Isaiah 53 - Believe It Because God's Pundit Said So!

Concerned citizens pay considerable attention to media personalities.  We listen to pundits when we are not quite sure what to think or believe ourselves.  There are two types.  One commentator tells us what we want to hear, only amplifying our deepest values, fears, and hopes.  Another commands our ear because he or she has built up a reputation of being right over and over again.  Even when we may not like what they are saying, something inside us cries out, “Stop!  Look!  Listen!”

Long before our modern media-driven age, people cared as much as they do today.  Back then the pundits were prophets.  These ancient men of God knew their times.  They observed the world around them.  They were not people pleasers.  But they did possess insight.  The prophet Isaiah was such a one.  He lived 700 years before the birth of Jesus.  Isaiah observed peace and war, success and failure, lust and contentment, generosity and selfishness, evil and good, and came to the conclusion that the world’s people bring suffering upon themselves. This sad state of affairs will never end, unless . . . . .

Unless God himself solves the suffering for us!  On the surface such an idea is preposterous.  After all, we humans create suffering.  We think, act, and speak contrary to our own best interests.  Isaiah observed this in his rulers, his neighbors and in himself.  Do good?  Be good?  We can’t.  We won’t.  We never will!  Not wholly.  Not consistently.  Not to the point of removing all that is wrong with this world of ours.

As preposterous as it must have sounded to the people who first heard it, Isaiah laid out for the human race a “suffering, substitutionary, saving scenario.”   You will find it in the middle one-third of the central one-third of a perfectly constructed 3x3x3, 27-chapter conclusion to his long 66-chapter book of prophecy.  The artful positioning of Isaiah, chapter 53, calls attention to itself like a giant exclamation point. 

Isaiah wrote as follows.  God’s Chosen One would have “nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”  He would be “despised and rejected by men.”  Yet “the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  He would be “stricken by God,” “pierced for our transgression,” and “crushed for our iniquities.”  He would “carry our sorrows” because the Lord “laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  By bearing the “sins of many,” he would declare the many “not guilty” in God’s eyes. 

Chapter 53 begins with the startling words, “who has believed our message?”  Isaiah knew that the initial reaction of those who read his prophecy of hope would be unbelief.  So what did Isaiah do?  He wove into his scenario the unbelievable!  God’s coming Savior would be both “numbered with transgressors,” yet be buried with the rich.  He would really and truly die, yet in the end see the light of life.   

Seven hundred years passed between the writing of Isaiah 53 and the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  The one crucified between two criminals was laid in the tomb of the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea!  Jesus would be seen physically alive three days after the disciple John saw blood and water leaking from lifeless corpse of his teacher!  Isaiah commands our attention because what he prophesied came true, even down to the most improbable of details.  Something inside us cries out, “Stop!  Look!  Listen!” 

Your life—now and forever—is all about Jesus!  Believe what Isaiah prophesied to be true!

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