and the offending world, and solicits our salvation on the ground of mediatorial right, and covenant engagements.

REFLECTIONS.

On a calm review of all these prophecies, in connection with others of a like nature, we must conclude that Jesus is indeed the Christ. By chance they could not have happened. They are not confined to the glorious person of Christ, they are national, and so many links in a grand chain of providences. The sceptre departed from Judah, Jerusalem was burned, the Jews were dispersed, and the gentiles were called. Without a doubt Daniel is correct: The Messiah shall be cut off, not for any crime of his own, but for the sins of the people.

Fuente: Sutcliffe’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Isa 52:13 Isa 53:12. The Vindication of the Servant of Yahweh (the fourth of the Songs of the Servant of Yahweh).

Isa 52:13-15. Yahweh announces that His Servant Israel shall be raised to a position so glorious that, even as many were appalled at his pitiable plight, so nations shall do him homage and kings be reverently silent in his presence, beholding so wonderful, so unheard-of a transformation.

Isa 52:13. shall deal wisely: translate prosper (mg.), but probably the easy emendation Israel is to be accepted.

Isa 52:14. thee: read him, with Targum and Syr. A parallel line such as and princes shuddered at him seems to have been lost.The words in brackets are introduced in Heb. by so. The picture seems to be that of a leper so disfigured as hardly to seem human (mg.). Possibly they should follow Isa 53:2. If retained here, read for his visage was marred.

Isa 52:15. sprinkle: an impossible translation, nor is mg. well based. Read shall do homage, with nations as subject.shut their mouths: cf. Job 29:9 f.

Isa 53:1-3. At this point the nations begin to speak, their words continuing apparently as far as Isa 53:11 a. First they utter their thoughts concerning the change in Israels fortunes. Who, they ask, could have believed what we have heard (mg.)? To whom was the working of Yahweh revealed? Why, Israel aforetime (so emend before him) grew up like a shoot from the roots of a tree that has been cut down, or a feeble plant in an arid soil. Far from possessing beauty such as fascinates, he was despised, pain-stricken, and diseased, so that men turned from him in revulsion, and we paid him no regard.

Isa 53:2. nor comeliness: delete as a gloss, and render following words as mg.

Isa 53:3. rejected of men: a fine thought, but the Heb. is very dubious; possibly emend, lightly esteemed.sorrows . . . grief: render, pains . . . sickness, and so in Isa 53:4.

Isa 53:4-6. But now we recognise that it was our sicknesses and pains which he was bearing when we thought him stricken with leprosy by God as the punishment of his sins. Not his sins but ours were the cause of his suffering: he suffered chastisement in order to bring us prosperity and healing. We, not knowing Yahweh the shepherd, wandered as sheep having no shepherd: but upon him Yahweh made to light the sin of us all.

Isa 53:4. Stricken: this term is used especially of a leper.

Isa 53:5. bruised: render, crushed.of our peace: i.e. which was to bring us peace = prosperity.

Isa 53:7-9. Though he was oppressed he made no protest, but suffered with the meekness of a sheep led to slaughter or shearing. Debarred from (so emend by oppression and) justice he was taken off (i.e. by death) and who considered his fate (so emending simply and as for his generation who among them considered), cut off from life and stricken to death (LXX) for our (reading our transgressions by an easy emendation for the transgressions of my people) rebellions! His grave was made with the wicked, and with evil-doers (so emend rich) his tomb, despite his life of innocence. The last words are probably a metaphorical way of saying that Israel had lost its national existence in exile.

Isa 53:7. yet he humbled himself: possibly the text, which is awkward, originally read, but he made no answer for himself (welo for wehu), and the words and opened not his mouth, the repetition of which is suspicious, are a correct gloss.

Isa 53:9. in his death: literally as mg. This seems almost absurd; the text by a slight alteration might perhaps be translated his burial-mound; in any case some such parallel is needed here.

Isa 53:10-12. The text of these verses is so corrupt that any translation is hazardous. This is apparent even in the English, in which Yahweh is, according to the usual interpretation third (the Lord), second (thou), and first (I) person.

But though men regarded him with scorn, Yahweh took pleasure in His Servant, and delivered his soul (= him, in Heb. idiom) from trouble. He caused him to see light and be satisfied, in his descendants brought him justice. (The foregoing is an attempt, removing doublets, emending, and using hints from LXX, to give approximately what is now rendered by Isa 53:10 f, down to justify, except the words my righteous servant which in Heb. follow justify. From this point it would seem that the nations cease to speak and Yahweh pronounces His verdict upon His Servant.) An object of scorn (so emending righteous) my servant may be to the many, though he is bearing their iniquities; therefore he shall inherit (so LXX for I will divide him a portion) with the great, and with earths rulers shall he share dominion (this seems to be the meaning of dividing the spoil with the strong) since he poured out his life-blood, and was numbered with the rebellious, when all the while he was bearing the sins of the many, interposing for the rebellious.

Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible

53:1 Who {a} hath believed our report? and to whom is the {b} arm of the LORD revealed?

(a) The prophet shows that very few will receive their preaching from Christ, and from their deliverance by him, Joh 12:38, Rom 10:16 .

(b) Meaning, that no one can believe but whose hearts God touches with the virtue of his Holy Spirit.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

The Servant despised 53:1-3

Expositors have called this chapter the holy of holies of Isaiah. It is also the middle chapter in part two of the book (chs. 40-66). Most of the approximately 80 references to Isaiah in the New Testament come from this chapter. [Note: A. Martin, Christ in . . ., part 2, p. 12] It is the most quoted or alluded to Old Testament chapter in the New Testament.

"Beyond question, this chapter is the heart of the Hebrew prophetic writings." [Note: Baron, p. 4. For a history of the ancient and modern Jewish and the rationalistic Christian interpretations of this chapter, with rebuttals, see ibid., pp. 16-47, 143-58.]

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

Isaiah marveled at the message that the Lord had revealed to him, that he and the Israelites were to declare to the world as lights to the nations (Isa 42:6; Isa 43:10-12; cf. Isa 53:3-6; Isa 16:6; Isa 24:16; Isa 42:24; Isa 52:15; Isa 64:5-6; Joh 12:38; Rom 10:16). It was almost unbelievable.

"It [the rhetorical question, "Who has believed our report?"] does not demand a negative answer, but is designed simply to call attention to the paucity of true believers in the world and especially among the Jews." [Note: Young, 3:340.]

The prophet also was amazed that the Lord had revealed His arm to His people. When the Lord would bare His arm to save humankind (Isa 51:9-10; Isa 52:10; Isa 63:12), that manifestation of His strength was not at all impressive. We might say that when God rolled up His sleeve, the arm that He exposed was not the powerful arm of a weight lifter but a very ordinary looking arm. Nevertheless that arm would prove to be stronger than any other arm. The Arm of the Lord appears here as a person distinct from the Lord Himself, namely, the Servant of the Lord.

