Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Judgment of the Servant for the People. Isaiah 53:4-12; Acts 8:34-40 (part 2)

Acts 1:8 was the final marching order from the Lord Jesus Christ to the apostles: that they were to stay in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit came and then they were to be witnesses of Jesus in Jerusalem, then in Judea and Samaria and then to the uttermost part of the earth.

We have looked at two areas of expansion that have taken place as a result of the persecution. The first is the movement into Samaria. As we go through this section of Acts, we need to think about how the Holy Spirit is working more overtly in these episodes, but there is no mention of the Holy Spirit guiding or directing Philip in vv. 4, 5.

Acts 8:4-5

Acts 8:4–5 NKJV

4 Therefore those who were scattered went everywhere preaching the word. 5 Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria and preached Christ to them.

The message in Acts is that the Holy Spirit is always working behind the scenes but it is in a covert manner. It is not something that is known or seen until after the fact; we only know it from its results. In the early church in this transition period, there were times when there was a more overt direction from God the Holy Spirit. But as we read through Acts and the epistles that is rare. This rarity challenges the common misconception that the Holy Spirit's movement was overt in the first century, especially in light of a lot of theological trends of the 20th century.

As we get into the episode in the latter part of this chapter we see the Holy Spirit overtly, actively, consciously, in a manner that was known to Philip, moving him from one location to another. This kind of expression in the book of Acts, while disappearing by the time we get to the mid part of the book, underscores the importance of the Holy Spirit's guidance in the early church's expansion. By the time we reach chapters 12, 13, and 14, the Holy Spirit is not mentioned in this manner. So that was part of the transition that was taking place.

The Holy Spirit is only mentioned as overtly moving the apostles in specific directions a few times or as God directing them through the appearance of an angel. Then, in this episode of Philip going to the Ethiopian eunuch, we have both overt direct direction and directive guidance from an angel of the Lord (v. 26), Acts 8:26.

Acts 8:26

Acts 8:26 NKJV

26 Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is desert.

and then we have the Holy Spirit’s guidance coming up just a few verses later in v. 29.

Acts 8:29

Acts 8:29 NKJV

29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.”

But for those who want to tell us that overt ministry is supposed to be the standard operating procedure for the church, the problem with that view is that there are few references to an overt ministry of God the Holy Spirit like this in the early part of Acts, and then that overt activity is not mentioned anymore.

And God operating overtly is not that normative even in the book's first part.

God directing overtly is not the expected, normal routine.

We need to ask why the Holy Spirit isn’t mentioned as having a more overt guidance pattern in the rest of the New Testament.

Why isn’t the Holy Spirit mentioned as utilizing a more overt guidance pattern in the New Testament?

It is just not there. When we look at it in light of some of the things we see in Acts 2, 4, 8, and 10 with Cornelius, what we see is that this sort of overt divine guidance is very rare in even the very early apostolic period.

The normal mode of God’s direction is more covert, more behind the scenes where the effect is felt more than any sort of sense of specific direction revelation from God. It is mostly from either circumstance or, as they understood what the mission was, they tried to just go forward and accomplish the mission as it seemed best to them.

This is how we see Philip making the first decision. He moves up and goes to Samaria on his own initiative. There is no direct overt guidance from the Holy Spirit, he just moves up there in contrast to what takes place in the second half.

After finishing the ministry in Samaria Peter and John are going to leave and go back to Jerusalem, and all that we are told at the end of that section in verse 25 is

Acts 8:25

Acts 8:25 NKJV

25 So when they had testified and preached the word of the Lord, they returned to Jerusalem, preaching the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans.

But we are not told what happens to Philip.

He travels with them back to Jerusalem or stays up in central Samaria and continues his ministry there. Or, we know later on that Caesarea by the Sea was his home later on and he may have already moved there, so he might have already moved there. We don’t know exactly what happened to Philip once they finished this ministry in Samaria.

We do know that the curtain goes down at the end of verse 25 and then opens again with the scene in verse 26. So, there is something of a time-lapse in the text at that point.

The second event that is brought up is the direction that God gave to Philip to move to the southern part of Judea.

Acts 8:26

Acts 8:26 NKJV

26 Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is desert.

The guidance given here to Philip comes from an angel of the Lord is expressly stated by the indicative verb. Now, this angel is not the same as the angel of the Lord that we have in the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is very clear that the term “angel of the Lord” has an article with it, so “THE angel of the Lord” and speaks of the pre-incarnate Lord Jesus Christ, whereas here, it just speaks of an angel who is sent from God to guide Philip.

This would be overt guidance. The Angel speaks as we understand speaking from the normal usage of the term. This would be a verbal, audible direction given to Philip, and the angel would have appeared to him. That is the normative situation whenever an angel gives guidance, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament.

It is not some internal impression or subjective feeling.

It has been frequently taken in different ways. People will tell you that an Angel told them such and such or to do thus and so, and they are talking about mystical impressions that they “receive” from angels.

Many use this text as support for that perplexing belief.

What happens in those cases, is that because of the way some traditions and some people have read certain things, they read them into the text. But all the text says is that an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, “saying.”

If we want to understand this, we must see how these words and this phraseology of an angel speaking are used in other places in Scripture. In every other place where it is used, there is an appearance of an angel and an external objective, an audible statement by the angel. So this is not some sort of mystical, subjective divine guidance through feelings; it is overt special revelation via an angel.

Verse 26 doesn’t mean Philip is in Jerusalem, it just tells us that this is the main road that went from Jerusalem to Gaza. The last little statement in the English says this was desert. Interestingly, it is unclear how that phrase relates to the rest of the sentence in Greek. The word “desert” grammatically could relate to either Gaza or to “road.” If it related to “road,” it would be speaking about the desert part of the road where it went through the desert.

If it referred to Gaza then it would be referring to the ancient city of Gaza. Gaza is where Samson was imprisoned and ultimately brought down the temple of the Philistines. Gaza was destroyed in 96 BC by one of the Hasmonean rulers, Alexander Jannaeus, and the new city of Gaza was not rebuilt until approximately 56 BC by the Romans, and it was a few miles south of the ancient city that had been the city of the Philistines. In other words, if it is rebuilt 56 BC, that is after Acts 15, and definitely way after Acts 8. There is no city of Gaza, just city ruins and the area known as

Somewhere along this roadway, Philip is going to meet up with the Ethiopians. Even at the time of the New Testament, the excavation of part of the ancient site of Gaza was often referred to, to distinguish this site from the new city, and this site was referred to as “desert Gaza.” So when the text reads, “This is desert,” it is probably talking about the road to desert Gaza, not the desert road to Gaza.

Gaza is only mentioned this one time in the Scripture, but, of course, we see it mentioned almost every day in the newspaper, usually about the Gaza strip, which has been given over to complete Palestinian Authority control with HAMAS, a derivative of the Muslim Brotherhood, running Gaza.

The angel gives him an order, and Philip responds. This is how every believer should respond when the Word of God directs us as to what to do. We should recognize that this is a direction from God and a normative pattern in our lives.

Acts 8:27

Acts 8:26–27 NKJV

There is obviously divine guidance behind the scenes, and there will be an intersection of the path of Philip and this Ethiopian.

But we don’t read that he arose and went, AND the Holy Spirit guided him to this eunuch. We know what is happening behind the scenes, but it is not overt. The text doesn’t make a point of always saying those things. In fact the emphasis is on the obedience of Phillip.

The reason for saying that is one of the things observed is that you can always tell when some people are brand new believers.

They are enthusiastic and very excited about the Christian life, which is always refreshing. But it is often found that there are people who think they have to talk in particular “Christian” verbiage. They might say “Praise the Lord” in every other sentence, say “Amen” and “Isn’t God wonderful,” and every time something has happened, they say, the Lord did this, the Lord did that.

Scripture doesn’t even do that. This shows the new believer’s enthusiasm, but hopefully, they will kind of calm down after a bit of time and recognize that using verbiage like that has no spiritual value one way or the other.

This verse is essential for setting up and understanding the background and context to answer and address some of the issues here.

We sometimes see in commentaries comments like, “We can see Philip’s yieldedness to the Spirit’s control and his obedience.” We don’t know how the commentator can see it because there is no mention of yieldedness. There is mention of his obedience but no mention of the Holy Spirit. It is a response to the angel. This is the subtle way in which people read things into the text. We have to be careful not to read things into the text.

Part of the issue is that people have an inability to reconcile how God (including God the Holy Spirit) works covertly in our lives because they can’t reconcile the idea of free will with sovereignty.

They typically don’t even realize that this is happening in their thinking.

This is largely the baggage that comes from the influence of Calvinism and the idea of determinism that comes from a non grace orientation. The idea of God’s Irresistable Grace diminishes the role of human responsibility and the need for operational faith in the life of the believer. The idea of Limited Atonement restricts the idea of the availability of God’s grace — people can’t fathom how God’s grace is constantly flowing and working.

Frankly, the Arminians aren’t any better, since they completely neglect grace as well, and put the burden solely on man.

But we understand that with volitional response we are enabled to take advantage of God’s magnificent grace enablement and empowerment. This is what we see in the text here: Phillip Arose, active voice, which is a positive volitional response that embraces grace. God’s provision is always manifest as we respond with a positive volition. God in His eternal breadth is not limited in His omniscience and omnipotence breadth of capacity and therefore is always able to create a matrix of grace that surrounds us and penetrates every aspect of our life.

Our passage and the action of Phillip is an unquestioning obedience that can be seen in Genesis 22:3.

Genesis 22:3

Genesis 22:3 NKJV

3 So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.

Here we again have the idea of no hesitation, but immediate response.

Part of the reason for this is going back to the doctrine of SHEMA which we reviewed in James 2 and Hebrews 11. There is a doctrine that can be heard and yet not acted upon which James condemns. The Old Testament of Shema is that what you hear you do. It begins with Abraham and continues as an irrepressible concept. The idea of hearing and not doing is simply anathema.

James 1:21-22

James 1:21–22 NKJV

21 Therefore lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. 22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

In terms of the obedience of faith, As we see in verse 29, the Holy Spirit plays a key role in this encounter as well, but don’t confuse the Holy Spirit with the angel in verse 26.

Acts 8:29

Acts 8:29 NKJV

29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.”

Now back to verse 27.

Acts 8:27 NKJV

27 So he arose and went. And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, and had come to Jerusalem to worship,

It is interesting to understand the background of the man from Ethiopia. We would think of this man as a Gentile, but the Scriptures are very clear when we get to Acts chapter 10 that the first Gentiles to be saved and to become part of the church are the members of Cornelius’s household. So this isn’t a Gentile. We are still seeing the church's expansion in a primarily Jewish context.

Ethiopia in Scripture doesn’t refer specifically to the modern state of Ethiopia but mainly to the modern nation of Sudan. It is the area called Cush in the Old Testament, also called Nubea in Scripture. It extends south of the first cataract on the Nile, so it is more in the area of the nation of Khartoum.

The Greek word for Ethiopia is aithiops [Αἰθίοψ], which has as its primary meaning “burnt face.” So it was a normal expectation of any reader at this time that if you were speaking of any of the Ethiopian people, then you were speaking of dark-skinned people who were from this area south of Egypt.

A question that we should ask because of the significance of what is going on in Scripture related to Jews and Gentiles is, just exactly what is the identity of this Ethiopian?

The first option is that he is Jewish.

We don’t think that is the case, but we do think that is a possibility. We have seen this in modern times. There is a considerable number of Ethiopians who were air-lifted to Israel back in the eighties and nineties and are considered by the Jews to be Jewish. So we ought to ask the question:

What is the basis for this claim to be Jewish, and what exactly is their identification?

Two significant operations took place back in the late twentieth century. The first occurred in 1984 and 1985 and was a secret operation known as Operation Moses. This involved a massive airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel over several months, and approximately 8,500 Jews were taken to Israel. But when information about this leaked out to the press, due to international pressure, the Jewish community shut down the operation. Then, about six years later, in May of 1991, due to the persecution of these people, there was a massive airlift that took place known as Operation Solomon. Over 24 hours, the Israelis did a massive airlift of 35,000 Ethiopians into Israel and set all kinds of records in doing that.

There have been several suggestions as to who these people are. Some have suggested that they were members of the ten lost tribes (a reference to the ten tribes that were in the northern kingdom of Israel, which was conquered in 722 BC by the Assyrians) who were removed from their traditional homeland and resettled in different areas of the Assyrian empire.

The Assyrian empire was the area that goes from Iraq, Syria, and Iran, which is the opposite of Ethiopia and northern Africa. So, they are probably not members of the ten lost tribes.

A second option has to do with the legends that have been carried on down through the centuries by the Ethiopian people and the group that refer to themselves as the House of Israel where they trace their origins back to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had a child.

When the Queen of Sheba was pregnant by Solomon, she went back to Ethiopia, where she had a son, and this was the beginning of this dynasty that extended down to Haile Selassie, who was the last emperor of Ethiopia. Nobody is sure how much of that is true.

There is another option, and that is that this is the product of intermarriage between Jews who left Judea with Jeremiah for Egypt when Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC, and then when some of the Jews who went to Egypt later went further south into the area of Ethiopia. There is also the view that there were a number of converts in the entourage that would have accompanied the Queen of Sheba to the court of Solomon, that there was a large number of these people who converted to biblical Judaism, and that when they went back to Ethiopia, they followed that, became a little bit segregated in their culture and continued down through the ages. There has been a lot of speculation as to who these Ethiopian Jews are, but we don’t have enough information about them.

One of the interesting things about this community is that it is very clear that they have a very ancient claim to being Jewish. They practice all of the Mosaic Law and the customs of Judaism, but it is not a second temple period Judaism, not a rabbinical form of Judaism. They have no understanding or awareness of any of the standard rabbinic practices in the time of Christ or the period just before Christ. They do not know the rabbinic laws enacted after the Old Testament period ended. They only know of Old Testament Judaism. Another reason we can know that their origins are ancient is partially based on the account in Acts chapter eight, the story of Philip with the Ethiopian eunuch and his evident Jewish awareness and knowledge of Judaism in Ethiopia, and an awareness to the degree that this Ethiopian eunuch who was a very highly place court official has made a pilgrimage to one of the annual feast days to Jerusalem to worship at the temple.

So, there are four options for identifying this Ethiopian.

The first is that he truly was a Jew. That is probably not likely.

A second way in which a Gentile could become a Jew or be considered Jewish was to become a full proselyte to Judaism.

In this case, they would accept all of the Torah, customs, and practices of the Jews, and this would be a complete part of their life and religion. This is probably not the case with the Ethiopian because, most likely, he was a eunuch—that is not just a title for somebody who was in a role of personal servitude to the royal family, though he most probably was—and if he was a eunuch then, according to Deuteronomy 23:1, he would not be allowed to enter into the inner courts of the temple to worship. He could have gone only as far as the courtyard of the Gentiles. So, he could not be a full proselyte to Judaism if he was a eunuch.

This would mean that the third option would be most likely, and this was a reference to a proselyte of the gate, someone who was a Gentile but believed in and worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the most part, they accepted the customs and practices of Judaism, but they did not have to submit to the rite of circumcision.

Again, here is what we showed you last week about categories of proselytes.

When we come to Cornelius in Acts chapter ten, we are told that Cornelius was a God-fearer. He is not considered a proselyte or a proselyte of the gate but a Gentile who worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob alone, who lived as best they could according to the laws of the Torah but did not necessarily have to follow or accept all of the customs and practices of the Jews. This explains why he has his copy of Isaiah. This would have been extremely rare in the ancient world. Usually, only a person of some wealth or means could own their own copy.

Acts 8:28

Acts 8:28 NKJV

28 was returning. And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet.

The term that is used for reading there fits with the regular usage of the word at this time when he was reading it out loud. One of the reasons they read out loud was that this facilitated memory, and they would memorize the Scripture. There was an emphasis in the culture to learn by rote memory.

Today, if you are in education and say anything about rote memory, you are considered somewhat antiquated, and yet most people who were educated and made most of the brilliant discoveries and inventions upon which everything modern is built came up through education systems built on rote memory. So, this should not be looked down upon by modern education schemes. It teaches how to learn and how to retain things. The more we memorize things the more we will remember things. The more we train our mind to remember things the easier it will become and the more we will remember. And who knows what kind of an impact that might have down through the years if we get Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia? As with Scripture, the same applies to hymns. People should memorize hymns. So, it is important to get this into the soul through Bible memory and learning hymns.

As Philip comes running up, he hears what the Ethiopian reads in chapter fifty-three of Isaiah. It is important to note that he doesn’t fully comprehend what he is reading. A point to bring up here is that everyone should be involved in a Bible reading program. We should read three, four, five, etc., every day because this is the Word of God that washes through our brains. Of course, there are going to be passages that we don’t understand. But we are reading to be reminded of promises so that if we see verses that are promises, we can underline the promises. We are being reminded of how God has worked in the lives of believers in the past. I am reading to be reminded of circumstances, situations, and events that took place in the Scriptures, and we are reading to be reminded of certain vital doctrines. We should be reading the Scriptures regularly. Unfortunately, that practice has fallen on dry times and is not practiced much today.

He is reading, but he does not understand or comprehend. But because he is reading he has a frame of reference for a conversation. Today, if we go into a public school, any environment where there are children, and we try to talk about the Bible, we are in serious trouble because they are biblically illiterate. Even among a lot of Christians in a lot of churches, they are biblically illiterate. They don’t know the events; they don’t know the people, so we can’t even have an informed conversation about the gospel, God, or spiritual things because people don’t have the vocabulary, information, or knowledge. And even if you are reading and not understanding everything there, you are still learning about people, places, events, and things, which becomes a foundation in your thinking for conversation and learning later on. But when you don’t have the basic vocabulary, nobody can have an intelligent conversation about the Bible or anything related to God.

What the Ethiopian is reading comes from Isaiah 53:7-8.

Isaiah 53:7-8

Isaiah 53:7–8 NKJV

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth. 8 He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

As he is reading this out aloud God the Holy Spirit gives further direction to Philip.

Acts 8:29

Acts 8:29 NKJV

29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.”

