Only a Righteous Servant Can Justify Many. Isaiah
53:4-12
In Isaiah 53:3 we have the words “sorrow” and
“grief.” The word sorrow is the Hebrew participle makob
which means someone who goes through suffering. Here, because of the context of
the passage, the focus isn’t on the fact that during His life He would have
gone through times perhaps of suffering, it is focusing on the ultimate
suffering that he went through on the cross. And he was “acquainted with
grief.” The word translated “grief” often has the idea of physical sickness.
The same word is in verse 4. Then at the end of verse 5 it says “by His
scourging we are healed.” There is terminology here that makes it sound like
physical healing of sickness. The Hebrew word has that nuance. It is roughly
equivalent to the New Testament word asthenes
[a)sqenhj] which is frequently translated “illness” or
“sickness,” but it is also translated “weakness” many times in the New
Testament because the core meaning has something to do with weakness or
inability. In the Old Testament the word is also used to relate to a calamity
or judgment of God. But it has a core meaning of someone who is weak, and that
can mean in context somebody who is weak physically, and thus it comes to mean
someone who is ill or sick—or weak spiritually and thus it is dealing with a
sin problem. So context is going to determine how this word is understood.
There are some who say that
Jesus died so we can be healthy. This is what the health and wealth evangelists
on television go to, the so-called prosperity gospel crowd. These words for
sickness and infirmities are talking about the result of cause. But the
concrete term here that is not a figure of speech are the terms that we find
for sin—iniquity, transgression, and sin. So when there is a word that is broad
and can go in one of two directions and is used in synonymous parallelism, a
narrower word, you have to look to the narrower word to define the broader
word. The broader word can refer to spiritual sickness or sin or physical
sickness, and since it is used in conjunction with terms that are related
specifically to sin then it has to be understood in that sense.
Verses 4-6 help us to
understand the core of what He does. This is poetry. Much of prophecy is
written as poetry and that is also important to understand because in poetry
language is used in a more figurative sense than in historical narrative or
legal language. Even a lot of historical literature in the Old Testament is
written in poetry. So language has a little bit of a looser sense to it in
poetic language.
We focus on the fact that we
have the contrast between “he,” a masculine singular pronoun, and a first
person plural pronoun “our”—he versus our. “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities.” The
sense here is clearly that of substitution, that something happens to Him not
because of what He has done but because of what others have done, and He
suffers in their place.
Isaiah 53:4 NASB “Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our
sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and
afflicted.
Jeremiah 6:7 uses this term again NASB
“… Sickness [grief] and wounds are ever before Me.”
The sickness and the wounds are the result of what happens in the previous
line, “Violence and destruction are heard in her.” What causes the violence and
destruction? It is in the line before that—wickedness. So this is a figure of
speech in Isaiah 53:4, “He has borne our griefs and
carried our sorrows.” The griefs and the sorrows are
the result of something else, and that something else is the sin that is the
ultimate cause of the sickness.
If an employer is approached by someone, maybe a homeless person who is hungry, for a job and that employer gives them a job and he says: “I will take away your hunger.” That doesn’t mean the employer is saying he is going to feed that person but he is going to pay him for the work done and from the pay that the individual receives he will be able to buy food. So when the employer says he will take away the person’s hunger he is, using the same figure of speech, saying he is going to produce the results, but actuality what he is going to do is produce the cause of the result. These rods “grief” and “sorrow” are talking about the end results. The other implication of that is that Christ take scare of everything from A to Z; A meaning the cause of all of the suffering and sin in the world as well as removing all of the results, i.e. the sin and suffering in the world.
So in the verse part of the verse where we see the
suffering servant, here is one who carries and takes away the result of sin. It
has that strong nuance from the Day of Atonement passages, words related to the
ritual of
It is so interesting how we as human beings jump to the conclusion when somebody is going through hard times that God is punishing them. That is what Job’s three friends were trying to convince Job of, but that wasn’t true. We have such a superficial view of suffering. So that is their view. They looked at Him, He is rejected, not accepted as the Messiah. God must be punishing Him is their thinking and therefore they thought of Him as one stricken, who had been physically hit by God. God is the one who had rejected Him and allowed Him to go through this suffering. The word translated “stricken” is a word that can mean someone who has been hit with a disease. It is used, for example, of Miriam being struck with leprosy in Numbers 12:9, 10 and also King Uzziah who was king at the early stage of Isaiah’s time of ministry. 2 Kings 15:5. It has the idea of someone afflicting somebody with something. The word for “smitten” means someone who is killed—hit to kill. There is a clear sense here that this suffering servant is going to die. That is embedded in the meanings of these words. He is smitten by God; God is the ultimate one who allows Him to be crucified. As Peter says, “God delivers Him over.” That is God’s plan.
