Yet it pleased the Lord...
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Isaiah 53:10 (NASB 2020)
But the Lord desired To crush Him, causing Him grief; If He renders Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, And the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand.
Isaiah 53:11 (NASB 2020)
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, For He will bear their wrongdoings.
Isaiah 53:12 (NASB 2020)
Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, And He will divide the plunder with the strong, Because He poured out His life unto death, And was counted with wrongdoers; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, And interceded for the wrongdoers.
Thesis: It pleased the Lord to die for you.
Intro:
Recently I heard of a church where the Pastor was approached by someone in the congregation and was asked, “Could you please preach the Gospel one Sunday?”
Now, I don’t know if there is anything more pitiful than for a starving animal to look up into the eyes of its owner, who sits at the table gorging himself, begging for food, but that’s the imagery that came to my mind.
A sheep, just bones and skin, begging the shepherd for some grain.
I try, every message - no matter the topic - to bring some assurance of the Gospel into every message. I may not do it perfectly, or smoothly, or even as consistently as I’d like to think - but I try.
We live in an era where, were you to ask many professing Christians to give you the Gospel they wouldn’t know where to begin. Some may quote the 10 Commandments, some may talk of loving your neighbor, or just being a good person.
That is not the Gospel.
The Gospel penetrates every part of your Bible - the problem is so few people know the Bible or view the Bible through that lens, but it is a necessity for the follower of Jesus.
As the Scottish preacher Alistair Begg puts it, “In the Old Testament He is predicted, in the Gospels He is revealed, in Acts He is preached, in the epistles He is explained, and in Revelation He is expected.”
We began a little 7 week class this past Wednesday, “From the Old Testament to Jesus”, and while not every single thing in the Old Testament may be a hyperlink to the Gospel, everything is a thread in that tapestry of the Gospel.
It is easy to find Jesus in Isaiah, it’s harder to see Him in Esther, but that doesn’t mean He isn’t there. And from this pulpit, I hope and pray, that in some way every Sunday you are given the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
So today...
Within this text we see three key roles Jesus Christ fulfills - the Sacrifice for our Sins, the Servant who satisfies the Father’s wrath, and the Savior who intercedes on our behalf.
The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice
Isaiah 53:10 (NASB 2020)
But the Lord desired
To crush Him, causing Him grief;
The Lord desired - it’s the Hebrew word “haf-ates” (חָפֵץ) and it can be translated “desired” or “pleased”. Now, this does not mean that God took some sort of sick pleasure in the murder of His Son.
It does not mean God set up in heaven, gleefully clapping while Jesus was being beaten, the nails driven through his hands and feet, or any of that. God was not pleased in the way we may initially think of pleasure.
Instead, another way to read it may be, “It was the will of the Lord”, or “it was the right thing to do” of the Lord. It pleased Him, not because it was the best option, but because it was the ONLY option - to crush Him, causing Him grief.
The suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, as Jesus is often called, did not deserve to die. Remember, Jesus had prayed
And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.”
It was the will of the Father that He must die.
It pleased the Lord. It was the only option - that the Son, that God, Himself, be put to death. And Jesus knew it.
Jesus understood His purpose. Jesus knew from the moment of His birth, the divine call that was upon his time on Earth. He was both fully God, and fully man, and it was only the blood of God that could do what God intended to have happen.
He said in the Gospel of John:
“Now My soul has become troubled; and what am I to say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour.
This had been God’s plan since the fall of man. Since the Garden of Eden, when God told the snake
Genesis 3:15 (NASB 2020)
And I will make enemies Of you and the woman, And of your offspring and her Descendant; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise Him on the heel.”
Paul draws this connection in Romans 5:17
For if by the offense of the one, death reigned through the one, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.
It pleased God because God knew the only thing pure enough, the only thing righteous enough, the only thing good enough to save us from our sins was His own, precious, holy, pure, righteous blood.
It pleased Him because it was His plan for the salvation of mankind, that there be a sacrifice worthy to atone for their sin, not just the sin of Adam, but the sin that had infected mankind since Adam.
As Peter said on the day of Pentecost:
this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death.
Yes, the people made the choices, but God knew the choices they’d make, He knew the right time to make it happen, He knew the right moment to send His Son, and He knew the right place and time for that ultimate sacrifice - right outside Jerusalem, almost 2,000 years ago.
Isaiah 53:10 (NASB 2020)
If He renders Himself as a guilt offering,
He will see His offspring,
When Isaiah says “He renders Himself,” he is making it clear that it was God - and along with God, God the Son - who was the architect of this suffering. He knew what needed to be done. He knew it needed to be carried out.
He made Himself the guilt offering.