Note that this is the first time in this episode that God the Holy Spirit has been mentioned. Does that mean that the Holy Spirit was inactive in the rest of this? No, not at all. It is not the story's background or point; this is not the normative pattern of divine guidance. But at this point, the Spirit, not the angel of v. 26, audibly communicates to Philip—that is the normal sense of the word. The comment “he had an impression of what he should do” is not what the text says. The text says he was given direct and specific information.

Acts 8:30-31

Acts 8:30–31 NKJV

30 So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31 And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.

This shows that it is not enough just to read the Scripture. Reading the Scripture is essential and critical, but it will not get you there. You have to have someone who can guide you in understanding the Scripture. That is the role of the pastor-teacher; that is why God has given the spiritual gift of pastor-teacher, and the pastor-teacher is a man who is gifted and trained (very important; just because you have a gift doesn’t mean you know how to use it). Too many churches and pastors have forgotten that today and would rather have somebody who has the gift than somebody who has been trained. The man with the gift who has no training is a time bomb. He is in trouble because he doesn’t know enough to stay out of trouble.

The eunuch asks one question, and it is essential to pay attention to this.

Acts 8:34

Acts 8:34 NKJV

34 So the eunuch answered Philip and said, “I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this, of himself or of some other man?”

He does not ask any other theological or doctrinal questions that we might ask. He is just saying, “Who is he talking about?” That is what opens the door to this tremendous conversation, the opportunity to communicate the gospel and clarify it for the Ethiopian.

Who is My Servant? Acts 8: 26-29, Isaiah 53

We are in Acts chapter eight vv. 26-40 which is one of the great episodes in the founding and expansion of the church when God directed, through first an angel and then the Holy Spirit, Philip to go south along the Gaza road and to meet with this Ethiopian eunuch. In verse 26 we see the directive from the angel for Philip to go along this road.

Acts 8:30

Acts 8:30 NKJV

30 So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?”

He probably would have been reading the section from 52:12 to the end of chapter 53.

Philips question is an interesting turn of the phrase in the Greek, ginoskeis ha anaginoskeis [γινωσκεις α αναγινωσκεις]. You can hear the alliteration there.

Basically the first verb ginosko would be translated “Do you understand, do you really comprehend what you are reading, or are you just reading the story?” The word for reading is another compound word based on ginosko—anaginosko, which usually means to read out loud. It is the same word used in Timothy when Paul tells Timothy to give attention to the public reading of Scripture.

Acts 8:31

Acts 8:31 NKJV

31 And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him.

He uses the word hodegeo [ὁδηγέω] which means to lead, to guide, to direct. It used of guiding a blind person; it is used in the LXX of God guiding or directing the Israelites through the desert,

Moses guiding the Israelites in passages such as

Exodus 15:13 ; 32:34 .

Exodus 15:13 NKJV

13 You in Your mercy have led forth The people whom You have redeemed; You have guided them in Your strength To Your holy habitation.

Exodus 32:34 NKJV

34 Now therefore, go, lead the people to the place of which I have spoken to you. Behold, My Angel shall go before you. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit for punishment, I will visit punishment upon them for their sin.”

It expresses guidance. So he needs someone to tell him what it means. He is an unbeliever. 1 Corinthians 2:13 says the natural man does not understand the things of the Spirit of God because they are spiritually discerned.

1 Corinthians 2:13

1 Corinthians 2:13 NKJV

13 These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

Because he is spiritually dead means he is lacking the internal immaterial components to fully comprehend the spiritual impact and teaching of a passage. So there needs to be further explanation and guidance, and God the Holy Spirit uses pastors, friends, people and literature to do that.

The Ethiopian had his scroll, indicating he was wealthy enough to have his own copy. A scroll was usually about 8-12 inches wide and anywhere from 16 to 145 feet long. It would have been written in square Hebrew text.

As Philip gets up on the chariot, he continues to read the next verse, a verse he has a question on Acts 8:32

Acts 8:32-33

Acts 8:32–33 NKJV

32 The place in the Scripture which he read was this: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; And as a lamb before its shearer is silent, So He opened not His mouth. 33 In His humiliation His justice was taken away, And who will declare His generation? For His life is taken from the earth.”

One thing that is interesting here is that in the quotation in the Greek from the LXX, the statement is made that He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and as a lamb before its shearers …” The word translated “lamb” is the Greek word onmos [ἀμνός], a word for lamb that is only used four times in all of the New Testament. This word is extremely significant.

In John chapter one, John the Baptist uses it twice with reference to Jesus: v. 29,

John 1:29

John 1:29 NKJV

29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

Verse 36,

John 1:36

John 1:36 NKJV

36 And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God!”

End of 2nd Service 10/13/2024

Sunday October 20, 2024

Pentecost: The New Church Series

Review

Last week we encountered the Eunuch of Etheopia, who has been to Jerusalem and is returning home. He is reading the scroll of Isaiah out loud, which tells us that he is fabulously wealthy to be able to afford such a unique and carefully written scroll by a scribe. Because he has journeyed to Jerusalem, we can conclude that he is more than a

Again, here is what we showed you last couple of weeks about categories of proselytes.

The Ethiopian Eunuch might fit the category of Yirei Shamayim (God-fearers) or Mityahadim (Hellenistic Jews), given his interest in Jewish teachings and his status as a God-fearer. He appears to be more than a Noachide, but cannot be a Ger Tzedek or Righteous Proselyte because he is castrated and therefore does not qualify for circumcision. He can’t be a Ger Toshav or Disciple of The Gate, because he lives outside of the land, and is returning home.

Keep this in mind if you have read any commentaries on this passage. It is always interesting to me how commentators, even those I respect a great deal, don’t do their homework and perpeturate ideas like … “he is probably a Disciple of the Gate.”

As Philip gets up on the chariot, he continues to read the next verse, a verse he has a question on Acts 8:32

Acts 8:32-33

Acts 8:32–33 NKJV

In John chapter one, John the Baptist uses it twice with reference to Jesus: v. 29,

John 1:29

John 1:29 NKJV

29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

Verse 36,

John 1:36

John 1:36 NKJV

36 And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God!”

This word for lamb would have had great significance if you were a Jewish listener because you would have connected the phrase “Lamb of God” with the Passover lamb or with any lamb that was part of a sacrifice, a lamb that was without spot or blemish.

Remember that Peter had also been a disciple of John the Baptist before being a disciple of Jesus.

Peter was taught this first by John the Baptist, then saw it personally.

He writes:

1 Pet 1:18-19

1 Peter 1:18–19 NKJV

18 knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.

End of 1st Service 10/20/2024

These three, then this passage in Acts 8 are the only four passages that use this term for “lamb” and it brings into focus the substitutionary sacrificial role of the lamb standing in the place of someone else. As the worshipper would come and put his hand on the lamb and recite his sins those sins were ritually being transferred from the person to the lamb, and then the lamb would be killed bearing the sin penalty.

We’ve been studying this Sunday Nights in our Names of God Study as we review the Covenant sacrifices of YHWH.

But the question that is asked of Philip is a fairly simple one.

Acts 8:34

Acts 8:34 NKJV

34 So the eunuch answered Philip and said, “I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this, of himself or of some other man?”

So, he is confused. He doesn’t understand who this whole passage is talking about.

Is it talking about Isaiah or somebody else?

By the time of the first century, some other options had been suggested by the Rabbis. Nothing had been developed in terms of an alternate type of interpretation, but the first option would have been a historical figure such as the eunuch mentions, Isaiah himself. Or possibly other ideas that floated around in subsequent years with Elijah, Hezekiah, or the prophets.

But none of these had any traction.

In the early period of the first century of the church, and the period before the first century, the evidence that we have is that the rabbis clearly understood Isaiah 53 to refer to the Messiah, to an individual.

They had difficulty reconciling that with their view that the Messiah would come as a ruling Messiah who would give victory to Israel. By the time of the first century, when Jesus came, the rabbis had already become myopic in their understanding of the Messiah as only a ruling Messiah and not a suffering Messiah. They had twisted the scripture from its normal, literal, grammatical, historical, contextual interpretation into a distortion.

But the Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures are clear, especially from Isaiah 53: that the Messiah will suffer and die for the iniquity of His people, and He will pay for the sins not only of Israel but for all people. That is very clear in this whole passage. But they couldn’t reconcile the glory aspect of the Messiah with the suffering aspect of the Messiah, and they got the glory before the suffering. This is why they couldn't put that together when Jesus came lowly and humble and not as a victorious conquering hero.

So one option was a historical figure—Isaiah himself or a prophet, and the second option was the nation or the people of Israel. There is some debate over this because it is not until much later in history that there is a definitive, well articulated interpretation among the rabbis that becomes accepted that it tries to interpret the servant here as the people or the nation Israel. Some things cited indicate that this idea was floated out there maybe as early as the second century, but nobody bit it. It wasn’t an idea that grabbed anybody. The primary idea through the first millennia of the church age among Jewish writers was that this was an individual.

The verse that is quoted by the Ethiopian eunuch starts in the middle of Isaiah 53:7.

He starts with the sentence,

Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 53:7 NKJV

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

The verse reads differently because he is quoting from the LXX. So, although the Septuagint differs from the Massoretic text, whether it is a paraphrase or whatever the reason, the focus is still the same: the servant of God, referred to as “my servant.”

So we take a diversion and do a study of Isaiah 53, which is such a critical passage to understand. The section begins at the end of Isaiah chapter 52.

Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

This is part of a servant psalm.

There are four servant songs in the latter part of Isaiah, from chapter forty to sixty-six.

Among liberal scholars (because the theme of Isaiah 40-66 is so much different from chapters 1-39) in the 19th century who thought everything in the Bible was cobbled together by editors much later than the claims of Scripture believed that Isaiah could not have written these two different parts because they had different themes, different focus, different vocabulary. This just shows the problems of these liberal scholars because there are many people throughout the world who write as experts in many fields.

Lewis Carol, who we know wrote Alice In Wonderland, also wrote a textbook on symbolic logic. It is suggested that if a computer was taken to do a study of the words that are used in Through The Looking Glass and the words that are used in his Symbolic Logic there is not a whole lot of overlap. It is completely different subject matter and a completely different approach to literature—a completely different style of literature. So it might be considered asinine to come along and say Lewis Carol wrote Through The Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland so that he couldn’t have written a technical book on symbolic logic. That shows how narrow-minded and limited some people are.

So we need to ask why there would be this difference. Maybe the text can tell us.

Isaiah 1-39: focus on God’s judgment in the future on nations and Israel for her disobedience to God.

Isaiah 40-66: focuses on God’s future provision for and deliverance of Israel; the fulfillment of promises for Israel.

In Isaiah 1-39, we focus on God’s future judgment upon the nations and Israel for her disobedience to God.

Isaiah begins with a focus on the future millennial kingdom, the reign of Messiah, and the glories that will come to Israel. This is followed by various chapters dealing with the judgments on Babylon and other nations surrounding Israel.

It is depressing when we read through it. If we were living in Israel at that time, we would think the world was going to fall apart because there is going to be horrible, horrible judgments. Isaiah is foretelling the destruction of the kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem by the Babylonians within 150 years because of their disobedience to God. This is not a happy message. He is condemning the false prophets and false teachers in Israel at the time, and it is a time of darkness and chaos in the world, and it is going to be really bad. But there is hope, and it is never that dark because God is in control.

Isaiah 40-66 doesn’t focus on judgment; it focuses on God’s future provision and deliverance of Israel, the fulfillment of all of God’s promises for Israel, and how no matter how terrible, how dark, how destructive or how horrendous things get God is still in control, and therefore even though it appears to be unstable it is stable because God controls history.

God is going to fulfill all of His promises and deliver Israel. It is a message of hope.

The last 27 chapters of Isaiah focus on God’s future deliverance, so it is a different focal point from what we have in the first 39 chapters. In the heart of this section from Isaiah 40-66 is the section from 52:13 to 53:12. This is the heart of this message, and it focuses on the deliverer and what He will do to deliver God’s people.

What is interesting today in the Jewish community is that Jews do not encourage reading certain passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, the synagogues all read the same passages of Scripture every week so that around the world, in what is called the Haftarah readings that they read together off the same page. As they get to the third Sabbath in August, the reading ends at Isaiah 52:12, and then the following reading begins at Isaiah 54:1. So, from Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 are not read, and they are not discussed.

One of the reasons for this is that during the period of the early church and through the Middle Ages by reading through this particular section hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews, became Christians because it was just so obvious when reading through this section that it must have been a prophecy related to the Messiah and Jesus fulfilled it. It was taken out of their reading. But this is a passage that predicts a suffering Messiah, a Messiah who suffers as a substitute for the people, so they will not suffer, and that the death of this suffering servant is not due to anything unjust or wrong in His life but that His death itself is an injustice because He is without sin, and it is on the basis of His death, His substitutionary work, that many will be justified (53:11).

In 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 the apostle Paul talks about the gospel, and in summarizing, says that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.

1 Corinthians 15:1-4

1 Corinthians 15:1–4 NKJV

1 Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,

For the apostle Paul, the Scriptures were the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. So where do we find the Hebrew Old Testament talking about the fact that the Messiah would die for our sins? Right here in Isaiah chapter 53. This has been one of those issues, if not the primary issue, that has caused such a division between Jews and Christians over the last 2000 years.

Isaiah 52:13-15 is an introductory summary of what is covered in Isaiah 53:1-12.

Isaiah 52:13-14

Isaiah 52:13–14 NKJV

His visage is His facial features, and this indicates that He is so tortured, beaten to a pulp, that no one could recognize Him.

The result is Isaiah 52:15

Isaiah 52:15

Isaiah 52:15 NKJV

15 So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; For what had not been told them they shall see, And what they had not heard they shall consider.

The word for sprinkle is the same word that is used for a priest dipping his hand in the blood and sprinkling it on the altar. It is the same word that is used in numerous sacrificial contexts. He will sprinkle “many nations” [Gentiles]. This is a clear statement in the summary here that the servant is not only going to die for Israel but also for the Gentiles. His death is going to have a universal application.

“… 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.”

The profundity of the gospel is emphasized there. So according to Isaiah 52:14-15, He suffers for the people of Israel, His blood will sprinkle many nations, and therefore it is clear from these verses that He will be the savior of both the Jews and the Gentiles.

If we look at this section of Isaiah, we must understand its background and organization.

There are three basic divisions in Isaiah 40-66.

Isaiah 40-48: The reality of a future deliverance for Israel.

Isaiah 49-55: The future deliverer of Israel.

Isaiah 56-66: The Kingdom in the future and what that will be like.

1. The first focus is on the reality of a future deliverance for Israel.

God promises that He will deliver no matter how dark it may appear, no matter how chaotic circumstances may appear—chapters 40-48.

Within that is the first song of the servant in Isaiah 42:1-9.

2. The second division focuses on the future deliverer of Israel, and the focal point of chapters 49-55 is 52:13-53:12. There are three songs in this section. The second is in Isaiah 49:1-13, the third song is in 50:4-11, and the fourth song is in 52:12-53:13.

3. Then Isaiah 56-66 focuses on the future deliverer of Israel—the future deliverance of Israel, the kingdom in the future and what that will be like.

For the most part in the history of interpretation among Jewish commentators, including the Targums and the Midrash is that this passage is talking about the Messiah, and it was understood to be an individual in this passage.

However, during the first thousand years or so after the fall of the temple many Jews were led to a belief in Jesus as the Messiah from reading this passage. So there were various attempts to try to reinterpret this—the suffering servant is Elijah, Hezekiah or Isaiah. Even today somebody comes up with a new interpretation but most of the time they don’t have any traction.

There was a famous rabbi known by the name of Rashi who was revolutionary in developing a new allegorical interpretation, a system of interpretation that was applied to numerous messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures.

His attempt was to basically remove the prophecies of an individual Messiah from the Old Testament. One of the interesting things about him is that this happened later in his life and he changed his views, but in his earlier commentary on the Talmud when he was younger he took an individual messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53.

When the printing press came along, in some of the first Bible that were printed there was also included his commentaries on the Old Testament. That influenced some Protestant reformers—like Calvin and a few others—so that they also had some of these views of some of these passages that we normally view as being messianic, weren’t.

Looking at Isaiah 53 we look at this immediate context and recognise that there is this emphasis on deliverance. The deliverance comes from an individual figure referred to in this section as “My servant.” So we have to ask the question: who is the servant of God?

There is debate on this, and if we are talking to anybody Jewish about this they will come up with the interpretation that the servant is the nation Israel.

There are different people identified with different servants in Isaiah, so it is not like we could say every time it is “my servant” it is Israel or every time it is “my servant” it is the Messiah, because it is not.

For example, in

Isaiah 20:3

Isaiah 20:3 NKJV

3 Then the Lord said, “Just as My servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and a wonder against Egypt and Ethiopia,

it refers to Isaiah himself but that doesn’t work all the time. In

Isaiah 22:20

Isaiah 22:20 NKJV

20 ‘Then it shall be in that day, That I will call My servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah;

it is “my servant Eliakim.”

Isaiah 37:35

Isaiah 37:35 NKJV

35 ‘For I will defend this city, to save it For My own sake and for My servant David’s sake.’ ”

it is “my servant David.” So there are different people who are identified as the servant of Yahweh. It is also very clear in some passages that the servant is also seen as the people of Israel.

Isaiah 41:8-9

Isaiah 41:8–9 NKJV

8 “But you, Israel, are My servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, The descendants of Abraham My friend. 9 You whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, And called from its farthest regions, And said to you, ‘You are My servant, I have chosen you and have not cast you away:

“you Israel are my servant.”

Isaiah 42:18-20

Isaiah 42:18–20 NKJV

18 “Hear, you deaf; And look, you blind, that you may see. 19 Who is blind but My servant, Or deaf as My messenger whom I send? Who is blind as he who is perfect, And blind as the Lord’s servant? 20 Seeing many things, but you do not observe; Opening the ears, but he does not hear.”

where it is a criticism of Israel being spiritually deaf, blind and ignorant of spiritual truth. In verse 19 God says, “Who is blind but My servant …” This is the negative criticism that the servant has failed to fulfil his role as a servant.

