Over the years that I've been
preaching, I have preached from Isaiah 53 several times, and
it's always sort of new to me. I know the truths that, I'm not
gonna say anything new to you, because there's nothing new under
the sun, and we know the gospel is older than the earth, older
than time. But it just has such a fervency
for the glory of God and a picture of Christ, the Lamb of God, the
suffering servant. So I've called this Christ, Our
Victorious Substitute. And because this is such a full
chapter, and I couldn't go through a series on Christ in the Old
Testament without dealing with this passage. Because it's so
full, I've divided it into two lessons. So we'll deal with this
passage this week and next week, Lord willing. But it starts off,
you know, Isaiah prophesied 700 years before the birth of Christ. And some of his prophecies are
so pointed and so particular that it's called some what I
call unbelieving Bible scholars. That's kind of like an oxymoron.
Unbelieving Bible scholar. They're not scholars in the Bible
at all. But they know the wording, they
know the original languages, they know the history. But because
Isaiah's prophecy is so specific, It's called some of them to say
well he was Isaiah's prophecy or these words on the page were
written later than what they were because how could Isaiah
know about we looked up this last week about Cyrus the king
of Persia who came along later. Well this is the word of God.
And all these things, I love that passage in Isaiah 46 where
he says, remember the former things of old, I'm God. I declare
the end from the beginning. I purposed it, I'll bring it
to pass. That's God that we're talking
about. This is the book of God. It's
not just a book written by several men over several generations.
God used those men and all that, but it's the word of God. So
Isaiah was called to the ministry to be one of God's prophets,
to speak the word of God to the people. And you know, you remember
back in Isaiah chapter 6 where this happened, God gave Isaiah
a glorious message, the message of the gospel. A lot of the true
Bible scholars call Isaiah the gospel, the book of Isaiah, the
gospel of Isaiah, just like you have the gospel of Matthew, Mark,
and Luke and John. But God gave him a glorious message
concerning the gospel of his grace to save sinners through
the glorious person and the finished work of Christ. You remember
when we looked at Isaiah 9, 6-7. Unto us a child is born. Unto
us a son is given. The government shall be upon
his shoulder. He'll establish it with judgment and justice.
That's gospel language. That's covenant language. That
shows us that our salvation, the salvation of sinners, always
was conditioned on Christ and that He fulfilled those conditions
to secure the salvation of His people. So this is the gospel
of God's grace in Christ. And when he says this, look at
verse one. Who hath believed our report? You may have in your
concordance in your Bible the word doctrine. Sometimes it's
called hearing. Who hath believed our hearing?
What we want you to hear. Who hath believed our doctrine?
And what he's saying here is who has believed our gospel? Now, why is that a question that
has to be answered? Well, think about it. First of
all, by nature, none of us will hear the gospel until the Holy
Spirit gives us life. We have to be given ears to hear,
eyes to see. We have to be given a new heart.
Natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.
That's the way it is. And God uses the Word of God.
to open our eyes in the power of the Holy Spirit. So who hath
believed it? Well, it's really specific for
Isaiah. Because, you know, Isaiah, he
prophesied through the reign of several kings. He mainly prophesied
in Jerusalem, in the city. Some say that he was even related
to King Uzziah. You remember King Uzziah, who
was struck with leprosy. Anyway, God called this man,
saved him by his grace, called this man and gave him the most
glorious message he's given any human being on the face of the
earth. And then he tells him in Isaiah chapter six, but practically
nobody's gonna hear you. Now that's certainly a motivation
for evangelism, isn't it? You go out and preach Isaiah,
but practically nobody's gonna hear you. And so Isaiah preached
for many years. And very few heard him. You remember
how he opened the book when he was talking about the sins of
Judah and Jerusalem in their religion? And he said if it weren't
for a remnant, a very small remnant of people, you'd be just like
Sodom and Gomorrah, even in your religion. Damned forever, that's
what Sodom, under the wrath of God. In other words, what he
was saying is if it weren't for the remnant, according to the
election of grace, through the Lord Jesus Christ, the whole
nation, 100%, would perish just like Sodom and Gomorrah. So who
hath believed our report? Well, as I said, nobody will
believe it apart from God's power. And that's what the next line
says. And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? The arm
of the Lord speaks of his power. It is God's power to save. It's not man's power. It's not
the power of our works or the power of our wills. Because our
works aren't good enough and we will not apart from the arm
of the Lord. Well, who is the arm of the Lord?