Now, the guilt offering was something we see take place in the Old Testament, in the Law. What’s fascinating about it is that it covered both intentional and unintentional sin. In other words, all sins were covered under this sacrifice.
There were different types of guilt offerings, but what was probably the most common was found in Leviticus 6.
Then he shall bring to the priest his guilt offering to the Lord, a ram without defect from the flock, according to your assessment, as a guilt offering,
and the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord, and he will be forgiven for any one of the things which he may have done to incur guilt.”
The guilt offering was done so that the person who had sinned would be absolved of the punishment they were to incur - it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t still have to deal with the consequences of their sin, but before God they were made right.
God says as much previously in Leviticus 5:17
“Now if a person sins and does any of the things which the Lord has commanded not to be done, though he was unaware, he is still guilty and shall bear his punishment.
The same is true with us, we may be forgiven our sins, yet still have to live with the sin consequences. Yet the idea of the guilt offering was that it was meant to be a remedy before God for man’s rebellion, His turning from God.
One commentator said it could very well be called a “satisfaction offering”.
What the Suffering Servant, Christ, did on the cross was not done to affirm our sins, or make them okay, but to take them upon Himself in order that we were made right before the Father, thus averting His wrath that our sins deserve, and therefore we deserve for having committed them.
And yet Isaiah says “He will see His offspring.”
This is - at first glance - kind of a “uhm, okay, keep reading and just don’t try to figure that out” verse. Because what could that mean?
But if we understand this in context, it is a beautiful truth. Look up the page of your Bible to verse 6:
Isaiah 53:6 (NASB 2020)
All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the Lord has caused the wrongdoing of us all To fall on Him.
In other words, we have strayed as sheep, but we will - because of HIS SACRIFICE - return as sons and daughters.
Again, the Apostle Paul draws the line for us, connecting the dots in his letter to the Galatians
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.
and further down that page he writes:
So we too, when we were children, were held in bondage under the elementary principles of the world.
But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law,
so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters.
Because of the Sacrifice we are treated as offspring, not lost children, but a member of His household!
Isaiah goes on...
Isaiah 53:10 (NASB 2020)
He will prolong His days,
And the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand.
This portion of verse ten, if we were to read this without the context of the New Testament, may cause us to do a double-take. It may make you scratch your head a little.
“He will prolong His days?” How? Didn’t we just get 10 verses about this guy dying? About his being “struck down (v. 4) and
Isaiah 53:5 (NASB 2020)
He was pierced for our offenses, He was crushed for our wrongdoings; The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him, And by His wounds we are healed.
He was like a lamb that is led to slaughter (v. 7), I mean, Isaiah literally says: “He was cut off from the land of the living” (v. 8)
Yet this guy is somehow supposed to come back from that? His days are supposed to be prolonged?
The Old Testament reader may have been quick to think of Job, who said of death
Job 10:21 (NASB 2020)
Before I go—and I shall not return—To the land of darkness and deep shadow,
The idea of a resurrection - while it’s made clear here in Isaiah, many did not ascribe to it. In fact, that’s the whole reason we say that Sadducees were sad-you-see, because they didn’t buy into the idea of a resurrection!
Yet this Sacrifice, this “Suffering Servant will have His days prolonged… it’s almost as if He will be rewarded with a resurrection...
“And the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand”
His kingdom will never end, it will never cease to prosper. This is the fulfillment of God’s promise to David concerning his offspring - not Just Solomon - but a later offspring
He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.
God’s not talking just about the earthly temple - He knew that temple would fall one day. He’s talking about the house, the temple of the Holy Spirit that exists even now, within this very room.
1 Corinthians 6:19 (NASB 2020)
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God...
It pleased the Lord to be that sacrifice, that we may be made right with Him.
The Servant
The Servant
Isaiah 53:11 (NASB 2020)
As a result of the anguish of His soul,
He will see it and be satisfied;
This anguish of His soul is so visible at the cross, and especially the night in the Garden. So much so, Luke tells us about it in this way:
Now an angel from heaven appeared to Him, strengthening Him. And being in agony, He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.
You may notice, when you go to look that up later that a footnote in your Bible says that wasn’t included in some early manuscripts and Luke is the only one who seems to mention the angel and the sweat being like drops of blood.
That’s not to say that it didn’t happen!
Mark also agrees that Jesus was greatly troubled. He writes
And He took with Him Peter, James, and John, and began to be very distressed and troubled.
And He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch.”
Matthew agrees with this, also stating Jesus was deeply grieved (Matthew 26:37).
Whether or not there was an angel, or sweat like drops of blood in the original text is moot.
