The Sovereign Servant
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 25 March 2018
This is an inexhaustible portion of Scripture, both as to its depth and its extent. It is perhaps the single greatest evidence of the inspiration and divine authorship of Holy Scripture. 700 years before the arrival of Jesus Christ, it records the details that were played out in His incarnation, His humiliation, and His exaltation. The theme is the Servant, who is promised by God to come to bring salvation to His people.
It is also the most comprehensive prophecy of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Old Testament. But I want to begin in Luke 24 where we find our Lord Jesus on the road to Emmaus. He has been crucified but it is now Sunday and He is alive. He has died and risen again. He is walking on the road to Emmaus with a couple of His disciples who are bemoaning the fact that He has died and have no knowledge of His resurrection.
He speaks to them in Luke 24:25-27, “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken. 26 Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory? 27 Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.” The Old Testament prophets revealed that the Messiah would suffer and then be glorified.
That was the part that was absent from their Jewish messianic theology. They had a theology of glory for the Messiah; but they had no theology of suffering. And when Jesus says this, He has suffered. With a thorough inspection of all Jewish literature from the past, there is no evidence that they ever believed the Messiah would come and suffer, let alone as a sacrifice for their sins. They did not know that Jesus would die for our sins.
Those are the elements of the work of the Messiah, and those two theologies summarize the entire Old Testament presentation of Messiah. You will find in the Old Testament in the Law, the Prophets, and the Holy Writings, statements about the Messiah’s suffering and His humiliation. You will also find throughout the Old Testament statements about His exaltation. But the two come together in Isaiah 53:12 .
Here is the most complete messianic prophecy in the Old Testament, 700 years before Jesus arrives, and those details are verified with absolute accuracy by history. What we know from this is that there will be two comings of the Messiah. The First Coming has suffering, death, and resurrection; the Second Coming has exaltation and glory. First He comes as a sacrifice for sin, the second time as the King of kings and Lord of lords.
Both of these are presented by the prophecies of the Old Testament. They are brought together in Isaiah 53 in a way that is almost like the New Testament, where both of these are clearly laid out from Matthew to Revelation. Now in Isaiah 53: 10-12 we meet the One identified in this section of Isaiah as the Servant of Yahweh, the Servant of the Lord, the Messiah. And now we see Him as the sovereign Servant.
To understand this, we need to go back to Isaiah 52: 13-15 where God says, “Behold, My Servant will prosper; He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted. 14 Just as many were astonished at you, My people, so His appearance was marred more than any man and His form more than the sons of men. 15 Thus He will startle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him for what had not been told them, they will see and what they had not heard, they will understand.”
All three verbs there used to describe “My Servant” are used to describe God Himself in Isaiah 6. And John 12 says that the vision in Isaiah 6 of God high and lifted up and sitting on a throne, was a vision of Jesus Christ. So we learned that the Messiah here will be as God is, the very essence of God. He will startle many nations. He will literally shut the mouths of kings, who will be stunned at the majesty and glory of His presence.
They will see in Him things they had never seen and hear from Him things they have never heard. This all fits the Jewish messianic glory theology. He is God. He is exalted. He succeeds and He prospers. That’s what that verb means in verse 13. He conquers the world. He subdues the nations. He says things and does things that have never been said and never been done as He exercises His majesty and His rule.
But there is an enigma in verse 14. Many are going to be astonished because it says His appearance is disfigured more than any man and His form marred beyond human likeness. Twice it identifies Him as a man. He is God in verse 13, and He is man in verse 14. As God, He is highly exalted, and as man, He is marred so severely that it is beyond any other man, beyond the form of any of the sons of men.
Who is this? And Yahweh God is speaking. Here is the mystery that is impossible at first to be unraveled, how this glorious person can at the same time be scarred, more disfigured than any human being, and ultimately come out of that, in verse 15, and be glorified. Well, we know what it means. The Messiah will both be humbled and exalted. This is Philippians 2, He humbled Himself and God highly exalted Him.
The suffering Servant fits into the purpose of God. That He would come in humiliation and He would also come in exaltation. Both His humiliation and His exaltation are here promised by God. This is God’s plan; this is God’s promise; these are God’s words. The suffering Servant, the disfigured Messiah is no victim, but rather the victorious Son of God chosen by the Father, empowered by the Holy Spirit for suffering and for glory.
How does that happen? Well the answer to the enigma of Isaiah 52:13-15 is Isaiah 53. This explains both His suffering and its purpose, and His glory and its purpose. So Isaiah 53 contains the most important truth ever given. The good news of salvation for sinners by the death of the Servant of Yahweh as the only acceptable sacrifice to take away the sins of the world. God begins and ends this great prophecy.
In between the declaration of God’s purpose and the affirmation of that purpose, comes Isaiah 53: 1-11. Here is the rejection and the hatred of the Servant by a future generation of Jews. Starting in verse 1, all the verbs are in the past tense, and they continue in the past tense. That means that this is not a prediction of something in the future; this is a prediction of something in the past.
But it describes the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is in the future. Yes, but the Jews who are making the confession are looking back to it and realizing that they were so wrong. Isaiah 53:1-11 is basically the content of the confession of Israel in the future when they do what Zechariah 12:10 says, “Look on Him whom they have pierced and mourn for Him,” and forgiveness is open to them and Israel is saved.”
