Advent 3: (Peace) The God Who Suffers

If you have your Bibles turn to Isaiah 52:13. If you don’t have your Bibles please feel free to grab one of them from the seat back in front of you. The red hardcover ones are KJV and the page is… the Blue softcover ones are ESV, a modern translation and the one I will be reading from and the page is...

We are continuing our series for Advent, looking at the candles we are lighting and the message they provide. Last week we lit the candle of Hope and studied the great hope promised in the day of God’s presence coming among us. This week we lit the candle of PEACE and as such we are studying how we are given the peace of God.

Peace is something that many people long for. It is something that some of us long for as we look at the wars going on in the world. We pray for God to bring an end to the violence being done.

Some of us long for peace in our homes. The stress of living in the community that is your family has placed a weight upon you and you are praying that God would somehow bring peace to the turmoil brewing in your family.

Some of us long for peace in our bodies

Some of us long for peace in our minds.

Some of us long for peace in our hearts.

It is good and right to cry out for peace because:

The cry for peace is a recognition of the reality of suffering.

And while it may seem counter-intuitive, the way that we are given peace is through the suffering of God Himself.

Let’s read Isaiah 52:13-53:12 together and dig into this treasure we have been given.

Isaiah 52:13–53:12 (ESV)

13 Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted. 14 As many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind— 15 so shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand.

1 Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2 For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. 3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? 9 And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. 10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

The prophet Isaiah was called to his prophetic ministry “in the year that King Uzziah died” (6:1), around 740 B.C. He lived long enough to record the death of Sennacherib (37:38), in 681.

It is in this book of his that we get many of the great christological prophecies that we take such great hope in. The promise of the virgin-born Immanuel-Child is in Isaiah 7. The great titles of the promised messiah, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace is in Isaiah 9. And this morning we read the prophecies of the suffering the Messiah will face from Chapter 53. All of these are cherished promises from God that we love to look at during the Advent season are promises of Jesus that came 700 years before he was born! How incredible! 700 years is a long time and it continues to show us that God knew what He would be doing throughout all of history.

And what did God know was going to happen when the Messiah came? He knew that the Messiah would suffer terribly, but it would be through that suffering that we would be brought peace! And what we now know, though it wasn’t clear from this passage this morning, is that God Himself would come in the flesh as the promised Messiah. God was promising an unnatural and undeserved suffering upon Himself in the person of the Son, Jesus.

I don’t know how much you’ve thought about suffering and what it means, I’ve thought a lot more about it this past week in preparation for this sermon, and I’ve started to realize that suffering due to a lack of something is a distinct characteristic of creation and not the Creator. Think about most instances of suffering. Maybe we feel the suffering of hunger or thirst. Maybe we are suffering because our bodies are lacking wholeness and total health. Maybe we are suffering because we have lost someone we love very much and our lack of them is causing suffering in your heart.

In being created there is automatically a reliance upon something else to make up for what you lack. The Creator is the one who provides what is needed. So the Creator does not suffer because of a lack. It is unnatural for God to suffer because of a lack. In fact, as the Creator of everything, it is impossible for God to suffer because he lacks something.

When YHWH, as the God of the universe suffers it is because of an overabundance, not a lack

His suffering is not because He is incomplete

There’s a popular worship song that implies God had a sense of incompleteness without us so Jesus brought Heaven to us, but this is a bad understanding of God.

God loves us so much that He wants what is best for us. He wants us to be able to understand the glorious peace and joy that comes from living in and being known by perfect community because He knows how good it is.

God's completion, His satisfaction, is not dependent on us.

Rather, God overflows with a love for His creation that always wants what is best for them. God wants us to know His perfect peace and joy and His suffering is because He cares about us and we are suffering. He is not suffering because He needs us to be with Him for Him to feel complete. He is complete with or without us. He does not need us for anything, and yet from the overflow of His love He still wants us.

God suffers because He loves, not because He lacks.

Are you following me?

This may seem like splitting hairs, but its actually really important that we understand this, because the we need to understand that the incarnation, God coming in the flesh and living as a human, is an offensive thing! God, who has never known a suffering of lack, would come to earth as a human in the fallen world, experiencing all that entails apart from actually sinning himself, and would take on the unnatural experience for the creator of the world to actually need something, to experience incompleteness. That is a bold statement.

When we spoke about God becoming man with Muslims they couldn’t get past the offensive, dirty implications of it! They would say things like, “You know what humans do when they go into the bathroom right? There is no way God did that! It is unclean and God cannot be unclean! There is no way God would be so humiliated as to come as a baby and need to nurse at his mother’s breast! To need a diaper changed. THIS IS SO DISHONORABLE TO GOD.”

To be honest, I never thought about Jesus’ humanity to that extent until my Muslim friends brought it up, but they have a point. Think of all the ways you suffer each day because you live as a created being in a world that lacks because of the destructive power of sin and the dirty reality of it all. Can you imagine that God himself willingly stepped into this suffering? It’s unnatural. It’s offensive to think that someone so loved, so worshipped, so perfect, would give that up to live the dirty and suffering life of a human. What would cause Him to do that?

And it wasn’t just the suffering of an aching back

Jesus stepped into a physical suffering that the first verses we read together describe rather horrifically. Is 52:14

Isaiah 52:14(ESV)

14 As many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind

How many of us could say we know suffering like that? We may experience the suffering of broken health and bodies, but have we ever been so bodily broken that people couldn’t tell what we were?

In verses 2-3 of Chapter 53 it says that he gave up his majesty and beauty, and the worship of the grand and terrifying citizens of the Heavens to be despised and rejected by men. To become a man of sorrows who would know grief. He would be despised and rejected by his own creation!

And it doesn’t stop there! He not only would suffer what He didn’t deserve He would also suffer what we do deserve! That sounds like a terrible deal!

The one perfect human, not only suffers the natural pains of living in a fallen world, but He also suffers the spiritual consequences for many! In John 1 we are told that Jesus is the living Word of The Father, the one through whom all creation and life was made! And now, this giver of life, the source of life!, is going to endure suffering and death! How unnatural, how wrong it is!

And yet, because of an overabundance of love for His creation, He chose suffering! He didn’t count the throne of Heaven as something to cling to, but gave it up to choose suffering! Verse 10 says that to crush Him was what God wanted, to put Him to grief. To endure unimaginable suffering for us!

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12… he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.

Most Kings expect others to die for them, but our King died for us. Jesus chose to know and endure great suffering for the express purpose of bringing us peace with God. And if we seek to have peace outside of our Creator it will be a false peace. God knew this. He always knew this and He also knew that the only way for our peace to be made with our Him, against whom we have all dreadfully rebelled, that He would have to suffer in the most unnatural way. And He chose to do so. Jesus, God the Son, chose to suffer out of an overflowing love so that we might know peace. And the requirements