Isaiah 53:11-12

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will

As we saw yesterday, so much of God’s salvation plan has already been accomplished that we can be confident that what still needs to happen will also be fulfilled. And here, in our final verses, we find out what that final stage of

I’m not much of a football fan, but even I know that when a team wins a really significant victory, there is often a celebratory parade in their hometown. Open top busses, cheering crowds lining the streets, the cup held high for

Jesus’ victory was won at the cross, but the victory parade will reach his climax when he gathers his people from every tribe and language and nation to sing his

We live in a world that wants us to believe that we are the heroes, that the spotlight of my life should be firmly fixed on ME. But the victory on which my whole life depends is not mine, but Jesus’.  The whole purpose of my life, now and forever, is to sing HIS praises and declare

So, as we reach the end of our time in Isaiah, let’s do that today. And let’s ask for God’s help to be people who continue to sing his praises and live for his glory

Isaiah 53:10

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an

For the past 6 and a half weeks, we’ve listened to Isaiah, and God himself, introducing us to the figure of the Servant. We’ve seen that the Servant will come to

There was a tension for Isaiah and his generation. Even as they trusted in the promises of the Servant to come, they still had to live through the experience of the coming exile which Isaiah also foretold. Similarly, we who live after

The Servant who suffered and died is already alive again – he is already ‘seeing his offspring’ (those who are born into God’s family because of him) and ‘prolonging his days’ in the present. Today and every day stretching on into eternity, the will of the Lord continues to prosper in his hand. And so, even as we continue to battle with our sin, and struggle with our brokenness, we can do it with hope. So much of what God promised through Isaiah has already been fulfilled that we can trust he will finish what he has started. The Lord Jesus, who suffered and died and is now risen and reigning in glory, WILL come back

Let’s pray that we would continue to trust in that great promise today.

Isaiah 53:9

He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘identity’ in our society at the moment. Whilst we might take issue with where some people now draw the line between which aspects of

So imagine how it felt for Jesus to be wrongly assigned to the category ‘wicked’.  There could be no greater miscarriage of justice than to identify the perfect and holy Son of God as belonging ‘with the wicked’.  In our society, we might think that being identified with ‘the rich’ was a compliment, but from the context of these verses it’s clear that being buried with the rich somehow implies an

Yet this wasn’t the first time in his life Jesus had been wrongly-labelled. Throughout his earthly ministry, the Pharisees repeatedly assigned him to an incorrect category. As Jesus himself put it, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, “Here is a glutton and a

Let’s praise him for that today.

Isaiah 53:8

By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished.

I rather like this phrase ‘the land of the living’. It’s got a much more poetic ring to it than simply saying ‘life’. And the idea of being ‘cut off from the land of the living’ is much more striking than if this verse simply said ‘he

He was cut off from the land of the living. Cut off from fellowship with others. Cut off from all that is good, enjoyable, nourishing and happy. That would be bad

Sin is the ultimate separating force. It cuts us off from a Holy God, and from the life which he gives. And it also cuts us off from fellowship with one another, undermining love and trust and loyalty. Abandoned by his followers and his friends, alienated from his father as he had never been before or since, Jesus was experiencing the separating power of our sin. 

It’s hard to imagine the strength of a force that could turn the Father’s face away from his beloved son in the moment of his greatest suffering. And yet, there is an even stronger force at work in the world. The gracious, forgiving, redeeming love of God, expressed in the Servant’s sacrificial death, reconciles us with a power much greater than the separating power of sin.

Because he was cut off, we have been brought near. Because he was excluded from the land of the living, we have been welcomed into an abundant and eternal life

Let’s praise him for that today.

Isaiah 53:7

He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open

One of the things I find most remarkable about the behaviour of Jesus during his arrest and trial is the fact that he remains silent when facing unjust accusations. I realise that his physical suffering and the experience of being separated from his Father on the cross, are in many ways worse things to experience. But they feel very far removed from our everyday lives, whereas the experience of being falsely accused, or misrepresented, or wrongly blamed is something that we probably all know a little of. And I know how much I hate it when it happens to me. I might, perhaps, be willing to bear some small consequence for something that wasn’t actually my fault. But when that does happen, I want to make very sure that everyone knows how undeserved it is! I can’t really imagine being able to bear it silently. Letting go of the opportunity to vindicate myself. I want it clearly on the record that I am innocent. If I have to experience unjust suffering, I want the injustice to be publically noted!  The arguments spring easily to mind: “Justice matters. Injustice isn’t OK. It would reflect badly on God if a Christian was thought to have said this or done that.” When really I’m motivated by the desire to vindicate myself. I care much less about justice, or God’s honour,

Let’s praise him for that today.

Isaiah 53:6

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

When our girls were younger we were all great fans of the Australian Christian musician, Colin Buchanan. A significant number of the Bible verses I know by heart are cemented in my memory because of his catchy tunes. So much so that I can’t read or think about today’s verse without mentally adding in the ‘Bah Bah Doo Bah Bah’s at the end of every clause! (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, stick Colin Buchanan Isaiah 53:6 into your search engine of choice and have a listen)

Sheep noises aside, this is a verse that deserves to be in the mind and heart of every Christian. If you were only ever going to learn half a dozen Bible verses in your whole life, I’d suggest that this ought to be one of them. In this one sentence we have the heart of the gospel. We have each chosen to wander away from the Lord. And what has he done in response? Sent a sheepdog to fetch us back to face our punishment? Turned us loose to fend for ourselves in a world of thorns and wolves? No. He laid all our wrongdoing on the Servant, Jesus, so that we don’t have to live under the penalty it rightly deserves.