The promise of Israel’s future salvation is laid out in Jeremiah 31, the new covenant. It’s repeated in Ezekiel 36: 22 - 29, where He saves them and gives them a new heart and gives them the Spirit and forgives their sins and puts the knowledge of Himself in them. That’s the promise of the future salvation of Israel. It’s reiterated in Zechariah 12:13. And all of that is affirmed by Paul in Romans 11:25 - 27, “So all Israel will be saved.”
It is then that they will say He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, chastened, punished for our well-being, scourged for our healing. God the Father caused the iniquity of us all to fall on God the Son. He was led as a lamb to slaughter. There is a future salvation for national Israel that is promised in the Old Testament and reiterated in the New Testament.
And Calvin working on the Geneva Bible, placed in the notes of Romans 11 this part, “The blindness of the Jews is neither so universal that the Lord has no elect in that nation, neither will it be continual for there will be a time in which they also as the prophets have foretold will effectually embrace that which they now so stubbornly for the most part reject.” All theologians then affirmed the future salvation of Israel.
They go through this confession until verse 11, and then the final word is left for God. And God affirms their confession in verse 12. And it is God who says in verse 11, “Yes, My Servant will justify the many, He will bear their iniquities.” Verse 12, “He poured out Himself to death, was numbered with the transgressors, and bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors.” That is God’s affirmation.
Up to this point, the provisions and the benefits of the Servant’s death have been viewed from the perspective of the people. The final lines from midpoint verse 11 to 12, will shift, and we’re going to hear now God‘s perspective. This is what God has done to His Servant. They have a full soteriological understanding of the cross of Christ. These are Jews in a future generation who make this confession, and they get the whole picture.
This is amazing because remember, this is 700 years before Christ even comes, and these are words coming from Jews thousands of years after that and indicating a complete understanding of the cross. Israel knows then what the reality is. Verse 10, they know that God was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief if He would render Himself as a guilt offering. They understand the substitutionary atonement of Christ.
Men are doing the worst that they can do, and they are pleased to do that. But here, God is delighted to crush Jesus. Men are doing the worst that they can do for the sinless One, and God is doing the best that He can do for sinners. Jesus is God’s Lamb, chosen by the determinate counsel of God; the purpose of God has determined that He will die. It is God who laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
Now this is not the death, as some have suggested, of a martyr. Physical difficulties are present, whether they are burned at a stake, killed another way; but if you study the history of martyrs, you find something quite interesting. Throughout the history of the church, you can see that martyrs die testifying to faith in the Lord. Martyrs die with hope in their hearts. Martyrs die under the sweet comforts of grace.
Our Lord’s death was not like that. Why? Because Jesus didn’t die under the sweet comforts of grace. Jesus died under the relentless and unrelieved terrors of Law. Jesus died under divine wrath unmitigated. Jesus died tasting hell. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” No believer ever died like that. But every unbeliever dies like that. Every unbeliever dies tasting hell.
God’s pleasure in crushing His Son in this way was not in His pain, but in His purpose. It was not in His suffering; it was in His salvation. Literally in Hebrew, He would render Himself as a guilt offering, because He would die to save sinners. But the pain and the agony was necessary. He had to die under the full realities of divine law and wrath.
The Jews understand it as the guilt offering. Why would the Holy Spirit put those words in Isaiah? There were five offerings the Jews gave, according to Leviticus, when they had their sacrificial system. There was the burnt offering, the grain offering, the peace offering, the sin offering and the guilt offering. Three of those were sacrifices. The other two, the grain and peace offerings were not.
Three of them were animal sacrifices that were pictures of the deadly results of sin. But also they were hopeful in that God would allow a substitute to die in the sinner’s place. And the sacrifice of an animal pictured the fact that God would allow a substitute. But of those three offerings the guilt offering is the most comprehensive offering.
The guilt offering, or the trespass offering, added the dimension of restitution or propitiation, which is a verb that means to be satisfied. It was the sin offering and the guilt offering that were offered every day in the morning and evening sacrifices. So they had these offerings going on all the time. It advanced the idea that the sin offering has to have repentance.
The sin offering recognized the existence of sin that brings death and also the hope of a substitute. But the guilt offering, because the whole animal was put on the altar, was the picture of complete satisfaction. The Jews understood that the offering of Christ was the guilt offering in that it was the complete offering. It provided full restitution, and full propitiation, the debt is fully paid and the sinners are free.
But they don’t stop there. Here is more of their confession. The middle of verse 10, “He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days and the good pleasure of God will prosper in His hand as a result of the anguish of His soul He will see and be satisfied.” So Jesus cannot be dead. This is a confession of His resurrection. Now these Jews shift into future tense the results of what He has done. Jesus will see His offspring.
And they have a final word in their confession, verse 11, “As the result of the anguish of His soul, He will see and be satisfied.” He will see the plan to its completion. He will see the redeemed gathered in. God is satisfied by the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and Christ is equally satisfied by seeing all His children gathered around His throne forever, loving, worshiping, and serving Him in His presence in heaven.
God will rejoice over the salvation of Israel that we are talking about in the future. And so will Christ. And as the result of the anguish of His soul, literally, He will see His spiritual offspring, including Israel, and be fully satisfied. The Servant’s full joy and satisfaction comes from providing righteousness, redemption, forgiveness and eternal heaven for His children. Let us pray.