Jesus, Our Suffering Servant

Jesus was also called “a man of suffering” (v. 3), deeply acquainted with every misery of the human race. Day after day he would stand and heal a river of suffering people one at a time (Matt 4:24; 12:15; etc.). Like a hiker who sees a friend bitten by a rattlesnake and who immediately sucks the poison out of his leg with his own mouth, so Jesus “bore our sicknesses” (v. 4). Jesus physically healed every disease he encountered, but that was also a picture of the deeper spiritual healing Jesus came to do. For we were “dead in [our] trespasses and sins in which [we] previously lived” (Eph 2:1), and Christ has borne our sicknesses and carried our pains. The word bore gives us the picture of a mighty Samson, who picked up the gates of Gaza and carried them to the top of a mountain (Judg 16:1-3). Jesus is mightier than Samson, carrying our sins up Golgotha.

So Jesus’s central mission was not to perform temporary healings for people who would later die anyway. Many preachers have misread Isaiah 53:4-5 and concluded that Christ’s atonement guarantees physical healing in this present age if we have faith to believe it. Rather, Christ’s mission was to die on the cross as a substitute for the sins of his people, winning eternal life in a future world where disease and death will be abolished forever. Jesus’s death would be misunderstood by onlookers, who would assume that he was dying for his blasphemy. “But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him, and we are healed by his wounds” (v. 5). Four great assertions of substitution in one amazing verse! “He” and “we” are continually in view: our sins, his suffering. The transfer of guilt—this is the essence of substitutionary atonement, and without it, we have no salvation. Note our condition: steeped in rebellion and iniquities, deserving a death penalty, at war with God, needing deep healing. All of our shortcomings were transferred to Christ at the cross. And note the specific word pierced in verse 5. This is a word whose force cannot be evaded, for three times in prophecy the idea of the piercing of Christ is asserted (Ps 22:16; Zech 12:10). Jesus’s punishment wins us peace with God (Rom 5:1). And the wounding of Christ heals us perfectly and eternally from all the damage sin has done. This healing comes in stages: justification then sanctification then glorification. Only in our future resurrection and our life in the new heaven and new earth will our healing be complete.

Verse 6 captures in picturesque language our continual sheeplike wandering in sin; the essence of it is a determined pursuit of “our own way” in everything we do. Christ paid the penalty for that wandering.

Isaiah 53:7-9

The words oppressed and afflicted (v. 7) speak of Christ being overpowered like the Hebrews were when the Egyptians enslaved them ruthlessly. So we see this in Jesus being beaten to a bloody pulp, spat on, mocked with the crown of thorns and purple robe, led through the public streets of Jerusalem, screamed at by the crowd, stripped, and nailed, lifted up, crucified, in agony. “Oppressed and afflicted” describes the single greatest display of human injustice in all history. Yet amazingly, it is also the greatest display of God’s justice in all history:

God presented [Christ] as an atoning sacrifice . . . to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be righteous and declare righteous the one who has faith in Jesus. (Rom 3:25-26; emphasis added)

In other words: God would rather slaughter his own beloved Son than allow guilty sinners like us into heaven unatoned for! There has never been a greater display of God’s justice in all history, nor of humanity’s injustice.

Yet in all of this human injustice, Jesus did not open his mouth; he remained silent and accepted the punishment because, as our substitute, he was acting as if he were truly guilty. Were we judged, we could not answer God once in a thousand times (Job 9:3). So Jesus’s silence and his meekly following his captors to his own execution (though he could have destroyed them all in an instant) speaks powerfully of his willingly laying down his life for us all. Unlike a dumb animal that has no idea what is about to happen, Jesus made a conscious decision to die for us, and thus his work was declared “one man’s obedience,” that of a new Adam, by which the disobedience of the former Adam was overwhelmed (Rom 5:19).

Isaiah 53:8-9 also asserts that this Suffering Servant would actually die for the sins of his people. He was “cut off from the land of the living” and “assigned a grave with the wicked.” From the garden of Eden, God established that the “wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), and only by dying could our substitute pay the just penalty for our sins. Verse 9 also asserts that Jesus would die an innocent man. Peter cited this verse to proclaim Jesus’s sinlessness: “He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth” (1 Pet 2:22). If Jesus had not been sinless, suffering in our place would not have accomplished anything. Finally, verse 9 also predicts Jesus’s burial in the tomb of a rich man, fulfilled when Joseph of Arimathea buried him with royal treatment in his own new tomb (John 19:38-41). These details cannot be explained away, and they completely preclude the “Israel is the Suffering Servant” interpretation.

Isaiah 53:10-12

In verse 10 we come on the deepest and most mysterious aspect of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus—the Father’s pleasure in the crushing of his Son and making him suffer. This is an infinitely sublime concept, for any human father who delighted in crushing his own son would be accounted as the vilest monster. But Scripture teaches us that the love God the Father has for his only begotten Son is so fierce and powerful that the blazing of the sun cannot touch it for intensity. The best explanation of this is Jesus’s own attitude toward the cross in Hebrews 12:2: “For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame.” The delight of the Father in Isaiah 53:10 is the same as the joy of the Son in Hebrews 12:2—not the cross itself but the glory it would win for God and the salvation it would work for a multitude greater than anyone could count from every nation on earth (Rev 7:9). The actual torture of Jesus was an agony beyond measure for the Father, as he showed by darkening the skies eerily and by shaking the ground when his Son died. This was immeasurable pain, followed by infinite pleasure and joy.

And the results of this agony are clear: “seed,” children for Abraham and for God. This is “the Lord’s pleasure [that] will be accomplished” (v. 10). I picture the Father having composed a magnificent violin concerto with every note penned by his sovereign will then handing it to his skillful Son who played it to perfection, filling the world with a music so sublime we will be melting to its melody for all eternity. And despite all the anguish of his soul (v. 11), Jesus would see the final success of God’s plan and be deeply satisfied with what he achieved. For by his death Jesus has justified the ungodly (v. 11; Rom 4:5). In Isaiah 53:12 the link between Jesus’s atoning death and his constant intercession is made clear—those Jesus died for he also prays for. The image of Jesus at the right hand of God interceding for us (Rom 8:34) is comforting to us who still battle constantly against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The section ends where it began, exalting Jesus Christ. God assigns to Jesus the elect from the whole earth as the “spoil” he has plundered from his enemy. And those saved souls will spend eternity bowing their knees before Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father.

This chapter builds faith in those who hear it all over the earth, if God wills to reveal Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. The fact that it speaks so plainly of Christ’s substitutionary death seven centuries before Christ is evidence of the supernatural origin not only of the book of Isaiah but, indeed, of the whole Bible. So this has evangelistic and apologetic power; we should quote its details to lost people. We should also build our own faith in Jesus daily by pondering Isaiah 53:5-6. This will humble us and also exalt us.

We should find eternal security in these few verses as well, for God made a plan for our salvation before the foundation of the world and predicted it clearly through Isaiah. Jesus achieved it two thousand years ago. And Jesus is at the right hand of God, interceding for us until we are at last with him in heaven.

We should use this chapter as grounds for personal and corporate worship. Hymn writers should continue to do what they’ve been doing for twenty centuries—using the ideas from these fifteen verses to write new hymns of praise to God.

Finally, we should seek by the Spirit to imitate Christ’s full obedience to the Father, for though we will not be called on to die a substitutionary death for anyone, yet our service in taking the gospel to the ends of the earth will require a similar taking up of our cross daily and following Jesus.