The Exaltation of the Servant. Acts
We are taking a side track
into Isaiah because of the conversation that Philip had with the Ethiopian eunuch,
recorded in Acts chapter eight. In a passage like Isaiah 52 and 53 it is always
important to identify who the speaker is, and that is not always easy. The
speaker in Isaiah 52:13-15 is God, and God is the one speaking at the end of
this section in Isaiah 53:10. Sandwiched in between the opening and the closing
where God is the speaker there is a report (typically vv. 1-9) from somebody.
It is important to identify who that somebody is and because the verbs that we
find in chapter 53:1-9 are for the most part past tense verbs—the speaker is
looking back on something that has happened in past time—and it is likely that
the speaker here refers to future regenerate Jews, the future saved remnant who
look back historically on what happened to the servant. This is their report in
53:1-9.
This opening passage in
52:13-15 gives an overview of what this whole servant psalm is going to talk
about. The focus here is on exultation and glorification of the Servant. So
often we come to this passage and look at it as the suffering servant because
there is so much in chapter 53 that talks about the substitutionary suffering
of the servant. But the focal point isn’t really on His suffering; the focal
point is on His exaltation and glorification. We see this in 52:13 which is a
sort of topical sentence.
Isaiah 52:13 NASB “Behold, My
servant will prosper, He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.” What
is that verse saying? It is saying that the servant is going to be successful,
and so successful that He will be exalted above everything. That sets the tone
for this whole section.
Isaiah 52:14 NASB “Just as many
were astonished at you, {My people,} So His appearance
was marred more than any man And His form more than the sons of men. [15] Thus
He will sprinkle many nations, Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him;
For what had not been told them they will see, And what they had not heard they
will understand.”
|
NKJV |
Jewish Publication Soc. 1917 |
Tanakh 1985 |
|
Is
52:13 Behold, My
Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very
high. Is
52:14 Just as
many were astonished at you, So His visage was marred more than any man, and
His form more than the sons of men Is
52:15 So shall He
sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their
mouths at Him; For what had not been told them they shall see, And what they
had not heard they shall consider |
Is 52:13
Behold, My Servant shall prosper, he shall be exalted and lifted up, and
shall be very high. Is 52:14
According as many were appalled at thee—so marred was his visage
unlike that of a man, and his form unlike the sons of men— Is 52:15
So shall he startle many nations, kings shall shut their mouths
because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and
that which they had not heard shall they perceive. |
Is 52:13
Indeed, My servant shall prosper, Be exalted and raised to great
heights Is 52:14
Just as the many were appalled at him—So marred was his appearance,
unlike that of man, His form beyond human semblance— Is 52:15
Just so he shall startle many nations. Kings shall be silenced because
of him, For they shall see what has not been told them, Shall behold what
they never have heard. |
Significant distinctions
between the translations have been underlined. In the first verse we see in the
left column that the NKJV translates “prudently,” and both the JPS and the Tanakh translate “prosper”—the same idea as “success.”
Prosper is the result of dealing wisely. The verb used there is used not just
for the act of being wise or dealing wisely or prudently with someone but the
result of that which is success or prosperity. So the JPS and the Tenakh are more in line with some more modern Christian
English translations and are more accurate in their rendering. Basically all
three agree in the second half of that verse that the servant will be exalted,
extolled and be very high. The idea is that He is elevated above everything.
The name Tenakh
is an acronym formed from the initial Hebrew letters of the Masoretic
Text's three traditional subdivisions: The Torah ("Teaching", also
known as the Five Books of Moses), Nevi'im
("Prophets") and Ketuvim
("Writings")—hence TaNaKh. The name "Miqra" (מקרא), meaning
"that which is read", is
an alternative Hebrew term for the Tanakh.
Then in verse 14 the NKJV says, “Just
as many were astonished.”
Astonished communicates the idea of
surprise, taken aback. The JPS and Tenakh both
translate that as “many were appalled” and are much more accurate. The Hebrew
word is often used of observing God’s terrible judgment on people. The rest of
the verse is very similar between the three.
The major difference is in
verse 15. The NKJV translates, “So shall He sprinkle many nations.” The
JPS and the Tenakh both translate that verb, “So
shall he startle many nations.” If we were involved in a discussion with
someone Jewish about Isaiah 52 and they pull out their Bible and we pull out
ours … their Bible says something different.
In verse 13 the verb is s’akal which means to act wisely, to be understanding and discerning, and as a result to prosper.
