imagine with me that in preparation
for our gathering for this worship service this morning, I had spoken
to the chairman of our deacons and asked him if he would do
me a favor. And that favor was to make sure
that one of the deacons would secure a number of little notepads
and an equal number of ballpoint pens. and that he would instruct
the ushers that at this point in the service they were to come
down the aisles and distribute one of those notepads and one
of those pens to everyone gathered here who's able to write, not
give it out to the little kids as a scribble pad, but as something
that would be useful for the ministry. And sure enough, with
their Thankfully, predictable efficiency, Mr. Davies has secured
the notepads and the pencils and duly instructed the ushers,
and right now they've come down the aisle, passed them out, and
each one of you now has in his lap a lovely little notepad and
your own ballpoint pen. And then I were to say to you
that I'm going to ask you two questions, and I'm going to give
you three minutes. to answer each one of those questions
in your own way and write it down on your notepad. My two
questions were these. Question number one, what is
the Bible? Simple question. What is this
big, usually black, sometimes red, blue-covered book that you
carry and bring to church called the Bible? What is the Bible? And he gives you three minutes
to think and write. And so you start thinking. What
is the Bible? One minute's gone already. Oh,
we're coming up on two minutes. I'd better write my answer. What
would you write on your notepad? Then I said, time's up, question
number two. Question number two is this. Why was the Bible given to us? What is the purpose of the Bible? You've got the question, now
think, now write. So you start thinking. And lo
and behold, a minute passes, two minutes, oh, oh, three minutes
coming up, got to write. Why was it given to us? Now,
I said, every one of you take your own pad, nobody looking
over anyone else's shoulder. I want you to grade your answer
yourself. And so we take up question number
one, what is the Bible? And if you look down at your
notepad and you found something like this, the Bible is God's
Word, or the Bible is God's Word written, or the Bible is the
written revelation of the mind and will of God, or the Bible
is God's Word in the words of men. Anything like that, I'd
say give yourself an A. For that is what the Bible is.
For the Bible says of itself, all Scripture, that is, all that
is Bible, is given by inspiration, literally, by the out-breathing
of God. Or in the language of Peter,
holy men spoke, and by inference wrote, as they were carried along
by the Holy Spirit. So the Bible is the Word of God
written. written through men, the Word
of God in the language of men, but it is the Word of God, carrying
all the authority of God Himself, so that what Scripture says,
God says. And you give yourself an A if
you're anywhere in that ballpark. But now the second question.
Why was the Bible given to us? You might have a little more
trouble with that. But if you had anything close to this answer,
you'd get an A as well. That the Bible is God's revelation
concerning the things we need to know and believe about Himself
and ourselves and His salvation in order to be ready to live,
prepared to die, and fit to go to judgment. That's why the Bible
was given. And again, the Bible tells us
that. In 2 Timothy chapter 3, Paul says to Timothy, from a
babe, from a nursing child, you've known the sacred writings, the
Bible, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through
faith that is in Christ Jesus. The Bible, which is God's holy
Word, is given to teach us what we need to know about Himself,
ourself, and His salvation to be fit to live, ready to die,
and prepared to go to judgment. But the Bible is a big book,
and it's a complex book in many places. It is a book that contains
some very strange means of communicating the mind and will of God. If
you were to first encounter the Bible and open up to Ezekiel
1 and the early chapters of Ezekiel and you saw wheels within wheels
and fiery this and all the rest, you say, I can't make sense out
of this book. Or if you were to open to the
book of the Revelation and you were to read about dragons and
beasts coming up out of the sea with ten horns, you'd say, what
in the world is this all about? But you see, if we read it carefully
from beginning to end, we will come to the conviction that it
is indeed God's Revelation, God's Word, in order to teach us all
we need to know about Himself. about ourselves and about His
salvation to be ready to live, to die, and prepared for judgment. But here's one of the wonderful
things. Along the way, along the way, in the midst of Ezekiel's
wheels and burning fire and John's beast coming up out of the sea
with tails and all the rest, God has given us some lovely
little statements that are like rare perfumes. They give us the
distilled essence of the whole message of the Bible. And God
has kindly and lovingly put into some simple statements along
the way the distilled essence of the whole message of the Bible. And it's one of those passages
that we're going to study together this morning. If you want to
know what the Bible is all about, master this one verse. And you have got a handle on
what the Bible's all about. You say, well, pastor, come off
it. I'm not kidding you. It's the
truth. I wouldn't lie to you. If ever I'm going to lie, I certainly
wouldn't lie from a pulpit. One verse, which, if you get
hold of its teaching, you have a hold on the heart of the whole
message of the Bible. And you know where that verse
is found? In the chapter I read in your hearing, Isaiah chapter
53 and verse 6. Isaiah chapter 53 and verse 6. And we're going to park and sit
down with this verse as our companion that we might grasp, some of
you, for the first time, what is the Bible all about. And for
many of you, I hope it will be a wonderful refresher course.
and be a little example of how you can use this verse as you
seek to acquaint others with what the Bible is all about. Isaiah 53 and verse 6. All we, like sheep, have gone
astray. We have turned every one to his
own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us Here
in this verse are two basic, major divisions of thought. They lie right on the surface.