In Isaiah 43:10.

Isaiah 43:10

Isaiah 43:10 NKJV

10 “You are My witnesses,” says the Lord, “And My servant whom I have chosen, That you may know and believe Me, And understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, Nor shall there be after Me.

God says, “You are My witnesses … and My servant whom I have chosen…”;

Isaiah 44:1

Isaiah 44:1 NKJV

1 “Yet hear me now, O Jacob My servant, And Israel whom I have chosen.

“But now listen, O Jacob, My servant, And Israel, whom I have chosen.”

In these passages it is clear that they refer to Israel as the servant of God. But the question is: Is that who God is speaking about when we get into the servant psalms. Isaiah also points out the flaws, the failures of Israel as God’s servant.

Israel is too corrupt and too sinful to fulfil God’s mission for them as His servant.

Isaiah 1:4

Isaiah 1:4 NKJV

4 Alas, sinful nation, A people laden with iniquity, A brood of evildoers, Children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, They have provoked to anger The Holy One of Israel, They have turned away backward.

Isaiah 29:10

Isaiah 29:10 NKJV

10 For the Lord has poured out on you The spirit of deep sleep, And has closed your eyes, namely, the prophets; And He has covered your heads, namely, the seers.

Isaiah 48:1

Isaiah 48:1 NKJV

1 “Hear this, O house of Jacob, Who are called by the name of Israel, And have come forth from the wellsprings of Judah; Who swear by the name of the Lord, And make mention of the God of Israel, But not in truth or in righteousness;

– giving lip service to God and to the Torah. So the nation of Israel is viewed as being too corrupt. They need a redeemer. How can Israel be the redeemer to redeem themselves when they are in need of a redeemer.

So Isaiah presents a second servant, and it is the role of the second servant to fulfil the mission of redemption for the people.

Isaiah 52:9

Isaiah 52:9 NKJV

9 Break forth into joy, sing together, You waste places of Jerusalem! For the Lord has comforted His people, He has redeemed Jerusalem.

His role is mentioned in Isaiah 42:7

Isaiah 42:7

Isaiah 42:7 NKJV

7 To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the prison, Those who sit in darkness from the prison house.

This is quoted as fulfilment in the ministry of Jesus. Isaiah 53:11.

Isaiah 53:11

Isaiah 53:11 NKJV

11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.

In Isaiah 53 the servant is modified by what noun?

“Righteous.”

Can Israel be called a righteous servant? Not at all; not in line with those other passages just quoted.

Isaiah 49:5-6

Isaiah 49:5–6 NKJV

5 “And now the Lord says, Who formed Me from the womb to be His Servant, To bring Jacob back to Him, So that Israel is gathered to Him (For I shall be glorious in the eyes of the Lord, And My God shall be My strength), 6 Indeed He says, ‘It is too small a thing that You should be My Servant To raise up the tribes of Jacob, And to restore the preserved ones of Israel; I will also give You as a light to the Gentiles, That You should be My salvation to the ends of the earth.’ ”

The role of the servant is to bring Jacob back so that Israel is “gathered to Him”

The servant is given to bring Israel back to God, but that is too small. We are not going to limit God’s grace to just bringing the Jews back; God’s grace goes to all the nations. It is clear from the context that the servant seems to be an individual, not the nation Israel. Two servants are in view: Israel initially, but the only servant who can provide redemption is the servant mentioned in Isaiah 53.

As we begin to approach this section of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 we see that it is formed in a chiasm, a literary device that organises words, lists, topics in an order so that they have a certain flow.

There is a focus on the servant’s glory in light of His suffering in Isaiah 52:13-15.

Isaiah 52:13-15

Isaiah 52:13–15 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. 14 Just as many were astonished at you, So His visage was marred more than any man, And His form more than the sons of men; 15 So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; For what had not been told them they shall see, And what they had not heard they shall consider.

When we come to the end of chapter 53 there is an emphasis again on the servant’s glory in view of His suffering.

The servant’s submissive character is emphasized in Isaiah 53:1-3.

Isaiah 53:1-3

Isaiah 53:1–3 NKJV

it is again emphasized in the passage quoted by the Ethiopian, Isaiah 53:7-9.

Isaiah 53:7-9

Isaiah 53:7–9 NKJV

The centerpiece is Isaiah 53:4-6.

Isaiah 53:4-6

Isaiah 53:4–6 NKJV

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 wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes 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.

The reason it is called a chiasm is the Greek letter chi [x], the letter X. If we take that letter and line it up it is the centre point that is the emphasis. It is not that the other points aren’t important, but it is a rhetorical device that is used by a writer to focus the reader’s attention on something.

The centerpiece here, vv. 4-6, is the role of the servant as the substitutionary atonement for the people.

Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

The Hebrew word for “behold” is a command to come to attention, to pay attention, to wake up and watch; this is something important to listen to. He focuses attention on the servant. What is interesting is the way this connects with other statements related to “behold” and “servant” that we have in the other prophets. Remember that Isaiah was written in the seventh century BC.

Zechariah was written after the Jews had returned to the land, somewhere around 515 BC, about 150 years after Isaiah, so he is referring back to what Isaiah has said. Zechariah assumes that his readers know Isaiah, so he says: Zechariah 3:8 .

Zechariah 3:8

Zechariah 3:8 NKJV

8 ‘Hear, O Joshua, the high priest, You and your companions who sit before you, For they are a wondrous sign; For behold, I am bringing forth My Servant the BRANCH.

Listen to the NASB

Zechariah 3:8 NASB95

8 ‘Now listen, Joshua the high priest, you and your friends who are sitting in front of you—indeed they are men who are a symbol, for behold, I am going to bring in My servant the Branch.

Same terminology: “behold, My servant.” But now we have something else to clarify the picture, the servant is called “the Branch.”

This is an important term because it comes out of Isaiah.

It is a messianic title. Isaiah 11:1

Isaiah 11:1

Isaiah 11:1 NKJV

1 There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

It is picturing the house of Jesse, the descendants of Jesse, as a tree. But the tree has been cut down, there is a stump there, and now there is going to be a new shoot, a new branch that is going to come out of that stump.

The way that was fulfilled is that it looked like the Davidic line ended with the defeat of Judah in 586.

They come back under Zerubbabel who was a Davidic descendant trying to re-establish themselves in Judah after the Babylonian captivity.

Then in the inter-Testamental period the Davidic line just seems to have disappeared.

The all of a sudden there is the beginnings of the Gospels and Jesus and His lineage is given in both Matthew and Luke, Matthew to show He can’t be the physical descendant of Joseph because Joseph came from Jeconiah.

God has cursed the line of Jeconiah and so Matthew chapter one is given to show us that Jesus could not be the physical son of Joseph.

Luke is given to show that He is the physical son of Mary and He has a direct line to the Davidic heirship through His mother, Mary.

So out of the stump of Jesse that appeared to be dead a new branch is growing forth and will bring new life to the kingdom.

This is also stated some 100 years after Isaiah by Jeremiah. Jeremiah 23:5

Jeremiah 23:5 NKJV

5 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; A King shall reign and prosper, And execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.

Jeremiah 33:15

Jeremiah 33:15 NKJV

15 ‘In those days and at that time I will cause to grow up to David A Branch of righteousness; He shall execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.

So the future Branch is righteous. This is the same thing we see in Isaiah 53, that the servant is righteous—“My righteous servant,” v. 11.

Another things that we learn here is that He is a man; He is fully human. Zechariah 6:12 .

Zechariah 6:12

Zechariah 6:12 NKJV

12 Then speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, saying: “Behold, the Man whose name is the BRANCH! From His place He shall branch out, And He shall build the temple of the Lord;

– referring to the future temple that Ezekiel described in Ezekiel 40ff.

Also in Zechariah 9:9

Zechariah 9:9

Zechariah 9:9 NKJV

9 “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, Lowly and riding on a donkey, A colt, the foal of a donkey.

End of 2nd Service 10/20/2024

Sunday October 27, 2024

Pentecost: The New Church Series

Review

In review, last week we looked at

Philip and the Ethiopian. Acts 8: 26-40; Isaiah 53

Last week, in the 1st service we continued our study in Acts 8:32-33, Where Phillip had joined the Eunuch, who asked him for guidance:

Acts 8:32-33

Acts 8:32–33 NKJV

We reviewed the subject of the ἀμνός--AMNOS, and the four verses, including our Acts 8 verse, and John 1:29, 36, and 1 Peter 1:18-19 that use this particular noun which means a Sacrificial lamb without blemish, the substitutionary sacrificial role of the lamb standing in the place of someone else.

Then we jumped into a review of the passage in Isaiah being read by the Eunuch, which places us into a very important study of Isaiah 52-53. We’ve studied this previously, and John has studied through it as well, but not this in depth.

We began with the overview of Isaiah,

Isaiah 1-39: focus on God’s judgment in the future on nations and Israel for her disobedience to God.

Isaiah 40-66: focuses on God’s future provision for and deliverance of Israel and the fulfillment of promises for Israel.

In Isaiah 1-39, the focus is on God’s future judgment upon the nations and Israel for her disobedience to God.

God is going to fulfill all of His promises and deliver Israel. It is a message of hope.

Then we looked at the outline of Isaiah 40-66, where our passage of importance lies.

These last 27 chapters of Isaiah focus on God’s future deliverance, so it is a different focal point from what we have in the first 39 chapters.

In the heart of this section from Isaiah 40-66 is the section from 52:13 to 53:12. This is the heart of this message, and it focuses on the deliverer and what He will do to deliver God’s people.

There are three basic divisions in Isaiah 40-66.

Isaiah 40-48: The reality of a future deliverance for Israel.

Isaiah 49-55: The future deliverer of Israel.

Isaiah 56-66: The Kingdom in the future and what that will be like.

For the most part in the history of interpretation among Jewish commentators, including the Targums and the Midrash, we read that the passage on the future deliverer of Israel, from Isaiah 49-55, is talking about the Messiah, and it was understood to be talking about an individual.

Now I mentioned, the Targums, which are the Aramaic translations of the Old Testament that originated when Aramaic became the common spoken language among Jews, and Hebrew was used mainly for religious purposes. This occured while in captivity and was perpetuated through the remainder of their time in the land.

Think of Aramaic like the spread of Greek across the known world by Alexander the Great, which even in the Roman Empire was the lingua franca of the Easter Roman Empire, while Latin was the lingua franca of the Western Roman Empire. Aramaic was the language of the Assyrians, and became the language of all trade, and thus was the default language of the Babylonians or Chaldeans as well.

There are two Targums of note:

Targum Onkelos, which is the Targum of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

Targum Jonathan, which is the Targum of the Nevi’im, or the prophets.

The Nevi'im are divided into two groups. The Former Prophets (Hebrew: נביאים ראשונים Nevi'im Rishonim) consists of the narrative books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; while the Latter Prophets (Hebrew: נביאים אחרונים Nevi'im Akharonim) include the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets.

Midrash is a form of Jewish literature that offers interpretation and commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures. It aims to uncover deeper meanings and provide ethical, legal, and theological insights. There are two types of Midrash:

Midrash Halacha: Focuses on legal interpretations of biblical texts and derives Jewish laws.

Midrash Aggadah: Explores stories, legends, ethical teachings, and theological reflections.

We went on to review the uses of Servant throughout scripture, and the references to the Servant as the Messiah, and the references to the Servant as Israel, to show that what the Masoretes attempted to do by reinterpreting the passage about the deliverer as being about Israel, in contradiction to all of the writings of the Targums, and the natural interpretation of the passages.

Now, in our study we can across another term for the servant who is the very center of the Isaiah 52-53 passage.

This additional term was raised after the Jews returned to the land by the post-exhilic prophet Zechariah,

Zechariah 3:8

Zechariah 3:8 NKJV

8 ‘Hear, O Joshua, the high priest, You and your companions who sit before you, For they are a wondrous sign; For behold, I am bringing forth My Servant the BRANCH.

Isaiah mentioned this name for the Messiah long before the exhile:

Isaiah 11:1

Isaiah 11:1 NKJV

1 There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

Then we have Jeremiah writing about the Branch after the exile of Judah, over 100 years after Isaiah:

Here we see the Branch proclaimed as the King.

Jeremiah 23:5

Jeremiah 23:5 NKJV

5 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; A King shall reign and prosper, And execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.

the same is said in chapter 33

Jeremiah 33:15

Jeremiah 33:15 NKJV

15 ‘In those days and at that time I will cause to grow up to David A Branch of righteousness; He shall execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.

So the future Branch is righteous. This is the same thing we see in Isaiah 53, that the servant is righteous—“My righteous servant,” v. 11 told us.

Isaiah 53:11 NKJV

11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.

Another things that we learn here is that He is a man; He is fully human. Zechariah 6:12 .

Zechariah 6:12

Zechariah 6:12 NKJV

12 Then speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, saying: “Behold, the Man whose name is the BRANCH! From His place He shall branch out, And He shall build the temple of the Lord;

This is referring to the future temple that Ezekiel described in Ezekiel 40.

So we have seen the Messiah proclaimed as Behold the Branch, Behold the man, Behold the king.

Then next, we learn in Isaiah 40:9

Isaiah 40:9

Isaiah 40:9 NKJV

9 O Zion, You who bring good tidings, Get up into the high mountain; O Jerusalem, You who bring good tidings, Lift up your voice with strength, Lift it up, be not afraid; Say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”

This is the beginning of the servant section in Isaiah, and now it is, “Behold your God.” All of this connects together in terms of the different roles of the servant. He is fully human; He is fully God; He is the King of Israel; He is the Branch, the descendant of David.

When we get into the New Testament we see this connection of how this phraseology that we have in Isaiah pulls together in terms of the presentation of Jesus in the four Gospels. For example, Matthew is all about presenting Jesus as the King—Behold the King.

We see the placard that is placed over the cross by Pilate, Matthew 27:37.

Matthew 27:37

Matthew 27:37 NKJV

37 And they put up over His head the accusation written against Him: THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS

In Mark the focus is on Jesus as the servant, the Branch as the servant of Yahweh. Mark 10:45.

Mark 10:45.

Mark 10:45 NKJV

45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”

In Luke the emphasis is on Jesus as the Son of Man, the son of David.

Luke 19: 10

Luke 19:10 NKJV

10 for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

In the Gospel of John the focus is on the deity of Jesus. He is the Son of God.

John 20:30-31

John 20:30–31 NKJV

30 And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

In Isaiah 52:12 Israel had failed by this point, remember that we reviewed Isaiah as talking about Israel as His servant, but they failed, and needed to be redeemed by another servant. So Israel is replaced by the second servant who is faithful.

Isaiah 52:12

Isaiah 52:12 NKJV

12 For you shall not go out with haste, Nor go by flight; For the Lord will go before you, And the God of Israel will be your rear guard.

Psalm 40:7-8

Now Psalm 40 speaks to the experience of King David, but also to the person of Christ in the sacrifice of His body.

Psalm 40:7–8 NKJV

7 Then I said, “Behold, I come; In the scroll of the book it is written of me. 8 I delight to do Your will, O my God, And Your law is within my heart.”

This is the servant who is man, king, God that is talked about my Isaiah, and we note as the one who sacrifices His body in his mission to be the better servant than Israel, who redeems Israel and all of mankind.

In the New Testament in Philippians Jesus is the one who emptied Himself as the second person of the Trinity and took on the form of a bondservant, and was made in the likeness of men.

So when we get pack to our passage in Isaiah 52:13 the servant is the one who deals wisely or prudently with His people.

Isaiah 52:13 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

That is also applied in Jeremiah 23:5 to the Branch.

Jeremiah 23:5

Jeremiah 23:5 NKJV

5 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; A King shall reign and prosper, And execute judgment and righteousness in the earth.

He is going to be exalted and lifted up very high above all of the angels.

An ancient Jewish Midrash said that He would be higher than Abraham, higher than Moses, and higher than the ministering angels.

He is higher than Abraham because He is the Son of God whose day Abraham looked forward to.

He is higher than Moses because He is the mediatory of a better covenant, according to Hebrew chapters seven and eight.

And He is exalted above the angels, Hebrews chapter one.

What is the result of this?

He is exalted above everyone, Isaiah 52:13 .

Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

We see that in the great servant passage in Philippians chapter two, that He will be exalted by God and have bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

The themes that are in Isaiah 52:13-53:12 are pulled together by later prophets.

They tie all these things together and then they fit integrally with everything in the New Testament about Jesus. It all comes together.

The Exaltation of the Servant. Acts 8:26-40, Isaiah 52:13-15

We are taking a side track into Isaiah because of Philip's conversation with the Ethiopian eunuch, recorded in Acts chapter eight.

In passages like Isaiah 52 and 53, it is crucial to identify who the speaker is, and that is not always easy.

The speaker in Isaiah 52:13-15 is God, and God is speaking at the end of this section in Isaiah 53:10-12 .

Isaiah 52:13–15 NKJV

Isaiah 53:10–12 NKJV

10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. 11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, And He shall divide the spoil with the strong, Because He poured out His soul unto death, And He was numbered with the transgressors, And He bore the sin of many, And made intercession for the transgressors.

Sandwiched between the opening and the closing, where God is the speaker, there is a report (typically vv. 1-9) from somebody. It is important to identify who that somebody is because the verbs that we find in chapter 53:1-9 are, for the most part, past tense verbs—the speaker is looking back on something that has happened in past time—and it is likely that the speaker here refers to future regenerate Jews, the future saved remnant who look back historically on what happened to the servant. This is their report in 53:1-9.

This opening passage in Isaiah 52:13-15 gives an overview of what this servant psalm will talk about. The focus here is on the exultation and glorification of the Servant. So often, we come to this passage and look at it as the suffering servant because there is so much in chapter 53 that talks about the substitutionary suffering of the servant. But the focal point isn’t His suffering but His exaltation and glorification. We see this in 52:13, which is a sort of topical sentence.

Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

What is that verse saying? It says that the servant will be successful and so successful that He will be exalted above everything. That sets the tone for this whole section.

