The Wounds of God - March 8, 2015 - Isaiah 53
Do you ever feel you're just scraping by in this life? I don’t just mean financially, although that is an issue as well. But scraping by…because of our wounds. Because of being paralyzed by our fears.
We’re racked with doubts about ourselves, our friendships. We’re scraping by because life has broken us, we sense. Loss that we’ve known has left us lost.
We bear physical wounds from evil done to us. We bear the scars of guilt because of evil we have done to others. We live with diseases, or we live with the knowledge that disease has taken someone we were close to away from us forever. Or we live with the fear of disease.
We live our lives in a bubble, perhaps rarely allowing even those closest to us to truly get close enough to know us. Our experiences have diminished us.
We look at children and on the occasions when we remember we were children once, we wonder at how we got to here from there. Once we were free, carefree and alive. Now, it’s all about scraping by.
We’re continuing our journey through Lent, the period of time leading up to Easter Sunday, and the message today is entitled: “The Wounds of God”.
We’re going to be exploring Isaiah 53, about The Suffering Servant, our Saviour Jesus Christ, and how and why it is that He came to us, and why it is that 2000 years later, Jesus is still so important, still so central to the lives of soooo many people, still inspiring places like the Yonge Street Mission to reach out to the hurting in His name.
So let's begin by considering the bigger picture of Who God is, and of what He accomplished in coming to us in Jesus Christ.
God Was Safe and Away from All Alarm
The God of Creation, the great Healer, the Almighty and Everlasting One lived entirely above all human suffering.
We understand that God is Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That by itself, the very nature of God, is less a tough theological or philosophical thing to get our heads around than it is just the recorded revelation of the Bible.
We can say: “I have trouble understanding or believing the Trinity, and we can think to ourselves then that it can’t be true until we understand it.
Or we can read the text and see that revealed in it is the fact of the oneness of God and the divinity of the Father, The Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Anyway, God was in a sense unaffected directly by the condition of humanity. To summarize an enormous story, just for the purposes of this message, we’ve seen from our exploration of the book of Genesis in recent months how God interacted with Adam and Eve, giving them the Garden of Eden and then, when they broke faith with Him, expelling them from the garden.
We’ve seen how God dealt with Cain over his murder of his brother Abel, with the horrific wickedness in the world that led to the Flood, and then God’s covenant with Noah to never again let the waters become a flood to destroy all life.
We’ve seen how God confounded the language of the people of Babel who sought to build a tower that reached into the heavens.
What we haven’t explored in detail yet this year is God’s dealing with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That’s a remarkable narrative that we’ll hopefully get to later this year.
But the end of the story of Jacob is the beginning of the story of God’s people in Egypt. At first, they did well in Egypt.
They were favoured by the Pharaoh. But then time went on and a new Pharaoh arose who began to fear the sheer volume of the people of Israel. And they were put to hard labour, slaves every one of them. And they began to cry out to God for deliverance.
God Starts to Hear Our Cry, Heals and Delivers from Afar
The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey...
And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.” Exodus 3:7-10
So, to be really brief, God delivers the people from bondage in Egypt. He delivers them miraculously out of the hand of their slave masters. They are set free. Finally, after 400 years of oppression. Free at last. But…there’s a problem. They are free in one sense, but in another, much deeper sense, they are still not free at all.
Why Are We Free But Still in Bondage?
In a sense, the rest of the history of God’s chosen people, which is incredibly fascinating: I really hope you spend the time to become familiar with their story, which is uncannily very much like our personal stories in many ways - the rest of the history of God’s people can be understood in these terms.
God set them free from external bondage to Egypt, but they were still not free. The external bondage they experienced in Egypt in a sense covered up a much deeper, much more problematic bondage.
It was a bondage to sin. A bondage to self. A deep, abiding allegiance to our own self-interest and pleasure, and a tepid, uneven relationship with God, where God keeps offering grace, extending mercy and love, and they/we ultimately rejected a relationship of love with God.
So the people were free in one way - no longer captives to Pharaoh, but they were mightily in bondage in another, much deeper way. Physical emancipation from slavery didn’t cut it, after all. What is to be done? What is to be done?
God Draws Near in Jesus
The way we approach problems or challenges is to look at a situation that is undesirable, consider what is a more desirable reality, and then strategize to fix the problem. Hopefully we come with the solution. If our best idea doesn’t work, then we try something else. If our solution to the problem creates other, worse problems, we try to fix those problems.
We can sometimes mistakenly apply human logic and human process to God. If we do that, we might think that God choosing to send Jesus was Plan B.
We might think that initially God hoped that the Garden of Eden would work out. When it didn’t He went into crisis mode, turfed them from the garden and hoped for some opportunity to fix the situation.
But it was God’s plan, from the beginning, to send Jesus to us, to deliver us from our sins. This touches on the Biblical view of God’s sovereignty.
God is omniscient - He knows everything, including past, present and future. And ultimately, He is in control of all things.
