The Servant in Isaiah’s Vision
Isaiah 53:5-6 "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, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
A wilderness road south of Jerusalem, sometime in the early 30s AD. A high official of the queen of Ethiopia, court treasurer, a man of immense political influence in his home country, was riding back to Africa in a chariot. He had just made the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship at the Temple and had a scroll on his lap. He was reading aloud, as ancient readers did, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah, chapter 53.
The Spirit of God brought a believer named Philip alongside the chariot. Philip heard the man reading and asked the question every honest reader of Isaiah 53 has asked: "Do you understand what you are reading?" The Ethiopian's reply echoed through two millennia. "How can I, unless someone guides me?" Then he asked the question Isaiah 53 has been asking the Jewish and Christian world for nearly 3,000 years: about whom does the prophet say this? Himself? Or someone else?
Luke writes simply: "Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus" (Acts 8:35).
By the end of that conversation the Ethiopian was baptized at the side of the road. The first recorded Gentile convert in the book of Acts was won to Jesus by an Old Testament chapter written 700 years before Jesus was born.
Now read what Isaiah saw, sitting in Jerusalem in the eighth century BC, three centuries before crucifixion was even invented as a method of execution.
"He was pierced 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 every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:5-6).
Pierced. Crushed. Stripes. The lamb led to the slaughter. The grave with the wicked and the rich man in his death. Iniquity laid on him. Read 700 years before any of the words of the New Testament were written, Isaiah's Suffering Servant song reads less like prophecy and more like an eyewitness account of Friday afternoon at Calvary, except the eyewitness was Isaiah, son of Amoz, in eighth century BC Jerusalem.
And notice what Isaiah does. The suffering servant in Isaiah 53 suffers for his people. In their place. Bearing their iniquity. Israel cannot atone for Israel. The servant has to be of the people but also for them. Isaiah was reaching, prophetically, for a Messiah who would be a Jew like the rest, born of the line of David, raised in the towns of Galilee, who would do for Israel and for the whole world what Israel could not do for herself.
Jesus walked into Isaiah 53 and filled it from the inside.
He was the Jewish Messiah Isaiah was reaching toward. He was the silent lamb led to the slaughter. He was the one despised and rejected by His own. He was the man of sorrows acquainted with grief. And He was the one upon whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all. Every chastisement that was supposed to fall on me, fell on Him. Every stripe that should have torn my back, tore His. Peter, who walked with Jesus for three years, will quote this exact passage in his first letter and apply it to his own former rabbi: by His wounds you have been healed (1 Pet 2:24).
Isaiah 53 is a passage to read on our knees. Whether the eyes opening to it for the first time are Ethiopian or American, ours or our neighbor's, the response Isaiah's chapter calls for is the response the Ethiopian gave: water at the side of the road. A baptism. A surrender to the Servant who was wounded for us.
Today: Read Isaiah 53 aloud. All twelve verses, slowly, in one sitting. Don’t skim, just let the words land. Hear the 700-year-old prophet describe in painful detail the back of your Savior. And let the chapter do what it has done in countless chariots and pews and hospital rooms across the centuries: pull you to your knees in front of the Servant who was pierced for you.
Prayer: "Father, I worship You for a Servant who bore what I should have borne and was crushed in the place where I should have been crushed. Open the eyes of every Jewish friend in our lives and communities to the Messiah their own prophet was reaching toward. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK