We’re continuing our studies on Messianic prophecy. We’ve been going through the prophecies of Isaiah, in particular now for the last many weeks, the Servant Songs, as they are called in Isaiah. And then the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked particularly at this fourth Servant Song, Isaiah 52:13 through the end of chapter 53. These Servant Songs announce the Lord’s servant whom he will send. Remember, this is roughly 740 years before the birth of Jesus, and these prophecies are given announcing a servant whom the Lord will send to accomplish his mission in the earth.
As we’ve seen, it turns out to be a mission of bringing justice to the nations. It includes judgment. It includes rescue not only for the people of Israel but for the nations as well. It’s a massive mission that he’s assigned to the servant, and he has promised that his servant would succeed in it. Now, this first stanza, or these first verses of the fourth Servant Song, we find the servant introduced again, and then briefly in that first stanza, his mission is described. And then we saw in the first three verses, his rejection from the people. And then today we’ll focus on verses four through six, where his rejection is explained.
I won’t take the time to read through the entire song this time, but let’s back up to verse 13 of chapter 52, and we’ll read through chapter 53 in verse six. I’m sorry, 52:13, yes.
Behold, my servant shall act wisely. He shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted. As many were astonished at you, his appearance so marred, beyond human resemblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind. So shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand. Who has believed what they heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. As one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Let’s bow for prayer. Our Father, this is certainly a mountain peak of Old Testament prophecy. The specifics, the details that it foretells so long before the coming of Christ, describing Him, His reception, His rejection, His work, and the significance of it. It’s amazing to see this done so far in advance, and such a clear picture of the atoning work of our Savior. We pray that you’ll give us a clear understanding of it this evening, and we pray that you’ll strengthen our faith in Him for it. In his name we ask, amen.
The Structure Of The Fourth Servant Song
You’ll remember, as I pointed out, this fourth song, as it’s called, has five stanzas of three verses each. The first stanza, verses 13 to 15; the second stanza, chapter 53, verses 1 to 3; then verses 4 to 6; then verses 7 to 9; and then finally the fifth stanza, verses 10 through 12. And remember, I pointed out that the song is kind of bracketed for us in terms of its message. Back at the beginning, chapter 52, verse 13, we read, “Behold, my servant shall act wisely. He shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted.” That is, he will act wisely and succeed. That’s the idea. And as a result of which he will be lifted up or exalted and praised. Then chapter 53 and verse 12, at the end, we read that he was numbered with the transgressors.
So the song describes and explains, as we have seen and we’ll see tonight in particular, it explains the sufferings that the servant will endure, but it announces up front and then it affirms again at the end of the song as well that his sufferings were the means of his success. He is exalted in triumph and in vindication after the sufferings that he will endure.
Now you’ll also recall some symmetry in the poetry here is, I think, of interest. Chapter 52, verses 13 to 15, the first stanza, is an introductory summary, giving us a summary of what he will tell us in this song. Prominent ideas: he will act wisely, he’ll succeed, the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand, as we read in chapter 53 in verse 10. So we have, remember the symmetry of chapter 52, verses 13 to 15, and then again at the last stanza, chapter 53, verses 10 to 12; there’s kind of a similar theme that’s being promoted.
We have the same with chapter 53, verses one to three, and then verses seven to nine; they correspond in the same kind of way. These two stanzas deal with his rejection by the people and how he was despised or how he would be despised. And then we come to chapter 53, verses four through six. This is the center stanza of the hymn. It is the heart of the song as well. Here he explains in graphic specifics the nature of the servant’s suffering. Isaiah 53 is known as a mountain peak of Old Testament prophecy. Within Isaiah 53, that is 52:13 all the way through the end of chapter 53, within that, these verses, verses four through six, are the heart and center of the prophecy, telling us what his coming was for.
