Isaiah 21

Chapter 21. The Suffering SaviorJust as there were many who were appalled at him— his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any manand his form marred beyond human likeness— so will he sprinkle many nations,and kings will shut their mouths because of him.For what they were not told, they will see,and what they have not heard, they will understandAfter the suffering of his soul,he will see the light of life and be satisfied;by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,and he will bear their iniquities.(Isaiah 52:14-15; Isaiah 53:11)The 53rd chapter of Isaiah should begin with our first text, including the last paragraph of the 52nd chapter. It is all one combined picture of the suffering Messiah. Jewish writers have tried hard to apply it to Israel as a nation and to show that it demands no other fulfillment in the life of an individual sufferer. But after the utmost strain of the natural force of language, such a construction utterly fails to carry conviction to an unprejudiced reader. We are constrained to recognize this marred face of suffering, this Man of sorrows, this victim of sacrifice, this Conqueror of Satan and sin as no less a person than the Man of Galilee and the Man of Calvary, who in the fullness of time appeared on earth and fulfilled every one of those minute predictions in His own person and in His passion and death. The prophet commences the 53rd chapter with a wail of complaint against the indifference and unbelief that rejected this momentous message and refused to recognize the arm of the Lord. He gives a picture of the sufferings of the Savior and the fruits that grow from the blood-stained soil of Calvary. Section I—The SuffererMany details make up this tragic picture. His Lowly Birth

1. The first is His lowly birth. “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). This great sufferer began His career amid circumstances of the deepest humiliation. He was born of a maiden mother with a cloud of reproach upon His name. His lot was that of poverty. His cradle was a manger. His home was Nazareth, whose very name stood for all that was despicable and was a play upon the words of the text, for its root word Nastar, just means a dry sprout, “a root out of dry ground.” There seems to have been no natural attractiveness about the person of Jesus Christ in a purely human way. He was a contradiction of the ideals of the flesh, and a disappointment to every form of human pride. His Rejection
2. Second is His rejection by His own people. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3). What a bitter trial it was to Moses to come to his nation with high enthusiasm and patriotic devotion, prepared to stand up for them against their oppressors, and then to find that they refused to appreciate his services and failed to understand his mission. Likewise, Jesus “came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11). That too must have been one of the great sorrows of Jesus’ life—to be conscious of the intense love which was sacrificing itself for His people and their utter inability to understand Him, appreciate Him or let Him save them. His Earthly Life
3. Jesus also suffered through the privations and sorrows of His earthly life. All the elements which constitute man’s cup of sorrow filled His bitter draught of earthly pain. He was poor and had to toil for His own livelihood and that of His mother. He was lonely and felt Himself a stranger in a strange world. His life was one of constant self-denial, repression and intense toil. He walked on foot again and again over all the land, working incessantly and often with wearied frame from dawn till darkness, teaching, healing, helping His fellowmen. And suffering was so strange to Him. He had never known sorrow before. It was a new world of experience. He was like a land bird far at sea and out of its element. He was like a naked man fighting His way through thickets of thorns. His whole being was open to a thousand sensitive sufferings that our coarser natures know nothing of. He was indeed “familiar with suffering.” Others left Him, His disciples forsook Him, but sorrow never left His side. His Sacrificial Sufferings
4. Perhaps the keenest element in His sorrow was His sacrificial sufferings. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). “The Lord makes his life a guilt offering” (Isaiah 53:10). “He bore the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12). The terrible sting of sin entered His soul. We know something of what it is to be crushed with a single sin and perhaps agonize and pray for hours before we rise above it and find forgiveness and victory; but on Him there rested all the sins of all the world. They were imputed to Him and counted as His own, and He had to bear their penalty and their poison. A great writer has said that there are three things in the story of Jesus that are utterly above all human experience. The first is that an innocent Man suffered as no one else suffered before. The second is that an Almighty One was crushed, defeated, destroyed by forces that He could easily have overcome. And the third is that through this very paradox He has won His victory and accomplished His great purpose of the world’s redemption. The question is often asked, “Is it right for an innocent person to suffer for the guilt of sinners?” In answer we may say first that God has so permitted, and therefore, it must be right. Secondly, vicarious suffering is the law of the universe. The vegetable world lives by absorbing the mineral. The animal world lives by absorbing the vegetable. The lower animals sacrifice themselves