Eight English words are used in the Old Testament to translate this verb. It
sometimes means instruct, to be prudent, to understand, to see, to make wise,
to have success, or to act with insight or devotion. The focus in this verse is
on acting wisely, i.e. bringing about success, accomplishing what you intended
to accomplish, bringing your mission to a positive conclusion. The second line
explains that that success is His exaltation. It parallels that. The second
line explains the result of that success, that He is exalted, elevated to
heaven. This is the theme verse for this whole section—the exaltation of the
Servant. The whole section is not about the suffering servant but about the
exalted servant. But He suffers to be exalted. That is the key to understanding
this.
Notice the words used here to
describe His exaltation: He is exalted, He is extolled, and He will be lifted
up very high. This is one of those passages where language is too limiting upon
the prophet. He piles these verbs on top of each other to express the ultimate
magnitude of what happens. He is not just honoured, not just glorified; these
words are too weak. He uses these verbs to indicate the highest conceivable
exaltation. Tow of these words are used in other
passages in Isaiah as a description of the highest throne in heaven, the throne
of God. In Isaiah 6:1 sees God in heaven “high and lifted up.” These two words
are used here to refer to the servant as well. He is elevated to the level of
the throne of God. In Isaiah 57:15 he is called “the high and lofty [exalted]
one.” Same verbiage. So to use these verbs and apply
them to the exaltation of the servant here indicates that He is elevated to the
level of the throne of God.
This fits with the
theology of Psalm 110. Psalm 110:1 NASB “The LORD
says to my Lord: ‘Sit at My right hand …’” Who are those two Lords? David is
the one writing the psalm and he says, “The Lord”—Yahweh—“said to my Lord.” So
who is in authority, who is the Lord over David. The
Lord over David can’t be a human lord because David is the highest authority in
Isaiah 52:14 NASB “Just as many
were astonished at you, {My people,} So His appearance
was marred more than any man And His form more than the sons of men.” This
verse begins a very interesting kind of construction. It is an unusual constructions in the Hebrew but it is one of those
constructions that involves three comparisons, or possibly two comparisons and
one contrast. We have to work through each possibility to figure out how it
would play out in terms of every word and phrase in the sentence. It starts
out, “Just as many were astonished at you, So His
appearance was marred.” We have “just as” and “so,” and then verse 14 begins
“so.” What is that all about? What does it communicate? Part of our
understanding of that is to understand the identification of the pronouns here,
terms like “many” and “you.” Who is the “you”? Then “His
visage.” It shifts from referring to the servant as a second person
singular, the “you.” Now he is talking about the servant with a third person
singular pronoun, “his.” Confused yet? “Just as you” as if God is speaking
initially to the servant and then and then He turns and is speaking to a
different audience, and now is referring to the servant at His side as in the
third person singular, “So His appearance.”
First of all, who are the many? There are
those who think that the many is just a general non-specific term referring to
all of humanity. In the next verse, “Thus He will sprinkle many nations,” the
many refers to all the nations on the earth apart from
The verb here translated “astonished” is
the Hebrew shmm, which means to be desolate,
to be appalled, amazed, shocked, aghast, horrified at something. It is as if you
were looking at something that is the most appalling, frightening, horrifying
thing you have ever seen. There is now going to be an explanation in the next
two clauses in the last half of verse 14 and the first half of 15. They
describe two different groups of people. Both are initially appalled as they
see what has happened to this individual. The first, “So His appearance was
marred more than any man And His form more than the sons of men.” When we
compare that with the JPS version and the Tenakh we see
a similarity. In the JPS version “his visage [face] is unlike that of a man,
his form unlike that of the sons of men.” The Tenakh,
“So marred was his appearance, unlike that of a man, His form, beyond human
semblance.” Both the JPS and the Tenakh understand/translate
this to be an individual. Even if it allegedly refers to the nation it is
something that is destroyed beyond description and no longer has the appearance
that it once had and is no longer recognisable. This couldn’t really be applied
to the Jewish people even in light of the holocaust; they were still
recognisable as the Jewish people afterwards. The image that is presented here
is that the entirety of this individual is so disfigured that His humanity is
no longer recognisable.
The word translated “marred” is the Hebrew
word mishchat. There is some debate about the
meaning of this word. This is the only place that this word is used in the
entire Old Testament. It has the idea of being physically tortured or abused to
the point of being unrecognisable. It talks about “his visage [appearance]” is
the Hebrew word mareh which has been
translated “face” or “visage, countenance, appearance.” There are some scholars
who try to make a distinction here that this just refers to His face, the other
refers to His body, but that is pressing the distinctions a little too far.