Jesus felt very real - the Hebrew word is “amal” (עָמָל) - and it typically gets translated “trouble” but can also be taken to mean “misery”.
This seems contradictory, though. If it pleased Him to do this, shouldn’t He look forward to it? Shouldn’t he be excited to go ahead and get this part over with?
That’s what verse 10 said, right? The Lord desired, it pleased the Lord to do this.
And there is where we truly understand, if we haven’t gotten it already that it wasn’t pleasure in the sense we think of it. It was in the understanding that this is what must be done - the Father’s will must be carried out.
It’s why He prayed,
Matthew 26:39 (NASB 2020)
“My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.”
If Jesus is to be the Suffering Servant, we must ask, then Who is He truly serving? And in the Garden, we see it made as clear as possible - not His humanity, but His divinity. He is serving the Father.
Not my will, but yours.
And because of His strength to pray it in the garden, we are capable of praying, “Not my will for my life, Lord, but Your will be done.”
That is why Isaiah goes on to say
Isaiah 53:11 (NASB 2020)
By His knowledge the Righteous One,
My Servant, will justify the many,
By His knowledge - by knowing who He is - He will justify the many.
The ESV translation says He will “make many to be accounted righteous”. He will make us right before God.
In His knowledge, knowing what lies ahead of Him, knowing - as I said a moment ago - from the point of His birth what His purpose on earth was, where He was destined to die and how… Jesus knew.
Yet He goes through with it, and as He does, He justifies, He declares us - the many - righteous before God almighty!
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
The apostle John would say
and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
That word “propitiation” is such an interesting word - even in English. We don’t say it very often. To “propitiate” means to “appease someone”, to satisfy someone else.
But to be frank, this is one time the Greek is probably easier than the English, as it’s the word “hilasmos”, and it’s only used in 1 John 2:2, and a couple chapters later in 1 John 4:10
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
He appeased God, as He justified us.
As Paul would say
Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we celebrate in hope of the glory of God.
Well, how does He do this? Just by His knowledge of these events? No. This verse concludes:
Isaiah 53:11 (NASB 2020)
For He will bear their wrongdoings.
This again points us back to verse 5
Isaiah 53:5 (NASB 2020)
But He was pierced for our offenses, He was crushed for our wrongdoings; The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him, And by His wounds we are healed.
Peter will make a connection to this
and He Himself brought our sins in His body up on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; by His wounds you were healed.
I want to clarify, this is spiritual healing, a cleansing of our unrighteousness.
He does also make a way for physical healing, but that’s in verse 4:
Isaiah 53:4 (NASB 2020)
However, it was our sicknesses that He Himself bore, And our pains that He carried; Yet we ourselves assumed that He had been afflicted, Struck down by God, and humiliated.
By His wounds we are healed eternally, by His death and His affliction we may be healed physically according to His sovereignty.
This proves again, that it was the Lord’s plan, and it pleased Him - in spite of the pain, in spite of the suffering - to be the Sacrifice we needed in order to be made righteous before God the Father.
The Savior
The Savior
Isaiah 53:12 (NASB 2020)
Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great,
And He will divide the plunder with the strong,
This “Suffering Servant” will be given the highest of honors, the greatest of titles.
The wording seems to be similar to that of a conqueror, one who has achieved a military triumph, even. His reward from battle is a portion and dividing the plunder. But we’ll break it down a little here...
He will be allotted a portion with the great… it would call to mind the previous words of Isaiah in chapter 52,
Isaiah 52:13 (NASB 2020)
Behold, My Servant will prosper, He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.
Paul would, of course, also write about this:
For this reason also God highly exalted Him, 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, to the glory of God the Father.
Of course, the writer of Hebrews will compare the superiority of the Son to that of the angels - saying,
Hebrews 1:5 (NASB 2020)
For to which of the angels did He ever say, “You are My Son Today I have fathered You”? And again, “I will be a Father to Him And He will be a Son to Me”?
Angels are fine, they serve their purpose, but they are not the Son, He is greater than them. He alone, as Savior, is worthy of our praise - God has allotted Him a portion with the great!
But that word great, that’s a pesky word in Hebrew. It’s an “Inigo Montoya” word, “You keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
It’s the Hebrew word “rav” (רַב) and here the tense “rav-vim” is used, and it is actually meant to mean “many”, and refers to those whom the Servant is designed to save.
In other words, those whom He saves are his spoils, we are His reward! But He also is rewarded in that He enjoys us, our worship. He rejoices in His spoils as we also rejoice in Him.
Christ doesn’t just rejoice for His own sake, but for ours, because He gives us the fruit of His victory, His victory over death, over the world, over the devil and hell itself - and His victory is now our victory!
