4-Day Commentary Challenge - Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Exemplo

    

THE SERVANT EXALTED

The first paragraph really gives us a summary of the whole prophecy. At the beginning Jehovah calls upon men to look upon His Servant:

Behold, My servant will prosper, He will be high and lifted up, and greatly exalted. (52:13)

This looks beyond the suffering to the glorious exaltation described in Philippians 2:8–11. The suffering must come first, however: 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. (v. 14)

How can one read of the torture inflicted upon the “holy, harmless, undefiled” Son of God and Son of man without being moved? Such torture, as described in Matthew 26:67, 68, and 27:27–30, was to bring actual disfigurement to that unique countenance, such disfigurement as to cause great amazement. The suffering becomes marvelously the pathway to glory. Amazement at His disfigurement is turned into wonder at His grace:

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. (v. 15)

THE SERVANT DESPISED

The Jews are right in considering this as a prophecy of Israel, but they have Israel cast in the wrong role. This is a picture of the nation of Israel in its future national Day of Atonement (cf. Zech. 12:10) when the people will at last recognize and acknowledge the Lord Jesus as the Messiah. This is the prophetic presentation of their musings at that time. They cannot comprehend the reality all at once. Who would have believed it, they say, that this “tender shoot,” this “root out of parched ground,” this undesired One, this despised and rejected One is really the Messiah after all! They are not referring to a report that they have made, but to a report that came to them. In this exclamatory question they admit their former unbelief: Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? (53:1)

The lowliness of the Lord Jesus is described. While there is reason to believe from other passages of Scripture that the win- some character of the Lord Jesus appealed even to some of the most hopeless of men, yet this prophecy makes clear that which some Christians have not yet fully comprehended, that the Lord Jesus Christ did not appear in such a way as to attract the natural man. While the power of His deity was evident on occasion, there was no mere glamor about Him. He lived His earthly life in humble circumstances, not in worldly pomp. The natural mind is all too ready to construe meekness as weakness and to waste its adulation on the proud and self-seeking. “No beauty that we should desire him” (v. 2) is the contemptuous but almost universal verdict, except of those whom the Father in His grace drew toward His beloved Son (John 6:44).

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. (v. 3)

It seems inconceivable to some that the Lord Jesus should be so despised. Here and there were the comparatively few disciples, the godly women who ministered to His needs, the Roman centurion, the Syro-Phoenician woman. But the great mass was ready to cry out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Many who followed Him and thronged about Him in His ministry were only eager to see some exciting miracle or to eat of the miraculously provided loaves (John 6:26). It is so even today. Many who prate at length of the “lowly Nazarene” as a great teacher and good man speak only in hollow mockery. When the issue is joined, when the truths of the gospel are considered, when His deity and substitutionary atonement are in question, then these too despise and reject Him. Who can estimate the guilt of the self-righteous religious leader who sneers at the precious blood of Christ?

There is an important lesson in this for believers. Why should we seek the approval of a world that despises our Lord? Why should we desire acceptance by men who reject Him?

Someday the godly remnant of Israel will be sorry for this rejection; someday they will turn in real repentance to Him.