Both words refer to His general appearance; they are basically synonymous. The
other word is toar which means “His form.”
Both describe His person, appearance. Remember, this was written in poetry.
“His countenance was marred more than any man.” He is so physically beaten up
and defaced that it is more than any human being and is unrecognisable.
The next phrase says, “And His form more
than the sons of men,” and the Tenakh translates it
“beyond human semblance.” He is reduced to something that is less than human by
this beating. When we go to the New Testament we see the description we have in
the Gospels of what happened during the trial of Jesus. We have two accounts,
one in Matthew and one in John.
Matthew 27:26-31 NASB “Then he
[Pilate] released Barabbas for them; but after having
Jesus scourged, he handed Him over to be crucified.
Roman scourging.
As administered by the Romans there were three different types of scourging.
There was the fustigatio, a less severe
beating for minor crimes. Then there was the flagillatio
which was a flogging. The worst form was the verberatio,
a scourging which was the most terrible of all of the punishments by whipping.
One writer describes it this way: “The criminal was stripped, bound to a post
or a pillar, or sometimes simply thrown on the ground and beaten by a number of
torturers until they grew tired of beating him, and they whipped him until his
flesh would hang from his bones in bleeding shreds. In the provinces (e.g.
Isaiah 52:14 NASB “Just as many
were astonished [horrified] at you, {My people,} So
His appearance was marred more than any man And His form more than the sons of
men.” So what are we talking about in those phrases? We are talking about His
physical suffering before He went to the cross, before the actual crucifixion
where God brought judgment upon sins. So at this point it is just the physical
suffering leading up to the cross.
Then the text steps it up another notch in
verse 15: “Thus He will sprinkle many nations…” This takes us from the physical
suffering to the spiritual suffering. Remember this is not getting into a point
by point detail—which is what we pick up in Isaiah 53:1-9—this is giving us a
summary overview of what 53:1-9 will describe for us. But there is a debate now
over what this initial verb “sprinkle” means. Again, up until the late 19th
century this was predominantly translated by the word “sprinkle” or “spatter.”
But as we’ve seen in the JPS (1917) and the Tenakh
it is “startled.” Notice that in the latter two translations it doesn’t
translate as “astonish” but as “appalled.” It is a very negative thing. This
group is appalled and horrified. But “startle” isn’t a negative word; it fits
with “astonished,” not with “horrified.” So that is the first problem. If the
tine is set by something negative and the word shmm
is used in many passages to relate to the horror with which people view the
judgment of God, then “appalled” is the right translation. But it doesn’t fit
with the idea of being startled. However, since the early 20th
century more and more scholars have come along wanting to translate this word
as “startled.”
Most of the modern translations continue
to translate as “sprinkle.” What is the issue here? For some as the approach
the translation they start with the assumption that this is not an individual,
the Messiah, but this is the nation, and that sprinkle somehow doesn’t fit the
idea, so they started looking to see if there was some secondary meaning
somewhere that they could find. They suggested that there was a second form of
this word that is translated “sprinkle,” another word spelled the same way but
it has a different meaning. It is listed in one of the Hebrew lexicons, (Brown,
Driver and Briggs—1918) as nazah2. Before giving the meaning
it has in parenthesis “dubious.” And the only citation it has for the meaning
of “startle” is Isaiah 52:14. It seems a little odd that the only place you can
find this meaning here where they identified it as a dubious meaning. But when
we come to the 1990s and the publication of HALOT it doesn’t even
list that secondary meaning at all, and the subsequent lexicons that have been
put out don’t recognise this as a legitimate meaning. The interpretive idea was
that as the first group is horrified by looking at what has happened to the
servant, the second group seeing His exaltation is surprised by His exaltation.
But the lexical data for that doesn’t exist. You can’t make up meanings just to
fit your theology; you have to go with word usage. The word usage here for nazah is that it refers ultimately to an act that is
ritually or literally indicative of a cleansing from sin. According to the Theological
Word Book of the Old Testament its primary significance derives from a
reference to blood sprinkling. This particular root is used with blood
sprinklings which are lighter, both as to how much blood is sprinkled and as to
what is expiated. So this is a word that is used for the sacrifice, the
covering, the atonement, the forgiveness of sin.
