We have Isaiah 52.13 down to
53.12, continuing our series on famous passages, well-known,
well-loved passages of Scripture. The book of Peter says of this
salvation, the salvation that God's children now enjoy, the
prophets have inquired and searched carefully. who prophesied of
the grace that would come to you in searching what or what
manner of time the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating
when he testified beforehand. This is a description of the
Old Testament Scriptures. He testified beforehand the sufferings
of Christ and the glories that would follow. Isaiah 53, as people
will know, is a great passage that talks of the sufferings
of Christ and the glory that will follow. Obviously in the
time that's before us we don't have the opportunity to look
at all of these verses in any great detail. We could spend
the rest of our days preaching and reading and studying these
verses and we would find that they were living and active and
they are powerful words from our God. So I thought I might
just read them and then we'll go and look at some of the highlights
in it. Isaiah 52, 13, Behold, my servant
shall deal prudently. He shall be exalted and extolled
and be very high, just as many were astonished at you. So his
visage was marred more than any man, and his form more than the
sons of men. So he shall sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths
at him, for what had not been told them they shall see, and
what they had not heard they shall consider. Who has believed
our report? And to whom has the arm of the
Lord been revealed? For he shall grow up before him
as a tender plant, as a root out of dry ground. He has no
form or comeliness. And when we see him, there is
no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected
by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we
hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we did
not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
smitten by 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 by His stripes
we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone
astray. We have turned everyone to his
own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearers
is silent, so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison
and from judgment, and who will declare his generation? For he
was cut off from the land of the living, for the transgressions
of my people he was stricken. And they made his grave with
the wicked, but with the rich at his death, because he had
done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased
the Lord to bruise him. He has put him to grief. And
when you 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 the labour of his
soul, and be satisfied. By his knowledge my righteous
servant shall justify many, for he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall
divide the spoiled with the strong, because he poured out his soul
unto death, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and he
bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors."
No wonder the Jews today hide from Isaiah 53. It's just the
most remarkable testimony of the Lord Jesus. And it's the
most quoted passage of the Old Testament in the New Testament.
The Jews, of course, don't like it because who has believed our
report? Most people haven't believed
his report. And of course the Gospel is a
report. The Gospel is a good report. It's not good advice. It's a
report of work done. And as you may have noticed as
we read those amazing verses, it's cast in the past tense. because, as Hebrews 4 says, that
God's works were finished from the foundation of the world.
God wasn't trying to do something. God was coming to do something. And this is the report of what
is done. And as verse 1 says there, And
to whom has the arm, the power of the Lord, been revealed? God's declaration, God's enlightenment
of eyes to see who He is, is always in the scriptures a revelation,
a revelation that comes through new eyes, a revelation that comes
as a result of new life, a revelation that has a new side. And it's
a sight to behold who Christ is and what He did. As Paul said to the Corinthians,
he sought to know nothing amongst them except Jesus Christ and
Him crucified. It's a revelation of eternal
love, a revelation of unconditional election, a revelation of accomplished
redemption. a revelation of almighty saving
grace, a revelation of immutable, unchangeable mercy, a revelation
of free forgiveness, a revelation of free salvation. And at its
heart is substitution. This is a great chapter, as all
of the Bible is, on substitution. So to whom has the arm of the
Lord been revealed? We will see as we go on, the
arm of the Lord has been revealed to a particular people, a people
who are described in many ways in this. In verse 1, of course,
the we are people who in their Adam state do not believe. They are people who, in verse
2, see no beauty and no reason to desire Him. They are people
who hid, hide our faces from Him. all of Adam's children come
into this world doing the things that Adam did in the garden after
the fall. The very first thing he did is
to try and cover his shame by his own activities, and at the
very first revelation of God to that couple in Genesis 3,
they are found hiding from God, and we do not esteem Him. That's what we are in ourselves. And he grew up as someone like
a tender plant, a root out of dry ground, someone who seemed
to be vulnerable, someone whose whose coming wasn't out of a
fruitful ground. In fact, Israel was a desert
and a wilderness spiritually when the Lord Jesus came. And
in that verse 2, we actually have as close as the Scriptures
ever come to a description of the Lord Jesus. He has no form
or comeliness. There was nothing about the Lord
Jesus physically. Moses was a beautiful baby. David
was an extraordinary handsome man. But the Lord Jesus came
as someone who had no form or comeliness. And when we see Him,
there is no beauty that we should desire Him. Every time, of course
you people know, every time you see a picture of Jesus, every
time you see a statue of Jesus, you know with absolute certainty,
according to the Word of God, that you are looking at something
that is a lie. And the people that have their
pictures and have their statues are really worshipping the statue
and not the person. In fact, the first man, it seems,
who was brave enough to paint a picture of the Lord Jesus did
so in the 3rd century, the historians say, and they found a young Greek
girl as the model. And so we have these pathetic,
effeminate pictures of the Lord Jesus. But He had no formal comeliness
and when we see Him there is no beauty that we should desire
in Him. In fact, as a Jew, He could live amongst the Jews for
30 years without anyone knowing who He was. He could move in
and out of the crowds of the Jews of His day and without anyone
knowing who He was. And of course the lesson is,
that to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? People will only see Jesus when
God reveals something to them. He is despised and rejected of
men, and a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Familiar
is the word there, a man of sorrows and familiar with grief. and we hid, as it were, our faces
from Him. He was despised and we didn't
esteem Him. I don't know about you in your
life, but I remember with shocking and horrifying clarity my despising
of the Lord Jesus when I was at university, my despising of
His name and how Like the rest I was happy to add a couple of
filthy expletives to his name and that was the common expression. I hated him. I hated those who
represented him in our university. I despised him. I had no esteem of him at all.