"When God made the universe, He used His fingers (Psa 8:3), and when He delivered Israel from Egypt, it was by His strong hand (Exo 13:3). But to save lost sinners, He had to bare His mighty arm!" [Note: Wiersbe, p. 60.]

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

5

CHAPTER XX

THE SUFFERING SERVANT

Isa 52:13-15; Isa 53:1-12

WE are now arrived at the last of the passages on the Servant of the Lord. It is known to Christendom as the Fifty-third of Isaiah, but its verses have, unfortunately, been divided between two chapters, Isa 52:13-15; Isa 53:1-12. Before we attempt the interpretation of this high and solemn passage of Revelation, let us look at its position in our prophecy, and examine its structure.

The peculiarities of the style and of the vocabulary of Isa 52:13-15; Isa 53:1-12, along with the fact that, if it be omitted, the prophecies on either side readily flow together, have led some critics to suppose it to be an insertion, borrowed from an earlier writer. The style-broken, sobbing, and recurrent-is certainly a change from the forward, flowing sentences, on which we have been carried up till now, and there are a number of words that we find quite new to us. Yet surely both style and words are fully accounted for by the novel and tragic nature of the subject to which the prophet has brought us: regret and remorse though they speak through the same lips as hope and the assurance of salvation, must necessarily do so with a very different accent and set of terms. Criticism surely overreaches itself, when it suggests that a writer, so versatile and dramatic as our prophet, could not have written Isa 52:13-15 through Isa 53:1-12 along with, say, chapter 50 or Isa 52:1-12 or chapter 54. We might as well be asked to assign to different authors Hamlets soliloquy, and the Kings conversation, in the same play, with the ambassadors from Norway. To aver that if Isa 52:13-15 through Isa 53:1-12 were left out, no one who had not seen it would miss it, so closely does chapter 54. follow on to Isa 52:12, is to aver what means nothing. In any dramatic work you may leave out the finest passage, -from a Greek tragedy its grandest chorus, or from a play of Shakespeares the heros soliloquy, -without seeming, to eyes that have not seen what you have done, to have disturbed the connection of the whole. Observe the juncture in our prophecy at which this last passage on the Servant appears. It is one exactly the same as that at which another great passage on the Servant was inserted, {Isa 49:1-9} viz., just after a call to the people to seize the redemption achieved for them and to come forth from Babylon. It is the kind of climax or pause in their tale, which dramatic writers of all kinds employ for the solemn utterance of principles lying at the back, or transcending the scope, of the events of which they treat. To say the least, it is surely more probable that our prophet himself employed so natural an opportunity to give expression to his highest truths about the Servant, than that some one else took his work, broke up another already extant work on the Servant and thrust the pieces of the latter into the former. Moreover, we shall find many of the ideas, as well as of the phrases, of Isa 52:13-15 through Isa 53:1-12 to be essentially the same as some we have already encountered in our prophecy.

There is then no evidence that this singular prophecy ever stood apart from its present context, or that it was written by another writer than the prophet, by whom we have hitherto found ourselves conducted. On the contrary, while it has links with what goes before it, we see good reasons why the prophet should choose just this moment for uttering its unique and transcendent contents, as well as why he should employ in it a style and a vocabulary so different from his usual.

Turning now to the structure of Isa 52:13-15 through Isa 53:1-12, we observe that, as arranged in the Canon, there are fifteen verses in the prophecy. These fifteen verses fall into five strophes of three verses each, as printed by the Revised English Version. When set in their own original lines, however, the strophes appear, not of equal, but of increasing length. As will be seen from the version given below, the first {Isa 52:13-15} has nine lines, the second {Isa 53:1-3} has ten lines, the third (Isa 53:4-6) has eleven lines, the fourth (Isa 53:7-9) thirteen lines, the fifth (Isa 53:10-12) fourteen lines. This increase would be absolutely regular, if, in the fourth strophe, we made either the first two lines one, or the last two one, and if in the fifth again we ran the first two lines together, -changes which the metre allows and some translators have adopted. But, in either case, we perceive a regular increase from strophe to strophe, that is not only one of the many marks with which this most artistic of poems has been elaborated, but gives the reader the very solemn impression of a truth that is ever gathering more of human life into itself, and sweeping forward with fuller and more resistless volume.

Each strophe, it is well to notice, begins with one word or two words which summarise the meaning of the whole strophe and form a title for it. Thus, after the opening exclamation “Behold,” the words “My Servant shall prosper” form, as we shall see, not only a summary of the first strophe, in which his ultimate exaltation is described, but the theme of the whole prophecy. Strophe 2 begins “Who hath believed,” and accordingly in this strophe the unbelief and thoughtlessness of them who saw the Servant without feeling the meaning of his suffering is confessed. “Surely our sicknesses” fitly entitles strophe 3, in which the people describe how the Servant in his suffering was their substitute. “Oppressed yet he humbled himself” is the headline of strophe 4, and that strophe deals with the humility and innocence of the Servant in contrast to the injustice accorded him; while the headline of strophe 5, “But Jehovah had purposed,” brings us back to the main theme of the poem, that behind mens treatment of the Servant is Gods holy will; which theme is elaborated and brought to its conclusion in strophe 5. These opening and entitling words of each strophe are printed, in the following translation, in larger type than the rest.

As in the rest of Hebrew poetry, so here, the measure is neither regular nor smooth, and does not depend on rhyme. Yet there is an amount of assonance which at times approaches to rhyme. Much of the meaning of the poem depends on the use of the personal pronouns-we and he stand contrasted to each other-and it is these coming in a lengthened form at the end of many of the lines that suggest to the ear something like rhyme. For instance, in Isa 53:5-6, the second and third verses of the third strophe, two of the lines run out on the bi-syllable enu, two on inu, and two on the word lanu, while the third has enu, not at the end, but in the middle; in each case, the pronominal suffix of the first person plural. We transcribe these lines to show the effect of this.

Wehu meholal mippesha enu

Medhukka me awonothenu

Musar shelomenu alaw

Ubhahabhuratho nirpa-lanu

Kullanu kass-sson tainu

ish ledharko paninu

Wa Jahweh hiphgi a bo ethawon kullanu.

