You see If God has taken away my guilt and not he sees me as righteous in Chris and removed any reason to be afraid of death and hell then all other worries are only small worries. Not the reference to healing—by his wounds we are healed.  The primary idea here is that we are healed from the disease of sin.

When I was a student in Dublin I remember a guy coming to our Christian Union and speaking on Isaiah 53.  As a young Christian I was blown away.  Here is a song written seven hundred years before the death of Christ and it gives exact details of his suffering.  It is so clearly about Jesus that when I once read it to a youth group someone asked me which of the four gospels is this from.

This is the fourth, and final, ‘servant song’ in Isaiah.  It is made up of five stanzas, each containing three verses.

Suffering and sprinkling (52:12-15)

Behold, my servant shall act wisely.  In these ‘servant songs’ the servant can refer to the prophet Isaiah or the people of Israel, but, in this song, it can’t be either because the servant suffers here for both.  The servant is unmistakably Jesus.

The servant ‘will be high and lifted up’.  The term ‘high and lifted up’ is used elsewhere in Isaiah to speak of the LORD/Yahweh.  Our rescuer is God and man.  He is God the Son.  The name Isaiah means ‘the LORD is salvation’, and this salvation is brought about by the Lord himself!

Suddenly we see that the high and lifted up one is marred in appearance.  He is suffering.  Hundreds of years before the Romans perfected the art of crucifixion, this song will show us Jesus at Calvary.

His suffering is connected with our sprinkling.  The idea of sprinkling has a number of roots.  The priests would sprinkle a leper that had been cleansed—and we are spiritual lepers who have had our guilt washed away.  Another idea behind sprinkling is on the Day of Atonement—when the blood of a goat would be sprinkled on the seat of mercy in the temple as a picture of a saviour’s blood cleansing our sin.

Strength and weakness (53:1-3)

To whom has the arm of the Lord being revealed?  The arm of the Lord is his ability to rescue his people.  Yet this arm of the Lord is found through an ordinary and weak person.  He grew up like a root out of dry ground.  This is an unpromising person from a failed nation.  Shockingly the servant comes from a backwater of the Roman Empire, and a lesser part of that nation.  He had no beauty that we should desire him.  He was not good-looking.  He was not marked out as ‘one to watch’.  He did not have life easy—he was a man of sorrows familiar with grief.  He knew the pain of rejection.  He lost members of his family.  He was let down by his friends.  Notice our role in his rejection: he was despised and we esteemed him not.

Salvation through substitution (53:4-6)

There was once a chaplain in a Dublin university who wrote in the college paper that ‘the death and resurrection of Jesus are not the crux of Christianity.’  The irony of course is that the word crux comes from cross.  The Villiers’ School motto is actually ‘fidei coticula crux’—the cross is the touchstone of faith.  The apostle Paul can sum up all his preaching by simply saying, ‘I preach Christ crucified’.

In Hebrew poetry the main point is made at the centre of a song.  This stanza is the centre and it clearly points to Jesus on the cross.  What we have here is imputation—charging something to someone’s account.  He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.  John Piper explains that the heart of the gospel is substitution—Jesus dies in our place. 

The result of his death is that we receive peace.  The word is ‘shalom’—which includes the idea of wholeness and well-being.

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