(Editor’s note: One day in each of these three pre-Easter weeks, we’re meeting three people with three very different and distinct views of Easter. Last week, it was Simon, a Cyrenian, who stood on the Via Dolorosa on a day when the Lamb was passing by. Today, Isaiah, a prophet who was born, lived, and died long before that first Easter — but who “surely” knew it was coming.)
“Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.” — Isaiah 53:4 (NIV)
The prophet Isaiah wrote beautifully, despite the heavy lifting required of him. He lived when Israel was largely a spiritually barren land. Things had not improved a great deal seven or so centuries later when Jesus, “the tender root,” was born into the “dry ground” of what we now call The Holy Land.
Time and a divine man’s life combined to show that Isaiah could be speaking of only one person here: Jesus. The Israelites at the time misunderstood: the person described by Isaiah must be a man who sinned greatly and so is being punished. Job’s friends thought his tremendously tragic circumstances were the result of the same thing: a man’s sin against God.
Often described as the chapter of the “Suffering Servant,” this text instead changes tense and puts Isaiah 700 years into the future and at the foot of the cross of Calvary. From that close distance, Isaiah is in the perfect spot to see what his sin has caused and the price that had to be paid for him and for every man to be made clean in the eyes of a Holy God.
It was our pain and our suffering that Jesus bore. Writer, pastor, and Bible scholar William Wiersbe calls Jesus, in the first verses of Chapter 53, “The Sorrowing Servant,” a man “rejected by mankind” and “familiar with pain.” In today’s text, Jesus is “The Smitten Servant,” and later “The Silent Servant,” and finally, “The Satisfied Servant.” The cross resulted in Easter — darkness to light — but not without a supernatural cost we won’t be able to fully grasp in this lifetime.
Isaiah was allowed to see it perfectly. A sinless child of God separated from the perfect love of his Father. In one word, hell.
An early step of salvation is realizing how much you’re in need of it. “Every humble and devoted believer in Jesus Christ must have his own periods of wonder and amazement at this mystery of godliness — the willingness of the Son of Man to take our place in judgment and in punishment,” wrote 20th-century pastor A.W. Tozer. “If the amazement has all gone out of it, something is wrong, and you need to have the stony ground broken up again.”
These days before Easter are a good time to consider Isaiah’s point of view, looking up at the cross with a heart that sees not the sheep dying for the sins of the shepherd — Moses Law — but instead, as the Good Shepherd dying for the sheep.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu
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