This is the strophe in which the assonance comes oftenest to rhyme; but in strophe 1 ehu ends two lines, and in strophe 2 it ends three. These and other assonants occur also at the beginning and in the middle of lines. We must remember that in all the cases quoted it is the personal pronouns, which give the assonance, -the personal pronouns on which so much of the meaning of the poem turns; and that, therefore, the parallelism primarily intended by the writer is one rather of meaning than of sound. The pair of lines, parallel in meaning, though not in sound, which forms so large a part of Hebrew poetry, is used throughout this poem; but the use of it is varied and elaborated to a unique degree. The very same words and phrases are repeated, and placed on points, from which they seem to call to each other; as, for instance, the double “many” in strophe 1, the “of us all “in strophe 3, and “nor opened he his mouth” in strophe 4. The ideas are very few and very simple: the words “he, we, his, ours, see, hear, know, bear, sickness, strike, stroke,” and “many” form, with prepositions and participles, the bulk of the prophecy. It will be evident how singularly suitable this recurrence is for the expression of reproach, and of sorrowful recollection. It is the nature of grief and remorse to harp upon the one dear form, the one most vivid pain. The finest instance of this repetition is verse 6, with its opening keynote “kullanu” “of us all like sheep went astray,” with its close on that keynote “guilt of us all,” “kullanu.” But throughout notes are repeated, and bars recur, expressive of what was done to the Servant, or what the Servant did for man, which seem in their recurrence to say, You cannot hear too much of me: I am the very Gospel. A peculiar sadness is lent to the music by the letters h and i in “holie” and “hehelie,” the word for sickness or ailing (ailing is the English equivalent in sense and sound), which happens so often in the poem. The new words, which have been brought to vary this recurrence of a few simple features, are mostly of a sombre type. The heavier letters throng the lines: grievous bs and ms are multiplied, and syllables with long vowels before m and w. But the words sob as well as tramp; and here and there one has a wrench and one a cry in it.

Most wonderful and mysterious of all is the spectral fashion in which the prophecy presents its Hero. He is named only in the first line and once again: elsewhere He is spoken of as He. We never hear or see Himself. But all the more solemnly is He there: a shadow upon countless faces, a grievous memory on the hearts of the speakers. He so haunts all we see and all we hear, that we feel it is not Art, but Conscience, that speaks of Him.

Here is now the prophecy itself, rendered into English quite literally, except for a conjunction here and there, and, as far as possible, in the rhythm of the original. A few necessary notes on difficult words and phrases are given.

I.

Isa 52:13 : Behold, my Servant shall prosper,

Shall rise, be lift up, be exceedingly high

Like as they that were astonied before thee were many,

-So marred from a mans was his visage,

And his form from the children of men!

-So shall the nations he startles be many,

Before him shall kings shut their mouths.

For that which had never been told them they see,

And what they had heard not, they have to consider.

II.

Who gave believing to that which we heard,

And the arm of Jehovah to whom was it bared?

For he sprang like a sapling before Him,

As a root from the ground that is parched;

He had no form nor beauty that we should regard him,

Nor aspect that we should desire him.

Despised and rejected of men

Man of pains and familiar with ailing,

And as one we do cover the face from,

Despised, and we did not esteem him.

III.

Surely our ailments he bore,

And our pains he did take for his burden.

But we-we accounted him stricken,

Smitten of God and degraded.

Yet he-he was pierced for crimes that were ours,

He was crushed for guilt that was ours,

The chastisement of our peace was upon him,

By his stripes healing is ours.

Of us all like to sheep went astray,

Every man to his way we did turn,

And Jehovah made light upon him

The guilt of us all.

IV.

Oppressed, he did humble himself,

Nor opened his mouth-

As a lamb to the slaughter is led.

As a sheep ‘fore her shearers is dumb-

Nor opened his mouth.

By tyranny and law was he taken;

And of his age who reflected,

That he was wrenched from the land of the living,

For My peoples transgressions the stroke was on him?

So they made with the wicked his grave,

Yea, with the felon his tomb.

Though never harm had he done,

Neither was guile in his mouth.

V.

But Jehovah had purposed to bruise him,

Had laid on him sickness; if his life should offer guilt offering,

A seed he should see, he should lengthen his days.

And the purpose of Jehovah by his hand should prosper,

From the travail of his soul shall he see,

By his knowledge be satisfied.

My Servant, the Righteous, righteousness wins he for many,

And their guilt he takes for his load.

Therefore I set him a share with the great,

Yea, with the strong shall he share the spoil:

Because that he poured out his life unto death,

Let himself with transgressors be reckoned;

Yea, he the sin of the many hath borne,

And for the transgressors he interposes.

Let us now take the interpretation strophe by strophe.

1. Isa 52:13-15. When last our eyes were directed to the Servant, he was suffering unexplained and unvindicated. {Isa 50:4-6} His sufferings seemed to have fallen upon him as the consequence of his fidelity to the Word committed to him; the Prophet had inevitably become the Martyr. Further than this his sufferings were not explained, and the Servant was left in them, calling upon God indeed, and sure that God would hear and vindicate him, but as yet unanswered by word of God or word of man. It is these words, words both of God and of man, which are given in Isa 52:13-15 through Isa 53:1-12. The Sufferer is explained and vindicated, first by God in the first strophe, Isa 52:13-15, and then by the Conscience of Men, His own people, in the second and third; {Isa 53:1-6} and then, as it appears, the Divine Voice, or the Prophet speaking for it, resumes in strophes 4 and 5, and concludes in a strain similar to strophe 1.

Gods explanation and vindication of the Sufferer is, then, given in the first strophe. It is summed up in the first line, and in one very pregnant word. Jeremiah had said of the Messiah, “He shall reign as a King and deal wisely” or “prosper”; {Jer 23:5} and so God says here of the Servant, “Behold he shall deal wisely” or “prosper.” The Hebrew verb does not get full expression in any English one. In rendering it “shall deal wisely” or “prudently” our translators undoubtedly touch the quick of it. For it is originally a mental process or quality: “has insight, understands, is farseeing.” But then it also includes the effect of this-“understands so as to get on, deals wisely so as to succeed, is practical” both in his way of working and in being sure of his end. Ewald has found an almost exact equivalent in German, “hat Geschick”; for Geschick means both “skill” or “address” and “fate” or “destiny.” The Hebrew verb is the most practical in the whole language, for this is precisely the point which the prophecy seeks to bring out about the Servants sufferings. They are practical. He is practical in them. He endures them, not for their own sake, but for some practical end of which he is aware and to which they must assuredly bring him. His failure to convince men by his word, the pain and spite which seem to be his only wage, are not the last of him, but the beginning and the way to what is higher. So “shall he rise and be lift up and be very high.” The suffering, which in chapter 1 seemed to be the Servants misfortune, is here seen as his wisdom which shall issue in his glory.