All right, so chapter 52, verses 13 to 15, we have the summary. And then we saw last time, chapter 53, verses one to three, Israel sees him now, looking back, and they confess their rejection of him. He was despised and rejected. And they look back and they say, “We didn’t know. He didn’t seem like anything special to us. We didn’t see any majesty, no glory beamed out from him. He seemed unimpressive. And so we rejected him.” And now in verses 4 to 6, the prophet explains the reasons why he was rejected. So here in verses 4 to 6, their confession continues, but here they’re not just lamenting that they rejected him unknowingly, but here they’re acknowledging what he had done for them and that they had missed all along.
The Servant Bearing The Sin Of His People
Again, verses four to six: “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. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
So the theme here in these verses is the servant bearing the sin of his people. The servant bearing the sin of his people. That’s reflected in verse four: “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrow.” We’ll see it again in other stanzas. Verse 11: “he shall bear their iniquities.” Verse 12: “he bore the sin of many.” But we have this language of bearing sin. The servant, a sin bearer.
So what does it mean to bear or to carry sin? That expression is used elsewhere in the scriptures, and it always connotes the idea of bearing the punishment for sin. Now, it’s important to keep that in mind. We’re going to look at that at some length. And to understand what’s going on here, we have to understand that. To bear sin is to bear the punishment of sin. I’ll give you some examples of that. In Leviticus chapter 24, verses 14 through 16, there was a blasphemer who was taken outside the camp to be executed and where he will bear his sin. There’s the idea of bearing the punishment for his sin. In Numbers 14, verse 34, regarding the wilderness punishment that is imposed on Israel for their unbelief at Kadesh Barnea, we read, “According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, 40 days, a year for each day. You shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you will know my displeasure.” There again, the idea of bearing sin or bearing iniquity means the idea of bearing the punishment of sin.
Now, Isaiah 53 in verse 4: “He has borne our griefs. He’s carried our sorrows.” What is distinctive here and how this verse differs from those others is that here the one bearing the sin is not the sinner. The one bearing the sin bears the punishment for the sin of others. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. So the thinking is like that of the scapegoat in Leviticus chapter 16 on the annual Day of Atonement, where the sins of the nation were confessed over the head of this goat and it was slapped on the backside and sent out into the wilderness where it bore their sin into the wilderness.
So when it says he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, the idea is not that he sympathized with us, he entered into our sufferings and felt our pain or something like that. The idea is that he made our sin his. The punishment due us, he took to himself. The idea is that of substitution. Now that then is the nature of the servant’s death. He’s punished for sin. He’s the righteous servant. He’s the one in whom the Lord is pleased. He has no sin for which he should be punished.
But verse four: “Surely our sicknesses he bore them, our pains he suffered them.” Verse five: “he was pierced for our transgression. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with his wounds we are healed.” Verse six: “we all like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” And then we find the same later in the song, verse 11, the Lord’s own reflection on it: “he has borne their iniquities.”
So to bear sin is to bear the punishment of sin, and the distinction here is that the servant bears the sin and the punishment of his people in their place. This is the same with the connotations we find in the scripture of the expression, “dying for sin.” We have examples of that where the idea is taking the punishment of sin. I could give you several examples here. 1 Kings 16, “King Zimri died for his sins which he committed.” He died for sins. His sins which he committed, he was punished for them. We find other examples of that; I can give those to you another time. Here the idea then, this expression is used of his dying for or bearing the grief for the sins of others. It is our transgressions, our iniquities, he bore them.
The next clause here in verse five explains further: “upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace.” Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. The thinking here is that Jesus bore our sins, he died because of our sins, bearing the punishment of our sins, and because he is punished, we are not held responsible for the consequences of our sin. He took the consequences of our sin for us. So the servant was despised, he was rejected, he was rejected by the people, but in his death and in his suffering, he took our sins and our guilt and made it all his own.
Now all of that… verse four, second part of the verse, all of this… “yet we,” there’s a strong contrast, a strong adversative here. The confession continues. We couldn’t have been more wrong. We didn’t realize it, but now we do realize it. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. That’s the language of punishment. We thought he was being punished by God for his sins. But now we see that he was being punished by God for our sins. He saw us under a weight of sin that we couldn’t take care of; we would have sunk beneath divine wrath. He stepped in in our place, bore the punishment for sin that we deserved, took it all to himself, made it his, and took our punishment.