Isaiah 52:14-15

Isaiah 52:14–15 NKJV

14 Just as many were astonished at you, So His visage was marred more than any man, And His form more than the sons of men; 15 So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; For what had not been told them they shall see, And what they had not heard they shall consider.

NKJV / Jewish Publication Soc. 1917 / Tanakh 1985

NKJV Is 52:13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

JPS Is 52:13 Behold, My Servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high.

Tanakh Is 52:13 Indeed, My servant shall prosper, Be exalted and raised to great heights

NKJV Is 52:14 Just as many were astonished at you, So His visage was marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men

JPS Is 52:14 According as many were appalled at thee—so marred was his visage unlike that of a man, and his form unlike the sons of men—

Tanakh Is 52:14 Just as the many were appalled at him—So marred was his appearance, unlike that of man, His form beyond human semblance—

NKJV Is 52:15 So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; For what had not been told them they shall see, And what they had not heard they shall consider

JPS Is 52:15 So shall he startle many nations, kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard shall they perceive.

Tanakh Is 52:15 Just so he shall startle many nations. Kings shall be silenced because of him, For they shall see what has not been told them, Shall behold what they have never heard.

Significant distinctions between the translations have been underlined. In the first verse we see in the left column that the NKJV translates “prudently,” and both the JPS and the Tanakh translate “prosper”—the same idea as “success.” Prosper is the result of dealing wisely.

The verb used there is used not just for the act of being wise or dealing wisely or prudently with someone but for the result of that which is success or prosperity. So, the JPS and the Tenakh are more in line with some more modern Christian English translations and are more accurate in their rendering.

Basically, all three agree in the second half of that verse that the servant will be exalted, extolled, and be very high. The idea is that He is elevated above everything.

The name TaNaKh is an acronym formed from the initial Hebrew letters of the Masoretic Text's three traditional subdivisions: the Torah, "Teaching," also known as the Five Books of Moses, Nevi'im "Prophets," and Ketuvim "Writings" —hence TaNaKh.

The name "Miqra" (מקרא), meaning "that which is read", is an alternative Hebrew term for the Tanakh.

Then in verse 14 the NKJV says, “Just as many were astonished.” Astonished communicates the idea of surprise, taken aback. The JPS and Tenakh both translate that as “many were appalled” and are much more accurate. The Hebrew word is often used of observing God’s terrible judgment on people. The rest of the verse is very similar between the three.

The major difference is in verse 15. The NKJV translates, “So shall He sprinkle many nations.” The JPS and the Tenakh both translate that verb, “So shall he startle many nations.” If we were involved in a discussion with someone Jewish about Isaiah 52 and they pull out their Bible and we pull out ours … their Bible says something different.

In verse 13, the verb is s’akal, which means to act wisely, to be understanding and discerning, and, as a result, to prosper. Eight English words are used in the Old Testament to translate this verb. It sometimes means instructing, being prudent, understanding, seeing, making wise, succeeding, or acting with insight or devotion.

The focus in this verse is on acting wisely, i.e. bringing about success, accomplishing what you intended to accomplish, bringing your mission to a positive conclusion. The second line explains that success is His exaltation. It parallels that. The second line explains the result of that success: He is exalted and elevated to heaven. This is the theme verse for this whole section—the exaltation of the Servant. The whole section is not about the suffering servant but the exalted servant. But He suffers to be exalted. That is the key to understanding this.

Notice the words used here to describe His exaltation: He is exalted, He is extolled, and He will be lifted up very high. This is one of those passages where language is too limiting upon the prophet. He piles these verbs on each other to express the ultimate magnitude of what happens. He is not just honored, not just glorified; these words are too weak. He uses these verbs to indicate the highest conceivable exaltation.

Two of these words are used in other passages in Isaiah as a description of the highest throne in heaven, the throne of God. Isaiah 6:1 sees God in heaven “high and lifted up.”

Isaiah 6:1

Isaiah 6:1 NKJV

1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.

These two words are used here to refer to the servant as well. He is elevated to the level of the throne of God.

In Isaiah 57:15, he is called “the high and lofty [exalted] one.” Same verbiage.

Isaiah 57:15

Isaiah 57:15 NKJV

15 For thus says the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, With him who has a contrite and humble spirit, To revive the spirit of the humble, And to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

So, using these verbs and applying them to the exaltation of the servant here indicates that He is elevated to the level of the throne of God.

This fits with the theology of Psalm 110.

Psalm 110:1

Psalm 110:1 NKJV

1 The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”

Who are those two Lords? David is the one writing the psalm, and he says, “The Lord”—Yahweh—“said to my Lord.” So, who is in authority? Who is the Lord over David? The Lord over David can’t be a human lord because David is the highest authority in Israel. The only authority over David must be a divine authority. The “my Lord” must be on the level with God, deity. “My right hand” is the position of honor at the highest throne in heaven. This is applied to Jesus in the New Testament in the passage that gives us the greatest picture of the exaltation of Jesus, Philippians 2:9-11

Philippians 2:9-11

Philippians 2:9–11 NKJV

9 Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

For what reason? Because Jesus humbled Himself to the point of obedience when going to the cross.

“… and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord [statement of deity], to the glory of God the Father.”

Isaiah 52:14

Isaiah 52:14 NKJV

14 Just as many were astonished at you, So His visage was marred more than any man, And His form more than the sons of men;

This verse begins with a very interesting construction. It is an unusual construction in Hebrew, but it is one of those constructions involving three comparisons, possibly two comparisons and one contrast. We have to work through each possibility to determine how it would play out in terms of every word and phrase in the sentence. It starts out, “Just as many were astonished at you, So His appearance was marred.” We have “just as” and “so,” and then verse 14 begins “so.” What is that all about? What does it communicate? Part of our understanding of that is to understand the identification of the pronouns here, terms like “many” and “you.” Who is the “you”? Then “His visage.” It shifts from referring to the servant as a second person singular, the “you.” Now he is talking about the servant with a third person singular pronoun, “his.” Confused yet? “Just as you” as if God is speaking initially to the servant and then and then He turns and is speaking to a different audience, and now is referring to the servant at His side as in the third person singular, “So His appearance.”

First of all, who are the many? There are those who think that the many is just a general non-specific term referring to all of humanity. In the next verse, “Thus He will sprinkle many nations,” the many refers to all the nations on the earth apart from Israel.

In Isaiah 53:11 when once again God is the speaker, “As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see {it and} be satisfied; By His knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many…”

To whom does that “many” refer? If refers not just to the Gentiles but to the Jews as well. So it is a non-specific term referring to all of humanity.

In verse 12 God says, “Yet He Himself bore the sin of many,”

again a non-specific pronoun referring to the mass of humanity. So it is just referring to an unspecified group of people. These are the people who are observing the servant and the ones who are addressed in 52:14,

Isaiah 52:14-15

Isaiah 52:14–15 NKJV

There is this group of people who are astonished at what happens to the servant.

The verb here translated “astonished” is the Hebrew “shmm”, which means to be desolate, to be appalled, amazed, shocked, aghast, horrified at something. It is as if you were looking at something that is the most appalling, frightening, horrifying thing you have ever seen.

There is now going to be an explanation in the next two clauses in the last half of verse 14 and the first half of 15. They describe two different groups of people. Both are initially appalled as they see what has happened to this individual. The first, “So His appearance was marred more than any man And His form more than the sons of men.”

When we compare that with the JPS version and the Tenakh we see a similarity.

In the JPS version “his visage [face] is unlike that of a man, his form unlike that of the sons of men.”

The Tenakh, “So marred was his appearance, unlike that of a man, His form, beyond human semblance.”

Both the JPS and the Tenakh understand/translate this to be an individual. Even if it allegedly refers to the nation it is something that is destroyed beyond description and no longer has the appearance that it once had and is no longer recognisable. This couldn’t really be applied to the Jewish people even in light of the holocaust; they were still recognisable as the Jewish people afterwards. The image that is presented here is that the entirety of this individual is so disfigured that His humanity is no longer recognisable.

The word translated “marred” is the Hebrew word mishchat.

There is some debate about the meaning of this word. This is the only place that this word is used in the entire Old Testament. It has the idea of being physically tortured or abused to the point of being unrecognizable.

It talks about “his visage [appearance]” in the Hebrew word mareh, which has been translated as “face” or “visage, countenance, appearance.” Some scholars try to make a distinction here that this refers to His face, the other refers to His body, but that is pressing the distinctions a little too far. Both words refer to His general appearance; they are basically synonymous. The other word is toar, which means “His form.” Both describe His person and appearance. Remember, this was written in poetry. “His countenance was marred more than any man.” He is so physically beaten up and defaced that it is more than any human being and is unrecognizable.

The following phrase says, “And His form more than the sons of men. " The Tenakh translates it as “beyond human semblance.” This beating reduces him to something less than human. In the New Testament, we see the description of what happened during Jesus' trial in the Gospels. We have two accounts, one in Matthew and one in John.

Matthew 27:26-31

Matthew 27:26–31 NKJV

26 Then he released Barabbas to them; and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified. 27 Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole garrison around Him. 28 And they stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. 29 When they had twisted a crown of thorns, they put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand. And they bowed the knee before Him and mocked Him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” 30 Then they spat on Him, and took the reed and struck Him on the head. 31 And when they had mocked Him, they took the robe off Him, put His own clothes on Him, and led Him away to be crucified.

There were three different types of Roman “scourging”

Fustigatio, a less severe beating for minor crimes.

Flagillatio which was a flogging.

Verberatio, a scourging -- the most terrible of all, punishment by whipping.

One writer describes it this way:

“The criminal was stripped, bound to a post or a pillar, or sometimes simply thrown on the ground and beaten by a number of torturers until they grew tired of beating him, and they whipped him until his flesh would hang from his bones in bleeding shreds. In the provinces (e.g. Judea) this was the task of soldiers. Three different kinds of implements were customary. Rods were used on freemen, military punishments were inflicted with sticks, but for a slave, scourges or whips were used and were comprised of leather thongs that were fitted with spikes or nails or bones or lead or glass to form a chain.”

This was the kind of instrument that was used on Jesus. He is beaten with this whip until the flesh is just hanging off of His bones, and then He is physically beaten and pummeled until He is just a bloody pulp. This is exactly what Isaiah is prophesying. He is beaten beyond all possible recognition.

Isaiah 52:14

Isaiah 52:14 NKJV

14 Just as many were astonished at you, So His visage was marred more than any man, And His form more than the sons of men;

So, what are we talking about in those phrases? We are talking about His physical suffering before He went to the cross, before the actual crucifixion, where God brought judgment upon sins. So, at this point, it is just the physical suffering leading up to the cross.

Then the text steps it up another notch in verse 15: “Thus He will sprinkle many nations…” This takes us from the physical suffering to the spiritual suffering. Remember this is not getting into a point by point detail—which is what we pick up in Isaiah 53:1-9—this is giving us a summary overview of what 53:1-9 will describe for us. But there is a debate now over what this initial verb “sprinkle” means. Again, up until the late 19th century, this was predominantly translated by the word “sprinkle” or “spatter.”

But as we’ve seen in the JPS (1917) and the Tenakh it is “startled.” Notice that in the latter two translations it doesn’t translate as “astonish” but as “appalled.” It is a very negative thing. This group is appalled and horrified. But “startle” isn’t a negative word; it fits with “astonished,” not with “horrified.” So that is the first problem. If the tine is set by something negative and the word shmm is used in many passages to relate to the horror with which people view the judgment of God, then “appalled” is the right translation. But it doesn’t fit with the idea of being startled. However, since the early 20th century more and more scholars have come along wanting to translate this word as “startled.”

Most of the modern translations continue to translate it as “sprinkle.”

What is the issue here?

For some as the approach the translation they start with the assumption that this is not an individual, the Messiah, but this is the nation, and that sprinkle somehow doesn’t fit the idea, so they started looking to see if there was some secondary meaning somewhere that they could find. They suggested that there was a second form of this word that is translated “sprinkle,” another word spelled the same way but it has a different meaning. It is listed in one of the Hebrew lexicons, (Brown, Driver and Briggs—1918) as nazah2. Before giving the meaning it has in parenthesis “dubious.” And the only citation it has for the meaning of “startle” is Isaiah 52:14. It seems a little odd that the only place you can find this meaning here where they identified it as a dubious meaning. But when we come to the 1990s and the publication of HALOT it doesn’t even list that secondary meaning at all, and the subsequent lexicons that have been put out don’t recognise this as a legitimate meaning. The interpretive idea was that as the first group is horrified by looking at what has happened to the servant, the second group seeing His exaltation is surprised by His exaltation. But the lexical data for that doesn’t exist. You can’t make up meanings just to fit your theology; you have to go with word usage.

The word usage here for nazah is that it refers ultimately to an act that is ritually or literally indicative of a cleansing from sin. According to the Theological Word Book of the Old Testament its primary significance derives from a reference to blood sprinkling. This particular root is used with blood sprinklings which are lighter, both as to how much blood is sprinkled and as to what is expiated. So this is a word that is used for the sacrifice, the covering, the atonement, the forgiveness of sin.

Exodus 29:20-21

Exodus 29:20–21 NKJV

20 Then you shall kill the ram, and take some of its blood and put it on the tip of the right ear of Aaron and on the tip of the right ear of his sons, on the thumb of their right hand and on the big toe of their right foot, and sprinkle the blood all around on the altar. 21 And you shall take some of the blood that is on the altar, and some of the anointing oil, and sprinkle it on Aaron and on his garments, on his sons and on the garments of his sons with him; and he and his garments shall be hallowed, and his sons and his sons’ garments with him.

In all of these verses and all of the verses that use the verb “sprinkle” in the Old Testament, we will see that they always express what is sprinkled; there is always an object—except for Isaiah 52:15. That is why they raise this issue. There is no mention of a liquid in Isaiah 52:15.

Leviticus 4:6

Leviticus 4:6 NKJV

6 The priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle some of the blood seven times before the Lord, in front of the veil of the sanctuary.

Leviticus 5:9

Leviticus 5:9 NKJV

9 Then he shall sprinkle some of the blood of the sin offering on the side of the altar, and the rest of the blood shall be drained out at the base of the altar. It is a sin offering.

Leviticus 14:51

Leviticus 14:51 NKJV

51 and he shall take the cedar wood, the hyssop, the scarlet, and the living bird, and dip them in the blood of the slain bird and in the running water, and sprinkle the house seven times.

Leviticus 16:14

Leviticus 16:14 NKJV

Leviticus 16:19

Leviticus 16:19 NKJV

19 Then he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, cleanse it, and consecrate it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel.

Numbers 19:18

Numbers 19:18 NKJV

18 A clean person shall take hyssop and dip it in the water, sprinkle it on the tent, on all the vessels, on the persons who were there, or on the one who touched a bone, the slain, the dead, or a grave.

Numbers 19:21

Numbers 19:21 NKJV

21 It shall be a perpetual statute for them. He who sprinkles the water of purification shall wash his clothes; and he who touches the water of purification shall be unclean until evening.

Then, a passage referring to a future time.

Ezekiel 36:25

Ezekiel 36:25 NKJV

25 Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.

This is referring to the beginning of the inauguration of the new covenant in the future messianic kingdom.

So what do all these have in common? The sprinkling is the means to state purification. That is the end result. We look at Isaiah 52:15 and it says, “Thus He will sprinkle many nations.” When they came up with this alternate thing they said let’s see if we can find a cognate.

We have to be careful with cognates. A cognate may help, but just because a word is similar in another language, there may be a whole different historical usage development, and it can come up meaning something else. They found that in Arabic, there was a cognate for this word, which means to startle. So that must be the meaning.

They said that the word nazah in the Hebrew Old Testament doesn’t fit any of the other twenty or so uses of nazah in the Old Testament, and we don’t like that; we are going to pick the meaning from Arabic and bring that in because this avoids the atonement tones of the word “sprinkle.”

The word “sprinkle” in and of itself in this summary statement indicates that what is about to be described is how the nations will be cleansed and purified from sin. It doesn’t say that per se, but it has that tone because everywhere else, the word nazah is used, and that is what it describes.

So “startle” doesn’t work. First, it is not an attested meaning of the word anywhere else in the Scripture. Secondly, it doesn’t fit the context here at all. It doesn’t fit the concept of being appalled or horrified, v. 14. So it is best to conclude that the reason for the response of being horrified is the disfigurement of God’s servant by meaning, and the result of that disfigurement is His spiritual atoning work that takes place on the cross.

So, the “Just as” at the beginning of verse 14 describes the horror men express when they see God’s judgment upon the servant. The first “so” talks about His physical suffering; the second “so”—“so shall He sprinkle many nations”—talks about the spiritual aspect of His suffering when He pays the penalty for sin. The result is then expressed in the last part: “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.”

There are different ways in which people interpret this.

The first is that they shut their mouths in despair because they have seen the truth and they are under judgment. The second view is astonishment.

This second view is preferable. Their mouths are shut because they see what God has done in the exultation of the servant. This one who was so beaten and so abused physically that He looked like something less than human is raised to a level that elevates Him above the angels and above all humanity to something that is super-human at the right hand of God the Father. As a result, they stand in awe as they begin to comprehend the Father’s plan of salvation.

This whole passage is about the exaltation of the servant. But the servant is exalted, as Philippians 2 says because He has been obedient to the Father and He has suffered for our sins. This sets up the introduction for us as we get into the next section, beginning in 53:1, where we see this report laid out from the lips of a future-believing remnant proclaiming that no one has really listened to them.

Sunday November 3, 2024

Pentecost: The New Church Series

Review

In review, last week we looked at

Philip and the Ethiopian. Acts 8: 26-40; Isaiah 53

Last week, in the 1st service we continued our study in Acts 8:32-33, Where Phillip had joined the Eunuch, who asked him for guidance:

Acts 8:32-33

Acts 8:32–33 NKJV

Rejection of the Servant and Realization of Who He Is. Isaiah 53:1-6

Isaiah 53:1-6

Isaiah 53:1–6 NKJV

1 Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him. 3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. 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 wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes 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.

As we saw last week, this passage is really about the exaltation of the servant. It is not about the suffering; that is secondary. The exaltation is because He is suffering. But if we look at these verses and read through them all the ones that relate to the suffering and all of the verbs used in relation to suffering are past tense verbs. In contrast, the verbs related to His future glorification and exaltation are future tense. So whoever is speaking and giving this report is looking back on what has happened with a view to what it will eventuate in: the servant's exaltation.

When we look at Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13 NASB95

13 Behold, My servant will prosper, He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.

where God is speaking and saying, "Behold, My servant will prosper"—

"Successfully" would be the best translation, not "prudently" as in the NKJV or in some cases "wisely." It is the result of acting wisely, i.e. in bringing about success in His mission, and then that "He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted." There is a piling up of verbs there related to His glorification because human language reaches a certain limit where you can't say anything more. You just don't have the words to describe the ultimate exaltation of the servant here. Two of these verbs "be exalted" and "very high" are verbs are also words that are used to describe the throne of God. So there is this implied statement here of the deity of the servant because these verbs do not apply to human beings. They are restricted in the Scriptures to God and to the throne of God. So this whole passage is really related to the exaltation of the Messiah, the servant, and because of what He does in His obedience to the Lord, invoking a sense of respect and admiration in the audience.

We come to the core section, 53:1-9, and it is really broken down into three sections: 1-3, 4-6, and 5-9.

It begins with someone asking two rhetorical questions:

Isaiah 53:1-3

Isaiah 53:1–3 NKJV

So this section focuses on a sort of introduction to the servant and his background—who He is in terms of His relationship with God and His relationship with this group of people, the "we," the "our," whoever is speaking, and that they failed to recognize Him and see who He was.

Some give this passage a non-messianic interpretation, which is exactly the problem with those speaking here in the first section. They are saying, "Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?" In other words, these rhetorical questions bring up the fact that there is only a limited number of people who have responded to their report and who have understood how God has revealed Himself to the servant. So, there is this limited response to the message. The reason why is that they didn't identify who He was; they rejected His appearance. This is precisely what happened in the first century when Jesus appeared. He was rejected because He didn't fit the expectations of the religious leaders in Israel. They expected a Messiah who would come, a glorified Messiah who would bring them victory over the empire of Rome. They were looking for a political, military figure; they were not looking for one who would come who would suffer. This is still a problem, especially in the Jewish community, but with many people who reject the gospel because they don't want to accept this view of the Messiah, they have another agenda.

What exactly is being said in this passage?

First, a non-messianic view, the idea that the individual here is identified either as a prophet or as the nation itself. It looks at the fact that this servant does suffer, but their view is that no matter whether it is Isaiah, another prophet, or the people, they think that the servant is suffering with the people, rather than for the people in the sense of a substitution. So, the servant is just one among them who suffers along with the rest of the Jewish people.

But this contradicts the broad context of Isaiah 53. We have to remember that from Isaiah's chapter forty to the end of chapter sixty-six, there is a huge shift that takes place in the theme of Isaiah. This is why there are those, usually of a liberal persuasion in their view of the authority and origin of the text, who believe that this second half of Isaiah was written by somebody else. In the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, Isaiah prophesies and warns of the future judgments on Judah, that they will be destroyed, specifically by the Babylonians. He then focuses on a future hope.

Chapters 49-52 focus on Israel's future salvation: God will provide a future deliverer. God has not forgotten Israel. God is going to be true to His promise, and there will be an ultimate redemption for the people. The kingdom's promises will eventually be fulfilled. That is the thrust of Isaiah 40-66.

In chapters 49 through 52, the focus is on a future deliverer. Then, if we look at the chapters following chapter 53, God invites Israel to participate in this salvation. So, there is a promise in the first chapters (49-52) that there will be future salvation, and then after chapter 53, God invites them to participate in the salvation. Still, in Isaiah 53 we see a hinge chapter because it is this chapter that tells us what that salvation is, how it is accomplished for Israel. So, chapter 53 is the link between the two and the transition from the announcement about a future deliverer, and the next chapters view that as having already been accomplished.

The second aspect, which is foundational to this whole section and destroys any of the other arguments for a corporate Messiah, Israel, or prophethood, is that the chapter clearly focuses on the fact that the servant, whoever He is, is righteous and pays the penalty for sin—not temporal punishment but eternal punishment.

We read in verse 5,

Isaiah 53:5

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

The focus is that there is going to be a payment for sin and that there is going to be a complete healing or deliverance from this sin.

Then, in verse 11,

Isaiah 53:11

Isaiah 53:11 NKJV

11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.

Again, this terminology is related to eternal deliverance or salvation. Those verses alone and those ideas alone wipe out the idea that the servant is another prophet or the servant is the corporate body of Israel.

Isaiah 53:4

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

This begins with the word "Surely," some say "However."

It is a contrast, and so the contrast is between the attitude of rejection by the people, whoever the "we" are in the first three verses, to work done by the servant in bearing grief, bearing our sorrow, things of that nature.

Those terms, "Surely He has born our griefs and carried our sorrows," come right out of the context of Leviticus chapter 16, which we looked at in 2nd service last week, which deals with the day of atonement. So, this is clear language based on understanding the ritual of the day of atonement and other sacrifice-offering passages in Leviticus. It begins with these two rhetorical questions to call our attention to the fact that a group of people are speaking who are delivering a message, but that message is not getting a receptive response.

So they ask:

Isaiah 53:1

Isaiah 53:1 NKJV

1 Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

They use the pronoun "our," a first-person plural pronoun.

When we look at the first verse, the last line of verse 2,

Isaiah 53:2-3

Isaiah 53:2–3 NKJV

2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him. 3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

who do these plural pronouns describe here?

Some options have been suggested.

One is that it refers to the Gentile kings mentioned in the last verse of chapter 52:

Isaiah 52:15

Isaiah 52:15 NKJV

15 So shall He sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; For what had not been told them they shall see, And what they had not heard they shall consider.

However, the context shifts when we read 53:1, "Who has believed our message?" and it does not mention those kings.

The other suggestion is that this is the prophet.

The third view is that this is the nation of Israel as a whole, and as part of that would be a future believing remnant of Israel, which, we think, is the answer. The only thing that fits is that this is a retrospective look from some future generation that looks back on what happened to the servant. They have realized who the servant is and what happened in their rejection of the servant. So there is an element of confession in this passage that they had failed to recognize the servant based on prophetic passages and had treated Him with no respect, rejected and despised Him.

Then they realize who He is and what He did, v. 4.

So the "we" and the "our" refer to a future generation, a Jewish remnant, who has come to realize the identity of the Messiah and what they had done in rejecting Him in the past.

Paul quotes from Isaiah 53:1 in Romans 10:16

Romans 10:16

Romans 10:16 NKJV

16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed our report?”

Remember that Romans 9-11 are focusing on the question: has God rejected the Jews? This is Paul's explanation of God's plan for Israel. They rejected the Messiah, but God did not reject them. The promises and the covenants still belong to Israel, and there is a small remnant of Jews that have accepted the Messiah, but most of them have not. They have not all obeyed the gospel, and Paul sees this as a fulfillment of this line in Isaiah 53:1,

Isaiah 53:1

Isaiah 53:1 NKJV

1 Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

Isaiah 53:8

Isaiah 53:8 NKJV

8 He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

God is speaking there--"my people." That verse indicates that "my people" is a different group than the servant, distinct from the servant: in fact, it is Israel.

The German Scholar Delitzsch stated, "Whenever you find a "we" in the Old Testament in the midst of prophecy, it is always a reference to Israel that is speaking." Also, the verbs here that all look to the past, to the suffering and death of the servant, indicate this contrast where they look back on what they did. There is this sense of confession and repentance in the true sense of the word, change that takes place over the course of these nine verses.

One commentator says: "What is going on here, so to speak, is that we seem to hear two disciples standing on the street corner in Jerusalem reviewing the things that happened on Good Friday in the light of the better insight that came after Pentecost."

Think about this. You have two Jewish Christian disciples there after Pentecost. Once they gain perspective and understand what has happened, they suddenly realize all that has happened regarding the arrest, the crucifixion, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. It is now making sense, whereas they didn't quite grasp all that on the other side when they were going into it. So what is happening here is this remnant in the future that realizes that Jesus is the Messiah, and they look back and say, we missed it. And not only did they miss it, but in their rejection, it brought about His death as well. So this section contains a confession from the believing Israelites of their failure to know the Scriptures, failure to understand what they taught about the Messiah as needing to suffer before He would be glorified and before He would reign, and that because they missed that and had rejected Him and despised Him it led to His suffering and death. But that, in turn, brought about the glories of their salvation.

Isaiah 53:1 NKJV

1 Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

The first question is,

"Who has believed our message?"

As they have come to understand that they have reported on it. They have a message. Who has believed our message now? That is what they are asking. The second question expands on that a little bit, and they say,

"And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?"

The phrase "arm of the Lord" is ultimately associated with His power and omnipotence. It almost always focuses on His power and ability to deliver people from calamities, especially deliverance from sin.

The question here is,

"And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?"

So, the gospel message has been revealed to only a few in that they have responded to it. They had rejected it. So, these two questions emphasize that the message has gone out to the Jewish people, but there has not been much of a response. They have mostly rejected it. Even though thousands upon thousands became Christians during the first century, ultimately, the gospel was rejected by the political and religious leaders and by the majority of the Jewish people. So, the first question emphasizes this rejection that has taken place.

Then, in verse 2, there is going to be an explanation. Whenever we see a passage begin with "For," it will usually be an explanation, or sometimes it is developing the cause for something. Further explanation will be provided here, and the reason for rejection will be expanded. In the first part of this verse, the emphasis is on the servant's relationship with God, and the second part is His rejection by man. The first part is about how God loved the servant and cared for, nourished, and nurtured the servant, and the second part focuses on how, in contrast, the Jews rejected Him, and overall, mankind rejected Him.

Isaiah 53:2

Isaiah 53:2 "For He grew up before Him ..."

Isaiah 53:2 NKJV

2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him.

We have two uses of the third-person singular pronoun. Who is the first, He? In context, it describes the servant. As God says in 52:13,

Isaiah 52:13

Isaiah 52:13 NKJV

13 Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high.

So, in terms of the nominative case here, He generally refers back to the servant.

Verse 3,

Isaiah 53:3

Isaiah 53:3 NKJV

3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

Isaiah 53:2 NKJV

2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him.

"For He grew up before Him..."

This implies that the servant is going to grow physically. There is going to be a process of maturation, He is not going to show up already mature. He will grow up "before Him," so this use of "Him' indicates this is a different person than the "He," and the "Him" would be the speaker in 52:12-15 identified as Yahweh (God the Father). "... like a tender shoot..." This is where it starts tying some imagery together from various other passages in the Old Testament related to the Messiah.

The phrase "tender shoot" is from a Hebrew word which means a suckling, a tender plant, a tender shoot, a young plant. It is a horticultural term, it is not talking about a nursing child but a shoot coming up out of dry ground. Dry ground is barren soil, something that is not expected to produce growth is going to develop and strengthen. So the image is of the trunk of a tree or something like that, which fits with other images of this idea of a root.

In Isaiah 11:1,

Isaiah 11:1

Isaiah 11:1 NKJV

1 There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, And a Branch shall grow out of his roots.

The picture of the trunk of a tree and the tree has been cut down. The root is Jesse, the father of David, the king of Israel. The Davidic line was viewed as having been cut down when the Babylonians defeated the kingdom of Judah. Even though some descendants of David could be designated and identified, there was never a restoration of the monarchy in Judah or Israel. So, there is this imagery of the line of David being cut down, and now there is just a barren stump in the ground. But all of a sudden, something new, a new growth, a new branch, will grow out of those roots and develop into something new. That is the image of the Messiah. He will come and restore the Davidic monarchy.

That same imagery is found in Ezekiel 17:22 .

Ezekiel 17:22 NASB

Ezekiel 17:22 NKJV

22 Thus says the Lord God: “I will take also one of the highest branches of the high cedar and set it out. I will crop off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one, and will plant it on a high and prominent mountain.

So, the imagery is taking one out of what already exists (David). Putting it on a high mountain indicates elevation and power. This is the same imagery here related to the Messiah, which states that God is the one who would establish and bring about His growth.

We are told that He will grow up as a tender plant, and this language indicates a messianic connection. "And like a root out of parched ground ..."

Then there is a shift, so we see God working to nourish and bring about the Messiah to restore the lineage of David, and then there is a contrast. The contrast will focus on the fact that the Messiah doesn't look like they expected Him to. He didn't fit their model, their expectation, because when they focused on the fact that the Messiah was a son of David who would reestablish the monarchy, they were thinking in terms of all of the cultural trappings that went with a king, all of the glories that went with a king: the power, the army, defeating the enemies of Israel. They focused on all of those aspects rather than the negative aspects.

Think about David. When David was initially anointed by Samuel in 1 Samuel 17, he was just a young teenager. He goes out and fights Goliath, and after that, Saul becomes very jealous of him because of all the victories and God's blessings for him. For the next ten or fifteen years, David has to run from Saul because Saul is persecuting him. David has already been anointed king, and people know he has been anointed king. Still, he endured a rejection period when he was running from Saul before God eventually elevated him to kingship. And that is a picture of the future Messiah, the son of David. He would go through a period of rejection even though He was already identified as the King of the Jews. He would go through a period of rejection and persecution--the church, the body of Christ, is in that period like David and his mighty men when they were hiding out in the wilderness. Then, ultimately, David was raised to the kingship when Saul took his life at the end of 1 Samuel. We see that same pattern with Jesus: suffering and then glorification. But by the first century in Israel, they had forgotten about the suffering aspect of the Messiah, which is very clear here, and they were focusing on the glory, so when Jesus came, He wasn't recognized. He came from a small village of Nazareth with a poor reputation.

So, what we have in Isaiah 53 isn't a statement that Jesus was unattractive. Still, it is a statement that He did not have the kind of physical presence one would expect of a savior of the world from a human viewpoint perspective. He looked just like an average Jewish male. "He has no {stately} form" indicated His external appearance, which did not fit what they expected. The other word, translated as "comeliness" in the KJV, is one of several words in Hebrew used to express the beauty of God, the glory of God, and the splendor of God, and that is how it is often translated in the Psalms when it relates to God. It is used 29 times in the Old Testament and 16 times in the Psalms. So it would be "He had no form or splendor." They were looking for a king who was magnificent, and there was nothing like that about Jesus. "Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.” the Hebrew word used here and translated "see" in the KJV indicates appearance or sight. It is translated as "visage" in 52:14; it is His appearance.

Sometimes, it is translated as "beauty." The idea here is that nothing about Jesus physically sets Him apart as a glorious Messiah. It would not be possible to look at Him and discern by appearance who He is and that He fulfills this prophecy. There is this rejection, and verse 2 is a confession of their rejection of the servant.

Then verse 3 continues to express this and says,

Isaiah 53:3

Isaiah 53:3 NKJV

3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

There is a hymn, Man of Sorrows, based on a meditation on Isaiah 53.

1. Man of Sorrows! what a name

For the Son of God, who came

Ruined sinners to reclaim!

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

2. Bearing shame and scoffing rude,

In my place condemned He stood,

Sealed my pardon with His blood;

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

3. Guilty, vile, and helpless we;

Spotless Lamb of God was He;

Full atonement! can it be?

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

4. Lifted up was He to die,

"It is finished!" was His cry;

Now in Heaven exalted high;

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

5. When He comes, our glorious King,

All His ransomed home to bring,

Then anew this song we'll sing:

Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Isaiah 53:3 NKJV

3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

The verb translated as "despise" is used here passively: He is despised. It also means to reject or to show disdain or contempt for someone. Interestingly, this is the same word used to describe Esau's rejection of his birthright. He showed contempt for his birthright, rejected it, and had disdain for it. It also describes what Goliath thought about the little pip-squeak David who came out to him. He had contempt for him, no respect whatsoever. The writers here describe their reaction to the servant. "... And like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him."

Isaiah 49:7

Isaiah 49:7 NKJV

7 Thus says the Lord, The Redeemer of Israel, their Holy One, To Him whom man despises, To Him whom the nation abhors, To the Servant of rulers: “Kings shall see and arise, Princes also shall worship, Because of the Lord who is faithful, The Holy One of Israel; And He has chosen You.”

So, how could the servant be the nation? It doesn't fit. The nation despised and rejected the servant.

Isaiah 53:3 NKJV

3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

He is called "a man of sorrows.” The word for sorrows means pain or anguish, and in the participial form here, it has the idea of one who suffers. So these two phrases, "a man of sorrows" and "acquainted with grief," describe the suffering of the Messiah on the cross. This is not a description of His life; He was not a sad man.

The word "sorrows" has the idea of sadness that comes across for us, but it really has the idea in Hebrew of someone who is going through a tremendous amount of physical suffering and pain and anguish, which is what Jesus went through on the cross.

Then it says He was "acquainted with grief." This is a word that is often translated as "sickness," "disease," or "illness." However, in some passages, it is used to describe calamitous situations. It describes the act of a judgment by God on someone. It is used that way in Ecclesiastes 6:2 .

Ecclesiastes 6:2 NKJV

2 A man to whom God has given riches and wealth and honor, so that he lacks nothing for himself of all he desires; yet God does not give him power to eat of it, but a foreigner consumes it. This is vanity, and it is an evil affliction.

This describes what He was going through upon the cross. Then again, they say, "He was despised," and that is the same word that indicates He was treated with contempt and total rejection. Then, "we did not esteem Him." The word used to translate esteem is a word that means to account and has the idea of counting something as valuable, something as worthwhile. They did not count anything about Him to be of value. So they completely misidentified who the servant was. That is what the prophecy says. He is going to show up, but He is not going to be identified.

Now, there is going to be a contrast. Notice how the next verse begins.

Isaiah 53:4

Isaiah 53:4 "Surely our griefs He Himself bore."

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

So, there is this shift from the fact that He is rejected and despised to a positive affirmation of what He has done. In the following three verses, notice the pronouns. This shows that some substitutionary payment is at the very core of this section. He bore our grief; He carried our sorrows. Then, notice the contrast between the third and first-person pronouns: "Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken."