But of themselves men do not see this, and they need to be convinced. Pain, the blessed means of God, is mans abhorrence and perplexity. All along the history of the world the Sufferer has been the astonishment and stumbling-block of humanity. The barbarian gets rid of him; he is the first difficulty with which every young literature wrestles; to the end he remains the problem of philosophy and the sore test of faith. It is not native to men to see meaning or profit in the Sufferer; they are staggered by him, they see no reason or promise in him. So did men receive this unique Sufferer, this Servant of Jehovah. The many were astonied at him; his visage was so marred more than men, and his form than the children of men. But his life is to teach them the opposite of their impressions, and to bring them out of their perplexity into reverence before the revealed purpose of God in the Sufferer. “As they that were astonied at thee were many, so shall the nations he startles be many; kings shall shut their mouths at him, for that which was not told them they see, and that which they have heard not they have to consider,”-viz., the triumph and influence to which the Servant was consciously led through suffering. There may be some reflection here of the way in which the Gentiles regarded the Suffering Israel, but the reference is vague, and perhaps purposely so.

The first strophe, then, gives us just the general theme. In contrast to human experience God reveals in His servant that suffering is fruitful, that sacrifice is practical. Pain, in Gods service, shall lead to glory.

II. Isa 53:1-3. God never speaks but in man He wakens conscience, and the second strophe of the prophecy (along with the third) is the answer of conscience to God. Penitent men, looking back from the light of the Servants exaltation to the time when his humiliation was before their eyes, say, “Yes; what God has said is true of us. We were the deaf and the indifferent. We heard, but who of us believed what we heard, and to whom was the arm of the Lord-His purpose, the hand He had in the Servants sufferings-revealed?” Who are these penitent speakers? Some critics have held them to be the heathen, more have said that they are Israel. But none have pointed out that the writer gives himself no trouble to define them, but seems more anxious to impress us with their consciousness of their moral relation to the Servant. On the whole, it would appear that it is Israel, whom the prophet has in mind as the speakers of Isa 53:1-6. For, besides the fact that the Old Testament knows nothing of a bearing by Israel of the sins of the Gentiles, it is expressly said in Isa 53:8, that the sins for which the Servant was stricken were the sins of “my people”; which people must be the same as the speakers, for they own in Isa 53:4-6 that the Servant bore their sins. For these and other reasons the mass of Christian critics at the present day are probably right when they assume that Israel are the speakers in Isa 53:1-6; but the reader must beware of allowing his attention to be lost in questions of that kind. The art of the poem seems intentionally to leave vague the national relation of the speakers to the Servant, in order the more impressively to bring out their moral attitude towards him. There is an utter disappearance of all lines of separation between Jew and Gentile, -both in the first strophe, where, although Gentile names are used, Jews may yet be meant to be included, and in the rest of the poem, -as if the writer wished us to feel that all men stood over against that solitary Servant in a common indifference to his suffering and a common conscience of the guilt he bears. In short, it is no historical situation, such as some critics seem anxious to fasten him down upon, that the prophet reflects; but a certain moral situation, ideal in so far as it was not yet realised, -the state of the quickened human conscience over against a certain Human Suffering, in which, having noted it at the time, that conscience now realises that the purpose of God was at work.

In Isa 53:2 and Isa 53:3 the penitent speakers give us the reasons of their disregard of the Servant in the days of his suffering. In these reasons there is nothing peculiar to Israel, and no special experience of Jewish history is reflected by the terms in which they are conveyed. They are the confession, in general language, of a universal human habit, -the habit of letting the eye cheat the heart and conscience, of allowing the aspect of suffering to blind us to its meaning; of forgetting in our sense of the ugliness and helplessness of pain, that it has a motive, a future, and a God. It took ages to wean mankind from those native feelings of aversion and resentment, which caused them at first to abandon or destroy their sick. And, even now, scorn for the weak and incredulity in the heroism or in the profitableness of suffering are strong in the best of us. We judge by looks; we are hurried by the physical impression which the sufferer makes on us, or by our pride that we are not as he is, into peremptory and harsh judgments upon him. Every day we allow the dulness of poverty, the ugliness of disease, the unprofitableness of misfortune, the ludicrousness of failure, to keep back conscience from discovering to us our share of responsibility for them, and to repel our hearts from that sympathy and patience with them, which along with conscience would assuredly discover to us their place in Gods Providence and their special significance for ourselves. It is this original sin of man, of which these penitent speakers own themselves guilty.

But no one is ever permitted to rest with a physical or intellectual impression of suffering. The race, the individual, has always been forced by conscience to the task of finding a moral reason for pain and nothing so marks mans progress as the successive solutions he has attempted to this problem. The speakers, therefore, proceed in the next part of their confession, strophe 3., to tell us what they first falsely accounted the moral reason of the Servants suffering and what they afterwards found to be the truth.

III. Isa 53:4-6. The earliest and most common moral judgment which men pass upon pain is that which is implied in its name-that it is penal. A man suffers because God is angry with him and has stricken him. So Jobs friends judged him, and so these speakers tell us they had at first judged the Servant. “We had accounted him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted,”-“stricken,” that is, with a plague of sickness, as Job was, for the simile of the sick man is still kept up; “smitten of God and degraded” or “humbled,” for it seemed to them that Gods hand was in the Servants sickness, to punish and disgrace him for his own sins. But now they know they were wrong. The hand of God was indeed upon the Servant, and the reason was sin; yet the sin was not his, but theirs. “Surely our sicknesses he bore, and our pains he took as his burden. He was pierced for iniquities that were ours. He was crushed for crimes that were ours.” Strictly interpreted, these verses mean no more than that the Servant was involved in the consequences of his peoples sins. The verbs “bore” and “made his burden” are indeed taken by some to mean, necessarily, removal or expiation; but in themselves, as is clear from their application to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the whole of the generation of Exile, they mean no more than implication in the reproach and the punishment of the peoples sins. Nevertheless, as we have explained in a note below, it is really impossible to separate the suffering of a Servant, who has been announced as practical and prosperous in his suffering, from the end for which it is endured. We cannot separate the Servants bearing of the peoples guilt from his removal of it. And, indeed, this practical end of his passion springs forth, past all doubt, from the rest of the strophe, which declares that the Servants sufferings are not only vicarious but redemptive; “The discipline of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.” Translators agree that “discipline of our peace” must mean discipline which procures our peace. The peace, the healing, is ours, in consequence of the chastisement and the scourging that was his. The next verse gives us the obverse and complement of the same thought. The pain was his in consequence of the sin that was ours. “All we like sheep had gone astray, and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all,”-literally “iniquity,” but inclusive of its guilt and consequences. Nothing could be plainer than these words. The speakers confess that they know that the Servants suffering was both vicarious and redemptive.