“He will divide the plunder with the strong”, those who have had victory, those who reign with Him during His millennial reign we see take place in Revelation
Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and will reign with Him for a thousand years.
and at the end of that thousand years, the devil is thrown into the lake of fire, and Death and Hades are thrown into the Lake of Fire,
And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
But that’s not you! Not if you have faith in this Suffering Servant, this Sacrifice of God, this Savior we call Jesus Christ!
Isaiah 53:12 (NASB 2020)
Because He poured out His life unto death,
And was counted with wrongdoers;
He poured out His life, in order for us to have everlasting life.
My sheep listen to My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give them eternal life, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand.
He poured out His life, that we may have the life which is the Light of mankind. That is why He came.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly.
For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it back.
And during His life, Isaiah says “he was counted with wrongdoers” and that doesn’t mean He was a wrongdoer, it means He identified with them, with those who were in need of salvation.
He condemned the Pharisees because they mocked him for the company He kept.
In Luke He said
For John the Baptist has come neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon!’
The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Behold, a gluttonous man and a heavy drinker, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’
And ultimately, He would be crucified between two thieves on Calvary’s hill, hanging between them as if He were a criminal Himself, yet even one of the thieves said “this man has done nothing wrong” (Luke 23:41b)
Jesus comes to earth as a baby, He dies on a Roman cross, so that He may die for the most ruthless, most vile of sinners, even to die beside them, in order that those from the least to the worst of sinners might be saved.
And that even they may enjoy eternity with Him.
Even the apostle Paul had told Timothy
It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost.
Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost sinner Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life.
Paul was a sinner, He was a Jewish Zealot who condoned the stoning of Stephen, he’d had men, women, children dragged from their homes, tried to make them blaspheme so that he could have them arrested.
He was a guy you would not want to wrong. For all the sins he confesses to in his epistles, Paul’s temper would have been the one I would fear, yet after His encounter with Christ, he was a changed man.
Even to the point the Corinthian churches spoke of his timidity.
How does that happen? How does a man go from bloodthirsty religious fanatic to a timid preacher and teacher of Scripture?
It can truly only happen through this Savior.
Isaiah 53:12 (NASB 2020)
Yet He Himself bore the sin of many,
And interceded for the wrongdoers.
He took that anger of Paul, that wrath, that mercilessness, and He bore it on that cross. He took your anger, your bitterness, your lust, your greed, your envy, your hate, your malice, your shameful sins we dare not even mention...
And He took them all.
And He bore them on His body on that cross. That ugly, Roman torture tool made of two planks of wood.
Those three nails, that crown of thorns.
He took your sin, and you no longer have to have it in your life.
And once you’ve accepted that, once you believe that, when it reaches your heart and you understand that because of Who He is - that even though He died, death could not hold Him...
And He now intercedes for you, even if you may sin, if we continue to sin, He still speaks on your behalf before the Father in Heaven.
Comparing Jesus to the Jewish priests, the author of Hebrews says,
Jesus, on the other hand, because He continues forever, holds His priesthood permanently.
Therefore He is also able to save forever those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.
He intercedes for the wrongdoers who still choose Him.
We will have sin, we will have our struggle, but it is only through Christ we have this salvation, this hope of heaven.
That’s the Gospel’s power in your life. That Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, died on a cross as an atonement for your sins and mine, that God raised Him on the third day, and He now sits at the right hand of the Father making intercession for everyone who believes in Him.
that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;
It’s as simple as that. That’s the truth and the power of the Gospel.
It pleased God to be our Savior and become a Sacrifice for our sins, that He may be that suffering Servant, who paves that narrow path towards Eternity in Himself.
Conclusion:
I’ll move to close...
but if you’re here, or you’re watching on-line and you’ve never made a decision to follow Christ - maybe you have and you’re just finding the strength to submit to Him hard lately - we’d love to pray with you, to pray for you.
Easter is a week away, and this feels much like an Easter type of sermon, but to be honest I don’t know what I’m going to preach on next Sunday. Not yet.
But there’ll be the same truth within that sermon that is in this one, some way, at some point, I can promise you that.
The message that Jesus Christ died for your sins, to make you right before God, and He rose again - and because He is not some dead teacher, but a living God, He has the power to transform your life.
He may not heal every problem, He may not pay every bill, but you will never face another problem alone as long as you live.
You will have in your corner the Savior, the Servant, the Sacrifice that is God - God who loved you so much He shed His blood for you, for you to spend eternity in His presence.
And that doesn’t begin when you die, it begins when you start to believe it, and live for it.
The greatest joy of Christianity isn’t that we die and one day go be with Jesus, it’s that Jesus is now in our lives, from this point forward.
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