Christ is. He's the power of God. Romans
1, 16 and 17. I'm not ashamed of the gospel
of God. It is the power of God. The gospel of Christ is the power
of God, the dynamite of God, because that's what the Greek
word power means. The dynamite of God, the power
of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth. And so God told
Isaiah that even though the number of the people would be as the
sand of the sea, only a remnant would believe. And Paul dealt
with that in Romans chapter 9, 10, and 11. Well, here he begins to describe
the arm of the Lord. Look at verses two and three.
It says, for he, now who's the he here? This Christ. Somebody
asked me one time, well, what do the unbelieving Jews do with
this chapter? They say that the person that
he's talking about here is Israel itself. But it's not. It's talking about Christ, the
Savior of His people, the victorious substitute. This describes the
substitutionary work of the Lord Jesus Christ. You know I say
all the time, He's our surety. That means our sins were charged
to Him. God in the covenant made Him
our surety. He's our substitute. This is
what's gonna be described here in these next few verses. He
took our place. And incidentally, that's what
it is. It's a real absolute substitution. It wasn't a transformation. He was made sin. That means he
was made our sin offering. Our sins were imputed to him.
He wasn't transformed into some substance called sin. Our debt
was laid to him. I put out an article. I'm going
to put it in the bulletin sometime. But it's by imputation. He was made sin. And so, when
we talk about, that's Christ the God-man, God in human flesh. And I put an article on Facebook,
got a lot of response from it. You know, our president this
past week has decided to, what he calls, do away with student
debt. And I read a quote there, it
says, no student debt is done away with, somebody's got to
pay it. Well, you know who's gonna pay it. The American taxpayer's
going, you're going to pay it. We're all going to pay it. And
I put on this article, I said, if you don't understand the doctrine
of imputation, look at this example. That debt was taken off the ones
who incurred the debt and imputed to us. Now it's our debt, and
we're going to have to pay it. So that's what imputation is
about. But that's what this is about. the substitutionary work
of Christ, and then I speak of him as the Redeemer. That's the
one who pays the debt. And he paid it with the price
of his blood. So here's how he describes him. First of all,
in his humanity, for he shall grow up before him as a tender
plant. That's the humanity of Christ. And he wasn't some kind of Superman. He's God-man. God manifest in
the flesh, the glorious person of Christ. This is the kind of
person that it took to save us from our sins. Because he had
to be God, because the payment had to be infinite and infinitely
valuable and powerful, and he had to be man without sin because
he had to die to shed his blood. So he shall grow up before him
as a tender plant, Think about the humanity of Christ. Think
about him in his youth. We don't have a lot in the Bible
to say about his youth. We see his infancy and the story
of his birth, and then we have a few things about him in his
youth, especially when he went, I think he was 12 years old when
he went into the temple and disputed with the elders there. And his
mother and father were looking for him, and he said, I must
be about my father's business. But that tender plant, and then
as a root out of a dry ground. You know what that describes?
That describes the state of Israel when the Christ came into this
world. A dry ground. This nation which
in the view of man, in their own viewpoint, should have been
lush and plush. And I'm not talking about physical
like grain and farming and all that, but I'm talking about in
the Word of God. It's almost like the worship
of God had been relegated to almost nothing. when the Lord
came into this world in his humanity. It was a dry ground. So here
he is, a tender plant in a dry ground. It says, he hath no form
nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that
we should desire him. You know, people have the idea,
they may not state it like this, that if Christ walked into the
room then everybody would notice something different about him
that would just kind of, we'd stand in awe. But that's not
the way it was. Outwardly speaking, he had no
form nor comeliness to draw us. He didn't have that presence,
physical presence, that impresses. because that's not what it was
all about. And I love that passage over in 2 Corinthians 5, where
it talks about when we're born again, we don't judge by outward
appearance. He said, even though we did judge
Christ by outward appearance, Jesus, but no longer, we judge
him by the beauty that he has in the truth, the word of God.
Who is this person? There's nobody like him, but
you couldn't see that by just looking at him. So he hath no
form nor comeliness, there is no beauty that we should desire
him. You know these so-called paintings of Jesus? They always
have him with a glow in his face or a halo or something. It's
not the case. He was just a man. And he appeared
to be such. And no beauty that we should
desire him. Now, since the Lord God has opened our eyes to the
glorious person of Christ, there is now a beauty that we should
desire him, isn't there? That's right, we see him for
who he is. And then here's the indictment
against the whole human race, really, because this is how depravity
is shown. We're born dead in spiritual
depravity, and spiritual death in depravity. And it says in
verse three, he's despised and rejected of men. Just the opposite
of desiring him, he's despised and rejected of men. He was a
man of sorrows. We sang at him last week. Man
of sorrows, what a name. And acquainted with grief. He
knew grief. Jesus wept. He knew all of the
griefs of the infirmities of flesh without sin. He knew hunger. He knew sorrow. He knew pain. All that. He got tired. And all
that's to be attributed to his humanity, not to his deity, but
it was an act of his entire person, and that's mind-boggling, isn't
it? He had to lay down and sleep. And then it says, and we hid
as it were our faces from him. Instead of being outwardly comely
or beautiful so as to draw us naturally to him, We hid our
faces from him. We turned our faces away from
him. Now I want to make this point.