But how did they get this knowledge? They do not describe any special means by which it came to them. They state this high and novel truth simply as the last step in a process of their consciousness. At first they were bewildered by the Servants suffering; then they thought it contemptible, thus “passing upon it an intellectual judgment”; then, forced to seek a moral reason for it, they accounted it as penal and due to the Servant for his own sins; then they recognised that. its penalty was vicarious, that the Servant was suffering for them; and finally, they knew that it was redemptive, the means of their own healing and peace. This is a natural climax, a logical and moral progress of thought. The last two steps are stated simply as facts of experience following on other facts. Now our prophet usually publishes the truths, with which he is charged, as the very words of God, introducing them with a solemn and authoritative “Thus saith Jehovah.” But this novel and supreme truth of vicarious and redemptive suffering, this passion and virtue which crowns the Servants office, is introduced to us, not by the mouth of God, but by the lips of penitent men; not as all oracle, but as a confession; not as the commission of Divine authority laid beforehand upon the Servant like his other duties, but as the conviction of the human conscience after the Servant has been lifted up before it. In short, by this unusual turn of his art, the prophet seeks to teach us that vicarious suffering is not a dogmatic, but an experimental truth. The substitution of the Servant for the guilty people, and the redemptive force of that substitution, are no arbitrary doctrine, for which God requires from man a mere intellectual assent; they are no such formal institution of religion as mental indolence and superstition delight to have prepared for their mechanical adherence: but substitutive suffering is a great living fact of human experience, whose outward features are not more evident to mens eyes than its inner meaning is appreciable by their conscience, and of irresistible effect upon their whole moral nature.

Is this lesson of our prophets art not needed? Men have always been apt to think of vicarious suffering, and of its function in their salvation, as something above and apart from their moral nature, with a value known only to God and not calculable in the terms of conscience or of mans moral experience; nay, rather as something that conflicts with mans ideas of morality and justice; whereas both the fact and the virtue of vicarious suffering come upon us all, as these speakers describe the vicarious sufferings of the Servant to have come upon them, as a part of inevitable experience, If it be natural, as we saw, for men to be bewildered by the first sight of suffering, to scorn it as futile and to count it the fault of the sufferer himself, it is equally natural and inevitable that these first and hasty theories should be dispelled by the longer experience of life and the more thorough working of conscience. The stricken are not always bearing their own sin. “Suffering is the minister of justice. This is true in part, yet it also is inadequate to explain the facts. Of all the sorrow which befalls humanity, how small a part falls upon the specially guilty; how much seems rather to seek out the good! We might almost ask whether it is not weakness rather than wrong that is punished in this world.” In every nation, in every family, the innocent suffer for the guilty. Vicarious suffering is not arbitrary or accidental; it comes with our growth; It is of the very nature of things. It is that part of the Service of Man, to which we are all born, and of the reality of which we daily grow more aware.

But even more than its necessity life teaches us its virtue. Vicarious suffering is not a curse. It is Service-Service for God. It proves a power where every other moral force has failed. By it men are redeemed, on whom justice and their proper punishment have been able to effect nothing. Why this should be is very intelligible. We are not so capable of measuring the physical or moral results of our actions upon our own characters or in our own fortunes as we are upon the lives of others; nor do we so awaken to the guilt and heinousness of our sin as when it reaches and implicates lives which were not partners with us in it. Moreover, while a mans punishment is apt to give him an excuse for saying, I have expiated my sin myself, and so to leave him self-satisfied and with nothing for which to be grateful or obliged to a higher will; or while it may make him reckless or plunge him into despair; so, on the contrary, when he recognises that others feel the pain of his sin and have come under its weight, then shame is quickly born within him, and pity and every ether passion that can melt a hard heart. If, moreover, the others who bear his sin do so voluntarily and for loves sake, then how quickly on the back of shame and pity does gratitude rise, and the sense of debt and of constraint to their will! For all these very intelligible reasons, vicarious suffering has been a powerful redemptive force in the experience of the race. Both the fact of its beneficence and the moral reasons for this are clear enough to lift us above a question, which sometimes gives trouble regarding it, -the question of its justice. Such a question is futile about any service for man, which succeeds as this does where all others have failed, and which proves itself so much in harmony with mans moral nature. But the last shred of objection to the justice of vicarious suffering is surely removed when the sufferer is voluntary as well as vicarious. And, in truth, human experience feels that it has found its highest and its holiest fact in the love that, being innocent itself, stoops to bear its fellows sins, -not only the anxiety and reproach of them, but even the cost and the curse of them. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”; and greater service can no man do to men than to serve them in this way.

Now in this universal human experience of the inevitableness and the virtue of vicarious suffering, Israel had been deeply baptised. The nation had been “served” by suffering in all the ways we have just described. Beginning with the belief that all righteousness prospered, Israel had come to see the righteous afflicted in her midst; the best Israelites had set their minds to the problem, and learned to believe, at least, that such affliction was of Gods will, -part of His Providence, and not an interruption to it. Israel, too, knew the moral solidarity of a people: that citizens share each others sorrows, and that one generation rolls over its guilt upon the next. Frequently had the whole nation been spared for a pious remnants sake; and in the Exile, while all the people were formally afflicted by God, it was but a portion of them whose conscience was quick to the meaning of the chastisement, and of them alone, in their submissive and intelligent sufferance of the Lords wrath, could the opening gospel of the prophecy be spoken, that they “had accomplished their warfare, and had received of the Lords hands double for all their sins.” But still more vivid than these collective substitutes for the people were the individuals, who, at different points in Israels history, had stood forth and taken up as their own the nations conscience and stooped to bear the nations curse. Far away back, a Moses had offered himself for destruction, if for his sake God would spare his sinful and thoughtless countrymen. In a psalm of the Exile it is remembered that,

He said, that He would destroy them,

Had not Moses His chosen stood before Him in the breach,

To turn away His wrath, lest He should destroy.

And Jeremiah, not by a single heroic resolve, but by the slow agony and martyrdom of a long life, had taken Jerusalems sin upon his own heart, had felt himself forsaken of God, and had voluntarily shared his citys doom, while his generation, unconscious of their guilt and blind to their fate, despised him and esteemed him not. And Ezekiel, who is Jeremiahs far-off reflection, who could only do in symbol what Jeremiah did in reality, was commanded to lie on his side for days, and so “bear the guilt” of his people.

But in Israels experience it was not only the human Servant who served the nation by suffering, for God Himself had come down to “carry” His distressed and accursed people, and “to load Himself with them.” Our prophet uses the same two verbs of Jehovah as are used of the Servant. {Isa 46:3-4} Like the Servant, too, God “was afflicted in all their affliction”; and His love towards them was expended in passion and agony for their sins. Vicarious suffering was not only human, it was Divine.

Was it very wonderful that a people with such an experience, and with such examples, both human and Divine, should at last be led to the thought of One Sufferer, who would exhibit in Himself all the meaning, and procure for His people all the virtue, of that vicarious reproach and sorrow, which a long line of their martyrs had illustrated, and which God had revealed as the passion of His own love? If they had had every example that could fit them to understand the power of such a sufferer, they had also every reason to feel their need of Him. For the Exile had not healed the nation; it had been for the most of them an illustration of that evil effect of punishment to which we alluded above. Penal servitude in Babylon had but hardened Israel. “God poured on him the fury of anger, and the strength of battle: it set him on fire round about, yet he knew not, and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart.” {Isa 42:25} What the Exile, then, had failed to do, when it brought upon the people their own sins, the Servant, taking these sins upon himself, would surely effect. The people, whom the Exile had only hardened, his vicarious suffering should strike into penitence and lift to peace.

