Sermon Tone Analysis

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

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

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:

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

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:

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.

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

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 further down that page he writes:

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!