I thought, and I can remember my words, he was just a crutch
for pathetic people. who can't make their own way
in this world. I despised religion, but really
in my heart I was just despising Him. And many of you have done
the same. See, we are people who run from
God. We are people in Isaiah, people
who are acquainted with grief. We are people of grief. We are
people of sorrows, verse 4. We are transgressors, verse 5. We are people who are sinners,
verse 5. We are people who have no peace
with God, and have no peace with other men, and have no peace
in this world, despite all the bravado. We are people who need
healing. We are like sheep, helpless,
defenseless, animals that cannot survive in this world without
the tender care of a shepherd. But we're sheep that go astray,
all the time go astray. And we turn, this is a great
description of sin in verse 6, isn't it? We have turned everyone
to his own way. That is what we are doing all
the time. And it's just remarkable that
in each of those things that we have done, Isaiah 53 shows
remarkably how the Lord Jesus has borne those things. We are
people who live in this world of grief, experiencing grief
and causing grief. Listen to what the Lord Jesus
has done in verse 4. Surely He has borne our griefs, The next word is just amazing
for those who sorrow. Sorrow over their sin. Sorrow
over the helplessness of themselves to overcome it. He's carried
our sorrows. He bears our grief. He carries
our sorrows. In verse 5, But he was wounded
for our transgressions. He was bruised. The word's a
nice word, bruised, but the real word is crushed. He was crushed for our iniquities. He was punished. The punishment
of our peace was upon Him. He was a man who felt the stripes
of the Romans. as they whipped him with that
awful whipping till his backbone is exposed and sometimes their
internal organs are exposed. By his stripes, we who need healing
are healed. And the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. As I said earlier, it's just
the most wonderful picture of substitution. I do often quote,
because I love Galatians 2.20. I have been crucified with Christ. And it is no longer I who live,
but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the
flesh. I live by the faith of the Son
of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. The Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all. I need to remind you, we need
to be kept reminded that in this substitution there is a particular
people that he has in mind. He bore our griefs, our sorrows. We esteemed him stricken, wounded
for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquity,
the chastisement of our peace upon him, and by his stripes
we are healed. The Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all." And he was like a lamb. before
his shearer's his silent, wasn't he? He was oppressed and he was
afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb
to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearer's his silent,
so he opened not his mouth. He was taken from prison and
from judgment, and who will declare his generation? It's a blessed thing for God's
children to be silent under the will of God. The Lord Jesus was
remarkable. He had the power to stop those
men. He had the resources, thousands
upon ten thousands of angels. But He opened not His mouth. so often led to complain, and
we need to be careful that we're not complaining against God and
His will in our lives. When you think of what He has
suffered here, what we have in these verses before us, we who
have been healed by Him, we who have had our sins laid on Him,
have every reason not to open our mouths except in gratitude
and in praise." And as we've said so often before,
the sins that were laid on him were the real sins of real people. And as extraordinary as it might
seem to many people, the Scriptures again and again have the Lord
Jesus describing the sins of his people as his own sins. Psalm 40 verse 12, for innumerable
evils have surrounded me. This is a psalm which is so clearly
about the Lord Jesus and it's said so in the New Testament.