Back in verse one, Israel confesses, “When we saw him, we saw nothing worthwhile. There’s no majesty, no royal bearing, nothing really attractive about him. So we despised him and we rejected him. We found him repulsive.” This is what we’ve called the state of his humiliation. In fact, we saw this back in one of the… in the first Servant Song in chapter 42 in verse two: “he wouldn’t lift up his voice in the street.” That is he, he won’t assert himself. And we see this man coming who’s not self-assertive, he doesn’t seem to have any royal bearing, no importance. Why would we follow a man like that? And so we rejected him, we despised him. We didn’t see any glory at all.
Now as sort of a side note, there was a glory about Jesus in his earthly life that they should have seen, and they were responsible to see. Jesus himself speaks of that. He speaks of it in John 5, probably most pointedly. “The works that I do in my Father’s name, they testify of me.” You should have known from what you’ve seen of my miracles who I am. They couldn’t explain the miracles, but still they rejected him. Actually, Matthew cites this verse here, verse four, in the account where Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law from her sickness, raises her up, and Matthew quotes it and says, “This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah. He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.” That is, the effects and the consequences of sin have been reversed. He took the curse of sin himself, and taking the curse of sin, he’s reversed the effects of sin.
Now that appearance of the king in the kingdom in his first coming, of course, he didn’t achieve the full removal of sin and its effects yet; that awaits his second coming. But here in Jesus’ earthly ministry, there are these flashes of the in-breaking of the kingdom. And Jesus himself says they should have seen it. They should have seen it. They should have believed. They’re responsible to. They didn’t. And now at any case, verse four, they do realize it. They realize the mistake.
In verse four, they confess, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” Verse five expands: “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.” So here we finally begin to learn what happened to him, or from Isaiah’s perspective, what would happen to him when he comes. He was pierced. He was crushed. Verses four and five. And verse six: he was pierced, he was crushed, he was chastised, he was wounded.
We read that now from this side of history, and we see all of the passion narratives of the gospel, and Jesus’ arrest, and his mistreatment by the soldiers, and his beatings, and the whippings, and the crown of thorns, and finally his crucifixion. We see all of that here. That is what the prophet has in mind back in chapter 52 verse 14: “His appearance was so marred beyond human semblance in his form, beyond that of the children of mankind.” All of this describing the abuse that he would take when he comes.
But what’s important here for the prophet and for us is not the punishment that he bore merely, but the reason for his sufferings. He was the sin-bearing substitute come to accomplish the redemption of his people. Verse five: “He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities.” Now the theological term that’s used here—it’s a term you ought to know, you want to know—it’s the term penal substitution. Both words are very important. We’ll see it more as we go along. He was pierced for our transgression. He’s punished for our sins. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. That’s the idea of reconciliation. His chastisement brought us reconciliation with God. God’s wrath was satisfied in him. He bore the sin. He was punished. And with us now, God is satisfied. And there’s peace established. We’re reconciled to God.
So the servant has come, he’s assumed our guilt, he’s taken our place, he’s borne our sin and the punishment for it, and as a result we are reconciled to God. So there’s an exchange that’s happening. Our sins are given to him, he takes the punishment for it, and now in turn we are reconciled to God. And no longer are we the objects of God’s wrath; there’s peace. And there’s peace because he took our sins.
So Israel here is confessing a horrible mistake. And notice carefully—I want to underline this, we’ve already mentioned it, but I want to underline it—notice carefully the precise point of their misunderstanding. Verse four: “They esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted” for his own sins. That’s the idea. They esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted because he deserved it. Verse five: now they confess with, I think, repentant horror, that he was in fact smitten, stricken by God for our sins. Their mistake was not in considering that Jesus’ sufferings was divine punishment. That was not their mistake. Their mistake was in assuming that it was divine punishment for his sins. “He deserved it.” And now they confess, it was our sins that he bore. It was punishment for our sins.