that the higher may live, and even the human race suffers and dies that it may give place to and propagate the next generation. Thirdly, He was voluntary in thus suffering vicariously for others. It would be wrong to compel an innocent person to suffer for the wrong of others. But if he chooses to be a substitute on the higher plane of heroism we have no right to prevent it. Fourthly, the One who suffered for us was not a stranger, but really One of our own race, its federal Head and entitled to represent us. And finally, it was on this principle that the human race fell through the sin of one man, Adam, our federal head. It is therefore in keeping that the race should be redeemed by their new Head, Jesus Christ. There is no doubt that Isaiah’s picture of the Savior’s sufferings represent them as vicarious. “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:5-6). What a picture of concentrated suffering. It is as though one man were suddenly compelled to stand for all the debts of all the people in the world, and from every quarter they came in upon him until He was swamped, bankrupt and crushed. It is as though a shepherd had gone out alone to stand between the flock and the wolves, and they all set upon him until they had torn him to pieces and he fell bleeding and dying, but the sheep were saved. It is as though all the burning rays of yonder sun at its torrid noon were converged in a great burning glass into one single point of flame and one sensitive heart was placed beneath that fiery focus and burned to cinders. All our guilt and all the penalty it deserved met upon Him and He sank beneath the awful load. But not until He had met the claim, had canceled the debt and had saved the world. His Trial and Judgment
5. Another place of suffering was His trial and judgment. “For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken” (Isaiah 53:8). What a pathetic story the trial of Jesus was. Worn with a sleepless night, His clothing damp with the bloody sweat of the garden, His heart sore with the betrayal of Judas, He is hurried before the council of the Jews and there He has to face the cruel denial of Peter, His own disciple, and the false accusations of His bitter foes. Again He is hustled to the court of Pilate, dismissed to the judgment seat of Herod, marched back again amid the mockeries of the soldiers to Pilate’s court once more, and there insulted, belied, stripped and scourged with cruel lashes loaded with nails, until the flesh hangs bleeding from His bones. And even Pilate, moved with a strange sympathy, points to Him as a spectacle of compassion, “Here is the man!” (John 19:5). Then amid a hideous carnival of cruelty and scorn, He is condemned and compelled to carry His heavy cross to the hill of Calvary where they crucify Him. Well might He say in the prophetic words of Jeremiah, “Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering” (Lamentations 1:12). His Death and Burial
6. He suffered in His death and burial. “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth” (Isaiah 53:9). Death to Him must have had a touch more terrible than to less sensitive natures, but He gave Himself up to it as an offering and a willing sacrifice. He literally poured out His very life unto death. The one extenuating feature in it all was that, instead of being buried with the wicked, He was with the rich in His death and the tomb of Joseph was offered as the resting place of His lifeless form. Forsaken by the Father
7. But the bitterest dregs of His cup of sorrow were yet to come. These were caused by the Father’s stroke. “Yet it was the Lord’S will to crush him and cause him to suffer” (Isaiah 53:10). For that dreadful moment He stood in place of guilty men and it was their day of judgment. Therefore upon His single head there fell the judgment stroke which the guilty world deserved. He bore our hell and in that awful moment, for an instant, His heart was crushed. When our dark hours come to us, we can bear anything if we have His presence. But when death was creeping over Him, and demons were tormenting Him and men were torturing Him, He reached out for His Father’s hand, He looked up for His Father’s smile, and all was darkness and wrath, and He uttered that bitter cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jehovah lifted up His rod, O Christ, it fell on Thee; Thou wast sore stricken of Thy God, Thy bruising healeth me; A victim led, my Savior bled, Now there’s no curse for me. The Travail of His Soul8. Still another area of suffering was the travail of His soul. Christ’s deepest anguish was inward. He was going through a great soul conflict of responsibility, desire and intense prayer for the salvation of men. The whole weight of the world’s redemption was resting upon His heart. It was the birth hour of heaven. Had He failed, hope would have died for every human soul and heaven been draped in mourning. That awful weight was upon Him. All His life long He bore it, but in the last and crisis hour it absorbed His being with the anguish of a travailing woman. The 22nd Psalm gives a little picture of that conflict. There is a strange expression there, “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dogs” (Psalms 22:20). Who was His darling? It was His beloved Bride. It was the Church that He was holding in His arms from the fearful attack of her foe, and His one last thought was to save others, but He couldn’t save Himself. (Matthew 27:42). He did save others, but oh, the awful cost—what tongue can tell! Section II—The Fruit of His SorrowAs It Affects Us First let us look at the fruit of His sorrow as it affects us.
