On The Servant Revealed

This week I had the privilege of speaking to Plymouth Christian Union about The Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53. They are going through a series on how the Old Testament reveals Jesus.

You get three common reactions to the Old Testament

1. Some are really inspired
2. Some get confused by the difference to the New Testament
3. Some can’t see the relevance

And that’s really sad, because for Christians, the Bible is our most important tool for understanding our faith. Its all to easy to ignore the Old Testament, calling it irrelevant. But we should take the Old Testament seriously

In it we find the reason why Jesus is so important.

Isaiah was writing to the Jews about eight hundred years before Jesus appeared on the scene. Just before Isaiah we see Israel doing quite well, but now things are slipping, and God’s people have decided to reject him.

Though its worth starting 8 centuries later on a desert road.

The story of an Ethiopian and a Hitch-hiking evangelist.

In the story, we find an important man struggling to understand this very passage. And he ends up asking Philip, the evangelist, a key question, and it may well be the question you are asking yourself:

Who is this passage really about?

The amazing truth of this scripture in Isaiah is that it is written to describe Jesus, centuries before he even appeared.

The first thing to notice is how the passage is laid out. In some Bibles it might be more obvious than in others, but this passage is very deliberately structured. It is poetry. It is the last of a series of four songs which talk about a suffering servant. It is broken down into 5 sections of 3 verses.

Hebrew poetry is very different to ours.

Rhyme is shown in similar or contrasting ideas and themes, rather than words. Verses will often carry a theme throughout in varying degrees of metaphorical language.

The themes for each section of this passage are:

The servant’s significance, status, suffering, silence and sacrifice.

Jesus was significant, though to human eyes had no status.

Most people saw nothing important. There was certainly nothing that would get him to the next level of the x factor. People wrote him off as something you walk past and never give a second glance. He was a nobody. But it is in this that we see the importance of his status.

If the people who sentenced Jesus thought he was God, they would never have sent him to the cross.

Jesus suffered at the cross for us.

It’s not his sin that hangs him there, it is ours.

Everybody’s. Yours. Mine.

That’s why it was so horrendous.

That’s why this is so enormous. That’s why the sky turned black and the earth trembled. That’s why Jesus shouted: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Because God laid on him the iniquity of US ALL.

If you read this passage and are not moved by what it says, then you are missing the point.

Jesus suffered for us in complete silence.

Isaiah says that he even though was oppressed and afflicted (verse 7), he remained silent. Just like a sheep before a shearer is silent.

When he is standing in the courtyard facing judgement – nothing. When he is beaten, when the soldiers spit on him, when he is flogged and mocked – nothing. When they force a crown of thorns onto his head – nothing. When they lead him away up through the city streets, and when the soldiers nail him through his hands and feet onto a piece of wood and erect him high for all to see – he just lets them do it.

Anyone in their right mind would have to ask why.

It is in the answer to this question we see the wonders of God’s love.

Jesus came to be a willing sacrifice for us.

He was a guilt offering for all. A guilt offering was the way that sinners were able to come back into the presence of a holy God. You can read all about it in Leviticus. And what you find is that there isn’t any level of sin, with a more expensive sacrifice earning you any extra points – but that all sin carries the equal weight of death.

Anything impure keeps you out of God’s presence and needs to be taken away in order for you to come back in. And so there was a sacrificial system. The person who brought an animal to be sacrificed put their hands on it, and the guilt was symbolically transferred to the animal, which was then sacrificed.

The people who were listening to Isaiah, not only when he first wrote the letter, but centuries later, would have understood the significance of the sacrifice.

They didn’t know who or what. But they would have known that God was using the servant’s sacrificial death to bring people back to himself. That’s why it says he bore the sins of the many.

The sacrificial death of Jesus was used to bring you home.

On that dusty desert road, eight centuries later, the Ethiopian got it.

Have you got it?

Is this just a nice way of thinking about scripture, and linking it all together, or is it real?

 “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”