He gives us free will to choose, but He will ultimately be vindicated, and He knows far more than you or I will ever know.
[[[Scripture speaks of this, God’s sovereignty, all in one chapter of Ephesians. It talks about this personally, for each one of us AND for the church, because we are together the body of Christ, AND it talks about God’s sovereignty over EVERYTHING.
Personally/The Church as a Whole
Ephesians 1:4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace,which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
So, what this is getting at is that, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, that reality has much more to do with God’s calling you and pre-determining that you would become a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ, than it does that YOU chose Him.
We love Him because He first loved us. 1 John 4 19 We love because he first loved us. That means that God is sovereign in your life. He is in control. And you can trust Him to be faithful and good, all the time. Amen?
Globally, Universally
11 In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,12 in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. Amen.
God’s plan, God’s control and sovereignty, is over everything. The Good, and The Bad. The good is His direct and perfect will. The bad - this always amazes me - the bad God takes and makes it somehow, by His grace, work together for good.
Romans 8:28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.]]]
So it WAS God’s plan, from the beginning, to send Jesus to us, to deliver us from our sins. How could or how did the everlasting Creator, the sovereign Lord of the universe, the One with no limits to His power, become human?
I’m sure we will never know, except - should He choose to tell us - in glory. But if God is without limitation, and if God chooses to draw near to you, to draw near to us, to all humanity, then I suppose God can do what He will?
On this point, much of coming to accept the gospel is conceding that God is God and can do as God pleases.
So we don’t know how God drew near to us. We simply know the account of His incarnation - the way He chose to show up. In a manger. In a barn. In the humblest of ways, the glory of God is revealed in His matchless humility. God drew near to us in Jesus Christ.
God in Christ Bears All Our Suffering
So now we come to our passage, having laid some groundwork. Our passage today begins with a challenge in the form of a question: 1 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?.
So it kind of gets personal right from the outset. Who will believe? Who will come to see that the arm, the strength of the Lord has been revealed in the humility, the ‘weakness’ of Jesus Christ?
One of the things that is really fascinating about this passage, and many other prophetic passages in the Bible, is that of course: they are prophecies.
That means that the passages themselves look ahead, into the future, far outside the scope of what humans could possibly predict or understand about the future.
So, to understand what's happening in the passage we're looking at today, it's important to understand that Isaiah was not using his accumulated wisdom.
And he's not tapping into the knowledge of someone with a time machine kaleidoscope who is able to see what's coming down the pipes in the future. Isaiah is writing what God is telling him to write. Isaiah existed on the same plain as you and me. God, who exists above time, and who makes His plans from a place above time, saw that the Messiah was coming.
He not only saw that Jesus was coming, but the fact of Jesus’ coming to us on this planet was part of His sovereign plan from the very beginning.
So while Isaiah is recording the prophecy about the future that God is giving Him, God is merely dictating His plans that He has always had.
We’ve been looking at the book of Genesis this year, and we saw how even in the beginning, God lets us in on his plan. Speaking to Satan right at the point of the Fall, of Original sin in Genesis chapter 3.
There God says that He who would come forth from the woman that God made “will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. That’s another prophecy, written by Moses, of what was to come.
The season we are in is Lent, and Lent wraps up with Holy Week. The low point of Holy Week is Good Friday, when Jesus is crucified. On that day, it looked like Satan had won.
But on Sunday Jesus rose from the dead, defeating death, defeating Satan. Thus Jesus’ injury, after all was said and done, was inflicted on His one big weakness, His achilles’ heel if you will - His humanity.
But in defeating death, in His victory over Satan, Jesus crushed Satan’s head.
Let’s keep reading:
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
This speaks of Jesus infancy and childhood, the tenderness of youth. He grew us as one of us. He grew up without status, in a low condition. And in a way not agreeable to the ideas that those waiting for the Messiah had.
They thought He should come in pomp, in power, as a mighty warrior. Instead of that, he grew up as a plant, silently, and insensibly. He had nothing of the glory which one might have thought to meet with him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
So not only was the manner of Jesus coming unimpressive to those awaiting a mighty deliverer, He was, in the end, hated and turned down by those He came to save.
He was despised by the Pharisees who looked at the display of His power in His miracles, and who heard the wisdom of His teaching - He was hated so much that their best thinking was that He needed to die. So rejected was He that He was plotted against. That’s a pretty active rejection, not a mere turning of the back to someone.
And Jesus was a man of sorrows. He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand. In fact he was the taunted one. The bullied one.
We ended up hating him. Our Saviour knew what it was like to have people turn away, hide their faces. To Say “no!”. To say “I will follow you wherever you go”, only to be followed up in the next breath by “I swear I never knew the man!” To say “Hosanna” in one breath and “Crucify him!” in another.
The KJV says he was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”. I have to wonder if there’s not a terrible irony in that verse. A little dark humour.
Let’s be honest. It’s a terrible understatement to say that Jesus was acquainted with grief. Acquainted” means to know something or someone superficially - on the surface.