You don't need to know one letter of the Hebrew alphabet. You don't
need to know much about grammar. It's right there for us to clean
it. Look at it. First of all, we
have the bad news of our desperate condition in sin. We have the
bad news of our desperate condition in sin. Look at it. All we right
sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his
own way. That is the bad news of our desperate
condition in sin. And then we have, secondly, the
good news of a gracious provision for sin. And the Lord has laid
on him the iniquity of us all. So those are the two obvious
divisions of thought. Man in the misery and danger
of his sin. God in the marvelous manifestation
of His grace and of His mercy. So let's unpack that. We want
to get a hold on the whole message of the Bible as it's squeezed
into this text of Scripture. First of all, then, the bad news. of our desperate condition in
sin. And you know what happens the
minute I say that? There's a temptation to do two
things that are naughty. You better not do them. There's
a temptation to do two things, to pull a shade and to make arrows. You say, the poor old man's...
There's a temptation, the minute you hear the word sin, and you
hear the word our sin, there's a temptation to pull a shade
and to make arrows. You know what I mean by that?
Just this. Jesus said this is the condemnation, that light
has come into the world and men love darkness rather than light,
because their deeds are evil, neither will they come to the
light, lest their deeds should be reproved. And when you hear
that this verse is going to talk about your condition in sin,
you have a temptation with the fingers of your soul to reach
out to a triple-laminated, room-darkening shade and pull it down and say,
no way is anybody going to get inside of me and show me my sin. And I plead with you, resist
the temptation to go shade-pulling. to go shade-pulling, or you may
have the temptation to go arrow-making. And what do I mean by that? Well,
in John chapter 7, Jesus, speaking to his own half-brothers, said,
These very insightful words And they are repeated again and again
in the experience of the servants of Christ. Jesus said in John
chapter 7 verse 7, The world cannot hate you, but me it hates,
because I testify of it, that its works are evil. Jesus said,
You know why people hate me? It's because I pull the shade
up. And you're going to be tempted
to make arrows and aim them at this man. because he's going
to be God's instrument to help you see your sin. And our natural
reaction to anyone that shows us our sin is to shoot arrows
and to hate them. But my dear friend, I plead with
you this morning. Resist the shade-pulling, arrow-making
tendency of your heart. A servant of God of another generation
said, The man that loves you most is the man that tells you
the most truth about yourself. Think of that for a minute. Suppose
you hadn't had a general physical checkup for a long time. And
I mean, you feel so healthy, you make everyone else sick. You go, last time you had your
cholesterol check, 120, and you eat ice cream every night and
eggs every morning and all. You feel healthy as a horse.
But you haven't had a general checkup for a long time. You
say, hey, I ought to go and get examined from stem to stern.
My company is providing one of these wellness centers where
you can go and get CAT scan and MRIs and every kind of blood
test and every kind of scan imaginable. And you say, well, the company's
going to pay for it. I haven't had a general checkup for a while.
I feel healthy as art, but I'll go anyway. So you go. And you
get scanned. head to toe, from toe back to
head, inside, outside. They did everything but open
you up and pull your liver out and put it on the table in front
of you. However, however, though you feel as healthy as a horse,
the scans reveal that you have a major mass in one of your critical
internal organs. You don't feel a thing, but you've
got a major And the blood tests and the scans and all the diagnostic
tests indicate this is an aggressive mass, but it's the kind if it
is dealt with, with radical surgery, there's a 95% survival rate. Now let me ask you something.
You don't feel anything's wrong with you. You feel healthy as
a horse. If that doctor really loves you,
what's he going to do? Is he going to say, oh, well, I hate
to confront him with the nasty C-word. I mean, this guy came
bopping in the office. I mean, he's going to get a big
long face. He's going to get the sweats.
