APPLICATION: Read  & watch/listen to Isaiah53
Christmas in the Old Testament

1 . The Servant’s Rejection vs. 1-3
     
2. The Servant’s Purpose vs. 4-9
 
3. The Servant’s Death vs. 10-11
 
4. The Servant’s Victory vs. 12


Life Application
More than one hundred and thirty years ago, God called a man named John Williams to go to the South Pacific Island of Aramonda as a missionary. John Williams, and his friend Mr. Harris, set sail one day to take the Gospel message to a cannibalistic tribe that had never heard about Jesus Christ as Savior. Upon landing, the tribal chief drew a line in the sand and said to the men, “You cross that line and you will die.” Together, both men crossed the line, and that night they were slain and eaten by the people of the island.

It was some time later before the news of their deaths reached their home church back in Spain in the year 1870. The call of God was then answered by George and Ellen Gordon who went to the same island and met the same fate.

A single man, named James McNair, was the next from that church to answer the call of God. Before darkness of the day of his arrival, he saw seven men accept Jesus as Savior before others slew him also.

By the year 1872, word reached the home church, and James Gordon, the brother of George Gordon, was the next to answer the call of God. He too began to work among the tribesmen but soon was killed like the others.

The mother of George and James Gordon went to church early on Sunday after hearing about the death of her second son. Others gathered around the altar where the lone mother had been praying and weeping. Then she said to them, “I am not weeping for my sons who have died, although I feel much sorrow for their loss, but I am weeping that I do not have another son to give.” She wept not for the loss of her sons, but for the lostness of the world.

In 1985, the first missionaries of the Assemblies of God were sent to the island of Aramonda. Today, more than one hundred and thirty years after the arrival of the first missionaries, there is a thriving church. Many former cannibals are now finding Jesus as their personal Savior because others paid the ultimate price earlier.
 
Digging Deeper
At the Cross? - Isaiah writes as if we were there at the cross, because we were. If it wasn’t our guilt that required the death of Jesus, what did? Remember Rembrandt’s painting, “The Raising of the Cross,” how he paints himself into the picture as one of the men crucifying the Lord? He not only portrays Jesus; he includes himself in the scene. Isaiah is doing that here, not with a brush on canvas but with a pen on paper. He’s not only describing Jesus; he’s telling our story too. We cannot say, “If I had been there, I wouldn’t have shouted ‘Crucify him!’ ”

Isaiah brings us to the heart of his message. Do you see what he’s saying? Jesus really was a man of sorrows, but they weren’t his own. He didn’t deserve them. They were our sorrows. In a way we don’t understand, Jesus substituted himself for us at the cross. God has done what we’d have no right to do—God has shifted the blame to Jesus Christ as he died for guilty people. God has pointed the finger. He has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Theologians call this imputation, from the Latin verb imputare, “to charge (to someone’s account).” Guilt must be paid for. It can’t be swept under the rug. You know that from your own experience. When you are wronged or injured—even in a fender-bender—someone has to answer for it, either you or the other person. The damage and cost don’t just go away. If it’s going to be put right, someone has to pay the cost. And so it is with God. There is no way he can turn a blind eye to our evil that is damaging his universe. How did God confront it? How was the damage paid for? Out of love for us, God charged that infinite debt to a substitute. Jesus Christ put himself in the place of sinners, the unbearable weight of their guilt was imputed to him, and he sank under it. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21, niv). This is the love of God.
Substitution is the very meaning of love. In A Tale of Two Cities, Sydney Carton takes another man’s place at the guillotine and defeats Madame Defarge’s lust for revenge. As he’s about to die, a young girl also to be executed realizes that Carton has changed places with the condemned man. She tells him, “I think you were sent to me by Heaven.” Dying love, real love, comes from God. Our part is to recognize in Jesus the only true love that exists and say to him, “I think you were sent to me by Heaven.”