No one has suffered pain like Jesus suffered, no one has been more rejected, abused, neglected, despised than Jesus was and it was the world who rejected him. That means me. That means you. That’s the point.
I saw a T-shirt once that showed a picture of Jesus’ bloodied body on the cross with words that said,
“If I am alright and you are alright, then why did this happen”? Let’s continue.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
There’s a story about a young child who lay in hospital dying of cancer, withering away to nothing. Her family was devastated. Friends came, from church, from work...and tried to offer solace.
They tried but could only come up with unhelpful little sayings that didn’t begin to touch the pain the family felt. And then a man, an Elder, from the church came to visit.
He walked into the hospital room, didn’t say a word, sat down beside the girl, as a few members of the family gathered...and he wept. He wept for a good 15 minutes. Then he got up and left. The family said that this man offered them an amazing gift. He identified with their pain. He let it in. He let it in.
Our Saviour has offered us an unspeakable gift. By his own choice, when he didn’t need to, when he was seated at the right hand of God the Father, he came to us. And he came to us with an attitude - with an attitude worth considering:
“Being in very nature God, (Jesus) did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!”
Do not ever forget that even before he came to heal us, he came to suffer with us. Think about that. As we think about the healing that we each need most deeply, we need to remember that Jesus did not come firstly to put an end to suffering, but rather to fill it with His presence.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken. 9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
So...the Scripture here puts all of us on the same level. All of us us, without exception, have gone off track, we’ve gone astray. In going astray, in not living for God, we’ve turned to our own way.
But here is the amazing thing. Although it is we, me, us that have gone astray, that have sinned against God, that have offended Him in our treatment of Him and our treatment of others, it is not we who pay the price.
God put on Jesus all of our sin. He laid it all on Him. What I earned, my wages for sin, which is death, Jesus paid those wages. He was led as a lamb goes to His slaughter.
That phrase is no accident, and it can remind us of God plan from the beginning. Revelation speaks of “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world”. (Rev 13:8 KJV)
He didn’t defend himself. Notice it refers to His silence in the face of oppression. He didn’t speak to defend Himself. If He has spoken He wouldn't have defending Himself anyway.
He was defending me. He was defending you. In His silence, in His willingness to go to the cross, He was willing to be stricken for our sins, our transgressions.
10 Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. 11 After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light [of life] and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. 12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
All of this was God’s will. It was God’s plan, for Jesus to bear my sins, to stand in my place in judgment. If you are not impacted by this, I feel confident to say that you do not, actually, really, understand this.
If you have trouble believing this, then you're in the good company of all who have considered the gospel, everyone who has wondered at the power of the gospel story, who has struggled to imagine and come to terms with not only the details of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
But you’re also in the company of those who have struggled with the even more difficult idea behind the gospel: that you are loved so powerfully, so extravagantly by God, that you are so valuable and objectively your life matters so much to the Creator of the universe, that He would do all that He did in the gospel for you.
Even if much of what I've said today is hard to grasp, or if it's just really new to you, immensely harder is letting it in, letting it into your life.
You might be like me when I was, as I described at the beginning of this message, just scraping by. No sense of meaning or purpose to my life. My family broken up, parents apart. Struggling to find any meaning whatsoever to my life. Having given up in many ways.
Any then I heard about this fellow-sufferer, Jesus. I learned that He gave His life for me, that He died on the cross, He suffered because He loved me.
Because He wanted me to be forgiven of my sins. Because He wanted me to know how much I am loved, and to have that love proven.
I didn't really grasp much of the gospel at that point. I was raised by my parents outside of any knowledge of God, let alone trusting Him. But I was moved to learn that I was loved by God, and that if I would just trust Him, He would show Himself faithful and good in my life.
Why Are We Just Scraping By in This Life?
Scraping By is No Longer Necessary. The Power to Overcome Trials and Be Refined by Suffering is Ours in Christ.
I learned that far from my feeling before I believed, that my life didn't have any particular value or meaning, the opposite was true. I learned that God had a purpose for my life, and it wasn't to just scrape by.
I wasn't to just exist until I died. I learned that in Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant, my life was intended BY GOD to matter. He would give me the power to overcome trials in a very important way. He would place His Holy Spirit in me.
And He would give me the power to grow through suffering rather than being destroyed by it. God would now use my trials, my temptations, my sufferings to refine me to be more and more like Jesus. No more just scraping by.
So, this Lenten season, as we journey to the cross together, may we embrace the God who draws near to us in Jesus Christ, Who whispers to us that He has the power to deliver us from whatever bondages we face, and most importantly, from the slavery to sin that so robs us of all the joy God intends for us.
May we look to Him who bore our sufferings on the
cruel cross, no longer wondering: “Why do we suffer God?”, and instead understand that suffering will always happen in this fallen world, but that our own suffering is given consolation and meaning as we live in the truth that God is deeply present to us in our suffering, and means to use it to transform us into the likeness of Jesus. In His name we pray. Amen.