This is the heart and the soul of the gospel, the great gospel truth of penal substitution, that the Lord Jesus, the servant of the Lord, the sinless one, in Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, “he was made sin for us.” Horrible terminology, isn’t it? The Lord Jesus was made sin for us. As Luther would say, he was constituted the greatest sinner. The punishment for our sin fell on him.
And then verse six, he gives us their confession in summary. Verse six gives us three statements, a threefold confession.
A Threefold Confession
Number one: “All we like sheep have gone astray.” That is, we’re all sinners. We’re sinners by nature, we go astray, we just went with the crowd. We’re all alike; our nature is to wander. Number one, all we like sheep have gone astray.
Two: “We have turned everyone to his own way.” We’re also sinners by choice. We’re rebels. We went with the crowd, but we did it willingly. We’ve gone astray. We’ve wandered. We’ve done it deliberately.
And then the third part of the verse, the startling, the horrifying, their glorious reality: “The Lord has laid on him our iniquity.” The Lord has laid on him our iniquity. Our long-awaited Messiah, the righteous servant, bearing our sin. We rebelled, and so there is this transaction. This one who had, verse nine, “had done no violence, there was no deceit in his mouth,” he assumed the sinner’s place, and as we sing, “he took the blame and he bore the wrath.” All right, again, 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Our sin made his.
Now verse six adds an important note that we shouldn’t miss. “The Lord,” this is the last part of verse six. “The Lord has laid on him our iniquity.” The Lord has laid our iniquity on him. This was God’s doing. It was the Lord who laid our iniquity on his servant. We rebelled, and so there’s this transaction. The same Lord who in the first stanza tells us that his servant will succeed and prosper and be exalted, now takes our sin and lays it on him, and he is punished in place of his people. The Lord has laid our iniquity on him.
Now, this is an important corrective, I think, for in some of the popular understandings of the gospel, we tend to portray God as the angry one, God the Father as the angry one, God the Son as the sympathetic one, and somehow by His work, He forces the Father’s hand, and He now won’t condemn us because of what the Son has done. And here we find it was the Lord’s doing from the very first. We have some songs that we sing that make me wince just a little bit because of this concept right here. “The father turns his face away” or “the father’s wrath completely satisfied.” That’s true enough. But it wasn’t just the Father’s wrath; it was the wrath of the triune God that God the Son bore. The Son was not doing something against the Father’s will; he’s fulfilling the Father’s will. The Father sends the Son, the Son willingly comes, becomes incarnate for this very purpose of bearing our sin.
And so Paul can say in Romans chapter three, “he sent forth his Son as a propitiation for our sins.” First John chapter four, “This is love, not that we loved him, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” It pictures us as the objects of God’s wrath. God the father sends the son, the son willingly comes. The father lays the sin of his people on the son, the son willingly takes it to himself. And bearing the punishment of our sin, we go free.
Well, this is the concept of penal substitution. There are two concepts there. I’ve said it several times. I want you to get it. Both words are important. Penal substitution. Penal, that is, it’s penalty. It’s punishment. It’s satisfying of justice, the satisfying of God’s wrath. God’s wrath, His just wrath, exhausted in the punishment of His Son in our place. Substitution: He bore it not only for our benefit, but as our stand-in and in our place. So all of this presupposes divine retribution for sin. Christ standing in our place, taking the just penalty of our sin to himself. In other words—and this is the expression the older theologians used to use a lot—He took our “law place.” The law of God condemned us for the sins that we have committed. And standing before the bar of divine justice, we stand condemned. Jesus interposes himself and stands in our place and assumes all of our responsibilities and all of our guilt, offers himself in sacrifice to God. And by his chastisement, by his punishment, we have peace. We’re reconciled to God.
Again, that’s verses five and six: “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. We all like sheep have gone astray, each one turned to our own way. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
I want you to notice one more expression in verse five: “With his wounds, we are healed.” With his wounds, we are healed. It’s not with his wounds plus anything else. His wounds are healing. That’s it. Our guilt, his punishment, that’s all. Well, this is the doctrine of penal substitution. It’s a term you want to know.