Notice Isaiah 53:5

Isaiah 53:5

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

Then at the end of verse 6,

Isaiah 53:6

Isaiah 53:6 NKJV

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.

The word "all" is a generic term that includes not only Jews but everybody in the human race. There is a sharp contrast that shifts from the fact that we rejected Him, despised Him, and had no reason to accept Him, but despite our rejection, He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. This is in synonymous parallelism, so griefs and sorrows are parallel to one another. And these terms are used not specifically for sin but as the consequences of sin. It is very clear from verse 6 that the penalty that is being paid here is a penalty related to sin.

But we need to focus on these verbs.

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

"He has borne our griefs,"

is a poetic way to translate this. It is the Hebrew word נָשָׂ֔א--NASA, which indicates lifting, carrying, or taking something somewhere, but it is specifically used in the day of atonement passages related to the payment for sin for the people and bringing about forgiveness.

Remember that on the day of atonement, the high priest would come out, and they would bring two goats to him. He would put his hands on the goats and recite the nation's sins for the previous year. They would take one goat that would be sacrificed, and that pictured the payment for the sin. Scripture says, Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. It wasn't that the animal could pay for the sin, but it is picturing the fact that eventually, there has to be a death that would be able to pay for all sin. Then the other goat called the scapegoat, is taken by a trusted friend of the high priest far away and out into the desert so that he could never find its way (because our sins don't come back on us) and is released, indicating that our sins are paid for and removed from us, "as far as the east is from the west." So, there is the complete removal of sin.

Leviticus 16:22

Leviticus 16:22 NKJV

22 The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to an uninhabited land; and he shall release the goat in the wilderness.

The word "bear" is the same word nasa. So, this is language that speaks of the day of atonement.

The second word here is "carried" (our sorrows).

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

It is from the Hebrew word, which indicates bearing a load for someone else. The very verb itself has the connotation of substitution.

So, He carries sorrows for someone else.

So, from verse 4, we see this emphasis on a substitutionary payment.

Then, starting in verse 5, we will see that it brings in the idea of a penalty. It is not just a substitutionary payment, but by the time we get to the second half of verse 5, the chastisement or the punishment related to our peace (with God) is upon Him.

So, the punishment becomes a penal, substitutionary death. Another way this has been spoken of is that it is a vicarious penalty.

Only a Righteous Servant Can Justify Many. Isaiah 53:4-12

Isaiah 53:3

Isaiah 53:3 NKJV

3 He is despised and rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

The word sorrow is the Hebrew participle MAHKOV which means someone who goes through suffering.

Here, because of the context of the passage, the focus isn’t on the fact that during His life, He would have gone through times perhaps of suffering; it is focusing on the ultimate suffering that he went through on the cross. And he was “acquainted with grief.”

The word translated as “grief” often has the idea of physical sickness.

The same word is in verse 4. Then, at the end of verse 5, it says, “By His scourging we are healed.” There is terminology here that makes it sound like physical healing of sickness. The Hebrew word has that nuance. It is roughly equivalent to the New Testament word asthenes [ἀσθενής] which is frequently translated “illness” or “sickness,” but is also translated “weakness” many times in the New Testament because the core meaning has something to do with weakness or inability. In the Old Testament, the word is also used to refer to a calamity or judgment of God. But it has a core meaning of someone who is weak, and that can mean, in context, somebody who is weak physically, and thus it comes to mean someone who is ill or sick—or weak spiritually, and thus it is dealing with a sin problem. So, context is going to determine how this word is understood.

Some say that Jesus died so we can be healthy. This is what the health and wealth evangelists on television go to, the so-called prosperity gospel crowd. These words for sickness and infirmities are talking about the result of cause. But the concrete term here that is not a figure of speech gives us the terms we find for sin—iniquity, transgression, and sin. So when there is a word that is broad and can go in one of two directions and is used in synonymous parallelism, a narrower word, you have to look to the narrower word to define the broader word. The broader word can refer to spiritual sickness, sin, or physical sickness, and since it is used in conjunction with terms that are explicitly related to sin, then it has to be understood in that sense.

Verses 4-6 help us understand the core of what He does. This is poetry. Much of prophecy is written as poetry, and that is also important to understand because in poetry, language is used in a more figurative sense than in historical narrative or legal language. Even a lot of historical literature in the Old Testament is written in poetry. So, language has a little bit of a looser sense to it in poetic language.

We focus on the fact that we have the contrast between “he,” a masculine singular pronoun, and a first-person plural pronoun, “our”—he versus ours. “He was wounded for our transgressions, and He was bruised for our iniquities.” The sense here is clearly that of substitution, that something happens to Him not because of what He has done but because of what others have done, and He suffers in their place.

Isaiah 53:4

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

The word “bore” is the Hebrew word nasa, which means lifting up or carrying something. This is a word used in passages related to sacrifices in Leviticus, specifically in those related to the Day of Atonement. All through this section, there is a repetition of keywords that tie everything together and make it very clear what is going on. “He bore our griefs,” and then, when we get to 53:12, we read in the last two lines, “He Himself bore the sin of many.”

Isaiah 53:12

Isaiah 53:12 NKJV

12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, And He shall divide the spoil with the strong, Because He poured out His soul unto death, And He was numbered with the transgressors, And He bore the sin of many, And made intercession for the transgressors.

In the first part, He carried our grief. Some people say He carried our sicknesses.

How would you argue with that?

You go to the parallel in verse 12—same verb, and it is very clear there that what He carries are the sins of many. It is not talking about sickness in verse four; it is talking about sin.

“And our sorrows” is a different Hebrew word, and it means to bear a load for somebody else.

It is used in Isaiah 46:4 where God is speaking to Israel

Isaiah 46:4

Isaiah 46:4 NKJV

4 Even to your old age, I am He, And even to gray hairs I will carry you! I have made, and I will bear; Even I will carry, and will deliver you.

In that last line the “bearing” is related to deliverance. The Hebrew word for deliverance is a different Hebrew word but it also relates to salvation. So the bearing is a word that is loaded with a nuance related to deliverance from sin.

Jeremiah 6:7 uses this term again

Jeremiah 6:7

Jeremiah 6:7 NKJV

7 As a fountain wells up with water, So she wells up with her wickedness. Violence and plundering are heard in her. Before Me continually are grief and wounds.

The sickness and the wounds result from what happens in the previous line, “Violence and destruction are heard in her.” What causes the violence and destruction? It is in the line before that—wickedness. So this is a figure of speech in Isaiah 53:4,

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

The griefs and the sorrows are the result of something else, and that something else is the sin that is the ultimate cause of the sickness.

If an employer is approached by someone, maybe a hungry, homeless person, for a job and that employer gives them a job and says: “I will take away your hunger.” That doesn’t mean the employer is saying he is going to feed that person, but he is going to pay him for the work done, and from the pay that the individual receives, he will be able to buy food. So when the employer says he will take away the person’s hunger, he is, using the same figure of speech, saying he is going to produce the results, but in actuality, what he is going to do is produce the cause of the result. These rods, “grief” and “sorrow,” are talking about the end results. The other implication is that Christ takes care of everything from A to Z, A meaning the cause of all of the suffering and sin in the world as well as removing all of the results, i.e., the sin and suffering in the world.

So, in the part of the verse where we see the suffering servant, there is one who carries and takes away the result of sin. It has that strong nuance from the Day of Atonement passages, words related to the ritual of Israel. The last two lines talk about their response to Him. He is doing all these wonderful things for us, and we didn’t know who He was, so we considered Him to be stricken. There is a series of three passive participles here in the Hebrew: smitten, stricken, and afflicted. And it is God who is the one who does this. They just looked at Him with all that happened, and they said God must be bringing this judgment upon Him.

It is so interesting how we as human beings jump to the conclusion that God is punishing them when somebody is going through hard times. Job’s three friends tried to convince Job of that, but that wasn’t true. We have such a superficial view of suffering. So that is their view. They looked at Him; He was rejected, not accepted as the Messiah. God must be punishing Him, is their thinking, and therefore, they thought of Him as one stricken who had been physically hit by God. God is the one who had rejected Him and allowed Him to go through this suffering. The word translated as “stricken” is a word that can mean someone who has been hit with a disease. It is used, for example, of Miriam being struck with leprosy in Numbers 12:9, 10

Numbers 12:9-10

Numbers 12:9–10 NKJV

9 So the anger of the Lord was aroused against them, and He departed. 10 And when the cloud departed from above the tabernacle, suddenly Miriam became leprous, as white as snow. Then Aaron turned toward Miriam, and there she was, a leper.

and also of King Uzziah who was king at the early stage of Isaiah’s ministry.

2 Kings 15:5

2 Kings 15:5 NKJV

5 Then the Lord struck the king, so that he was a leper until the day of his death; so he dwelt in an isolated house. And Jotham the king’s son was over the royal house, judging the people of the land.

It has the idea of someone afflicting somebody with something. The word for “smitten” means someone who is killed—hit to kill. There is a clear sense here that this suffering servant is going to die. That is embedded in the meanings of these words. He is smitten by God; God is the ultimate one who allows Him to be crucified. As Peter says, “God delivers Him over.” That is God’s plan.

The responsibility for the death of Christ isn’t the Jews, it is the human race. There were many Jews who believed in Him as Messiah, and there were Romans as well as Jews who were responsible for His crucifixion. But ultimately, God allowed it because He had a plan to accomplish redemption, and there needed to be a sacrifice, a substitutionary punishment. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, had to die as the punishment for the sins of the world. So, He is smitten ultimately by God and He is afflicted, i.e. degraded, humiliated, oppressed. This is all of the mockings, the beatings, the scourging that took place with His arrest.

The next verse focuses on His substitutionary work.

Isaiah 53:5

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

NASB “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being {fell} upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.”

There are four sets of word pairs in the verse. It is Hebrew poetry, which doesn’t rhyme words, it rhymes ideas. Here, we have a synonymous parallelism. We understand these two words, “wounded” and “crushed” [bruised], because they are synonymous parallelism. There are two different words for sin here: transgressions and iniquities. There are two words for punishment: chastisement and scourging [stripes]. And there are two different words for the solution: peace and heal. The healing isn’t referring to a physical healing from a disease; that becomes clear from other words in the passage.

The first word, “wounded,” is the Hebrew halal, meaning fatally pierced through. This is not talking about the spear of the Roman soldier that John records. That was to reveal that Jesus had died by that point because the blood had separated into the red blood cells and the lymph, and that indicated that death had already occurred. He was pierced by the nails that were driven through His wrists and ankles.

He was “crushed,” Heb. Data, a word translated as pulverized, broken in pieces. The noun form relates to dust. It indicates how He dies. These words, when applied to a human, indicate death.

Ezekiel 28:9

Ezekiel 28:9 NKJV

9 “Will you still say before him who slays you, ‘I am a god’? But you shall be a man, and not a god, In the hand of him who slays you.

Ezekiel 32:26

Ezekiel 32:26 NKJV

26 “There are Meshech and Tubal and all their multitudes, With all their graves around it, All of them uncircumcised, slain by the sword, Though they caused their terror in the land of the living.

He is not just someone who suffers for others; He is going to die for them. But He dies specifically for their sins, their transgressions, and their iniquities.

End of 11/3/2024 2nd Service

Sunday November 10, 2024

Pentecost: The New Church Series

Review

In review, last week we looked at

Philip and the Ethiopian. Acts 8: 26-40; Isaiah 53

Last week, in the 1st service we continued our study in Acts 8:32-33, Where Phillip had joined the Eunuch, who asked him for guidance:

Acts 8:32-33

Acts 8:32–33 NKJV

Where we left off:

The next verse focuses on His substitutionary work.

Isaiah 53:5

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

There are four sets of word pairs in the verse.

It is Hebrew poetry, which doesn’t rhyme words, it rhymes ideas.

Here, we have these rhyming ideas presented as synonymous parallelism.

We understand these two words, “wounded” [or pierced in the niv] and “crushed-nkjv” [bruised-nasb], because they are synonymous parallelism.

There are also two different words for sin here: transgressions and iniquities.

There are two words for punishment: chastisement and stripes [scourging in the NASB ].

And there are two different words for the solution: peace and heal.

The healing isn’t referring to a physical healing from a disease; that becomes clear from other words in the passage. So this passage absolutely cannot be used to sell the idea that the purpose of Christ’s punishment is to provide for the charismatic view of atonement as an exchange of His physical suffering for our physical healing.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

The first word, “wounded,” is the Hebrew HALAL, or the verb form of MEHOLOL מְחַלְלֶֽי, meaning fatally pierced through.

And, as we mentioned last week, no, this is not a prophesy about the spear thrust of the Roman soldier that John records, impaling our Lord on the cross.

Notice how the word is used in the proclamation against the King of Tyre, in Ezekiel 28:9.

I want you to get the whole context, so let’s start at the beginning. Ezekiel 28: .

Ezekiel 28:9

Ezekiel 28:1–6 NKJV

1 The word of the Lord came to me again, saying, 2 “Son of man, say to the prince of Tyre, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Because your heart is lifted up, And you say, ‘I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods, In the midst of the seas,’ Yet you are a man, and not a god, Though you set your heart as the heart of a god 3 (Behold, you are wiser than Daniel! There is no secret that can be hidden from you! 4 With your wisdom and your understanding You have gained riches for yourself, And gathered gold and silver into your treasuries; 5 By your great wisdom in trade you have increased your riches, And your heart is lifted up because of your riches),” 6 ‘Therefore thus says the Lord God: “Because you have set your heart as the heart of a god,

So in Verses 1-6 we got the larger context. The King of Tyre is supplanting himself as God in his own heart. This is reminiscent of Nebuchadnezzer. The king in this instance is Ethbaal III, who ruled from about 591 B.C. to 572 B.C. Remember that Tyre is the home of the Phoenicians, who ravaged the Mediterranean seaboard as well as the Jewish coast. Nebuchadnezzer would himself take out this King of Tyre.

Now in verse 7-8, we have the immediate context.

Ezekiel 28:7-8

Ezekiel 28:7–8 NKJV

7 Behold, therefore, I will bring strangers against you, The most terrible of the nations; And they shall draw their swords against the beauty of your wisdom, And defile your splendor. 8 They shall throw you down into the Pit, And you shall die the death of the slain In the midst of the seas.

Ezekiel 28:9

Ezekiel 28:9 NKJV

9 “Will you still say before him who slays you, ‘I am a god’? But you shall be a man, and not a god, In the hand of him who slays you.

We also looked last week at

Ezekiel 32:26

Ezekiel 32:26 NKJV

26 “There are Meshech and Tubal and all their multitudes, With all their graves around it, All of them uncircumcised, slain by the sword, Though they caused their terror in the land of the living.

That was to reveal that Jesus had died by that point because the blood had separated into the clotted red blood cells and the lymphatic fluids, and that indicated that death had already occurred. He was pierced by the nails that were driven through His wrists and ankles.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

In parallel, He was “crushed,” Heb. DUKKA/MEDUKKA, a word translated as pulverized, broken in pieces. Crushed and Bruised are way to weak for this word that means to be beaten into pieces. In other words beaten to the point that there are only pieces of the person, or the constituent dust of formation. The noun form relates to dust. It indicates how He dies. These words, when applied to a human, indicate death.

Notice how it is used in Psalm 90.

Psalm 90:3

Psalm 90:3 NKJV

3 You turn man to destruction, And say, “Return, O children of men.”

You can see that this is not a mere wounding that is a mystical poultice for death. It speaks of punishment to destruction, to death. He, this servant, put Himself in front of overwhelming destructive judgement for us.

He is not just someone who suffers for others; He is going to die for them. But He dies specifically for their sins, their transgressions, and their iniquities.

The first word for sin, from our synonymous parallelism, is the Hebrew word PESHA, meaning transgression.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

The idea of a transgression is someone violating a command, someone ultimately who has rejected someone else's authority and rebelled against that authority.

It is interesting that when it is used in contexts not related to God, it relates to violating the property rights of others.

This is once again an affirmation that the Bible affirms the right to own property, the right to enjoy the benefits of that property, and the right to use that property under the authority of God and not for the government to come in and tax it confiscatorially, which is what we have today when the government and people in government think that they have a right to our property simply because they are the government. That is completely unrecognized by God as a right of government.

So this is a key word there, and it means rejecting God’s authority and going our own way against God.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

The second word, “iniquities,” is the Hebrew word AVEN, meaning an infraction, and it has the idea of crookedness, of something that is distorted, perverse, and something iniquitous.

We see these words used in relation to Leviticus 16 which is about the Day of Atonement.

Leviticus 16:14-24

Leviticus 16:14–24 NKJV

14 He shall take some of the blood of the bull and sprinkle it with his finger on the mercy seat on the east side; and before the mercy seat he shall sprinkle some of the blood with his finger seven times. 15 “Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering, which is for the people, bring its blood inside the veil, do with that blood as he did with the blood of the bull, and sprinkle it on the mercy seat and before the mercy seat. 16 So he shall make atonement for the Holy Place, because of the uncleanness of the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions, for all their sins; and so he shall do for the tabernacle of meeting which remains among them in the midst of their uncleanness. 17 There shall be no man in the tabernacle of meeting when he goes in to make atonement in the Holy Place, until he comes out, that he may make atonement for himself, for his household, and for all the assembly of Israel. 18 And he shall go out to the altar that is before the Lord, and make atonement for it, and shall take some of the blood of the bull and some of the blood of the goat, and put it on the horns of the altar all around. 19 Then he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, cleanse it, and consecrate it from the uncleanness of the children of Israel. 20 “And when he has made an end of atoning for the Holy Place, the tabernacle of meeting, and the altar, he shall bring the live goat. 21 Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, concerning all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and shall send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a suitable man. 22 The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to an uninhabited land; and he shall release the goat in the wilderness. 23 “Then Aaron shall come into the tabernacle of meeting, shall take off the linen garments which he put on when he went into the Holy Place, and shall leave them there. 24 And he shall wash his body with water in a holy place, put on his garments, come out and offer his burnt offering and the burnt offering of the people, and make atonement for himself and for the people.

The words iniquities, transgressions and sin are mentioned several times on the Day of Atonement and several times in Isaiah 53, which shows that this has a ritual connection that is connecting what the servant does with what is done by the high priest on the Day of Atonement.

The servant can’t be Israel.

Why?

Because: Isaiah 59:2

Isaiah 59:2-3

Isaiah 59:2–3 NKJV

2 But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, So that He will not hear. 3 For your hands are defiled with blood, And your fingers with iniquity; Your lips have spoken lies, Your tongue has muttered perversity.

Isaiah speaks to Israel; they can’t be servants because they must be righteous. The response:

Isaiah 59:12

Isaiah 59:12 NKJV

12 For our transgressions are multiplied before You, And our sins testify against us; For our transgressions are with us, And as for our iniquities, we know them:

So, there is a recognition by the Jewish people that they are iniquitous; they have transgressed the law, and they are not qualified to be righteous servants.

Then Isaiah 64:6

Isaiah 64:6-7

Isaiah 64:6–7 NKJV

6 But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away. 7 And there is no one who calls on Your name, Who stirs himself up to take hold of You; For You have hidden Your face from us, And have consumed us because of our iniquities.

The word “iniquities” is used as a parallel here to the filth of the unrighteousness in verse 6.

The “chastisement” in Isaiah 53:5 refers to a legal punishment, discipline.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

The stripes or scourging refers to whipping or being beaten.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

Isaiah 1:6

Isaiah 1:6 NKJV

6 From the sole of the foot even to the head, There is no soundness in it, But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; They have not been closed or bound up, Or soothed with ointment.

Psalm 38:5

Psalm 38:5 NKJV

5 My wounds are foul and festering Because of my foolishness.

Proverbs 20:30

Proverbs 20:30 NKJV

30 Blows that hurt cleanse away evil, As do stripes the inner depths of the heart.

Exodus 21:25

Exodus 21:25 NKJV

25 burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

As a result, we have peace with God—shalom, used of the peace offering; healing, rapha, is often used to describe the healing of a relationship with God, primarily for healing disease, but it also has a spiritual sense.

Why is this necessary? Isaiah 53:6

Isaiah 53:6

Isaiah 53:6 NKJV

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.

Sheep can’t take care of themselves, and they all wander off alone without thought for safety. They would die without a shepherd.

By the way, the existence of sheep is a significant argument against Darwinian evolution. According to Darwinian evolution, sheep evolved long before anybody cared for them. Sheep have to be watched over and cared for, and we are the same way.

In contrast:

Isaiah 53:6 NKJV

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.

The iniquity has put a burden upon the servant.

As a result of this: Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 53:7 NKJV

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

Jesus went throughout this entire trial without saying a thing. He screams out only when God judges Him for the world's sins. This is why He was silent, to show that contrast. The physical suffering was the worst that anyone could go through, and yet he didn’t even moan or groan.

Isaiah 53:8

Isaiah 53:8 NASB95

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 For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?

Jesus was arrested the night before He went to the cross as He was praying with His disciples in an olive grove across the Kidron Valley, where there was a large olive press. Gethsemane means olive press. An olive press is where they would take the olives and press them out, and it is a sort of imagery for what was happening to the Lord Jesus Christ in terms of the pressure upon Him.

“… And as for His generation, who considered That He was cut off out of the land of the living …”

He has been rejected, oppressed, ignored, arrested, and seen as someone who was cut off—he died. And this is

“For the transgression [pesha] of my people, to whom the stroke {was due}?”

“For” is a preposition of substitution. The apparent idea is that He is unworthy of punishment, but He takes on the punishment for others.

Isaiah 53:9

Isaiah 53:9 NKJV

9 And they made His grave with the wicked— But with the rich at His death, Because He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth.

When He does, He is with two criminals, and when they bury Him, they bury Him in a grave belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, who was a wealthy Pharisee, a secret believer in Jesus as the Messiah.

Then we get His character analysis:

“Because He had done no violence, Nor was there any deceit in His mouth.”

The suffering servant is without sin; He has done nothing for which to be punished; there is no guilt there. There were six trials of Jesus, all of which were deemed to be illegal.

Isaiah 53:10-12

Isaiah 53:10–12 NKJV

The Judgment of the Servant for the People. Isaiah 53:4-12; Acts 8:34-40

The thing that we should not lose track of in this study is that this is ultimately about an evangelistic ministry, that of Philip, and we see a critical facet in the church age, which is the role of God, the Holy Spirit. But even though God, the Holy Spirit, has a role and is the one who guides, directs, and oversees the process, it is not at the expense of or apart from human responsibility. Philip is responsible for following the Holy Spirit's leadership, going from Jerusalem to Gaza, talking with the Ethiopian eunuch, and helping him understand what he is reading.

We are about to start the study of Acts chapter nine and the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. We see a comparison and contrast here between the mindset of the Ethiopian eunuch and Saul of Tarsus. The Ethiopian is overtly positive to the Word of God. He is reading Isaiah and wants to know what it means.

He has a well-grounded frame of reference for understanding the Old Testament and the background in light of all the sacrifices and feasts, etc., in terms of that framework for understanding the basic message of the Old Testament. Even though it is unclear in his head, he wants to know the truth. We will see Saul of Tarsus as the prime persecutor of Christianity.

If we were to spend time talking to the Ethiopian eunuch the day before he met Philip, what kind of person would he have been in terms of his openness and interest in the Word of God? And what about the Saul of Tarsus as an unbeliever? He had arguably the most extensive understanding of the Old Testament at that time and was probably his generation's most rabbinical student. And yet, he is extremely hostile to Christianity. The Ethiopians were not hostile.

We must think about this because we often talk to someone we know. If they put up their defenses as Saul of Tarsus would, we would, too, flippantly write them off as negative and not going to turn around.

How many of us would have thought thirty minutes before Jesus appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus that he would even lighten up on his hostility to Christians?

Probably too often, we run into people in our lives who are that way, and we retreat too much and back off, and it is easy for us to be dismissive and say, well, they’re just negative and not interested.

How do we know there will not be a point when they will change? It is going to take years for some of them. We may be one person in a stream of fifty, sixty, or seventy who gives that person the gospel.

It may be that you are the person who needs to have a relationship with that person, become their friend, and get to know them, not just as a target for evangelism but also understanding that it may take the rest of your life to explain the gospel to that person before they finally respond.

We usually don’t think of witnessing that way, and too often, the evangelical community and too many Christians have adopted a drive-by evangelism approach. Most of the time, that is not effective.

The idea of substitutionary payment of a legal penalty is foreign to our culture today. To them, it sounds unjust. If they say it is unfair that somebody could take the penalty for somebody else, what have they just done?

They have imposed their view of justice upon God. And so, as we explain the gospel to them, we ought to figure out a way to expose that. As we think about that, we need to lay a foundation.

Where would we start?

Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to take his son, his only son, to Mount Moriah and there to sacrifice him to God.

God never intended for Abraham to kill Isaac. How do we know that? Very simply because God had told Abraham that it would be through Isaac that he would have descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky and the sands of the sea.

So obviously, God intended to give Abraham an innumerable number of descendants through Isaac. But He wanted to test Abraham to see if Abraham had finally got to the point where he trusted God.

What happened when Abraham took out his knife to sacrifice Isaac?

There was a ram caught in the bushes that was to be offered instead of Isaac. That was the substitute.

Then go from there to the whole principle of substitutionary sacrifice, then the principle of the Passover and the substitution of the lamb’s blood on the door for the firstborn's life, and from there to the day of atonement.

Walk through this concept showing that the Bible from the beginning affirms the principle of a substitutionary payment because the person guilty of ever fulfilling that kind of payment would redeem them. They can only be condemned. Laying the principle out there sometimes contradicts everything the unbeliever has come to understand. But every circumstance is different.

In this circumstance, we have this Ethiopian who is, for all practical purposes, Jewish in his thinking and acceptance of the Old Testament, but he hasn’t put everything together yet. He has been reading Isaiah 53 and has been confronted with this substitutionary terminology, talking about this servant of God:

End of 11/10/204 2nd Service

Sunday November 17, 2024

Pentecost: The New Church Series

Review

In review, last week we looked at

Philip and the Ethiopian. Acts 8: 26-40; Isaiah 53

We return to our study of Philip and the Ethiopian which becomes for us a perfect model of the presentation of the Gospel. The Ethiopian was being prepared by the Holy Spirit. He is positive towards God’s word already, and is being convicted to understand that He hasn’t put the pieces together. He is open to instruction and input, so God sends Philip to meet him.

Let’s reread the account as it has been a few weeks since we have done that.

Acts 8:26-38

Acts 8:26–38 NKJV

26 Now an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise and go toward the south along the road which goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” This is desert. 27 So he arose and went. And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, and had come to Jerusalem to worship, 28 was returning. And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet. 29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go near and overtake this chariot.” 30 So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31 And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he asked Philip to come up and sit with him. 32 The place in the Scripture which he read was this: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; And as a lamb before its shearer is silent, So He opened not His mouth. 33 In His humiliation His justice was taken away, And who will declare His generation? For His life is taken from the earth.” 34 So the eunuch answered Philip and said, “I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this, of himself or of some other man?” 35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him. 36 Now as they went down the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, “See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?” 37 Then Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” And he answered and said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” 38 So he commanded the chariot to stand still. And both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him.

The Judgment of the Servant for the People. Isaiah 53:4-12; Acts 8:34-40

Philip is responsible for following the Holy Spirit's leadership, going from Jerusalem to Gaza, talking with the Ethiopian eunuch, and helping him understand what he is reading.

Because the conversion of Saul of Tarsus will be such a contrast in Acts 9. We should note the comparison and contrast here between the mindset of the Ethiopian eunuch and Saul of Tarsus.

The Ethiopian here is overtly positive to the Word of God. He is reading Isaiah and wants to know what it means.

By contrast, we will see Saul of Tarsus as the prime persecutor of Christianity. With a misguided zeal, it will take the confrontation of Jesus Himself expressed in His divinity on the road to Damascus to stop him in his tracks and both figuratively, and literally to open his eyes to HaMoshiach, the Messiah of Israel.

If we were to spend time talking to the Ethiopian eunuch the day before he met Philip, what kind of person would he have been in terms of his openness and interest in the Word of God?

And what about the Saul of Tarsus as an unbeliever? He had arguably the most extensive understanding of the Old Testament at that time and was probably his generation's most rabbinical student. And yet, he is extremely hostile to Christianity.

The Ethiopians were not hostile.

We must think about this because we often talk to someone we know. If they put up their defenses as Saul of Tarsus would, we might flippantly write them off as negative and not going to turn around.

How many of us would have thought before Jesus appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus that he would even lighten up on his hostility to Christians?

Probably too often, we run into people in our lives who are that way, and we retreat too much and back off, and it is easy for us to be dismissive in our self justification, in thinking that they’re just negative and not interested.

We usually don’t think of witnessing that way, and too often, the evangelical community and too many Christians have adopted a drive-by evangelism approach. Most of the time, that is not effective.

They have imposed their view of justice upon God. And so, as we explain the gospel to them, we ought to figure out a way to expose that. As we think about that, we need to lay a foundation.

Where would we start?

Well, the Ethiopian had been prepared as any observant Jewish person was able to be.

Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to take his son, his only son, to Mount Moriah and there to sacrifice him to God.

So obviously, God intended to give Abraham an innumerable number of descendants through Isaac. But He wanted to test Abraham to see if Abraham had finally got to the point where he trusted God.

What happened when Abraham took out his knife to sacrifice Isaac?

There was a ram caught in the bushes that was to be offered instead of Isaac. That was the substitute.

So let/s pick back up on Isaiah, where we have the Romans Road of salvation expressed. The Ethiopian and Philip did not need Romans, which was obviously not written yet, since Paul has not been saved yet, let alone been taught by the Lord or sent out as an Apostle writing epistles to the churches he has founded.

Isaiah focuses on the substitutionary work of the prophesied servant.

Let’s return to Isaiah, where this is being addressed, by the focus on the servant’s vicarious suffering for the sins of others.

It starts in this verse which we have studied at some length already:

Isaiah 53:4

Isaiah 53:4 NKJV

4 Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted.

Three central statements are made. The first two in 53:4a represent the speakers’ present understanding of the Servant while the third factor in 53:4b explains a former misunderstanding of the Servant’s afflictions.

The reality is that everything He endured—being pierced and crushed and punished—was in payment for our transgressions, and our healing and well-being came at the price of His wounds

The idea of the substitutionary work continues in the next verse

Isaiah 53:5

Isaiah 53:5 NKJV

5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed.

Every single one of us—all but Him—have strayed far from God’s path and gone our own way, yet the Lord laid the guilt and iniquity of all of us on Him

The reason He needs to die for our transgressions is revealed in the next verse:

Isaiah 53:6

Isaiah 53:6 NKJV

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.

So we see that the penalty for sin is necessary, but is laid on Him; He, the servant of Isaiah 53 is the one who pays that penalty.

Strikingly, as this Servant is being afflicted and attacked, He neither defends Himself nor protests, just as a lamb goes to slaughter

His response to bearing that penalty:

Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 53:7 NKJV

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

The opening statement of oppression and judgment is probably a Hebrew idiom related to His arrest and judgment.

Then we have the second

Isaiah 53:7 NKJV

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

This is the section that is quoted in Acts chapter eight.

Acts 8:32 NKJV

32 The place in the Scripture which he read was this: “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; And as a lamb before its shearer is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

Isaiah 53:7 NKJV

7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.

What does it mean that He was oppressed and afflicted? This is extremely difficult to translate from the Hebrew. There is a lot of debate over what some of these terms mean and how they are to be expressed. The LXX translation, which is what is quoted in Acts 8, is a little bit different, and it is helpful to look at it to understand the gist of what is being said in the original Hebrew because the LXX version seems to summarize the meaning of Isaiah 53:7 without giving a direct translation of it. The word used in the LXX for “lamb” is AMNOS [ἀμνὸς], which is only used four times in the New Testament. It is an important word. Notice the passages where it is used.

When Jesus comes down to the Jordan, where John the Baptist is baptizing, (John 1:19) we read

John 1:19

John 1:19 NKJV

19 Now this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”

The next day, John says the same thing.

John 1:36

John 1:36 NKJV

36 And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, “Behold the Lamb of God!”

So, two references are in John chapter one, identifying Jesus as the Lamb of God. Acts 8:32 is the third use; 1 Peter 1:18, 19 is the fourth use, that

“you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, {the blood} of Christ.”

This is a direct reference to the Passover lamb, which had to be qualified to be used as a sacrifice. It had to be evaluated and watched to ensure it was without spots or blemishes. So Jesus is identified by this phraseology, which uniquely identifies Him with the Old Testament sacrifice.

And Jesus does not protest the unjustness of His condemnation. Not once.

Isaiah 53:8

Isaiah 53:8 NKJV

8 He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

This is also a difficult passage to translate from the Hebrew. The issue is how to punctuate the line,

“who will declare His generation?”

(NKJV). Is that in the sentence, or should that be re-translated as “Who will declare to His generation?” Corrected translation:

“Yet who of His generation considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke {was due?}”

The blow/stroke was due to “my people.” They are guilty; they are the ones who were to receive the penalty, but instead, it falls upon the servant.

Translation in the Tanakh: (The second line has a note in the margin which says: “This is extremely difficult, we are not sure what this means.”) That is the difficult Hebrew phrase there.

Isaiah 53:8 NKJV

8 He was taken from prison and from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.

“Who can describe His דּוֹר֖ DOR.” Does it use “generation”? There is a problem with understanding the Hebrew word dor.

But notice how the Rabbis translate the last two lines in the Tanakh: “For he was cut off from the land of the living through [not for] the sin of my people…”

The Hebrew preposition is the preposition of substitution; it is for, not through. “…who deserve the punishment.” When they get to that last “who deserve the punishment,” they get the substitutionary idea they try to avoid by using “through.”

The main idea is in the ESV (English Standard Version):

Isaiah 53:8 ESV

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?

In other words, who among His contemporaries realized what was going on? He was being cut off and executed “for the transgression of my people.” This is the best translation seen so far.

Both His death and burial were ignominious, even though He Himself was guiltless, committing no violence and speaking no deceit

He was not guilty of any sin or any crime whatsoever.

Returning to verse 8:

“…For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke {was due?}”

It is clear there that the servant is distinct from the people. The servant is the one who is struck and who pays the penalty “for the transgressions of my people.” We don’t see how it can be argued that the servant is just another term for the people in light of that verse 9 and verse 10.

Isaiah 53:9

Isaiah 53:9 NKJV

9 And they made His grave with the wicked— But with the rich at His death, Because He had done no violence, Nor was any deceit in His mouth.

Isaiah 53:10

Isaiah 53:10 NKJV

So the servant's life is made an offering for sin.

“… He [God] will see {His} offspring, He will prolong {His} days, And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.”

But all this happened by the explicit will of God, who crushed Him in order that the Servant would make His own life a guilt offering (אָשָׁם֙—ASAM) so that He would see future generations (lit. seed, offspring), His life would be extended (= resurrection), and He would succeed in doing God’s work

Isaiah 53:11

Isaiah 53:11 NKJV

11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities.

That is the doctrine of propitiation. God's righteousness and justice are satisfied by the sacrifice, the sin offering of the servant on the cross.

“… By His knowledge …”

By learning about the servant.

“…the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, As [for] He will bear their iniquities.”

He carries that penalty in His body—substitutionary.

the Lord Himself declares, His righteous Servant will make many righteous, having also carried their iniquities

Isaiah 53:12

Isaiah 53:12 NKJV

Indicating His ultimate victory over those who have unjustly condemned Him.

“… Because He poured out Himself to death.”

This isn’t just suffering. One of the views is that the suffering isn’t fatal. This is just a picture of the suffering of the Jewish people of the time. But this doesn’t fly.

“… And was numbered with the transgressors; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, And interceded for the transgressors.”

The last phrase indicates His high-priestly role in place of or as a substitute for the transgressors.