He's going to get all upset. I'll just tell him he is exactly
what he feels like, healthy as a horse. I ask you, does that
doctor have an ounce of real love for that patient? No, he
loves himself. And, my friend, I want to be
a faithful doctor this morning, because whether you feel it or
not, you have a malignant mass that will drag you to hell unless
it is excised by the power of the gospel. And I want to begin
by helping you to face God's diagnosis of you. And that's why we're going to
start with the bad news of our desperate condition in sin. Now, how does God set it before
us? Well, look at your Bible, and
you'll see that He does so in two ways. He does so, first of
all, by a vivid picture of our desperate condition. All we,
like sheep, have gone astray. And then, by a blunt assertion
of our desperate condition, we have turned every one of us to
his own way. So we have a vivid picture and
a blunt assertion, a vivid picture of our corporate condition. Oh,
we like sheep have gone astray. And then a blunt assertion of
our individual condition. We have turned each one of us
to his own way. See? It's right there in the
Bible. Let's unpack them for a few moments. First of all,
the bad news of our desperate condition in sin is to be seen
in terms of this vivid picture of our desperate condition. The prophet compares our condition
in sin to something that would have been very familiar to his
readers and his hearers. They were an agrarian society. They knew what sheep were. Many
of you will live and die and the only time you saw a sheep
was at Turtle Back Zoo. let alone see a flock of sheep.
You never saw a flock of sheep. You've had no opportunity to
observe the interaction between shepherd and sheep, and sheep
and shepherd, and all of those things. So if you're going to
understand those biblical passages that refer to them, you've got
to study the commentaries and people that describe what Eastern
pastoral life was like. Well, Isaiah uses the imagery
of pastor and flock several times in his prophecy, and here he
says, all of us like one vast flock of sheep have gone astray. And when he used that vivid imagery,
that vivid picture, what was he underscoring? He was underscoring
the fact that all of humanity, without exception, are part of
one vast flock of sheep that have strayed and have strayed
in such a way that they have exposed themselves to danger
and to destruction, to predatory beasts and to starvation. For sheep who stray from their
rightful shepherd, and his guidance and his protection and his care
are the most vulnerable of all domestic animals. And so he says,
all we, like one vast flock of sheep, have gone astray? And what realities does that
vivid picture underscore and identify? Well, let me just speak
of two of them. First, we have strayed from God
Himself as the object of our supreme desire and our supreme
delight. We have strayed from God Himself
as the object of our supreme desire and delight. All of us,
like sheep, have gone astray. And when a flock of sheep goes
astray, it leaves its rightful shepherd and the intimate relationship
between the sheep and the shepherd. And likewise, when the prophet
says, All we, like sheep, have gone astray, he is underscoring
the biblical truth that each and every one of Adam's sons
and daughters have strayed from God Himself as the object of
their supreme desire and delight. You and I, as creatures made
in the image of God, we were made that we might find our greatest
delight and our true identity in intimate, unbroken, face-to-face
communion with God. When we open up the early chapters
of Genesis before the entrance of sin, it is evident that Adam
and Eve and God were perfectly compatible with one another. There was blissful, mutual contentment. God is content with the man and
the woman. It says He beheld all that He
made, and behold, it was very God. And Adam and Eve were perfectly,
blissfully content with God. What He had given them, what
He had made them, the tasks assigned to them, the limits that He placed
upon them, of all of the trees you may freely eat, but of that
one tree in the midst of the garden you shall not eat of it.
In the day you eat, you will die. And the picture there in
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 is that of exquisite mutual delight,
perfect compatibility between God and the creature made in
His image, blissful mutual contentment one with another. And that was
the crowning glory of man. Adam and Eve, unlike the beasts
whose constitution and functions reflect the wisdom and the power
and the love and the tender care of God for His creation and His
creatures and for man, man was made with a capacity that no
cow even in Eden ever had. Adam could see a sunset. and
with breathless wonder throw up his hands and say, Oh, God,
what a majestic God you are! And something of your majesty
and beauty is mirrored in the sunset. The cow looks up at the
same sunset and goes, No! No capacity! No capacity to see and perceive
the handiwork of God. to be thrilled with God, to be
ecstatic with the wonder of being a creature who can know God,
and commune with God, and talk to God, and who can hear God
talk to him. That is the horror of sin, that
when the prophet says, Oh, we like sheep have gone astray,
we have gone astray from God Himself. as this object of our
supreme desire and delight? What is the first commandment?
Jesus answered that question. They were trying Him to try to
get Him involved in rabbinical discussions and debates. And
they said, Master, what's the great commandment? He said, The
first and great commandment is this. You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart. with all your mind, with all
your soul, and with all your strength. And you see, that commandment
for Adam and Eden was not a burden. That was the open door to His
delight and the exquisite joy of being God's creature made
in God's image. And the greatest criminal act
of the human race was to turn from God as the object of that
passionate supreme love. with heart, mind, soul, and strength. In Romans chapter 3, he's giving
a summary statement starting in verse 9 to verse 18. In verse 11, he says this, There
is none that seeks after God. There is none that seeks after
God. The only creature except the
angels made with a capacity to know God, to seek Him with delight,
to experience personal, intimate communion with Him, there is
none that seeks after God. Why? All we like sheep have gone
astray. Gone astray from God as the object
of our supreme desire and delight. But then, secondly, we've strayed
from the law of God as the governing rule of our lives. We've gone
astray from God and His law as the governing rule of our lives.
You see, when the sheep leave the side of the shepherd, they
leave the shepherd's and the shepherd going before them and
leading them and directing them. They lead the government of the
shepherd. And when the prophet says, All
we like sheep have gone astray, gone astray not only from God
as the object of our desire and delight, but from His law as
the governing rule of life. so that Paul in Romans 8-7 had
to write these sad words. The carnal mind, that is, the
disposition, the governing disposition of the soul of every man or woman
by nature until transformed by supernatural grace, the carnal
mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law
of God, neither, indeed, Can it be? What a horrible state, but it's
true. The governing disposition of
every one of our souls by nature is enmity itself. It doesn't
say the carnal mind is at enmity. The text says the carnal mind
is enmity itself, nothing but enmity against God. And how does
it show its enmity against God? by denying the existence of God
and trying to be an atheist? Or what someone called, I read
last week, you know what an agnostic is? Someone says, I don't know.
That's just a polite atheist. The text says this. It shows
its enmity by its insubordination to God's law. It may admit the
existence of God. It may give lip service to God
as creator and governor of His world. But when it comes to the
government of my world, God, mind your business. My world
is my world. It is not subject to the law
of God. God's law that says we are to love Him supremely. You
will have no other gods before me. The sanctity of His being. You are to worship in my way
alone. Second commandment. Third commandment. You are to
honor my name. Fourth commandment. Honor my
day. It goes on to speak of the sanctity of instituted government
honoring father and mother, the sanctity of life, sex, possessions,
truth, and the sanctity of the heart. And wherever God says,
Thou shalt, the human heart says, I will not. And wherever God
says, Thou shalt not, the human heart says, I will, because it
is enmity against God. When the prophet said, All we
like sheep have gone astray, All we, like sheep, have gone
astray. This is what is bound up in the
statement. The bad news of our desperate
condition locked up in this vivid picture of that condition. A
vast flock of sheep who have gone astray from God. But then, secondly, notice this
blunt assertion of our desperate condition. Look at it. We have
turned everyone to his own way. You see, from the corporate collective
picture of the whole human race like a vast flock of sheep, he
now individualizes. Let me illustrate it this way.
Whenever you've been involved in a group picture, and the group
picture gets posted in the office, or gets passed around, what's
the first thing you look for? Come on, be honest. What's the
first thing you look for? Your cousin Josie? Your Uncle
Harry? No, no. You look for yourself,
right? I could ask, how many of you
are going to be honest and admit it? Okay. All right. That's what
we do. Now that's what we've got to
do with this passage. All we like sheep have gone astray.
That's the wide angle lens. There's the whole human race
encompassed in that lens. Now we get the super zoom lens
and there's only one person in the picture. That's you. That's
me. We have turned every one of us
to his own way, from the generic imagery to the specific individual
blunt pronouncement, we have turned every one of us to His
own way. Now notice, if the text had said
we have turned every one of us to idolatry, to profanity, to
murder, to adultery, to thievery, He might rise up and say, that's
not true of me. Now eventually, if you search
the law of God deep enough in your own heart with enough honesty,
you say, I'm guilty. But in terms of the actual, external,
visible expressions of how you show your identity as a strange
sheep, This is the common denominator of every one of us. Each one
of us has his own way of straying. Each one of us has his own individual
pattern in which we express our enmity to God and our alienation
from God. We have our own custom-made path
of self-indulgence. The New Testament counterpart
of this text is 2 Corinthians 5.15, where the apostle says,
"...and that Christ died for all that they who live should
no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes
died and rose again." He assumes that every Corinthian, no matter
what his individual pattern of sinful life was before conversion,
Here was the common denominator, living unto self. Why do some
people become self-righteous, very religious, polite, nice,
useful people in the community, but strangers to God's grace,
strangers to their sin and their need of Christ, strangers to
repentance and faith? Because that pleases them. It
may be a combination of genetic factors and training and upbringing
and culture. They feel comfortable living
unto themselves in a path of polite, self-righteous, religious
community service. Some people become outright heathens.