There is in the heart of every last man and woman who ever lives a sense of justice, a sense of right and wrong. It’s a reflection of God’s image. We’ve been created in God’s image. And we understand this right and wrong and deserving punishment. And we get that. We may suppress it, but we get that. And pretensions that maybe on balance, we’ve done well enough will never do because it doesn’t satisfy the conscience, and it doesn’t satisfy the conscience because justice in that case has not been satisfied. “Well, on balance, I’ve done fairly well and I’ll be all right and God will accept me.” In that case, justice has not been served. And because justice has not been served, our conscience can never be at ease. And so we give ourselves to platitudes about God’s love and goodness. And in that case, God just accepts us the way we are. And that’s that. And in that case, justice is not served. And because justice is not served, our conscience can never let us go.
But when God first awakened our hearts to our sin, he made us see the dreadfulness of our standing before him. The first thing we did is we ran to Jesus. Because here is one who’s qualified to stand in the place of sinners. Here is one who has done for sinners what the sinners could not endure themselves. And it’s not just the first day, but every day of our life since, marked as it is, every day marked by sin. What we want to know is that we have someone who stood before God and answered for our sins. And what we want to know is that our standing with God has nothing to do with me. It has to do with what someone else has done in my place. What we want to know is that justice has been satisfied. It’s been served. No loopholes in it. There’s no way justice can come back to me.
And so we look to Jesus and he’s the one who has endured the wrath of God in place of sinners. God’s justice is satisfied. The curse has been borne. And now God accepts us. And he accepts us not because of anything about us. And that’s the glory of the gospel message. That my standing with God has nothing to do with me. It has to do entirely with what the Lord Jesus has done in my place. “With his stripes, I’m healed.”
This deserves the prominent place that it has had in Christian hymnody. It doesn’t have that place in contemporary hymnody as much as it should. It shows up some, but it deserves a central place. “It was for crimes that I had done, he groaned upon the tree.” That’s penal substitution. “Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned he stood.” That’s penal substitution. “What thou, my Lord, has suffered was all for sinners gain. Mine, mine was the transgressions, but thine the deadly pain.” That’s penal substitution. “Whence come these sorrows? Whence this mortal anguish? It was my sins for which thou, my Lord, must languish.” Like we sang this evening, “my sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to his cross and I bear it no more.”
This is the power of the cross. Christ became sin for us, took the blame, bore the wrath. We stand forgiven at the cross. With his stripes, we are healed. That’s the value of Jesus Christ. It is not only the central theme of this song; this is the heart and soul of the Christian faith. This is the very reason for Christianity in the first place: someone to answer for sin.
And if you are not trusting safely in Jesus Christ, I have to tell you, you’re on your own. And you will bear your sin before God on your own. The glorious good news of the gospel is I’m not on my own. I have someone who has stood in my place and has answered to God for all of my sins. God has sent his son and he has come and taken the place of the sinner.
So here is Israel’s confession. “We didn’t see it. We didn’t see it. But we see it now. We didn’t recognize him. We recognize him now. We thought he got what was coming to him. And here we find he got what was coming to us. We thought he got what he deserved. He got what we deserved. He was indeed smitten by God.” Amazing thing. The Lord’s righteous servant smitten by God, but not for his sins, for ours.
Looking back to our first stanza, chapter 52, verse 15, here we have the reason that Gentile kings gasp speechless in awe and adoring amazement, because this servant that they’d never heard of, now they see. This servant that they never heard of, now they hear of him, and here he has come and taken their place and borne their sins. What do we say about this? And here’s the answer to the question that’s raised in that first stanza of the song. How is it that this servant will be both despised, rejected on the one hand, and yet exalted on the other? And the answer, of course, is that by his sufferings and death, he redeems God’s people to himself. And for that, God has highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name. And for that, of course, he is the object of our praise forever. Amen.