How could this be anything other than wonderful news? Yet it is only good news for those who know themselves to be wandering sheep. Perhaps for city-dwellers, being considered a sheep doesn’t seem so bad. If our ideas about sheep are drawn from children’s picture books and model farms, we might not mind the comparison. Surely they are cute, clean, cuddly and harmless? But if you’ve had dealings with real live sheep, you may feel differently.

My grandparents were farmers on the Welsh border. I remember when we visited, my brother and I having to join in when sheep were being moved from place to

However familiar these words are, let’s thank him again for that today, and pray that in our gratitude we would increasingly learn to follow the good shepherd instead of turning away from him.

Isaiah 53:4-5

Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,

Yesterday we saw that the Servant was ‘a man of suffering and familiar with pain’.  Today we discover that this wasn’t simply a description of what happened to occur in his life. He wasn’t just a bit unfortunate, someone who attracted more than his share of bad luck. He willingly chose this path. He took up the pain and bore the suffering. Much of

Only the Servant has ever done that. He has completely taken the pain and suffering that our transgressions deserved. Yes, we still experience the pain and

And this was no mere transaction on a balance sheet. Not a nice, neat, clean solution to a theoretical problem. It was real, and physical and brutal. He was punished, stricken, pierced, crushed and wounded.  And he did it willingly. For us.

Let’s thank him for that today.

Isaiah 53:2b-3

He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing

When we were reading Chapter 49 I said that the Servant was visually unimpressive – if you’d walked past him in the street in 1st Century Palestine you wouldn’t have given him a second look. But actually, it’s worse than that.

Both of those things made him uncomfortable to be around, in his own day. And both of those things are still, at the very least, awkward today. We live in a society

So, if we were in charge of selecting a man for this role of Servant, wouldn’t be want to pick someone who looks … well, attractive? Yet God very deliberately doesn’t do that. Jesus’ conception was utterly miraculous, so his appearance can’t have been the inevitable consequence of the combination of Mary and Joseph’s genes.

Similarly, when preparing the way for the Servant, surely God would want to remove every obstacle and difficulty that might interfere with his mission? Yet it turns out

What a complete reversal of the values of our world! How wrong must our value judgements be, for us to look at the Servant and despise him.

Let’s pray that God would be teaching us more and more to value what he values, and to worship and honour the Servant who so many looked down on.

Isaiah 53:1-2a

Who has believed our message and to whom has the

The Servant didn’t come in a flash of blinding lights, surrounded by fireworks and serenaded by angels everywhere he went. Rather, he grew up like a tender shoot. Slowly, gradually, unimpressively. Weak and vulnerable. Not a precious sapling that’s been given a good dose of fertiliser, surrounded by protective fencing

It’s so small. So ordinary. So unimpressive. For a people who were facing the prospect of being overrun by their hostile neighbours, this wouldn’t have seemed like

And so we can be confident that God’s purposes WILL succeed, however unlikely that might seem. Even when others ridicule our faith, and write Jesus off as irrelevant or ineffective. Even when we look at ourselves and wonder how on earth God could possibly use us to bring others to Jesus. Even when we look at our world, and wonder if there is any power great enough to mend everything that is broken.

Let’s praise God that this tender shoot is stronger and more powerful than we can imagine, and ask for his help to keep believing in Jesus while we wait for the full extent of his glory and greatness to be finally revealed.

Isaiah 52:15b

For what they were not told, they will see, and

The ‘they’ in this verse are the kings we thought about yesterday – those people who will stand silent as they face the final judgement, realising that the Servant who they rejected as worthless is in fact the exalted ruler and judge.

At that moment, everything that wasn’t obvious about

This final day judgement is not just about the punishing of wrongdoing. It’s about the putting right of everything that is wrong or broken, everywhere in the universe. Everything will be made as it should be. And so truth will be clear, hidden things will be revealed, foolishness will be replaced by understanding.

This is a complete contrast to the world we find ourselves in right now. We still live in a fallen world, where we can’t even trust our own thinking because it has been warped by sin. Left to our own devices, we don’t just prefer darkness, we actually think it is light. We not only think and act foolishly, but we pride ourselves on how clever we are.  The people of Isaiah’s time were just the same. When God commissions Isaiah to be a prophet, back in Chapter 6, he warns him that the people will “be ever hearing,

Here we are promised that there will be a day when people WILL see and hear and understand what is really true – about God, and themselves, and the salvation

In God’s kindness, we don’t need to wait until the final judgement for those things to become clear. All of us who have put our faith in Jesus have only done so because he has already opened our blind eyes and softened our hard hearts so that we could hear and understand and believe the good news of the gospel.

Let’s thank him for that today, and let’s pray that his Spirit would continue to be at work in the lives of those who don’t yet know him, so that they too might see, understand, repent, believe and be saved, before it is too late.