throwing themselves on the crest of every sensuous pleasure until
they are the object of the disgust of 90% of even the world. And why do they do it? Because
that pleases them. Genetic factors, factors of contacts
and influences and involvements, all kinds of things you see may
flow in to make your tailor-made self-centered life, but at the
bottom you live to please yourself. And you weren't made to live
to please yourself. You weren't made that your life
be regulated by what I want, when I want it, why I want it,
how I want it. I'm going to live for myself. And the prophet says, this is
bad news, but this is accurate news. Always, like sheep that
have gone astray, we have turned every one of us, without exception,
to his own way. If you ask the question, well,
how does God look upon all this? Well, I want you to know God
doesn't look upon it with a kind of accommodating indulgence.
It says, well, you know, boys will be boys, human beings will
be sinners. No, He doesn't look upon it with
a kind of accommodating indulgence. He doesn't look upon it with
an unprincipled indifference, like an old nearsighted doting
old grandpa, that the grandkids can get away with it. They love
to go visit grandpa because they can get away with murder. That's not God. He's not an unprincipled,
indifferent grandpa. He's not an accommodating, indulgent
man. No. Look what He did with our
first parents. He drove them out of Eden and
pronounced the sentence of death. Sweat of the brow. in the process of mothering. What did He do when men's straying
became so aggravated and their living unto self so aggravated
that the earth is full of violence and indifference to the norms
of God? God blotted out the whole human
race except one family, eight people He spared. That's what
God thinks about this straying and this living unto self. when
it came to an aggravated expression in the City of the Plains where
people said, my body's my own. This was the first citywide,
townwide, area-wide expression of aggressive, militant, homosexual
philosophy and patterns of life. Our bodies are our own. We'll
do what we will with them. Nobody's going to tell us. God
says, we'll see. God sends fire out of heaven to consume the
Cities of the Plains. He has a nation that he's nurtured
and cared for, entered into covenant with them, showered them with
blessings innumerable. They won't obey God, and God
says, okay. He destroys their temple, sends
them into captivity for 70 years. A few hundred years later, he
lets the Roman armies destroy their temple and dismantle their
nation and leave it in rubble. And then the Bible has a doctrine
of a place called hell. My friends, sitting here this
morning, God does not take lightly the reality, bound up in this
bad news, of our condition in sin. The soul that sins, it shall
die. The wages of sin is death. You are of purer eyes than to
look upon iniquity. These are the statements of God's
infallible Word. That's the bad news. There was a bishop in the Anglican
Church who said these very profound
words. The first step on the road to heaven is to know that
we are by nature on the road to hell. The first step on the
road to heaven is to know that by nature we are on the road
to hell. I ask you, has this reality ever
become an all-consuming obsession of your own mind and soul? Has
the truth of the bad news of your condition in sin ever become
the thing that blocks out all other things, so that day and
night, whenever your mind could be free from any other responsibility,
only one thing mattered. God Almighty has a controversy
with me. I stand under His wrath. He could
cut me off any moment, and I'd drop into hell. Until it becomes the grand obsession,
and you take it seriously, my friend, the devil will gladly
cooperate with you to make anything and everything else the matter
of your obsession. Guys, gals, face, form, fun,
the latest movie, the latest video, the latest this, the latest
that, anything but to get you to think soberly about your true
condition. He's so mad at God, he's determined
to take as many of God's creatures to hell with him. And the grand
weapon he uses is to get you to be obsessed with everything
but the one thing that ought to be the obsession of your mind.
How can I be right with God? And what I'm trying to do this
morning with all my heart and with my Bible open before me
and with illustration and with analogy and whatever else I can
do is to break the spell by which the devil has got some of you
like this. He stands in the wings even while
I'm preaching, laughing to himself. I've got so-and-so sitting there
in Trinity Church and the preacher is up there pouring out his heart.