Look at him. By faith look at him hanging there on his cross. What is he saying to you by his sacrifice? “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). “Come, for everything is now ready” (Luke 14:17). “Come to me … and I will make with you an everlasting covenant” (Isaiah 55:3). Look at him. By faith, see his dying love for you. What is it worth? His blood is flowing down into pools at the foot of that cross. But it doesn’t lie there in waste and loss. It flows out toward us—guilty, sad us. His blood flows out toward a woman who has shamed herself in a desperate craving to be loved. His blood washes her shame clean off her. Then that shame flows back to the cross, where it shames Jesus and is no longer her burden to bear. His blood flows out toward a man held in bondage to lust. He has discovered too late that there is no comfort there, only emptiness and self-hatred. But the blood of Jesus flows out to that man, cleanses him entirely, and takes that painful wrong back to the cross where Jesus suffers for it as his own wrong, freeing that man forever.

The blood of Jesus is flowing out to sinners of all kinds, taking from them their guilt, their shame, their loss, their tears and despair, and giving them a whole new life. Jesus is saying to you right now, “I don’t want you to bear your burden one moment longer. Let my chastisement give you peace. Let my stripes heal you.” We are all like stupid sheep, wandering off from him through our own futile self-remedies and self-righteous excuses. Who can deny it? But look what God has done. God has laid on Christ the iniquity of us all. Believe it, and entrust your guilt to him. He can’t bear it and survive, but he’s still willing to bear it.

The Victorious Plan of God - The death of Jesus Christ was more than a human plot; it was a divine strategy. At his cross, Jesus was doing “the will of the Lord” (cf. Romans 3:25). And he wasn’t embittered by it. He didn’t hang from his cross screaming curses at his tormentors, the way other victims did. Nor did he blaspheme God. He perceived in his torments the saving will of the Lord. This is the mystery of the cross. It was on that instrument of human torture that Jesus Christ made his soul an offering to God for other people’s sin. The cross, therefore, was no defeat. Isaiah’s prophetic eye can see that Jesus was taking the initiative by his death, making the will of God prosper in the most improbable way imaginable. At his cross Jesus achieved the ancient purpose of God with victorious love.

This is why his death produces life in us: “He shall see his offspring.” Who are they? All of us who benefit from his death when he justifies us. In verse 12 Isaiah uses a military metaphor to describe this. Jesus divides the spoils of his victory with us as his “strong” partners in God’s saving plan (Revelation 2:26, 27). The world perceives his followers as little more than a band of fugitives and losers (Luke 22:35–38). But through Christ’s justifying cross-work, we are enriched beyond measure. We possess all things worth possessing (1 Corinthians 3:21–23).

As Jesus stands back and looks at God’s saving plan, as he measures the price he had to pay for its success, how does he feel about it? “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.” The Isaiah scroll from Qumran inserts an interpretative word here: “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see light.” Anguish was not his final emotional experience. His anguish led to a dawning “light” of victorious joy. Looking on what he accomplished by his passion, Christ is satisfied. Why? Because he’s the kind of person who enjoys clearing sinners of their guilt and accounting them righteous, though it demands that he bear their iniquities upon himself.

Here is love, vast as the ocean, lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom, shed for us his precious blood.
Who his love will not remember? Who can cease to sing his praise?
He can never be forgotten throughout heaven’s eternal days.
On the mount of crucifixion, fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God’s mercy flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers, poured incessant from above,
And heaven’s peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in love.

The Jesus who “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried,” to quote the Apostles’ Creed, also “rose again from the dead” and now is “seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” With supreme power and every moral entitlement, Jesus Christ is acting as the executor of the saving will of God for our guilty human race. He isn’t suffering anymore. His offering for sin was complete. And right now, today, all over the world, he’s enjoying the satisfaction, the sheer pleasure, of making many ungodly people to be accounted righteous.