IV. Isa 53:7-9. It is probable that with Isa 53:6 the penitent people have ceased speaking, and that the parable is now taken up by the prophet himself. The voice of God, which uttered the first strophe, does not seem to resume till Isa 53:11. If strophe 3 confessed that it was for the peoples sins the Servant suffered, strophe 4 declares that he himself was sinless, and yet silently submitted to all which injustice laid upon him.

Now Silence under Suffering is a strange thing in the Old Testament-a thing absolutely new. No other Old Testament personage could stay dumb under pain, but immediately broke into one of two voices, -voice of guilt or voice of doubt. In the Old Testament the sufferer is always either confessing his guilt to God, or, when he feels no guilt, challenging God in argument. David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Job, and the nameless martyred and moribund of the Psalms, all strive and are loud under pain. Why was this Servant the unique and solitary instance of silence under suffering? Because he had a secret which they had not. It had been said of him: “My Servant shall deal wisely” or “intelligently,” shall know what he is about. He had no guilt of his own, no doubts of his God. But he was conscious of the end God had in his pain, an end not to be served in any other way, and with all his heart he had given himself to it. It was not punishment he was enduring; it was not the throes of the birth into higher experience, which he was feeling: it was a Service he was performing, -a service laid on him by God, a service for mans redemption, a service sure of results and of glory. Therefore “as a lamb to the slaughter is led, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, he opened not his mouth.”

The next two verses (Isa 53:8-9) describe how the Servants Passion was fulfilled. The figure of a sick man was changed in Isa 53:5 to that of a punished one, and the punishment we now see carried on to death. The two verses are difficult, the readings and renderings of most of the words being very various. But the sense is clear. The Servants death was accomplished, not on some far hill top by a stroke out of heaven, but in the forms of human law and by mens hands. It was a judicial murder. “By tyranny and by judgment,”-that is, by a forced and tyrannous judgment, -“he was taken.” To this abuse of law the next verse adds the indifference of public opinion: “and as for his contemporaries, who of them reflected that he was cut off from,” or “cut down in, the land of the living,”-that in spite of the form of law that condemned him he was a murdered man, -that “for the transgression of my people the stroke was his?” So, having conceived him to have been lawfully put to death, they consistently gave him a convicts grave: “they made his grave with the wicked, and he was with the felon in his death,” though-and on this the strophe emphatically ends-he was an innocent man, “he had done no harm, neither was guile in his mouth.”

Premature sickness and the miscarriage of justice, -these to Orientals are the two outstanding misfortunes of the individuals life. Take the Psalter, set aside its complaints of the horrors of war and of invasion, and you will find almost: all the rest of its sighs rising either from sickness or from the sense of injustice. These were the classic forms of individual suffering in the age and civilisation to which our prophet belonged, and it was natural, therefore, that when he was describing an Ideal or Representative Sufferer, he should fill in his picture with both of them. If we remember this, we shall feel no incongruity in the sudden change of the here from a sick man to a convict, and back again in Isa 53:10 from a convict to a sick man. Nor, if we remember this, shall we feel disposed to listen to those interpreters who hold that the basis of this prophecy was the account of an actual historical martyrdom. Had such been the case the prophet would surely have held throughout to one or the other of the two forms of suffering. His sufferer would have been either a leper or a convict, hut hardly both. No doubt the details in Isa 53:8-9 are so realistic that they might well be the features of an actual miscarriage of justice; but the like happened too frequently in the Ancient East for such verses to be necessarily any one mans portrait. Perverted justice was the curse of the individuals life-perverted justice and that stolid, fatalistic apathy of Oriental public opinion, which would probably regard such a sufferer as suffering for his sins the just vengeance of heaven, though the minister of this vengeance was a tyrant and its means were perjury and murder. “Who of his generation reflected that for the transgression of my people the stroke was on him!”

V. Isa 53:10-12. We have heard the awful tragedy. The innocent Servant was put to a violent and premature death. Public apathy closed over him and the unmarked earth of a felons grave. It is so utter a perversion of justice, so signal a triumph of wrong over right, so final a disappearance into oblivion of the fairest life that ever lived, that men might be tempted to say, God has forsaken His own. On the contrary-so strophe 5 begins-Gods own will and pleasure have been in this tragedy: “Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.” The line as it thus stands in our English version has a grim, repulsive sound. But the Hebrew word has no necessary meaning of pleasure or enjoyment.” All it says is, God so willed it. His purpose was in this tragedy. Deus vult! It is the one message which can render any pain tolerable or light up with meaning a mystery so cruel as this: “The Lord” Himself” had purposed to bruise His Servant, “the Lord Himself had laid on him sickness” (the figure of disease is resumed). Gods purpose in putting the Servant to death is explained in the rest of the verse. It was in order that “through his soul making a guilt-offering, he might see a seed, prolong his days, and that the pleasure of the Lord might prosper by his hand.”

What is a guilt-offering? The term originally meant guilt, and is so used by a prophet contemporary to our own. {Jer 51:4} In the legislation, however, both in the Pentateuch and in Ezekiel, it is applied to legal and sacrificial forms of restitution or reparation for guilt. It is only named in Ezekiel along with other sacrifices. {Eze 40:39; Eze 42:13; Eze 44:29; Eze 46:20} Both Numbers and Leviticus define it, but define it differently. In Numbers {Num 5:7-8} it is the payment, which a transgressor has to make to the human person offended, of the amount to Which he has harmed that persons property: it is what we call damages. But in Leviticus it is the ram, exacted over and above damages to the injured party, {Lev 5:14-16; Lev 6:1-7} or in cases where no damages were asked, {Lev 5:17-19} by the priest; the representative of God, for satisfaction to His law; and it was required even where the offender had been an unwitting one. By this guilt-offering “the priest made atonement” for the sinner and “he was forgiven.” It was for this purpose of reparation to the Deity that the plagued Philistines sent a guilt-offering back with the ark of Jehovah, which they had stolen. {1Sa 6:13} But there is another historical passage, which though the term “guilt-offering” is not used in it, admirably illustrates the idea. A famine in Davids time was revealed to be due to the murder of certain Gibeonites by the house of Saul. David asked the Gibeonites what reparation he could make. They said it was not a matter of damages. But both parties felt that before the law of God could be satisfied and the land relieved of its curse, some atonement, some guilt-offering, must be made to the Divine Law. It was a wild kind of satisfaction that was paid. Seven men of Sauls house were hung up before the Lord in Gibeon. But the instinct, though satisfied in so murderous a fashion, was a true and a grand instinct, -the conscience of a law above all human laws and rights, to which homage must be paid before the sinner could come into true relations with God, or the Divine curse be lifted off.

