‘He was pierced for our transgressions’ (Isaiah 52:10-53:12)

 

When I was a student in Dublin I remember a guy coming to our Christian Union and speaking on Isaiah 53.  As a young Christian I was blown away.  Here is a song written seven hundred years before the death of Christ and it gives exact details of his suffering.  It is so clearly about Jesus that when I once read it to a youth group someone asked me which of the four gospels is this from.

This is the fourth, and final, ‘servant song’ in Isaiah.  It is made up of five stanzas, each containing three verses.

Suffering and sprinkling (52:12-15)

Behold, my servant shall act wisely.  In these ‘servant songs’ the servant can refer to the prophet Isaiah or the people of Israel, but, in this song, it can’t be either because the servant suffers here for both.  The servant is unmistakably Jesus.

The servant ‘will be high and lifted up’.  The term ‘high and lifted up’ is used elsewhere in Isaiah to speak of the LORD/Yahweh.  Our rescuer is God and man.  He is God the Son.  The name Isaiah means ‘the LORD is salvation’, and this salvation is brought about by the Lord himself!

Suddenly we see that the high and lifted up one is marred in appearance.  He is suffering.  Hundreds of years before the Romans perfected the art of crucifixion, this song will show us Jesus at Calvary.

His suffering is connected with our sprinkling.  The idea of sprinkling has a number of roots.  The priests would sprinkle a leper that had been cleansed—and we are spiritual lepers who have had our guilt washed away.  Another idea behind sprinkling is on the Day of Atonement—when the blood of a goat would be sprinkled on the seat of mercy in the temple as a picture of a saviour’s blood cleansing our sin.

Strength and weakness (53:1-3)

To whom has the arm of the Lord being revealed?  The arm of the Lord is his ability to rescue his people.  Yet this arm of the Lord is found through an ordinary and weak person.  He grew up like a root out of dry ground.  This is an unpromising person from a failed nation.  Shockingly the servant comes from a backwater of the Roman Empire, and a lesser part of that nation.  He had no beauty that we should desire him.  He was not good-looking.  He was not marked out as ‘one to watch’.  He did not have life easy—he was a man of sorrows familiar with grief.  He knew the pain of rejection.  He lost members of his family.  He was let down by his friends.  Notice our role in his rejection: he was despised and we esteemed him not.

Salvation through substitution (53:4-6)

There was once a chaplain in a Dublin university who wrote in the college paper that ‘the death and resurrection of Jesus are not the crux of Christianity.’  The irony of course is that the word crux comes from cross.  The Villiers’ School motto is actually ‘fidei coticula crux’—the cross is the touchstone of faith.  The apostle Paul can sum up all his preaching by simply saying, ‘I preach Christ crucified’.

In Hebrew poetry the main point is made at the centre of a song.  This stanza is the centre and it clearly points to Jesus on the cross.  What we have here is imputation—charging something to someone’s account.  He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.  John Piper explains that the heart of the gospel is substitution—Jesus dies in our place. 

The result of his death is that we receive peace.  The word is ‘shalom’—which includes the idea of wholeness and well-being.  I have been asked to speak on Peace at the Christian Union in U.C.D.  I am taking this passage.  You see If God has taken away my guilt and not he sees me as righteous in Chris and removed any reason to be afraid of death and hell then all other worries are only small worries.

Not the reference to healing—by his wounds we are healed.  The primary idea here is that we are healed from the disease of sin.  But Matthew’s gospel does link this to physical healing.  God will heal all our illnesses.  There will be a time when Jesus returns and gives us imperishable bodies that will experience no sickness.  There are times, even now, that God heals in response to the prayers of his people giving us a foretaste of what is to come.  But we can see in the New Testament that God does not always heal his people in this life—the apostle Paul struggled with illness, Timothy had to take wine for his stomach and Trophimus had to be left behind in Miletus because of an illness.  In fact, most death comes through illness and we will all die unless Jesus comes back first.

I puzzled over the words of verse four—he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows.  All grief and sorrow results from the fact that we live in a world under God’s curse of death because of sin.  Jesus enters that world and suffers with us.  As he dies on the cross he experiences the pain that should be on us.  Through his suffering our suffering receives an expiry date.  He will bring us to a place where there are no more tears.

Our guilt and his innocence (52:7-9)

At the end of the last stanza there is a reference to the fact that we all like sheep had gone astray.  In this stanza Jesus is a lamb that is led to the slaughter.  Lile a sheep before its shearers is silent so he opened not his mouth.  We see this in how Jesus refused to defend himself before the Sanhedrin, Herod and Pilate.  He was assigned a grave amongst the wicked, and with a rich man in his death—there may be an emphasise here on the idea of the rich being corrupt.  Of course, this prophecy was fulfilled in his burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

His delight to save (10-12)

It was the will of the LORD to crush him.  Who put Jesus on the cross?  Well we bear responsibility because it was for our sins he had to die.  The crowd who cried ‘crucify’ bear responsibility because they wanted him dead.  The Jewish authorities bear some responsibility because they pushed for his death, as do Herod and Pilate.  But ultimately it was God the Father who had him sent to die.

I remember a friend in the previous church where I was serving holding back the tears as he read the following words from the theologian Sinclair Ferguson: ‘When we think of Christ dying on the cross we are shown the lengths to which God’s love goes in order to win us back to himself.  We should almost think that God loved us more than he loves his Son.  We cannot measure his love by any other standard.  He is saying, “I love you this much” … [Through the cross] God does something to us as well as for us, he persuades us he loves us.’

He will see and be satisfied.  Jesus is satisfied with what he has accomplished through his death.  He delighted to show the love of the Father.  He sees us as his people and says, ‘you were worth it.’  He has accounted many righteous.  Not only are we forgiven, we are seen as righteous.  The Father now sees us as if we had lived the perfect life of Jesus.   The risen Jesus lives to make intersession for us—he is praying that we will make it to the end and his prayers cannot fail.

Conclusion

Right at the heart of this song is the Hebrew idea of shalom, which is a bigger word than our peace.  Through what Jesus has done of the cross we can know wholeness—we are forgiven, have a certain hope, live in the love of Christ, are empowered by his Holy Spirit and assured that death and condemnation have no hold over us.  In light of this, all other worries are small.

A few verses to conclude our thoughts.

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave himself up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, give us all things (Rom. 8:32).  This is not a ‘prosperity gospel’.  In context the ‘all things’ is what we need to grow and stay in Christ.  Trust him, his love for you is going nowhere!

Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more will be saved from God’s wrath through him (Rom. 5:9).  He has done the hard thing of taking rebels and making us his children, so he can be trusted to keep us in him and bring us through the final judgement.

Finally, cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you (1 Peter 5:7).  Surely, as we look at this passage in Isaiah, we can be left in no doubt that he cares for us.  He suffered as we suffer, and he suffered for us, and he suffered that there would be an expiry date on all our pain.  Upon his was chastisement that brought us peace.