The Gospel according to Isaiah

We’ve been thinking this week on Things Unseen about some passages in the prophecy of Isaiah, or more exactly, we’ve been thinking about someone Isiah wrote about. And yet, if you think about it, if Isaiah’s boys had asked who it was he was writing about, he’d have had to say he didn’t really know. He certainly didn’t know exactly who He was or when He would come. Peter reminds us of this in 1 Peter 1:10–12. The prophets wrote about the grace that others would experience in the future, and God especially enabled Isaiah to write about how the Messiah Savior would suffer before He entered His glory, even if he didn’t know who He would be or exactly when or how He would come.

And today I want to draw attention to the fourth song. It’s the best known one. I suppose most of us think about it as the Suffering Servant song of Isaiah 53. I remember having to memorize the whole chapter in the King James Version of the Bible when I was about eight or nine in the very ordinary state elementary school I attended. How times have changed. But what my schoolteacher didn’t know is that the song doesn’t begin at Isiah 53:1, but at Isiah 52:13.

It begins with the same words as the first Servant Song, “Behold, my servant,” and we should look, because the opening stanza in the song speaks first about the exaltation of the Servant. “He shall be high and lifted up,” and then it goes on to speak about his humiliation, “His appearance will be marred beyond human semblance” (Isa. 52:14). And then it goes on to speak about the effect of the Servant’s work “He will sprinkle the nations” (v. 15). That surely refers to His saving work. Even kings will become silent one day in His presence.

But then the song goes into the details with which most of us are more familiar. Chapter 53 explains why He will be so highly exalted: it’s because He was so profoundly humiliated for our sakes. And these verses not only fill out the picture of His sufferings, they also explain it. They tell us the reason for those sufferings was our sin, that He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, that He died under the judgment of God, but it was our judgment He was taking. And because of that, He was raised up and exalted.

Almost every time I read these verses, I remember a morning assembly in my final year in high school, when one of my friends stood up to read the Bible lesson for the day. Again, it was just an ordinary state school. As I said, times have really changed. The passage for the day was Isaiah 53, and my friend introduced it with these words: “The reading this morning is from the gospel according to Isaiah.” I still remember my instinctive reaction: “Oh, Hugh, Isaiah isn’t a gospel, it’s a prophecy.” I’m sure he knew that, and it was just a slip of the tongue. But later on, I thought: “Hugh, you are absolutely right. You couldn’t be more right about Isaiah 53. It’s the gospel according to Isaiah. It’s the gospel of Jesus, the gospel of the Suffering Servant. It’s the gospel the Holy Spirit enabled Isaiah to write, even if he wasn’t able to understand what he was writing.”

So, centuries before our Lord Jesus came into the world, the pattern of His life was there in the Bible. Earlier in the week, we heard the Servant say to the Father, “You waken my ear each morning and open My ear to listen, and I commit Myself to You and to this plan of salvation.” And how wonderful it is to think that the Lord Jesus must have learned Isaiah 53 by heart when He was probably the same age I was and perhaps even younger and that He understood increasingly that this passage was speaking about Him and was telling Him what the Servant of the Lord was to be. And how wonderful that He committed Himself to doing the will of His Father, knowing that this would entail so much suffering, and that He did that out of love for His Father and out of love for us. That surely makes us want to sing:

Died he for me, who caused his pain?
Amazing love! how can it be
That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Or maybe we want to sing:

See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down:
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

Or perhaps this is what we should be singing today:

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands—and shall have—my life, my soul, my all.

I hope you feel that way too, today. Do have a blessed weekend, and if you can, join us again next week on Things Unseen.