Isaiah 53:3-6 - A Man of Sorrows

SERMON TEXT

Let’s look together this morning at the four verses in chapter 53 of Isaiah, reading from verse 3 to verse 6.

We read the short chapter earlier in our service this morning, but I would like for us to pay special attention to these verses together.

[READ ISAIAH 53:3-6]

With so many great themes and messages in this small section of Isaiah’s prophecy,

It was quite hard to think of where to begin this morning to consider this handful of verses,

so I will take them in the order the Holy Spirit has given them to us.

We finished last week with verse 3 as the completion of a thought begun in the 13th verse of the previous chapter.

But this morning, I’d like to look at it as the jumping-off point for these next verses.

The main reason is this first word in verse 4: “Surely”.

Please bear with me in a short grammar lesson, this word is a conjunction - a word that ties the things before it to the things after it.

But it is a really special conjunction, used only a dozen or so times in the Old Testament.

At its core, we can often translate it “but”.

So why didn’t they here?

Because it’s ALSO an interjection - the kind of words that we put an exclamation point after.

Like “holy cow!” or “Oh, wow!”

We see it in places like Genesis 28:16 “Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”” .

Here, I think it does no violence to the Scripture if we think of Jacob exclaiming, “HOLY COW! The Lord is in this place, and I didn’t know it!”

Or in Exodus 2:14 when Moses was telling one of the Hebrews in Egypt not to fight with his brother:

“[The Israelite] answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely [HOLY COW!] the thing is known.””

You get the idea.

So when verse 4 of our passage today begins with “Surely He has borne our griefs..”,

He is looking back to the verse before, the verse that describes how the Messiah was treated on earth:

Isaiah 53:3 “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”

We looked at Him and thought, “Nah, not worth it. I’ll keep this life.”

Not only are we not grateful to Him, we REJECT Him.

John 1:11 “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”

That’s where we ended last week: WE esteemed Him not.

But then, Isaiah tells us: “But Holy Cow! He has borne OUR griefs.”

We undeserving, ungrateful people - HE bore our griefs.

We who hid our faces from Him - He carried OUR sorrows.

We who brought God nothing but grief - HE loved us.

We really have difficulty thinking about a love that selfless, even when we have experienced it in Jesus Christ.

Here on earth, everybody wants something.

We might think we have selfless love for our spouse,

But scratch the surface, and we discover we often want OUR needs met by them.

Often we do the kind and loving things SO we can get them in return.

We may do kind things, but we almost always expect kind things in return.

We think of our love for our children as being selfless,

But when our children disobey or are disrespectful to us, we are quick to ask, “How are they so ungrateful?”

Or we think “How dare they treat ME like this?”

With few exceptions, every love we give here on earth, we expect to be reciprocated.

We expect every good gesture or kind action to be acknowledged, thanked, and cherished.

Even, I fear, in the love we have for God.

How many preachers are there who exhort us to love God so He will bless us?

How fickle, how tarnished, is that kind of love?

Let me tell you the truth:

Even is God never did a single kind thing for you except saving you through Jesus Christ, you are STILL overwhelmingly blessed.

You are still ahead if you lived the rest of your life here on earth in excruciating pain.

You are ahead if every person in the world reviles you.

You are still unimaginably blessed even if you are persecuted and wounded every single day.

Why would we be drawn to love god because of what God WILL do for us?

Is the sacrifice of His Son not enough for us?

Do we require comfort from Him?

Or wealth from Him?

Or peace from Him?

Or ease from Him?

Or health, or happiness, or satisfaction, or vacations, or full bellies, or anything else?

Is there ANYTHING greater than the fact that God has sent His Son to save you from His wrath?

There may be some here who love God and man more selflessly,

But for most people I’ve known in my life,

They may help and love for a while,

but if the person they help is ungrateful, they will move on to someone else.

Because they weren’t getting anything FROM the person they were helping.

But HOLY COW! God loves us in this same circumstance.

He loves us when there’s NOTHING to be gained from us - because He gains nothing from us.

Even our praise is tarnished.

Even our thanks proceeds from sinful hearts.

And is lifted on breath He gives us.

There is nothing we can ever, in all eternity, do to enrich Him by a single penny.

He doesn’t feel better when we love Him.

He doesn’t gain anything when we worship Him.

He doesn’t NEED us.

He never needed us.

He will never NEED us.

And still He loves us.

When we were ungrateful, unlovely and unloving, HE GAVE HIS SON. Holy COW!

It is proof that His love IS selfless.

His love is completely merciful.

His love for us is not based on what He can gain from us, but precedes anything we can do.

We were the corpse lying in the tomb like Lazarus.

No praise, no life, no breath.

And God, through Jesus Christ, gave us everything we need for life and godliness.

But we must move on.

Let’s take a look at v. 5:

Isaiah 53:5 “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”

Now you may be pointing at your Bible right now, and saying, “This verse starts with ‘but’ too!”

And it does.

This conjunction is tying the last thought of verse 4 to the next verses.

From : We esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

Even 600 years before, Isaiah is telling us by the Holy Spirit that Jesus wasn’t coming to be attractive.

He isn’t trying to woo us with His words or His appeal.

Who in this world wants to follow a Savior who has problems?

We want a Savior who can teach us to conquer all our adversity.

One commentator puts it this way: the revelation of the arm of the Lord that will deliver the Lord’s people is met with shock, astonishment, distaste, dismissal, and avoidance. Such a one as this can hardly be the one who can set us free from that most pervasive of all human bondages: sin, and all its consequences. To a world blinded by selfishness and power, he does not even merit a second thought.