And I've got him thinking about this, thinking about that, thinking
about the other, deflecting this, deflecting that. And the devil
stands in the wings, and with hellish glee he gloats that he's
got you. But, oh, my dear lost friend,
I want to un-get you. The first step to heaven is to
come to grips and take seriously that by nature you're on the
road to hell. But thank God our text is not
only a text It has the bad news of our desperate condition in
sin, but secondly, consider with me the good news of a gracious
provision for sin. All we, like sheep that have
gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and, and,
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. This is good news, good news
of a gracious provision for sin. And I want you to see two things
about the good news, just like we saw two things about the bad
news, two things about the good news. Number one, note the author
of this provision for sin. Note who the author is. And the
Lord. You see, when they're talking
about us, it's bad news. Good news comes when you talk about
the Lord, Jehovah, the Great I Am. He, the offended God, has
taken the initiative to do something about our condition in sin, so
that the author of this good news and this gracious provision
is the offended God Himself. We are going to hear about something
that God has done. in the face of the bad news of
our sinful condition. And the Lord has laid on Him
the iniquity of us all. You want to have a good little
rule of thumb by which to assess any religious system that professes
to be good for your soul, ask yourself this question. Does
it tell me what God has done? Or does it tell me what I can
do and I have done? There's the acid test. Every
false religion starts with man and terminates upon man. God
only comes in as something ancillary to what man can do to lift himself
up, what man can do to fill his heart with pride that he has
accomplished his own salvation. Whether it's sitting cross-legged
with closed eyes and learning the mantras of a Buddhist system
of mind control and drawing near to whatever's out there and getting
in touch with it, it's man reaching upward, man creating his own
ladder to heaven. Whereas God's provision is just
that. It is God's provision. It is
God breaking in to the human condition. And that's the pervasive
emphasis from Genesis to Revelation. Once man has sinned, alienated
himself from God and runs to hide in bushes, who takes the
initiative? You don't have Adam coming out
of the bushes saying, Oh God, you know, I ran from you, I sinned,
and I feel some emptiness and some ache in here, and God, I
want to seek you. No, he's running and hiding in
the bushes. And it says, God comes to him and says, Adam,
where are you, Adam? And God finds him, and then God
says, I'm going to do something. I'm going to put enmity between
the serpent and the woman. Between the serpent seed and
the woman seed, I am going to break up this alignment. Adam,
Eve, you have aligned yourself with the devil. You would be
aligned with him in time and in eternity, but I am not going
to let you do it. Hallelujah! I am going to break
up the enmity. I am going to do it. I will put
the enmity. And that is biblical religion
from Genesis 3.15 to Revelation. God so loved the world. that He gave His only begotten
Son. God commendeth His own love to
us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Ephesians 2, 1-3 describes our
wretched condition. But then verse 4 says, But God,
who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved
This provision has God as its initiator, God as its author. But then look at the method of
this provision. What is the method? And here
we've got to put on our thinking caps and marshal our faculties
to think. Look at the text. And the Lord,
He's the author, has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. You may have a Bible that has
in the marginal reading, he hath made to light on him. Both of
those translations are weak. Men who know the Hebrew language
thoroughly, and I'm not one of them, tell us that the word used
here should be translated, the Lord hath made to hit or to strike
violently upon him. That the word has the concept,
I lay I laid this on the pulpit. I
gently laid it. You take the little one, and
you lay the little one in the crib. It's not that the Lord
laid our sins upon Him. No. There was something violent
in the activity of God. The Lord hath made to strike
violently on Him the iniquity of us all. Now, we've got to
think. Who is the Him? To whom does this pronoun refer? Jehovah does something to Him
that is the very heart of His provision for sin. What is it?
Who is He? Well, if we look back to the
preceding verses, verses 4 and 5, we don't get any real clue. Surely He has borne our griefs. He was wounded for our transgressions,
but He's not identified. We go back to 53, 1 to 3, who
has believed our report. Verse 2, He grew up before Him. Verse 3, He was despised and
rejected. He was despised, but who is He?
Who is the He? Who is the He to which all these
pronouns refer? Well, that's why I began the
reading with verse 13. of chapter 52. There He is identified. Here is the subject of all the
he's of the following verses. Behold My servant. Behold My servant. It is the servant of Jehovah. And when Jesus was in the days
of His flesh, He took several of these passages in which God
speaks of His servant and He applied them directly to Himself
without embarrassment and without equivocation. The servant of
Jehovah applied the passages directly to Himself. So, the
hymn of verse 6 is none other than Jesus. the Jesus of the
gospel records, the Jesus of supernatural conception in Mary's
womb, where eternal deity, the eternal Word, took to Himself
a true, rational human soul and body, and was constituted the
theanthropic person, that is, the true God-man, two distinct
natures in the one person forever. The hymn of verse 6 is none other
than the God-man, Christ Jesus, the one who grew through every
stage of human development, grew in wisdom, stature, favor with
God and man, Luke 2.52, was tempted of the devil, validated his identity
with his miracles, was hung upon a cross, rose the third day from
the dead. This is the hymn of verse 6. Now, think with me carefully.