The cross isn’t a dreamy religious ideal; the cross is a power, it’s working. The one who descended to unimaginable depths is now enjoying the spoils of complete victory. He’s actively saving guilty people today. He treats transgressors as his friends and shares his victory with his former enemies. He stands before the Father, making intercession for the very ones who drove him to death. His cross is a power that evil cannot conquer or even understand, but to God it’s everything. Nothing will ever rob Christ of his hard-won right to justify the ungodly.

Who else can love you so miraculously and helpfully? Who else would willingly serve as your scapegoat? What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?

“The guilt that men are never able to efface, in spite of sacrifices, penance, remorse and vain regrets, God himself wipes away; and men are at once freed from their past and transformed.” You can be freed from your past. But Christ is the only way. His sacrifice was good enough for God. Why shouldn’t it be good enough for you?

We can respond in either of two ways. One response is to say, “No, that can’t be true. It can’t be that simple.” I remember hearing Joan Baez sing the gospel song, “Oh, Happy Day.” Maybe you know the words: “Oh, happy day! Oh, happy day! When Jesus washed my sins away.” She sang so beautifully, as she always does. But at the end, with her voice trailing off, she said, “If only it were that easy.” Isaiah didn’t think it was easy. The suffering servant of the Lord did the most costly thing ever. He suffered the just hell of God’s holy wrath against sinners, rather than their bearing it themselves. If there had been an easier way, God would have found it.

Of course, we shouldn’t ignore the wrongs we can put right. The gospel doesn’t make that easy. But the gospel is addressing a deeper question than our injuries to one another. What about our offenses against God? How do we make amends at the level of God’s infinite justice? How can our trinkets of morality down here, conservative or liberal, compensate God? The gospel’s answer is the perfect Lamb sacrificed for human guilt before God—and God was fully satisfied. All we should do, all we can do, is bow before Christ in our need. The answer must be that simple, or we’re thrown back on the impossible task of undoing our own guilt. Don’t try to be heroic here. This is so much more profound than our moral heroics. Don’t trivialize Christ. Revere him.

That’s the other response. We believe the gospel. We stop amassing our own imagined righteousness. That pile of dung called our moral superiority over other sinners, which cannot offset our guilt before God but only make things worse—we admit the ugly truth of it all. We revere Jesus Christ crucified for sinners and receive his grace with the empty hands of faith.

If you’re an unbeliever, admit that you’ve gone too far to get yourself out. Let the Scapegoat bear your guilt away, and God will never bring it up again. He promises. Will you receive Christ as your Savior—right now?

If you’re a believer, you know the way to refreshment. Take your sins to Christ. Tell him everything. This is his promise: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

Charles Simeon, the Anglican pastor, by his own experience guides us toward the breakthrough we all need:
In Passion Week, as I was reading Bishop Wilson on the Lord’s Supper, I met with an expression to this effect—“That the Jews knew what they did, when they transferred their sin to the head of their offering.” The thought came into my mind, What, may I transfer all my guilt to another? Has God provided an Offering for me, that I may lay my sins on His head? Then, God willing, I will not bear them on my own soul one moment longer. Accordingly I sought to lay my sins upon the sacred head of Jesus.


DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
 
1. How does the depiction of the Servant's suffering in Isaiah 53 resonate with your understanding of suffering in the world today?
2. Discuss the concept of vicarious suffering. How does it apply in modern contexts?
3. What does it mean for the Servant to be "despised and rejected"? How can we respond when we feel similarly?
4. What significance does the Servant's silence have in the face of unjust suffering? How can we apply this in our own lives?
5. How can you relate the Servant’s sacrifice in Isaiah 53 to the sacrifices you see in your life or in the lives of others?


PRAYER:





[1] Raymond C. Ortlund Jr. and R. Kent Hughes, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 95.
[2] Raymond C. Ortlund Jr. and R. Kent Hughes, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 95.
[3] Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39, ed. E. Ray Clendenen, The New American Commentary (Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2007), 238.
[4] J. Alec Motyer, Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 20, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 101–102.
[5] Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39, ed. E. Ray Clendenen, The New American Commentary (Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2007), 242.