Exodus 29:20, 21 NASB “You
shall slaughter the ram, and take some of its blood and put [sprinkle] {it} on
the lobe of Aaron’s right ear and on the lobes of his sons’ right ears and on
the thumbs of their right hands and on the big toes of their right feet, and
sprinkle the {rest of the} blood around on the altar.
What we will see in all of these verses
and all of the verses that use this verb “sprinkle” in the Old Testament is
that they always express what is sprinkled; there is always an object—except
for Isaiah 52:15. That is why they raise this issue. There is no mention of a
liquid in Isaiah 52:15.
Leviticus 4:6 NASB “and the
priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle some of the blood seven
times before the LORD, in front of the veil of the
sanctuary.”
Leviticus 5:9 NASB “He shall
also sprinkle some of the blood of the sin offering on the side of the altar,
while the rest of the blood shall be drained out at the base of the altar: it
is a sin offering.”
Leviticus 14:51 NASB “Then he
shall take the cedar wood and the hyssop and the scarlet string, with the live
bird, and dip them in the blood of the slain bird as well as in the running
water, and sprinkle the house seven times.”
Leviticus 16:14 NASB “Moreover,
he shall take some of the blood of the bull and sprinkle {it} with his finger
on the mercy seat on the east {side;} also in front of the mercy seat he shall
sprinkle some of the blood with his finger seven times….[19]
With his finger he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it seven times and
cleanse it, and from the impurities of the sons of Israel consecrate it.”
Numbers 19:18 NASB “A clean
person shall take hyssop and dip {it} in the water, and sprinkle {it} on the
tent and on all the furnishings and on the persons who were there, and on the
one who touched the bone or the one slain or the one dying {naturally} or the
grave…. [21] And he who sprinkles the water for impurity shall wash his
clothes, and he who touches the water for impurity shall be unclean until
evening.”
Then a passage
referring to a future time. Ezekiel 36:25 NASB
“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse
you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.” This is referring to the
beginning of the inauguration of the new covenant in the future messianic
kingdom.
So what do all these have in common? The
sprinkling is the means to state purification. That is the end result. We look
at Isaiah 52:15 and it says, “Thus He will sprinkle many nations.” When they
came up with this alternate thing they said let’s see if we can find a cognate.
We have to be careful with cognates. A cognate may help but just because a word
is similar in another language there may be a whole different historical usage
development and it can come up meaning something else. They found that in
Arabic there was a cognate for this word, a word that means to startle. So said
that must be the meaning. They said that this word nazah
in the Hebrew Old Testament doesn’t fit any of the other twenty or so uses of nazah in the Old Testament and we don’t like that,
we are going to pick the meaning from Arabic and bring that in because this
avoids the atonement tones of the word “sprinkle.” The word “sprinkle” in and
of itself in this summary statement indicates that what is about to be
described is how the nations will be cleansed and purified from sin. It doesn’t
say that per se but it has that tone, because everywhere else the word nazah is used that is what it describes.
So “startle” doesn’t work. First of all it
is not an attested meaning of the word anywhere else in the Scripture.
Secondly, it doesn’t fit the context here at all. It doesn’t fit the concept of
being appalled or horrified, v. 14. So it is best to conclude that the reason
for the response of being horrified is the disfigurement of God’s servant by
mean, and the result of that disfigurement is His spiritual atoning work that
takes place on the cross. So the “Just as” at the beginning of verse 14
describes the horror expressed by men as they see God’s judgment t upon the
servant. The first “so” talks about His physical suffering; the second “so”—“so
shall He sprinkle many nations”—talks about the spiritual aspect of His
suffering when He pays the penalty for sin. The result of this is then
expressed in the last part: “Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him; For what had not been told them they will see, And what they
had not heard they will understand.”
There are different ways in which people
interpret this. The first is that they shut their mouths in despair because
they have seen the truth and they are under judgment. The second view is
astonishment. This second view is preferable. Their mouths are shut because
they see what God has done in the exultation of the servant. This one who was
so beaten and so abused physically that He looked like something less than
human is raised to a level that elevates Him above the angels and above all
humanity to something that is super-human at the right hand of God the Father.
As a result they are standing in awe as they begin to comprehend the Father’s
plan of salvation.
So this whole passage is talking about the
exaltation of the servant. But the servant is exalted, as Philippians 2 says,
because He has been obedient to the Father and He has suffered for our sin.
This sets up the introduction for us as we get into the next section, beginning
in 53:1, where we see this report that is laid out from the lips of a future
believing remnant which is proclaiming that no one has really listened to
them.