It is in this sense that the word is used of the Servant of Jehovah, the Ideal, Representative Sufferer. Innocent as he is, he gives his life as satisfaction to the Divine law for the guilt of his people. His death was no mere martyrdom or miscarriage of human justice: in Gods intent and purpose, but also by its own, voluntary offering, it was an expiatory sacrifice. By his death the Servant did homage to the law of God. By dying for it He made men feel that the supreme end of man was to own that law and be in a right relation to it, and that the supreme service was to help others to a right relation. As it is said a little farther down, “My Servant, righteous himself, wins righteousness for many, and makes their iniquities his load.”

It surely cannot be difficult for anyone, who knows what sin is, and what a part vicarious suffering plays both in the bearing of the sin and in the redemption of the sinner, to perceive that at this point the Servants service for God and man reaches its crown. Compare his death and its sad meaning, with the brilliant energies of his earlier career. It is a heavy and an honourable thing to come from God to men, laden with Gods truth for your charge and responsibility; but it is a far heavier to stoop and take upon your heart as your business and burden mens suffering and sin. It is a needful and a lovely thing to assist the feeble aspirations of men, to put yourself on the side of whatever in them is upward and living, -to be the shelter, as the Servant was, of the bruised reed and the fading wick; but it is more indispensable, and it is infinitely heavier, to seek to lift the deadness of men, to take their guilt upon your heart, to attempt to rouse them to it, to attempt to deliver them from it. It is a useful and a glorious thing to establish order and justice among men, to create a social conscience, to inspire the exercise of love and the habits of service, and this the Servant did when “he set Law on the Earth, and the Isles waited for his teaching”; but after all mans supreme and controlling relation is his relation to God, and to this their “righteousness” the Servant restored guilty men by his death.

And so it was at this point, according to our prophecy, that the Servant, though brought so low, was nearest his exaltation: though in death, yet nearest life, nearest the highest kind of life, “the seeing of a seed,” the finding of himself in others; though despised, rejected, and forgotten of men, most certain of finding a place among the great and notable forces of life, -“therefore do I divide him a share with the great, and the spoil he shall share with the strong.” Not because as a prophet he was a sharp sword in the hand of the Lord, or a light flashing to the ends of the earth, but in that-as the prophecy concludes, and it is the prophets last and highest word concerning him-in that “he bare the sin of the many, and interposed for the transgressors.”

We have seen that the most striking thing about this prophecy is the spectral appearance of the Servant. He haunts, rather than is present in, the chapter. We hear of him, but he himself does not speak. We see faces that he startles, lips that the sight of him shuts, lips that the memory of him, after he has passed in silence, opens to bitter confession of neglect and misunderstanding; but himself we see not. His aspect and his bearing, his work for God and his influence on men, are shown to us, through the recollection and conscience of the speakers, with a vividness and a truth that draw the consciences of us who hear into the current of the confession, and take our hearts captive. But when we ask, Who was he then? What was his name among men? Where shall we find himself? Has he come, or do you still look for him?-neither the speakers, whose conscience he so smote, nor God, whose chief purpose he was, give us here any answer. In some verses he and his work seem already to have happened upon earth, but again we are made to feel that he is still future to the prophet, and that the voices, which the prophet quotes as speaking of having seen him and found him to be the Saviour, are voices of a day not yet born while the prophet writes.

But about five hundred and fifty years after this prophecy was written, a Man came forward among the sons of men.-among this very nation from whom the prophecy had arisen; and in every essential of consciousness and of experience He was the counterpart, embodiment, and fulfilment of this Suffering Servant and his Service. Jesus Christ answers the questions which the prophecy raises and leaves unanswered. In the prophecy we see one who is only a spectre, a dream, a conscience without a voice, without a name, without a place in history. But in Jesus Christ of Nazareth the dream becomes a reality: He, whom we have seen in this chapter only as the purpose of God, only through the eyes and consciences of a generation yet unborn, -He comes forward in flesh and blood; He speaks, He explains Himself, He accomplishes almost to the last detail the work, the patience, and the death that are here described as Ideal and Representative.

The correspondence of details between Christs life and this prophecy, published five hundred and fifty years before He came, is striking; if we encountered it for the first time, it would be more than striking, it would be staggering. But do not let us do what so many have done-so fondly exaggerate it as to lose in the details of external resemblance the moral and spiritual identity.

For the external correspondence between this prophecy and the life of Jesus Christ is by no means perfect. Every wound that is set down in the fifty-third of Isaiah was not reproduced or fulfilled in the sufferings of Jesus. For instance, Christ was not the sick, plague-stricken man whom the Servant is at first represented to be. The English translators have masked the leprous figure, that stands out so clearly in the original Hebrew.-for “acquainted with grief, bearing our griefs, put him to grief,” we should in each case read “sickness.” Now Christ was no Job. As Matthew points out, the only way He could be said “to bear our sicknesses and to carry our pains” was by healing them, not by sharing them.

And again, exactly as the judicial murder of the Servant, and the entire absence from his contemporaries of any idea that he suffered a vicarious death, suit the case of Christ, the next stage in the Servants fate was not true of the Victim of Pilate and the Pharisees. Christs grave was not with the wicked. He suffered as a felon without the walls on the common place of execution, but friends received the body and gave it an honourable burial in a friends grave. Or take the clause, “with the rich in his death.” It is doubtful whether the word is really “rich,” and ought not to be a closer synonym of “wicked” in the previous clause; but if it be “rich,” it is simply another name for “the wicked,” who in the East, in cases of miscarried justice, are so often coupled with the evildoers. It cannot possibly denote such a man as Joseph of Arimathea; nor, is it to be observed, do the Evangelists in describing Christs burial in that rich and pious mans tomb take any notice of this line about the Suffering Servant.

But the absence of a complete incidental correspondence only renders more striking the moral and spiritual correspondence, the essential likeness between the Service set forth in chapter 53 and the work of our Lord.

The speakers of chapter 53 set the Servant over against themselves, and in solitariness of character and office. They count him alone sinless where all they have sinned, and him alone the agent of salvation and healing where their whole duty is to look on and believe. But this is precisely the relation which Christ assumed between Himself and the nation. He was on one side, all they on the other. Against their strong effort to make Him the First among them, it was, as we have said before, the constant aim of our Lord to assert and to explain Himself as The Only.

And this Onlyness was to be realised in suffering. He said, “I must suffer”; or again, “It behoves the Christ to suffer.” Suffering is the experience in which men feel their oneness with their kind. Christ, too, by suffering felt His oneness with men; but largely in order to assert a singularity beyond. Through suffering He became like unto men, but only that He might effect through suffering a lonely and a singular service for them. For though He suffered in all points as men did, yet He shared none of their universal feelings about suffering. Pain never drew from Him either of those two voices of guilt or of doubt. Pain never reminded Christ of His own past, nor made Him question God.