If the author of this provision is God Himself, what is the method
of this provision? The method is nothing other than
the substitutionary sin-bearing of the servant of Jehovah. The
substitutionary sin-bearing of the servant of Jehovah. Since Jesus is the Him, the provision
for sin is made by God the Father causing to strike, to hit violently
the servant of Jehovah. not for any sin of His own, for
the Scripture says He was holy, harmless, undefiled and separate
from sinners. And in this very passage we read
in verse 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. Verse 10. It pleased
the Lord to bruise Him. He has put Him to grief. What
is the method of God's dealing with our sin? It is nothing less
than the substitutionary sin-bearing of the servant of Jehovah. Now,
you know what that means. I want to say it as simply as
I can without touching in any way the mystery and the profound
mind-boggling reality. Hear me carefully. You will never
understand how God has made provision for your sin unless in your mind,
when you read about Jesus dying, you get beyond what the Jewish
leaders did to Him, what Judas did to Him, what the soldiers
did to Him, what the mocking cloud did to Him in their feverish,
frenzied, brutal, cruel, sadistic treatment of our Lord. As horrific
as that is, hear me, my friend, until you see beyond what men
did and what He suffered at the hands of men, you will never
understand. God's provision for your straying,
for your living unto yourself. For the provision is found not
in what men did to Him, but what in God the Father did to Him. Until you grasp what the Father
did to the Son in all of the agony and in all the horrific
terrifying events surrounding the cross. You will never see
and grasp God's provision for your sin. What did God the Father
do? We read, verse 10, it pleased
the Lord to bruise Him. He has put Him to grief. Did the Father come out of heaven
and take a cloud and physically bruise His Son? Did the Father,
in the realm of the external events of the cross, do something
that caused Him grief? No. It was in the unseen world
of spiritual reality that the Father bruised Him, that the
Father put Him to grief. And perhaps it will help you
if I explain it this way. You remember Jesus was in the
garden praying with His disciples. Judas comes with the mob from
the high priest and the soldiers and they arrest him, they bind
him. From that moment when he was bound, dragged off to the
high priest and then to Pilate and then off to Herod and back
to Pilate and then to Sanhedrin and then tied to a stake and then he was
cruelly scourged Then the cross beam was laid upon his shoulders
and he was taken out and executed on the cross. From his being
arrested and apprehended in the garden until he was hung upon
the cross and his lifeless body was taken down and placed in
a borrowed tomb, he appeared in only one visage, only one
appearance before anyone looking on the scene. And you know what
that was? It was the posture, that's the word I'm fighting
for, it was the posture of a condemned felon. If you had been standing
halfway between the garden and the high priest's palace where
he was taken after they apprehended him and bound him, you'd say,
there goes an apprehended criminal. He's in handcuffs. He's been
dragged off to the police station. And when you see them interrogating
him, when you see them then mocking him, the crown of thorns, the
scourging, you say, there is a guilty criminal. Then when
you see him dragged out, the nails placed in his hands and
in his feet and lifted up and executed in an execution reserved
for the scum of society. No decent Roman citizen was executed
by crucifixion. You see, there is not only a
guilty criminal, but the worst of criminals. His whole posture
before the visible sight of anyone who saw any part or all of this
is, this is a guilty criminal. Now among the many reasons God
permitted that, here's one of them. God was demonstrating in
the theater of the visible what was in reality going on in the
theater of the invisible. In that invisible realm where
God dwells, and where our sins are recorded, and where God's
justice burns against sin, and where His righteousness and holiness
demand the punishment of sin, God is saying, My Son is the
guiltiest of all criminals. And I will treat Him as such.
And while men brutalize Him and hang Him on a cross, the Father
is bruising Him. The Father is putting Him to
grief. Why? Because He is making to strike
violently upon His Son the punishment due to you and to me for our
straying and for our turning to our own way. And when our
sins, not in their defiling influence, for the Son of God was never
more pure than when He was most guilty, never more undefiled
than when He was laid in with the sins of the world. No, He is charged with the guilt
and the hell-deservingness of our sins. And when He is charged
with them, the Father sits in court robed in His robes of pure
justice. And He takes His place upon His
throne of inflexible, eternal, unbending justice. And before
Him stands a criminal laden with the multitudes of the sins of
a great multitude whom no man can number. And while the father
sits in court and his son stands before him, laden with those
sins, the father bruises him. The father puts him to grief.