The main reason that the natural man turns his face away from
this person is not because of how he looked in his physical
makeup. It's because of what he said. Because of his message. the light of the gospel, the
light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, which
does what for us? It exposes the iniquity and sinfulness
and evilness of our own works, our refuges. Our false refuges
are exposed by what he said. Over in John, I think it's John
15 where he's talking about how men hated him and they would
hate his disciples. I think that's where he made
the statement, if I had not come and spoken to them, they would
not have the reason to do that. But the light that exposes the
darkness. Men love darkness and hate the
light because their deeds are evil. And that's talking about
religious deeds. That's talking about man's best
efforts to save himself and to make himself righteous. And the
gospel of Christ, the word of this person, exposes that to
be wicked and evil and deserving of condemnation and death. And
that's what people hate. It's what I hated before God
gave me a new heart. So we hid, as it were, our faces
from him. He was despised and we esteemed
him not. The only person, think about
it, the only person who ever walked this earth who deserved,
really deserved to be esteemed, we esteemed him not. We valued
him not. Now you might say, well there's
a lot of people who deserve to be esteemed. I'll tell you how
I think about that. There's people I admire. in history
for what they've done and accomplished. It has nothing to do with salvation,
though. But I'm talking about as it pertains
to God. Because even those who deserve
our esteem in human things, what they've done and what they had
was a gift of God, freely You take a person who's successful
in life and family and business and all of that, that's good. And I admire that. But everything
they have and everything they've done was given to them by God.
How many times have I told you, take that next breath. That's
a gift from God, isn't it? That's a gift from God. Now,
natural man doesn't recognize that and doesn't admit to that. He attributes it to his own hard
work and whatever, or his own intelligence. But either way,
Christ is the only person who truly, in the eyes of God, deserved
our esteem, and we esteemed him not. In fact, what'd we do? We crucified the Lord of glory.
We called him a malefactor. You know what that is, don't
you? It's a criminal. We called him a blasphemer. And then when
the Lord opens our eyes to see the truth, boy, what a change
that is. The glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ. Well, now he comes to the issue
of substitution. The substitutionary work of Christ,
and look how it comes about. Look at verse four. He says,
surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Everything that he went through
by way of grief and sorrow is what we deserved. It's what we've
earned. but having the demerit of sin
charged to him, he bore our griefs and our sorrows. Now, you may
say, well, preacher, I've gone through a lot of grief and sorrow.
Well, I have too, but nothing like this. Where our grief and
our sorrow here on this earth, and I'm talking about believers
now, is not even to be compared with the grief and the sorrow
of the Son of God incarnate. That's the truth. He bore the
sins of every one of God's elect. And he bore them to the cross.
Now, he himself, in himself, didn't deserve this. Didn't earn
it. Now, people can argue, say, well,
he deserved it and earned it because of sin imputed. And you
might be able to say it that way. But what we deserved and
what we earned was imputed to him. That's the way I like to
say it. But he bore our griefs. So every pain, every pain that
he suffered, every tear that he shed, every breath that he
took in agony, it was for our griefs and our sorrows. And he
says, yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
Now that's an interesting line, isn't it? Because you know what?