The responsibility for the death of Christ isn’t the Jews, it is the human race. There were many Jews who believed in Him as Messiah and there were Romans as well as Jews who were responsible for His crucifixion. But ultimately God allowed it because He had a plan to accomplish redemption and there needed to be a sacrifice, a punishment that was substitutionary. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, had to die as the punishment for the sins of the world. So He is smitten ultimately by God and He is afflicted, i.e. degraded, humiliated, oppressed. This is all of the mockings, the beatings, the scourging that took place with His arrest.
The next verse focuses on His substitutionary work. Isaiah
53:5 NASB “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was
crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our
well-being {fell} upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.
There are four sets of word pairs in the
verse. It is Hebrew poetry, which doesn’t rhyme words, it rhymes ideas. Here we
have a synonymous parallelism. We understand these two words, “wounded” and “crushed”
[bruised], because they are in synonymous parallelism. There are two different
words for sin here: transgressions and iniquities. There are two different
words for punishment: chastisement and scourging [stripes]. And there are two
different words for the solution: peace and heal. The healing isn’t referring
to a physical healing from a disease; that becomes clear from other words in
the passage.
The first word “wounded” is the Hebrew chalal and it means to be fatally pierced through. This
is not talking about the spear of the Roman soldier that John records. That was
to reveal that Jesus had died by that point because the blood had separated
into the red blood cells and the lymph and that indicated that death had
already occurred. He was pierced by the nails that were driven through His wrists
and ankles.
He was “crushed,” Heb. daka,
a word that is translated pulverised, broken in pieces. The noun form relates
to dust. It indicates how He dies. These words when applied to a human indicate
death. Cf. Ezekiel 28:9 and 32:26. He is not just someone who suffers for
others; He is going to die for others. But He dies specifically for their sins:
their transgressions and their iniquities.
The first word translated sin is the
Hebrew word pesha, meaning transgression. The
idea of a transgression is someone who has violated a command, someone
ultimately who has rejected the authority of someone else and has rebelled
against that authority. It is interesting that when it is used in contexts not related to
God it relates to violating property rights of others. This once again an affirmation
that the Bible clearly affirms the right to own property, the right to enjoy
the benefits of that property, and the right to use that property under the
authority of God and not for the government to come in and tax it confiscatorially, which is what we have today when the
government and people in government think that they have a right to our
property simply because they are the government. That is completely unrecognised
by God as a right of government. So this is a key word there and it means the
rejection of God’s authority and going our own way against God. The second word
“iniquities” is the Hebrew word aven meaning
an infraction and it has the idea of crookedness, of something that is
distorted, perverse, and something that is iniquitous. We see these words used
in relation to Leviticus 16 which is about the Day of Atonement. See Lev. 16:14-24.
The words iniquities, transgressions and sin are mentioned several times on the
Day of Atonement and several times in Isaiah 53, which shows that this has a
ritual connection that is connecting what the servant does with what is done by
the high priest on the Day of Atonement.
The servant can’t be
The “chastisement” in Isaiah 53:5 refers
to a legal punishment, discipline. The stripes or scourging refers to the
whipping or being beaten. And as a result of that we have peace with God—shalom,
used of the peace offering; healing, rapha, is
often used to describe the healing of a relationship with God; primarily for healing
of disease but it also has a spiritual sense.
Why is this necessary? Isaiah 53:6 NASB
“All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way …”
Sheep can’t take care of themselves and they all just wander off on their own
with no thought for safety, and they would die without a shepherd. The
existence of sheep is the greatest argument against Darwinian evolution that
you will see. According to Darwinian evolution sheep evolved a long time before
there was anybody to take care of them. Sheep have to be watched over and taken
care of, and we are the same way. In contrast: “… But the LORD
has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him.
As a result of this: Isaiah 53:7 NASB
“He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth; Like a
lamb that is led to slaughter, And like a sheep that is silent before its
shearers, So He did not open His mouth.
Isaiah 53:8 NASB “By oppression
and judgment He was taken away …” Jesus was arrested the night before He went
to the cross as He was praying with His disciples in an olive grove across the Kidron Valley, a place where there was a huge olive press.
Isaiah 53:9 NASB “His grave was
assigned with wicked men [plural], Yet He was with a rich man [singular] in His
death …” When He does He is with two criminals, and when they bury Him they
bury Him in a grave belonging to Joseph of Arimathea
who was a wealthy Pharisee, a secret believer in Jesus as the Messiah. Then we
get His character analysis: “Because He had done no violence, Nor was there any deceit in His mouth.
Isaiah 53:10-12 NASB “But the LORD
was pleased To crush Him, putting {Him} to grief; If He would render Himself
{as} a guilt offering, He will see {His} offspring, He will prolong {His} days,
And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.