The father pours into the soul of his son the felt experience
of hell. What is hell? Depart from me! Depart from me! Depart from me! source of all light and love
and grace and mercy, be swallowed up in the bitterness of all that
is opposite to love and grace and mercy. The Father bruised
Him until the Son, who bore silently all the indignities that men
could heap upon Him, in the hours when the heavens were shrouded
in blackness, the Son could bear no more. And toward the end of
those three hours, as the Father was bruising Him and the Father
was putting Him to grief, from the depths of His holy soul were
run those words, My God, My God, why have You abandoned Me? Hell is abandoned. The Father bruised Him. The Father
put Him to grief. When you shall make His soul
an offering for sin. My friend, that's what your sin
looks like to God. That's what my sin looks like
to God. All that I have been and done and am as a straying
sheep, as one who turned to his own way, what's it look like
to God? Go to Golgotha. Go to Golgotha and look beyond
the contused, bruised, bleeding, battered body of Jesus and hear
the cry, My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? How can
I preach it without being swallowed up in tears of grief? Would my
sin put Him to death? My sin, my sin caused His cry. I know of no Christian hymn that
captures this biblical truth more powerfully, more graphically,
than the hymn by Annie Cousin, in which she likens Christ's
experience at the hands of His Father to a vast burden, to a
full cup of wrath, to a rod to a tempest and to a sword. And this is what she wrote. O
Christ, what burdens bowed Thy head! Our load was laid on Thee. Thou stoodest in the sinner's
stead. It's bare all ill for me. A victim led, Thy blood was shed. Now there's no load for me. Death and the curse were in our
cup. O Christ, was full for Thee,
but Thou hast drained the last dark drop. It is empty now for
me. That bitter cup, love, drank
it up. Now blessings draft for me. Jehovah lifted up His rod. O
Christ, it fell on Thee. Thou wast sore stricken of Thy
God. There's not one stroke for me. Thy tears, Thy blood beneath
it flowed. Thy bruising healeth me. The tempest awful voice was heard. O Christ, it broke on Thee. Thy open bosom was my ward. It braved the storm for me. Thy form was scarred. Thy visage
marred. Now cloudless peace for me. Jehovah bade his sword awake. O Christ, it woke against Thee. Thy blood the flaming blade must
slake. Thy heart its sheath must be. All for my sake, my peace to
make, now sleeps that sword for me. Ah, my dear friend, if you
can hear of such a Savior, and say, I still want to be a straying
sheep. I still want to have my own way. What can God do who loves His
Son but send you to hell? I ask you, what can God do who
loves His Son but banish you if you treat with scorn such
mercy and such grace? In my preparation I came across
a marvelous quote from John Calvin on this passage, and with this
I close. God was not satisfied with sending
his son once for all, exposing him to death, and smiting him
with his wrath, though he loved him as his only begotten son.
For although it seemed as if he wanted to overwhelm him completely,
he showed extreme severity against him, yet he was always the well-beloved
son, as we have said, and it all took place that we might
be forgiven. He was not, I say, satisfied
with that, but he daily sets before us this treasure, that
we may enjoy it. He declares to us that Jesus
Christ, who once had His side pierced, today has His heart
open, as it were, that we may have assurance of that love that
He bears to us. And as He once had His arms fastened
to the cross, He now has them wide open to draw us to Himself. My friend, in the light of the
Good News, what are you to do? The Bible's answer is clear.
Repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Turn from that
living of a life independent of God, which can bring you nothing
but misery now and misery in the age to come. Turn from that
life of living unto yourself. Throw yourself down at the feet
of this Savior who lives and with open arms says, Come to
me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn
of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart. You will find rest
to your souls, for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Yes, there is a yoke, there is
a burden, but it is the yoke and the burden of the one who
died for us. and who lays upon us nothing
but that for which we were made, to know God, to commune with
God, to glorify God, to serve God in the light of His law and
His word. The whole Bible condensed in
one verse. The bad news of our desperate
condition in sin. All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his
own way. but the good news of a gracious
provision for sin. And the Lord has laid on Him
the iniquity of us all. In the early hours of this morning,
my prayer was, O God, if the gospel is the power of God unto
salvation, and I believe it is, O God, this day bring some within
the orbit of its power. who will mark this day as the
day of salvation. My friend, it is the day of salvation
today. If you hear His voice, do not
harden your heart. Go to this Christ. He welcomes
sinners. Let's pray. What can we say when we have
sought in some little way to understand the magnitude of your
grace and mercy in the sending of a Savior for the likes of
us? Oh, God, by this gospel, conquer
some hearts today. For those of us who are your
children, conquer us afresh where we've grown cold and indifferent
and calloused. to those things that our Savior
was willing to undergo that we might be saved. Lord, warm our
hearts. Draw us afresh and back to our
first love, that out of that love we may be more zealous in
obeying our Lord Jesus, more fervent in our prayers, more
unashamed in our witness to others of His grace and mercy. Seal,
then, your word, we pray.