8. It brings us deliverance from sickness. “Surely he took up our infirmities” (Isaiah 53:4).
9. It brings us victory over sorrow. “[He] carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4).
10. It brings us the forgiveness of our transgressions. “But he was pierced for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5).
11. It brings us salvation from the power of sin. “He was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5)—the power of indwelling sin.
12. It brings us peace. “The punishment that brought us peace was upon him” (Isaiah 53:5).
13. It brings us justification. “By his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many” (Isaiah 53:11).
14. It brings us His intercession. “[He] made intercession for the transgressors” (Isaiah 53:12).
15. It brings salvation for the nations. “So will he sprinkle many nations” (Isaiah 52:15). What a rich and glorious salvation is thus provided, covering all our temporal and spiritual needs, and large as the world itself in its boundless fullness. As It Affects Him Second, let’s look at it as it affects Him.
16. God will “prolong his days” (Isaiah 53:10). This refers to His resurrection, ascension and “the power of an indestructible life” (Hebrews 7:16) which has been given Him.
17. “He will see his offspring” (Isaiah 53:10). This refers to His spiritual offspring. There are two races in the world today, the Adam race and the Christ race. The Adam race is doomed. The Christ race is redeemed. Christians are the seed of Jesus, born of His very being and partners of His own life.
18. “The will of the Lord will prosper in his hand” (Isaiah 53:10). This refers to the great mediatorial work given Him by the Father which is the reward of His sufferings and which He is carrying on with victorious power until His kingdom shall have been established in all the world.
19. Next, there are the spoils of victory. “Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death” (Isaiah 53:12). As the reward of His conflict and suffering, He is to share the spoils of victory over Satan and all his foes. Among them are the restitution of this lost world which Satan had captured for a time and claimed to rule as its lord. Christ has overcome him by the cross and is finishing His triumph through the power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit. The vision of prophecy has revealed to us the final triumph when the enemy shall be forever imprisoned in the lake of fire and all the things that he has wrecked shall be restored when “the time comes for God to restore everything” (Acts 3:21). Then shall that sublime vision of the Apocalypse be fulfilled, I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS. (Revelation 19:11-13, Revelation 19:16)
20. “He will see the light of life and be satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11). Tell me how much would satisfy your heart for this sin-cursed world, and there I will tell you something of what would satisfy the heart of Jesus. But you could tell me nothing, if you were to talk for a thousand years, that would even faintly approximate all the joy, the victory, the glory which these words imply for earth and heaven, for our ransomed race and our Redeemer’s heart of love. All this He saw as He hung that day on Calvary and the prospect took away the bitterness of the cross. He could see the ransomed throng, He could hear their rapturous song Rolling through the ages long; He could see His glorious Bride Saved and seated by His side, And His soul was satisfied. Will we help to satisfy His soul?