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©August 7th, 2022 by Rev. Rick Goettsche SERIES: Isaiah
Most Americans over the age of 30 have pretty strong memories of September 11th, 2001.
It was a day when not only the twin towers in New York fell, but the world in which we lived seemed to come crashing down around us.
Many of the things we thought we knew about the world were called into question, and life in America (and the world) has been very different since that date.
There may be similar dates in your own life—dates that forever changed things.
· The date you got a phone call telling you a loved one had died.
· The date you received a devastating diagnosis.
· The date your spouse told you they wanted a divorce.
· The date of an accident that changed everything.
Each of us has different dates that change our lives, and the circumstances of each of those dates is unique.
But they all share one fact in common—they were unexpected and left us looking for answers.
Much of the time, we never get answers to why such things happened in our lives.
This morning, we look at a similar date in history.
It is a date that was surprising and unexpected to almost everyone.
It was a date that changed everything for everyone for all time.
And it was a date that didn’t make sense to most people.
That date is the day Jesus was crucified.
The good news is that unlike many of the life-changing events of our lives, God tells us why this event happened.
The remarkable thing about this discussion of Jesus’ crucifixion is that the passage we are looking at this morning was likely written 500 years before it happened!
Isaiah 53 contains one of the clearest and most striking teachings on the crucifixion of Jesus, and this morning we’re going to unpack it and seek to understand it more fully.
Introducing the Servant
As Isaiah begins chapter 53, he describes the servant who will be the subject of the remainder of the chapter.
1 Who has believed our message?
To whom has the Lord revealed his powerful arm? 2 My servant grew up in the Lord’s presence like a tender green shoot, like a root in dry ground.
There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him.
3 He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.
We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.
He was despised, and we did not care.
(Isaiah 53:1-3, NLT)
Isaiah tells us that from a human perspective, this servant would not seem like anything special.
He describes him as a tender green shoot growing up out of dry ground.
A young plant in dry ground is fragile and frail.
Isaiah said the Lord’s servant wouldn’t appear to be someone on whom you could rely—He wouldn’t be the person you would choose to do the most important task in the history of humanity.
He says there was nothing majestic about his appearance or anything to attract us to him.
Most of us seem to have the idea that Jesus looked like someone special.
Maybe it is because renaissance art always depicted him with a halo or a heavenly glow, or maybe it’s just because that makes sense to us.
If Jesus was God in human form, then He surely must have been easily identifiable as such, right?
Isaiah tells us we are wrong.
If you didn’t know better, you would have walked right past Jesus and never even noticed him.
He looked just like everyone else.
And because of that, the world turned their backs on Him.
Jesus was despised and rejected in his crucifixion, but He was also despised and rejected long before that.
Nobody thought this man could have been the Messiah.
He was born in humble circumstances.
His family was poor.
He came from a tiny town that no one thought much of.
Jesus didn’t fit the mold of what people thought the Messiah should be.
And so, they were skeptical and mocked him.
Even his own family was not initially convinced!
He didn’t seem like anyone special, but God would use Him to accomplish more than anyone could have imagined.
What Jesus Accomplished
After giving us a picture of how the world rejected this servant because He didn’t seem like anything special, Isaiah tells us what the servant would accomplish.
4 Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down.
And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! 5 But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.
He was beaten so we could be whole.
He was whipped so we could be healed.
6 All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.
We have left God’s paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.
(Isaiah 53:4-6, NLT)
This man who didn’t appear outwardly to be anything special ended up doing what no one else could.
He carried the punishment for our sins.
Sin is not a popular topic of discussion in our world today.
In fact, our world would tell you that telling someone what they are doing is sinful and wrong is hate speech.
But in reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
Jesus came to take on the punishment of our sins.
But if we do not believe we have done anything wrong, then we do not believe we have any need for forgiveness.
The first step in understanding the good news of what Jesus has done for us is understanding the bad news that we are all sinful creatures who need a savior.
Talking about sin isn’t popular, but it’s absolutely necessary!
Isaiah describes us as all being like sheep who have strayed away.
I have learned from people who raise sheep that they are pretty dumb animals.
They will wander off and get themselves into all sorts of trouble without even realizing it.
They don’t do what makes sense, to such a degree that sometimes you wonder how a sheep could have possibly gotten into the situation they are in.
This is the animal Isaiah uses to describe human beings.
We have all acted foolishly because we have chosen to rebel against God.
Here's the amazing thing: you don’t even have to believe in God to recognize that you are sinful.
No matter who you are, there is some code of morality you believe you should follow.
But we don’t even follow our own code!
We certainly don’t measure up when it comes to God’s code of morality.
The big problem comes when we recognize that there must be a reckoning for our failures—that if there is a moral code bigger than us, then there is a moral lawgiver to whom we are accountable…and we have broken the law.
We cannot erase those failures on our own.
This is where Jesus comes in.
Isaiah says Jesus bore our penalties.
The punishments He faced were not things He deserved; He only bore them because He was taking our place.
In theology, we call this substitutionary atonement.
Rather than leaving us to take the penalty we had earned, He took our place and our punishment so that we might be forgiven.
Isaiah says that the result of Jesus offering himself in this way is that we are healed.
The healing he speaks of here is not of physical illness, but a far deeper and more significant healing.
Because of Jesus, our relationship with God is healed.
No longer do we stand condemned before God.
When God looks at us, He no longer sees our sin, but Christ’s sacrifice for us.
By Jesus’ sacrifice, we are made sinless, just as He was.
He took on our sin, which removed it from our account.
This is the astounding truth of the gospel—and it is very good news for us.
Jesus’ Attitude
The remarkable thing is that Jesus had the power to stop everything happening to Him at any time, but He chose not to instead.
Here’s how Isaiah describes his attitude.
7 He was oppressed and treated harshly, yet he never said a word.
He was led like a lamb to the slaughter.
And as a sheep is silent before the shearers, he did not open his mouth.
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