If Jesus Christ was the Messiah, some opponents might say, how do you explain His followers?

Fishermen

Tax collectors

Rebels

Women

And who came to Him?

The afflicted.

The blind and deaf

The lame

The demon-possessed

The terribly sinful.

Where were the religious leaders?

The influencers?

The nobles?

The pro athletes and celebrities of that day?

Where were the ones that could legitimize this Jesus of Nazareth?

He was so poorly regarded that a few years following His resurrection and ascension, a Roman historian referred to Jesus (who he called “Crestus”) as a slave.

Surely the life of Jesus, His rejection by the wise and learned and powerful, appeared to everyone that God’s hand was striking Him every day of His life.

Because Jesus Christ is not a Messiah designed and made for the masses;

He is the Messiah of God for God’s particular people.

Yes, He was afflicted, BUT verse 5 tells us why:

He wasn’t afflicted because He had done anything wrong.

He wasn’t marked by God for difficulty and trial to pay for some great error He had made or would make.

He wasn’t humiliated for His own training or discipline or preparation.

He was pierced for OUR transgressions, crushed for OUR iniquities.

Now, in church we use the words often: transgression and iniquity.

We read them, and we consider them just another word for “sin”.

And sometimes we even nod and think, “I get it. I get it. Sin is bad. Let’s move on”

And when we think something like that, we prove just how much we don’t get it.

We don’t understand the magnitude of these words - transgression and iniquity -

And without understanding that, we can never understand the magnitude of God’s mercy.

Transgression means nothing short of rebellion, revolt.

It is betrayal at its highest;

Treason against God.

It may be open - like shaking your fist in God’s face.

Or it may be covered up, hidden in secret places, where we just tell ourselves “I don’t want to do what God tells me.”

We are very good at disguising treason.

Sometimes, we make it sound like a good thing.

Like in a book I read some years ago called “Situational Ethics”.

He put forward a hypothetical dilemma:

Suppose you meet a murderer who is intent on murdering your friend. He asks you for your friend’s address. If you give it to him, you know he will go there and kill your friend. Do you lie?

In this book, you are taught to justify your lie by saying it serves the greater good.

That’s his thesis.

But I remember when I was discussing it with my friend Don, he helped me see through the haze the author made.

Don said: Tell the murderer “I’m not going to tell you.”

We are really good at making our sinful choices look like they are the best choice.

All the while knowing they are feeding our covetousness, or pride, or other lusts.

Sometimes, if we know we can’t disguise our sin as good, we just claim that we had no choice.

The situation was forced upon us, and we couldn’t help it.

This is undoubtedly the oldest excuse for transgression:

Adam told God, “The woman YOU gave me handed me the fruit.”

I was the victim here.

But no matter how we paint it, our transgressions, our treasons are a purposeful insult to God who gives us life and every good thing.

But then there is this other word: iniquities.

Not just one iniquity; this, like the transgressions, is plural.

And it means to warp something.

To pervert something.

This is no mere “missing the mark”;

It is taking the good things of God, the blessings of this world, and using all our strength to deform them into something we can use to sin and rebel against God.

It is taking those good gifts of our heavenly Father and warping them into weapons to hurt others or ourselves.

It is using the good things we have in His mercy and grace and use them to advance our sin or deformity from His holiness.

He was pierced for our rebellions; He was crushed for OUR perversities.

There is within each one of us a core of flesh that is desperately wicked.

That left to itself without the grace of God to restrain us would try to remake this world in OUR image.

And, I am convinced, that is the very definition of hell.

And it was for OUR grave offenses, these capital crimes, that Jesus, the Messiah, was punished in our place.

The Lamb of God who takes away sin.

That torture He endured on the cross and the eternal, unfiltered wrath of God He faced -

Those brought us peace.

By those very wounds, those bruises, those welts - we are restored to God forever.

All we like sheep have gone astray...

Please hear this: it is a tragedy if those words COMFORT us.

If we somehow take the fact that everyone in the world is a rebel and perverse in many different ways:

Is that a word of COMFORT?

How could it possibly be a comfort to us that we live in a world that ignores God and warps the good things He gives into unholy objects to satisfy our own lusts – that should make us tremble before God.

Can it comfort us that the height of the creation of God, a person, is debased and degraded, or degrades themselves in their slavery to sin – we should weep.

How can we possibly comfort ourselves when we do the very same things, only to a lesser extent than someone else?

When we harbor the same lusts, and approach the same deformation of creation, but we do it in a subtler way?

Who is the greater thief: the one breaks into a house and steals, or the one who withholds the wages from a worker?

Or the banker who robs the poor through fees that make the bank rich?

Or the believer who will pursue another for a debt they have loaned to them?

I could list a thousand examples, and every one of them is an example of trampling the eighth commandment.

Twisting the good gift of God into a perverse object of our desires.

How could we ever entertain the thought that God could or would or should EXCUSE our sin?

He is entirely right and good and just to destroy it, to crush it, to punish it with all His mighty power.

And as for us, when we are in our right minds, the minds that are on God’s glory, we must confess His holiness and righteousness and perfect justice.

Jesus Christ didn’t come and give His life to EXCUSE our sins;

He came to free us from them.

He didn’t come so that God could be more like us;

He came to make us more like Him.

To return us to Him.

We who are fallen.

We who are warped and ruined.

We who have no hope other than the hope that God will be merciful.

And He has shown mercy for His people through Jesus Christ.

The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.