Untitled Sermon (3)
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There is a fellow PCA seminarian who is also preaching this same passage this morning. I saw on Twitter we were doing the same text and I agreed with his sentiment, “It is hard to not just read the text, sit down, and let the text stand for itself.” It is such a clear passage. I want us to walk through just looking at what we have heard over the last three weeks. In Isaiah 42 God declares “My servant will bring justice” and Isaiah 49 God goes further and says not just will my servant bring justice but He will bring a light to the nations. And then last week what we saw was the the Servant would suffer, but that God would strengthen Him.
What the people in Isaiah’s day were hearing was this progressive unfolding of who the Servant is and what He will be like. And Isaiah begins this final song by saying “My servant shall act wisely” or what may be a better understanding is “My servant will be successful. He will be high and lifted up. He will be exalted” And if you’re reading these songs and get to this point, you may be thinking “Yeah He is!” This Servant is going to bring justice and bring the nations to the Lord. And yes he may be harmed- but God will keep Him. This is who we’re waiting on.” And you’re exactly right. We’ve felt this build, a rising intensity of what the Servant will do. We’re expecting this glorious crescendo
But there is a sudden shift in the text. This servant who is to be exalted is marred. He will be so beaten and brutalized that we will question if He is even human. We would see him and be horrified. And now we maybe feel the tension this text should be heard with. He’s a Servant who’s going to come and suffer. But his coming is what will make the nations holy. This disfigured servant will be worshipped by kings. Those who are mighty will one day come and bow down to this him. And while Isaiah was commissioned to speak to these people who would hear but not understand-who would look but not actually see, when the Servant comes, people will see and understand him clearly.
And so what I would like to do with the rest of our text is walk through it and just lay it out very simply so that you can see and hear as clearly as possible that the Lord Jesus Christ has come. So we will look at How Jesus Came, Why Jesus Came, and then What He Brings With Him.
First we see how he comes. He arrives in a way that ton it’s surface seems ordinary. He does not crack the sky with the grand army of angels to establish justice, slaying the wicked and doing what is right. He does not come with the brilliance of the brightest star in order to to be a light to the nations. He does not appear through the smoke, fire, and cloud like at Sinai. Rather he takes on our nature. God adds humanity to save us. He becomes like us. The self-sufficient God who lacks nothing and needs nothing, became dependent on Mary. The same God who created the world through the very Word of his power babbles and learns how to read and write. The Eternal God aged, The All Knowing God is taught the very Law he wrote. The Word took on flesh and dwelt among us.
This Jesus grows up slow, just like anyone else. It is pretty normal. It’s regular. But this is the way God works. Yes we see the arm of the Lord, His great and mighty power, demonstrated through these great works at times. But so much more often, He uses regular ordinary means. He uses the common and the boring. It isn’t through amazing works that he makes us more like Him, but it’s through regular means. Hearing His word. Prayer. Receiving and remembering his sacraments. These are the things that God uses for our growth.
It is this very common way of coming to us that shatters any misconception about who He is or why He came. He is not at all what the people of His day or
ours expected Him to be. This Servant King, this Messiah, is not attractive to us. Isaiah writes that “he has no beauty that we would desire him” And this is incredible humility. The one through the world was created with it’s sunsets and rises, It’s breathtaking mountain ranges and bright plants had no beauty. The King of all things steps down and has no majesty. The one that we are created to enjoy, we despise and turn our faces from.
But He also comes as weak. He is not born to a king or a wealthy merchant. He rather comes humbly. He is born in a poor carpenters house. He takes on humanity and is born just like you and I. When he begins his ministry, it is not with crowds and fanfare. It is not with the opulence of the Temple. It isn’t with the great minds affirming everything he says. Rather it is with fishermen, a tax collector, and a nationalist. He begins his ministry in His home town. There’s nothing about him that we would see that would make us say- this man will establish justice and be a light to a nations.
This is the way of the cross: weakness, humility, and dying. But culturally what we see is that we don’t want that Jesus. Please don’t offer me a Jesus who says His Kingdom is more than something political. We would rather figure out that lo and behold, Christ joins us on all of our niche political positions. That the two of us have figured it out. Or others want the Doc Holiday/Russell Crowe Jesus. The one that is fierce and quippy. The one who hasn’t shaved in some time and is always aggressive. Others want an always affirming Jesus. The one that always understands my weaknesses and errors but not the failures and grievous sins of those around me.
But He makes it very clear that He’s not come to create a physical kingdom. That such a goal is far too small. Nor does he always tell me what I want to hear. So often He says hard things that confront me and call me a sinner too. And while He is certainly the Son of Man, He made sure the children were brought to Him. He is far less a always good movie character.