The 1985 Tanakh: “Assuredly, I will give him the many as his portion, he shall receive the multitude as his spoil, for he exposed himself to death, and he was numbered among the sinners; whereas he bore the guilt of the many, and made intercession for sinners.”

Even in the Tanakh, they cannot escape the substitutionary aspect of what the servant would do for the sinners.

Back to Acts chapter eight:

Many times, when the New Testament quotes one or two verses from a passage, it alludes to the entire passage, not just those one or two verses. That would be the case here. The Ethiopian asks a specific question about to whom this passage is piqued, but Philip would have explained the entire passage to him.

In the first part of Isaiah 53:8, “He was taken from prison and from judgment,”

is handled in the LXX as a summary of His humiliation and not receiving justice. There is a perversion of justice that took place. It refers to His arrest and trial, summarized in the LXX as a humiliation because justice was perverted then. It does not translate it word for word but expresses the idea in the Masoretic Text. Then, “And who will declare his generation, for his life is taken from the earth.” In the original, it says, “he was cut off from the land of the living,” so the LXX interprets that as His physical death.

Acts 8:34

Acts 8:34 NKJV

34 So the eunuch answered Philip and said, “I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this, of himself or of some other man?”

As we have seen through this study of Isaiah 53 it cannot refer to any other person in history.

Acts 8:35

Acts 8:35 NKJV

35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him.

It doesn’t say this was the only Scripture he talked about—“beginning from this Scripture.” He “preached,” which means he is giving the gospel, proclaiming Jesus to him.

Then we see a result.

Acts 8:36

Acts 8:36 NKJV

36 Now as they went down the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, “See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?”

There’s no indication here of what the Ethiopian said. We see the result of his response. We don’t know how he learned about baptism. Did he see Christians baptized in Jerusalem, or did Philip explain this to him? The summary of Philip’s conversation leaves a lot out, but we understand it because we see its results.

Some have tried to communicate that baptism is not for today. The largest group that has done this is known as ultra-dispensationalists. Dispensationalists are those who believe that God administers history in different ways in different periods of time. Charles Ryrie pointed out that what makes one a dispensationalist were three things: A literal interpretation of Scripture, a distinction between God’s plan for Israel and God’s plan for the church; everything in God’s plan is ultimately related to the glorification of God.

Early dispensationalists in the 19th century tried to put the beginning of the church age in Acts 10.

Others put it later on when Paul first began to go out in Acts 13 to take the gospel to the Gentiles; others came along and said the church age didn’t begin until the close of Acts or AD 70.

But what makes the difference between legal and grace dispensation under the law is baptism by means of the Holy Spirit.

That is Acts chapter two.

Even though it is in a transition period, you can’t come along and say there were some features this way and some that way, so the church doesn’t begin until sometime later in Acts. That was the argument of the hyper-dispensationalists and the ultra-dispensationalists, and they concluded that baptism only had significance concerning the Jews.

If that was true, then why was Paul baptizing Corinthians? Paul said he wasn’t baptizing because the Corinthians were abusing it. He didn’t say he didn’t baptize anybody because baptism is out. At the same time, he wrote that he was in Ephesus, and in Acts chapter nineteen, all of a sudden, there were these disciples of John the Baptist who had been baptized by John the Baptist and understood his message of repentance (Old Testament salvation).

Now Paul asks, “Were you baptized in the name of Jesus?” He explains the gospel to them and then baptizes them in the name of Jesus—that is the issue. That identification with Jesus is a picture of identification with Christ in the baptism by means of the Holy Spirit.

The next verse is probably not in the original:

Acts 8:37

Acts 8:37 NKJV

37 Then Philip said, “If you believe with all your heart, you may.” And he answered and said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

We don’t find that language anywhere else (If you believe it wholeheartedly). That implies that if you don’t believe with all your heart, you aren’t saved and can have a half-hearted belief. That just doesn’t fit with anything else in Scripture, and it is only in a few MSS traced to one geographical area.

Neither the Critical Text nor the Majority Text includes this verse. Scholars universally recognize that it was inserted late in the manuscript tradition and is not part of the original text, just based on its textual history.

Acts 8:39

Acts 8:39 NKJV

39 Now when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught Philip away, so that the eunuch saw him no more; and he went on his way rejoicing.

Does this mean that the Holy Spirit told Philip it was time to leave, or is there a supernatural transportation that takes place here? We tend to think it was supernatural transportation because of the suddenness of the vocabulary and the narrative here. The verb is harpazo [αρπαζω], which doesn’t necessarily mean a supernatural snatching away but is used that way. It primarily means making off with someone else’s property by attacking or seizing it. But it is also used to remove something, gain control of something, snatch something, and take it away.

This is the word used for the Rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

1 Thessalonians 4:17

1 Thessalonians 4:17 NKJV

17 Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.

It is used 13 times in the New Testament. When Jerome translated the New Testament into Latin, he chose rapio as the verb, where we get our word “rapture.”

There are seven “raptures” in Scripture: the rapture of Enoch, the rapture of Elijah, Isaiah (Is. 6), Jesus going to be with the Father in heaven, Philip getting harpazo’d from the road to Gaza to Ashdod, and Paul (2 Corinthians 12), the church at the end of the church age.

Acts 8:40

Acts 8:40 NKJV

40 But Philip was found at Azotus. And passing through, he preached in all the cities till he came to Caesarea.

So here we see the inclusion of a black Gentile, but he is not considered a full Gentile because the text treats Cornelius in Acts 10 as the first Gentile convert to the church. The Ethiopian was a proselyte to Judaism.

Saul to Paul: Psychotic Break, Psychological Delusion, OR Divine Revelation of Grace? Acts 9:1

This section is biographical in many ways, and it is very important because Luke describes the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus three times in Acts. It is described as a third-person narrative here in Acts 9; it is described two more times in the first-person perspective as the apostle Paul relates it first to the mob in Jerusalem in Acts 22 and then later in Acts 26 as he gives his testimony to Herod Agrippa.

For these events to be recorded three times in Acts and then again in Galatians and Philippians, and alluded to in a couple of places in 2 Corinthians, tells us how important the Holy Spirit views this episode. This isn’t just a story. But it is foundational to understanding some critical elements of grace—grace versus legalism, and it is vital for understanding the power of God in transforming the thinking and then the life of an individual as we see this radical transformation that takes place in the person of Saul of Tarsus. It is important for us to understand the supernatural and miraculous nature of his conversion, and the revelation that God gives him becomes the foundation for much of the doctrinal teaching of the New Testament. And consequently, what we see in anything important is that it becomes the target of significant assaults and attacks from those who are opposed to Christianity. This comes from different sources, and ultimately, they try to give this a naturalistic interpretation.

We have to remember that from the unbelieving viewpoint, there is no God. That is the basic assumption of theological liberalism, no matter what they claim. The bottom line is that they have a God who does not enter into and act in space-time history. He is either a disconnected God or He is an impotent God, and he views everything that way so that whatever happens in history is always from the vantage point of a naturalistic worldview that, by definition, excludes the kind of supernatural interference in history that the Bible presents. Therefore, when the modern unbeliever reads this, he discounts it immediately. Within that nanosecond of hearing and discussing the story, he immediately discounts it as this can’t be true. By definition, because he has never seen anything like this, God doesn’t do anything like this in anybody’s life today; therefore, it is just a story, a myth, something that somebody dreamed up in order to promote his own religious views and it has no foundation in objective reality or objective fact. So, there is an attempt to completely reinterpret this in terms of psychological narrative.

This episode with Saul fits perfectly within the thesis and the purpose of the book of Acts. There is the expansion by the Holy Spirit, beginning in Jerusalem, then Judea, Samaria, and then to the uttermost part of the earth. And it is this episode in Acts chapter nine when Saul of Tarsus is converted and becomes the apostle Paul is given a commission by the Lord Jesus Christ to take the gospel, not to the Jews—Peter is the apostle to the Jews—but to the Gentiles. It is Peter who takes the gospel to the first Gentile, Cornelius, but it is Paul who will exploit that in his three missionary journeys and then his fourth, which is his journey to Rome.

Many times in “doctrinal churches” or teaching churches, we don’t spend a lot of time on biography, and yet if we look at the Bible, the vast majority of the Bible is narrative, the story of people’s lives and how God works in people’s lives. We see doctrine put into shoe leather, and it has worked out in history. That is very important because the doctrine that we believe, the teaching we believe, isn’t just some abstract theological system. It is not a philosophy; it is not just principles of life. It is the reality of God’s creation and how this is to be part of our life. We are to live consistently with that because this is the warp and woof of reality. So we can’t separate doctrine from history, from individual’s lives, and specific events. Suppose we do that and cut the doctrine and separate it from the historical events in and through which it is revealed. In that case, it becomes nothing more than an academic exercise, a philosophical system, and it is no different from Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, or any other philosophical system. That is one thing that makes Judeo-Christianity, going back to the Old Testament, so different. God reveals Himself in and through history. So, we can’t divorce history from doctrine. We have to understand doctrine within the historical context. History has no meaning in Islam or in Greek philosophy; it is only the Bible that gives meaning to history, and so as our lives are history written within the framework of large history, if history is irrelevant, our life is irrelevant. The Bible gives meaning and value to every individual’s life, first because we were created in the image and likeness of God, and second because history is divinely guided and has a God-intended purpose.

Political correctness is the suicide weapon that Western civilization has chosen. Political correctness is destroying and will destroy (if it is not stopped) Western civilization because it is a mask that we have chosen to put on to avoid looking at reality as it is. Political correctness has redefined many issues in life so that we can’t do certain things or talk about certain things because if we do, it is going to offend somebody. And one of the tremendous social sins today is that we may do something that offends someone. Sorry, but anything we do is bound to offend somebody, and the Word of God and the cross of Christ are offensive to a large segment of people in this world.

This is the same thing—going back into Acts 9—that we see in the misinterpretations of Christianity, i.e. there is no such thing as a real absolute. That is one of the dividing points between a biblical worldview or divine viewpoint and human viewpoint. Human viewpoint says that man is the center of everything and that man determines ultimate reality. Divine viewpoint says that God determines ultimate reality and everything operates according to His manual of instruction, and His manual is based on the fact that He is the creator of all things. Anyone who is not worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob through Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for us, is an idolater to the greatest degree.

Understanding the life of Paul centered on this event is very important, and sadly, many Christians, many young people, are never exposed to the biography of Paul in Scripture. All of these doctrines taught in Scripture are grounded in what happens in the life of Paul as God revealed it to him.

We are introduced in Acts 9:1 to Saul

Acts 9:1

Acts 9:1 NASB “Now Saul …”

Acts 9:1 NKJV

1 Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest

Luke has been talking about what happened in the expansion of the gospel and to the Ethiopian eunuch. There had been a persecution in Jerusalem, and so the disciples were scattered. But in their scattering, they were evangelizing. This is caused by the persecution spearheaded in many ways by Saul of Tarsus.

So 9:1 is just picking up where that narrative left off.

Acts 9:1 NKJV

1 Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest

“… still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest.”

He asks for letters from him to the synagogue at Damascus. This was his authorization to go outside the province of Judea into what is now Syria to seek out and arrest anyone who was a Christian—those who were “of the way.” They are not called Christians yet. That comes later.

Acts 9:2

Acts 9:2 NKJV

2 and asked letters from him to the synagogues of Damascus, so that if he found any who were of the Way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Acts 7:58, the occasion of the stoning of Stephen.

Acts 7:58

Acts 7:58 NKJV

58 and they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.

Saul is called a young man here. The term “young man” would be applied up to the age of thirty, so we know that he is no older than thirty and probably not younger than twenty.

Acts 8:1

Acts 8:1 NKJV

He was in full approval. This gives insight into his character and his belief system. He is one of the strongest advocates for Pharisaical Judaism at this time. This is a picture of a man who is passionate about what he believes, a picture of a man who is so committed to what he believes that when there is a challenge to that belief system, he is willing to take the initiative to physically persecute, assault, arrest and execute for blasphemy those who opposed him. As a result, 8:1

Acts 8:1–3 NKJV

1 Now Saul was consenting to his death. At that time a great persecution arose against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. 2 And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great lamentation over him. 3 As for Saul, he made havoc of the church, entering every house, and dragging off men and women, committing them to prison.

If the crucifixion of Christ occurred in AD 33, then this event took place probably no earlier than two years later. It would have taken place about AD 35, and all of these events described in Acts chapter nine would have been completed by AD 37.

The reason for saying that is because in 2 Corinthians 11:32-33, we are told,

2 Corinthians 11:32-33

2 Corinthians 11:32–33 NKJV

32 In Damascus the governor, under Aretas the king, was guarding the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desiring to arrest me; 33 but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped from his hands.

Aretas died in AD 40. So, these events would have taken place at least three years before Aretas died.

Rabbinic tradition meant that Paul would have, under normal circumstances, moved to Jerusalem to begin his rabbinic studies when he was probably thirteen or fourteen. If we assume the youngest age, that he was twenty when this takes place in AD 35, that would mean that he would have been born about 15 AD and moved to Jerusalem about 28 or so. That is fascinating because that means that, at the very least, Saul of Tarsus was living as a student of Gamaliel in Jerusalem between 28-35 AD. Think about that. Who keeps coming to Jerusalem during those years? Jesus. So he would not have been ignorant of Jesus of Nazareth. If we had met Saul of Tarsus any day up until the day that Jesus appeared to him on the road to Damascus, even fifteen minutes earlier, we would have been convinced that he was a lost cause. He was a religious rabble-rouser, operating on religious arrogance on steroids, and if anybody was hostile to Jesus and Christianity, it was Saul. So, if we say that anybody will never respond to the gospel, it will be Saul. And look what happened.

You and I have no right to think that somebody we have been witnessing will not be responsive to the gospel. We don’t know how long it will take before the Holy Spirit makes it really clear to them and they finally “see the light” (metaphorically).

What we know about Paul is that he was born in Tarsus. We don't know how much he was exposed to Gentile teaching. It was a center for Stoic philosophy. There was a major university training center there for physicians. Some speculate that he may have met Luke, the physician in Tarsus. We don’t know about that. It is just an interesting guess. Paul’s education was strictly Jewish. They were devoted to the Pharisaical teachings so they would have been separatists and not mingled very much with the Greek culture. However, he did have a position of privilege because he was a Roman citizen.

In Philippians 3:5, 6 Paul tells us a little bit about his family background:

Philippians 3:5-6

Philippians 3:5–6 NKJV

5 circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; concerning the law, a Pharisee; 6 concerning zeal, persecuting the church; concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.

The Pharisees were the conservative, self-righteous legalists. They were not liberals like the Sadducees. The Pharisees believe that the Torah was from God. Paul believed that righteousness came through ritual observance and was dedicated to that. He discovered from Philippians 3:7ff that righteousness from the Law was worthless, that only righteousness from God has any meaning, and the only way to get God’s righteousness was by trusting in Jesus Christ.

Acts 22:3-5

Acts 22:3–5 NKJV

3 “I am indeed a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, taught according to the strictness of our fathers’ law, and was zealous toward God as you all are today. 4 I persecuted this Way to the death, binding and delivering into prisons both men and women, 5 as also the high priest bears me witness, and all the council of the elders, from whom I also received letters to the brethren, and went to Damascus to bring in chains even those who were there to Jerusalem to be punished.

Paul was the poster child of second-temple Judaism. If you wanted to be the greatest, most devoted Jew in that period, the model Jew was Saul of Tarsus. But then something happened. He was confronted on the road to Damascus by Jesus Christ. We have to understand who he was before he was saved to realize that nobody makes this kind of 180-degree shift just out of some psychotic break or dementia or just because they had some sort of guilt complex over all of the people that they had brought to death. This radical change goes to the very core of his being, and it could only happen because something truly took place on the road to Damascus. He describes it this way in Galatians chapter one:

Galatians 1:12-15

Galatians 1:12–15 NKJV

12 For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ. 13 For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. 14 And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers. 15 But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace,

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Pentecost—The New Church: The Birth of the New Testament Church: The Judgment of the Servant for the People. Isaiah 53:4-12; Acts 8:34-40 (part 2)

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Sunday October 13, 2024

Review

Philip and the Ethiopian. Acts 8: 26-40; Isaiah 53

Acts 8:4-5

Acts 8:26

Acts 8:29

Acts 8:25

Acts 8:26

Acts 8:27

Genesis 22:3

James 1:21-22

Acts 8:29

Acts 8:28

Isaiah 53:7-8

Acts 8:29

Acts 8:30-31

Acts 8:34

Who is My Servant? Acts 8: 26-29, Isaiah 53

Acts 8:30

Acts 8:31

Exodus 15:13 ; 32:34 .

1 Corinthians 2:13

Acts 8:32-33

John 1:29

John 1:36

End of 2nd Service 10/13/2024

Sunday October 20, 2024

Review

Acts 8:32-33

John 1:29

John 1:36

1 Pet 1:18-19

End of 1st Service 10/20/2024

Acts 8:34

Isaiah 53:7

Isaiah 52:13

1 Corinthians 15:1-4

Isaiah 52:13-14

Isaiah 52:15

Isaiah 20:3

Isaiah 22:20

Isaiah 37:35

Isaiah 41:8-9

Isaiah 42:18-20

Isaiah 43:10

Isaiah 44:1

Isaiah 1:4

Isaiah 29:10

Isaiah 48:1

Isaiah 52:9

Isaiah 42:7

Isaiah 53:11

Isaiah 49:5-6

Isaiah 52:13-15

Isaiah 53:1-3

Isaiah 53:7-9

Isaiah 53:4-6

Isaiah 52:13

Zechariah 3:8

Isaiah 11:1

This is also stated some 100 years after Isaiah by Jeremiah. Jeremiah 23:5

Jeremiah 33:15

Zechariah 6:12

Zechariah 9:9

End of 2nd Service 10/20/2024

Sunday October 27, 2024

Review

Philip and the Ethiopian. Acts 8: 26-40; Isaiah 53

Acts 8:32-33

Zechariah 3:8

Isaiah 11:1

Jeremiah 23:5

Jeremiah 33:15

Zechariah 6:12

Isaiah 40:9

Matthew 27:37

Mark 10:45.

Luke 19: 10