Nor did He seek pain for any end in itself. There have been men who have done so; fanatics who have gloried in pain; superstitious minds that have fancied it to be meritorious; men whose wounds have been as mouths to feed their pride, or to publish their fidelity to their cause. But our Lord shrank from pain; if it had been possible He would have willed not to bear it: “Father, save Me from this hour; Father, if it be Thy will, let this cup pass from Me.” And when He submitted and was under the agony, it was not in the feeling of it, nor in the impression it made on others, nor in the manner in which it drew mens hearts to Him, nor in the seal it set on the truth, but in something beyond it, that He found His end and satisfaction. Jesus “looked out of the travail of His soul and was satisfied.”

For, firstly, He knew His pain to be Gods will for and outside Himself, -“I have a baptism to be baptised with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished: Father, save Me from this hour, yet for this cause came I to this hour: Father, Thy will be done,”-and all opportunities to escape as temptations.

And, secondly, like the Servant, Jesus “dealt prudently, had insight.” The will of God in His suffering was no mystery to Him. He understood from the first why He was to suffer.

The reasons He gave were the same two and in the same order as are given by our prophet for the sufferings of the Servant, -first, that fidelity to Gods truth could bring with it no other fate in Israel, then that His death was necessary for the sins of men, and as mens ransom from sin. In giving the first of these reasons for His death, Christ likened Himself to the prophets who had gone before Him in Jerusalem; but in the second He matched Himself with no other, and no other has ever been known in this to match himself with Jesus.

When men, then, stand up and tell us that Christ suffered only for the sake of sympathy with His kind, or only for loyalty to the truth, we have to tell them that this was not the whole of Christs own consciousness, this was not the whole of Christs own explanation. Suffering, which leads men into the sense of oneness with their kind, only made Him, as it grew the nearer and weighed the heavier, more emphatic upon His difference from other men. If He Himself, by His pity, by His labours of healing (as Matthew points out), and by all His intercourse with His people, penetrated more deeply into the participation of human suffering, the very days which marked with increasing force His sympathy with men, only laid more bare their want of sympathy with Him, their incapacity to follow into that unique conscience and understanding of a Passion, which He bore not only “with,” but, as He said, “for” His brethren. “Who believed that which we heard, and to whom was the arm of the Lord revealed? As to His generation, who reflected that for the transgression of my people He was stricken?” Again, while Christ indeed brought truth to earth from heaven, and was for truths sake condemned by men to die, the burden which He found waiting Him on earth, mans sin, was ever felt by Him to be a heavier burden and responsibility than the delivery of the truth; and was in fact the thing, which, apart from the things for which men might put Him to death, remained the reason of His death in His own sight and in that of His Father. And He told men why He felt their sin to be so heavy, because it kept them so far from God, and this was His purpose, He said, in bearing it-that He might bring us back to God; not primarily that He might relieve us of the suffering which followed sin, though He did so relieve some when He pardoned them, but that He might restore us to right relations with God, -might, like the Servant, “make many righteous.” Now it was Christs confidence to be able to do this, which distinguished Him from all others, upon whom has most heavily fallen the conscience of their peoples sins, and who have most keenly felt the duty and commission from God of vicarious suffering. If, like Moses, one sometimes dared for loves sake to offer his life for the life of his people, none, under the conscience and pain of their peoples sins, ever expressed any consciousness of thereby making their brethren righteous. On the contrary, even a Jeremiah, whose experience, as we have seen, comes so wonderfully near the picture of the Representative Sufferer in chapter 53, -even a Jeremiah feels, with the increase of his vicarious pain and conscience of guilt, only the more perplexed, only the deeper in despair, only the less able to understand God and the less hopeful to prevail with Him. But Christ was sure of His power to remove mens sins, and was never more emphatic about that power than when He most felt those sins weight.

And “He has seen His seed”; He “has made many righteous.” We found it to be uncertain whether the penitent speakers in chapter 53 understood that the Servant by coming under the physical sufferings, which were the consequences of their sins, relieved them of these consequences; other passages in the prophecy would seem to imply that, while the Servants sufferings were alone valid for righteousness, they did not relieve the rest of the nation from suffering too. And so it would be going beyond what God has given us to know, if we said that God counts the sufferings on the Cross, which were endured for our sins, as an equivalent for, or as sufficient to do away with, the sufferings which these sins bring upon our minds, our bodies, and our social relations. Substitution of this kind is neither affirmed by the penitents who speak in the fifty-third of Isaiah, nor is it an invariable or essential part of the experience of those who have found forgiveness through Christ. Everyday penitents turn to God through Christ, and are assured of forgiveness, who feel no abatement in the rigour of the retribution of those laws of God, which they have offended; like David after his forgiveness, they have to continue to bear the consequences of their sins. But dark as this side of experience undoubtedly is, only the more conspicuously against the darkness does the other side of experience shine. By “believing what they have heard,” reaching this belief through a quicker conscience and a closer study of Christs words about His death, men, upon whom conscience by itself and sore punishment have worked in vain, have been struck into penitence, have been assured of pardon, have been brought into right relations with God, have felt all the melting and the bracing effects of the knowledge that another has suffered in their stead. Nay, let us consider this-the physical consequences of their sins may have been left to be endured by such men, for no other reason than in order to make their new relation to God more sensible to them, while they feel those consequences no longer with the feeling of penalty, but with that of chastisement and discipline. Surely nothing could serve more strongly than this to reveal the new conscience towards God that has been worked within them. This inward “righteousness” is made more plain by the continuance of the physical and social consequences of their sins than it would have been had these consequences been removed.

Thus Christ, like the Servant, became a force in the world, inheriting in the course of Providence a “portion with the great” and “dividing the spoils” of history “with the strong.” As has often been said, His Cross is His Throne, and it is by His death that He has ruled the ages. Yet we must not understand this as if His Power was only or mostly shown in binding men, by gratitude for the salvation He won them, to own Him for their King. His power has been even more conspicuously proved in making His fashion of service the most fruitful and the most honoured among men. If men have ceased to turn from sickness with aversion or from weakness with contempt; if they have learned to see in all pain some law of God, and in vicarious suffering Gods most holy service; if patience and self-sacrifice have come in any way to be a habit of human life, -the power in this change has been Christ. But because these two-to say, “Thy will be done,” and to sacrifice self-are for us men the hardest and the most unnatural of things to do, Jesus Christ, in making these a conscience and a habit upon earth, has indeed shown Himself able to divide the spoil with the strong, has indeed performed the very highest Service for Man of which man can conceive.

Fuente: Expositors Bible Commentary