He was stricken and smitten of God and afflicted of God. Look
at verse 10, we're not gonna get to verse 10 today, but listen
what it says in verse 10. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise
him. The Lord hath put him to grief
when the Lord shall make his soul an offering for sin. This is, you know, the substitutionary
suffering under death of Christ is the work of the Father. But what he's saying here in
this verse, when he says that he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities, all of this, and when he says
that we esteemed him not, but our estimation of Christ by nature,
is that when he went to the cross he got what he deserved because
he was a blasphemer, a malefactor, a criminal, a sinner. And that's what he's saying here
is we esteemed him stricken, smitten of God. That's why they
put upon the cross, they looked at him upon the cross as a malefactor. And you know, before that, the
Pharisees called him a blasphemer. So yes, he was smitten of God,
but in the natural way of looking at it through us and our sinfulness,
we thought that he was a criminal, that he was a blasphemer, an
idolater. This man called himself God,
and only a blasphemer would do that. Now we know the reality,
that he is God. He is the great I Am. But we
esteemed him to be a sinner. That's why when I hear people
today talking about how Christ was made a sinner, that is just
sickening to me. It's distasteful to me. So yes,
he was smitten of the Father because of our sins imputed to
him. And what he was doing was the work of God. But look at
verse five. But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was
bruised for our iniquities. That word bruised means crushed. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was tormented, that word is. He suffered for our transgressions
and then he died for our iniquities. Now again, it's the language
of imputation. How could he suffer justly of
his father if he was a perfect man? And he was. You may have
heard the word impeccable. If you don't know what that word
means, it means he could not sin. He was incapable of sinning. He could not be turned into sin
or transformed into anything sinful. He's the impeccable Christ. As he was wounded for our transgressions,
the Bible says that he was the pure, spotless Lamb of God. So here we have our transgressions,
our iniquities imputed to him, and here's the result, look at
verse five. The chastisement, that's punishment, and in this
case, you know, our chastisements are not punishment in the sense
of paying for sins. It's punishment in the sense
of learning and growing. But his chastisement was to pay
for our sins, to redeem us. And the chastisement of our peace
was upon him. That peace that comes between
God and sinners, God reconciled to his elect and his elect reconciled
to him. That peace, the punishment under
death that was required to bring about that peace was upon Christ. It's not upon you. It's not upon
me. And what had to happen in order
to establish that peace? It had to be a propitiation,
a sin-bearing sacrifice who brings satisfaction, and righteousness
had to be the result. Righteousness and peace have
kissed each other, Psalm 85 says. Without righteousness, there's
no peace. There's only death, only adversity. But Christ is
our peace. He made peace by the blood of
His cross. And His righteousness has imputed
us so that we have life from God to reconcile us to Him. God's reconciled us to God. That's what 2 Corinthians 5 is
about. The ground of reconciliation.
Christ made sin. Us made the righteousness of
God in Him. And that's imputation. It says that our peace, the chastisement
of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes, with his stripes,
we're healed. You know, charismatics today
take that verse and apply it to physical healing. Well, if
that applies to physical healing, I want to tell you something.
If it does, Christ is a failure. That is. Now, they'll say something
like this. They'll say, well, I know he's
not a failure, but you are, because you don't believe in that. Now
how can you take this beautiful passage of Scripture, which is
talking about eternal salvation, spiritual healing, and turn it
into something that is so, how would you call it, so low as
that? Because you don't know Him. You
don't see the glory of God in the face of Christ. You don't
know His righteousness. We are healed spiritually. 100% sins because because the Lord
laid upon him the iniquity of us all and Because all that happened
and because with his stripes were healed Sin cannot be charged
to us Now we still feel the effects of sin in our physical bodies
this body is dead because of sin But we're physically we're
spiritually healed one day. We will be physically healed
completely healed when we go to be with him. And so he says
in verse seven, he was oppressed. Or verse six, all we like sheep
have gone astray. That's the state of all of God's
elect by nature. Lost sheep, that's what we are. Dumb old sheep. We can't find
our way home. We have turned everyone to his
own way. We got a lot of ways, and we
turned to all of them, but none of them's the right way. There's
a way that seemeth right in the eyes of men. It's the way of
death. And the Lord hath laid on him.
The Lord hath made the iniquity of us all to meet on him. The
iniquity of us all, all his sheep, all of his elect. Our sins were
imputed to him. Verse seven, he was oppressed
and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. You know, He did speak even when
He was on the cross. Seven beautiful sayings. But
what this means is that when we accused Him and He was taken
to court, He didn't open His mouth to defend Himself. He didn't
argue. He knew what He was about to
do. He did it willingly. Think about that. All this that
He's going through, He was a willing participant. And he opened not
his mouth. He's brought as a lamb to the
slaughter, the Lamb of God. Behold the Lamb of God. And as
a sheep before her shears is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.
And let me read, I'm gonna start here next week in verse eight.
But it says, 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.
Now this verse eight is sometimes a little bit difficult to understand. But as I said, he did not speak
to defend himself. He knew the sins of God's people
were imputed to him, laid to him. He came here for that purpose,
to die for our sins. His life was taken away in a
violent manner, under a pretense of justice, taken from prison
and from judgment. But men wrongfully accused him. We accused him of being a malefactor,
all of that. All of the events of Christ's
death were by the sovereign predestined purpose and work of God. And
he got the job done. We'll pick up there next week
on this. All right.