So then it is no surprise that Isaiah makes it very clear that Christ is rejected both in His day and in ours. In his time of ministry people wanted him to throw out the Romans, undo what Caesar set up. But he doesn’t come for this reason. And so they despised Him. And even now when people make the life and death and Resurrection about something other than the forgiveness of sins, they find that they don’t want Jesus as He is. But rather Jesus as we’d like Him to be. And so they reject Him. But Christ didn’t come to run off the Romans. He doesn’t come to affirm our pet sin or our political flavor. Rather, He comes to serve. He comes to die. Dying is winning. Serving is majestic Weakness is the way in His Kingdom.
It is His humility that is the basis for His exaltation. Paul writes in Phil 2:4-10
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,” This is how Jesus comes to us. Plain, ordinary, weak, and serving.
Second, why Jesus came. He comes to stand in our place. Is 53:4-5 “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 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.”
Notice here that the man of sorrows, knowing sickness or disease or suffering in verse three- turns and now bears our sickness and carries our sorrows. This Jesus who is beaten, flogged, stripped, mocked, and tortured carries our wrongdoing. He’s stood in our place. We consider him cursed, and He’s the one bearing our curse.
The reason that He has come is that we have decided to wander about. To follow the desires of our own hearts. Everyone has decided, No I will seek to live by my understanding and my inclination. Whatever is good in my eyes I will do it. Our text this morning calls this transgressions. The word here that is used does mean that, but we don’t use that word in our day. I think the better word here is crime or rebellion. Or as one commentator uses “Covenant breaker”.
Christ came because we are born into a state of sin and misery. Because we are by nature all covenant breakers. We do not keep God’s Law. We are the treasonous, the deathly sick, the putrid.
This is who are in the text. Not the innocent people horrified at the beaten man. But rather the ones who God has poured out His love on and we see this when God sends His Son to bear our sins.
This is what we have to understand about Jesus or we miss it.
If you take nothing else home and think of nothing else during your Christmas holiday think on this. Christ came to die for your sins. The lights are fine. The songs are great. The weather is meh. The Hallmark movies are really bad. But if you don’t see that this baby, Emmanuel died for you-That He takes your sin away by substituting Himself for you. If you miss that, your Christmas is just another day for food and presents. It’s just another birthday party for you. What you must see is that the Lord has put on to Christ all of our sins. Isaiah writes that Christ was taken away and cut off, striken for our rebellion. We see here that Christ is our true Passover Lamb. Christ is sprinkles the nations clean as we read above, but it is with His own blood. They made his grave with the wicked, though He was innocent. He does this in our place. And it is through His death that we are healed.
And what we see in v. 10 is that this was not random. It was not reactionary. It was not Satan thwarting the plans of God. No, it was the will of the Lord to crush Him. It was the eternal plan of God to send a seed of woman, who would one day crush the head of the serpent. Yes the serpent strikes his heel. Jesus does die. He is cut off from the land of the living. He is buried. But this was the will of the Lord. This is the way in which death dies. In the this Kingdom, you win by dying.
This is why Christ came- to stand in our place and die, for the forgiveness of our sins.
So then see what He brings. Is 53:10-12 “ when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.”
What He brings is our righteousness. The Good News of the Gospel for you this morning is this- Christ has died for you. He has died for your sins. The righteous Jesus has taken on your sin. You are in this moment, declared justified. Or as Rob said this morning, your sins are forgiven. And they are forgiven today. Christ has taken your sin and substituted Himself for you, your rebellion for His loyalty. So then when God sees you He sees you as He sees Christ, perfect. So then you are free.
Christ has forgiven your sins and in His victorious death, you get the spoils. He gets born and you get the presents. The Shorter Catechism asks about the benefits that we who are called and respond to Christ’s offer of forgiveness receive. And we can answer it this way summarizing and condensing several questions together: We are declared righteousness before God and accepted by faith because Christ’s righteousness is given to us. We are brought in to God’s family and treated like His son or daughter. We are, in this life, made more and more like our Savior. We are renewed and enabled to obey God’s commands. Because of these three we have assurance that God loves us. We also get peace of conscience and joy- real lasting joy in the Holy Spirit, and the confidence that He will bring us all the way Home.
There is therefore now no condemnation for you. There’s nobody heaven hell or middle that can bring you before God and bring up your sin, not even yourself. Believer, when the devil shows up and reminds you that youre a sinner. Youre a rebel. You are a transgressor. Notice in v 12. Christ was counted as a rebel. He has come and willingly was considered a transgressor, He bore the sins of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.
Christ has come
Christ has died
Christ pleads to His father on your behalf
So then you are free