God is still fulfilling the Old Testament scriptures regarding the Servant’s mission, opening eyes and hearts, through the mission of the church. Mission is the fruition of “Thus says the Lord.”

Discouragement is inevitable when we serve in the mission of the church. We see worldly systems that, with sophistication and accuracy, promote sin and hinder the gospel. We see people show interest in the good news, but they remain unpersuaded. We see the darkness of satanic addiction and brokenness strangling families and communities, and it is called “progress”. We, the local church, may be just a small candle in hundreds (or thousands) of square kilometres of thick darkness. There are declining numbers of people going into pastoral ministry and cross-cultural gospel work. And if all that wasn’t enough, we have ourselves and our own sin and limitations to deal with. Needless to say, godly confidence in fulfilling the mission of the church can be hard to come by.

But the Apostle Paul’s situation wasn’t much better; it was probably much worse. A sprawling Roman empire that thrives on corruption, systemic idolatry, and immorality. Travel that is dangerous and physically exhausting. The Christian church is fledgling, afflicted by sin within and pagan ideologies without. They have no outside funding or sources of mature leaders. There are no geographic safe havens. Christianity is only legal so long as it is deemed irrelevant or confused by outsiders with Judaism. And, if we roughly equate the population of modern-day Turkey (88 million) to the population of the Roman Empire, Turkey (at 0.1% evangelical) is significantly more evangelized.

And yet, in this setting, Paul is bold and expansionistic in his approach to the mission of the church. This article seeks to explore a key part of the biblical-theological engine which drives this bold mission in a barren context: the Servant of the Lord from Isaiah. We begin with how the Servant functions in early Christian missionary theology, and then reflect on how the Servant’s mission functions within the theological story of Isaiah. Finally, we close with a reflection on the Servant’s mission for our service.

The Servant of the Lord in Paul’s Mission

The book of Acts gives us a narrative that is fundamentally shaped by the Servant’s mission. When Jesus promises his Spirit to empower witnesses “until the end of the earth,” in Acts 1:8, it is likely a fulfillment of the Servant of the Lord who will be salvation “to the end of the earth” (Isa 49:6). And Luke records how Paul later returns to this verse to support his preaching of salvation to the Gentiles when faced with Jewish opposition (Acts 13:47). Indeed, had Acts not elsewhere clarified that Jesus was the Servant (Acts 3:13), we might have been tempted to think that Paul was the Servant of the Lord, because his mission flows so clearly from the pattern of the Servant.

When Luke quotes Paul’s mission is described as “to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18) there are unmistakable echoes of the Servant of the Lord who came to “open blind eyes” (Isa 42:7, 61:1), causing light (Isa 42:16). Luke believed that Paul’s mission (and that of the early church) was the fulfillment of prophecy regarding the Servant’s own work. And that isn’t too surprising, because Jesus himself had spoken about global proclamation in his name as fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy (Luke 24:44-47).

And so when we turn over to Paul’s own explanation of his anticipated mission to Spain, it is no surprise that we find the Servant, the Messiah, there also. In his discussion of why preachers need to be sent, he quotes Isaiah 52:7, “how beautiful are the feet of those proclaiming the good news” (Rom 10:15). This is not random proof-texting. The death and resurrection of the Messiah were the very kingdom of God and peace which Isaiah had spoken of regarding the Servant of the Lord (cf. Isa 53:5). Paul also quotes Isaiah 53:1 (“Who has believed our hearing?”) to show that the Jewish rejection of Jesus, the Servant, was prophesied and therefore not unexpected. For Paul, the Servant of the Lord’s proclamation in Isaiah 52-53 is the lens through which he understands his own proclamation of Jesus.

And, when Paul is rounding off his argument about not wanting to build on another’s foundation and having fulfilled the gospel, he quotes Isaiah 52:15, “to those whom it has not been proclaimed, they will see, and those who have not heard will understand.” To be clear, this Old Testament citation does more than simply say that those who have not heard the gospel will hear it; it actually promises understanding of the gospel (cf. Rom 15:12, Isa 11:10). It promises success in mission proclamation. And that is why it is so relevant for Paul: in a world where the church is a tiny minority, Paul can be expansionistic in his gospel designs because he knows some from among the nations will come to understand the good news of the Servant of the Lord.

However, the hearing and understanding Paul envisions as happening through his mission may be more than we initially think. That is to say, the hearing and understanding that is prophesied regarding the Lord is not just that some will hear and respond. In reality, it is saying that the Servant of the Lord will transform the nations’ spiritual faculties so they will rightly see who the Servant is.

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