My iniquities have overtaken me, he said, so that I am not
able to look up. They are more than the hairs
of my head. There are many others, Psalm
69 verse 5, O God, you know my foolishness, my perversity, and
my sins are not hidden from you. We are wanting to hide sins.
The Lord Jesus says down in verse 11, By His knowledge my righteous
servants shall justify many. The knowledge of God is infinite. He knew all of the people for
whom He was suffering. He knew their iniquities perfectly. He knew them perfectly. He knew the circumstances of
their lives perfectly. Always, when God operates, all
of His divine characteristics operate as one glorious complete
whole. And part of that is knowledge,
part of it is absolute sovereignty, divine love, perfect predestination. God's holiness, God's goodness,
God's mercy, all of God's character, all of them are one all the time. And so when God loves, He loves
with perfect knowledge. When God says that His sins Our
sins are His sins and He calls our sins His sins. He is not
doing it in ignorance. He is not doing it without power.
He is not doing it without holiness. My righteous servant is not doing
it without righteousness. And despite what men see, what
men saw was someone who was led like a lamb to the slaughter. He was taken from prison and
judgment by men who thought they were powerful, by Satan who finally
thought that he had his man. From the beginning he had tried
again and again and again to get rid of God so that he can
have his throne. He tried to kill the babies in
Moses' day, but God preserved Moses. Just think through the
scriptures the number of times where Satan was raised up against
the woman and her seed. Finally now he has the Son of
God in his hands as it were, as a lamb as it was, as a sheep
who was silent, and now at the time of His greatest triumph,
where He was going to lead him to the judgment of men, and He
was going to lead him without a generation, verse 8, where
He was going to have him cut off from the land of the living
by the hand of wicked people. He's actually fulfilling God's
perfectly designed purposes. for His glory and for our good. For the transgressions of My
people He was stricken." The word stricken there and the word
smitten in verse 4, in this word down here, are words that in
the scriptures relate to God striking someone. When King Uzziah
took upon himself the role of a priest and went into the temple,
the word is that he was smitten by God, this same word here. He was stricken and they made his
grave with the wicked. They had planned for him to be
cast down into that valley, Kidron, with the bodies of others, the
bodies of the others who were crucified with him and where
Judas went. They had planned his grave to
be in the most defiled place that they could possibly imagine
outside of their city. And yet, as we know, Joseph of
Arimathea came along with Nicodemus, and they made his grave with
the rich in his death, because he had done no violence nor was
any deceit in his mouth. All of God's sovereign purposes
centre on the glory of the Lord Jesus. And here we have the centrepiece
of the glory of the substitution. Just look at verse 10. It pleased
the Lord to bruise him. It pleased the Lord to crush
him. It satisfied God to crush him. He has put him to grief. So all
the pain of Gethsemane wasn't a pain that had anything much
to do at all about the horrible things the Romans did, the wicked
evil things the Jews did. The thing that caused him such
grief was that he was going to be made sin by God himself. Sin, according to Jeremiah 44
verse 4, is this detestable thing that I hate, this abominable
thing that I hate. The only way we'll ever have
any inkling of how evil sin is, how grievous it is, and how much
it hurts God, is when we see sin put on the Lord Jesus and
dealt with at the cross. It's the only place in this creation
where we even glimpse something of the horrible nature of sin. When God found sin on His Son,
the justice of God had to be satisfied in punishing that sin. It pleased God. It pleased the
Lord to crush Him. When we have communion, we have
a symbol of this crushing, don't we? We get wine because we crush
grapes. We get bread because we take
a grain of wheat and we crush it. Such is the weight of God's
abhorrence of sin. When he finds it, he crushes
it. He'll either crush it gloriously
in a substitute, or people, as I so often quote in John 8, they
will die in their sins. They will be crushed eternally
by their sins. And you make his soul. See, sin
for us is a physical thing most of the time. Karnalais sees sin
as physical. But sin is a soul matter for
us and for God. It's only by the suffering of
his soul for sin that spiritually he can redeem his people. He
must suffer physically, but He must suffer the agonies of His
soul." And we can mouth those words, I don't think we have
a tiny inkling of what it means to go through that spiritually,
as He did. And then we have in verse 10, and following, we have the great
reward of this, isn't it? He loved his bride so much that
he gave his life for his bride, rather than having his bride
perish. and he shall see his seed. You
had no physical seed in this world, but he shall see his seed,
and he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord
shall prosper in his hand." Right now, he is seeing his seed. What it is for him to see his
seed? is for him, as the next verse
says, to be satisfied. It's an easy word to say. There's
only one man who's ever walked on this earth who has been satisfied. Men are insatiable. Insatiably
chasing after pleasures, insatiably trying to weave together a robe
of their own righteousness. They're insatiable. You try and
find someone who's happy. They're satisfied. Their satisfaction
might last for a few hours or a few days or a few weeks. But
you go and talk to them and you'll find there are things that they're
not satisfied about and it doesn't matter how long they live. One
of my saddest experiences many years ago was going to an elderly
uncle of mine, great uncle of mine, and he was 90-something
years old. He'd lived in what could only
be described as luxury for most of his life, and had the money
to do the things he wanted to do, the money to send his children
to fancy schools, the money and the time to be known by famous
people and have famous people come to his place, the time,
the money and time to indulge a whole bunch of the passions
of his life. He was 93, I think, when Lucia and I went to see
him in the hospice at Bury. And he had 93 years to look back
on. And he was angry about his life. He was sad about his life. He had four kids who loved him. He had a bunch of grandchildren,
a bunch of great-grandchildren, property, the esteem of people. But he was an angry man and it
was really, really sad to see that man at death's door, 93
years, angry and unsatisfied. It's one of the wonderful parts
of the substitution, isn't it? Is that because our righteous
servant, the one who has served our souls, is satisfied God's
children are the only children in this world who can say that
they're satisfied. They can say, like Jacob when
he met his brother, I have enough. I have everything. Because he bore our iniquities. And sin can't be in two places
at one time. It cannot be on the back and
in the soul of our substitute and be on our backs and on our
souls at the same time. It might feel like that to us
as we walk through this world and we sin and our sins grieve
us and we hide them from the people that we love and esteem,
but they are just there as real as ever for us in our conscience. But God says they're gone. God
says they are on a substitute. God says that they are put away. Blessed is the man whose sins
are covered, whose iniquities the Lord will never count against
him. He can't count them against us. He's put them on his son. They became Jesus before the
foundation of the world. They really became his on the
cross in a very real and painful and manifest way for all the
world to see. They can't be on me. They can't be on me and on him
at the same time. They are on him and they are
gone. He'll be satisfied. It's a great
thing to keep in mind, isn't it, that our Lord Jesus, right
at this very moment, sits on the throne in heaven, ruling
this universe, ruling this world, ruling the lives of all of his
people here, satisfied. Satisfied. Colin Jeff is satisfied
with you. He's satisfied right now. He was satisfied yesterday. He'll
be satisfied tomorrow. He'll be satisfied in a hundred
years' time. He'll be satisfied in a million
years' time. He'll never ever stop being satisfied. He'll see the labour of his soul.
He will see what he earned. And by His knowledge My righteous
servant will justify many, for He shall bear their iniquities. He's a just God, Isaiah 45, 20
says, a just God and a Saviour. And God will divide Him a portion
with the great, and He shall divide the spoiled with the strong. The spoil is all the rewards
of that warfare and everything that he went through. What are
the rewards of it? That he will make his bride to
be what he is. What's the spoil? He'll present
his bride before this world, holy, spotless and blameless,
because He poured out His soul unto death, and He was numbered
with the transgressors, and He bore the sin of many. And now
what does He do? He made intercession for the
transgressors. He stands right now at the throne
of God, praying for us, interceding for us. Always there is a lamb
as if it had been slain. Always there, God's children,
stand where the Lord Jesus stands, in Him, before God, holy, spotless,
blameless. It's a shame our chapter divisions
spoil us from looking at the next word. And what's the very
next word? What's the next word in the scriptures?
I don't know why we have the chapter divisions where we do.
Sing. Sing is the next word. Sing,
oh barren. We are unprofitable, unfruitful
servants. Barren. Sing, barren people. You have not borne, not achieved
anything. Break forth into singing and
cry aloud. And Paul quotes this in Galatians
to remind us that we are not the children of the bondwoman.
We're the children of the free. We are the faith children of
the free. That's why in the next chapter,
everyone who thirsts, come, says the Lord Jesus now. If you have
no money, and you do have no money, you have nothing to offer
God, come. Come without your money, buy
and eat. It's come. Buy wine and milk
without money and without price. Come, he says. Keep on coming to the Lord Jesus. Keep on resting in someone who's
satisfied and be amazed. Be amazed. that He was wounded
for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. And by His stripes we are healed. And now we have peace with God. Peace that allows us to rest
our heads on our pillows at the end of another day and rest in
the fact that what we need to present to God is the Lord Jesus
and nothing else. May he cause us to sing, know
that we're barren, and sing. Let's pray.