These two passages that I have just read may be the clearest statement of Christ's redemptive mission in the whole Bible. Once you connect Christ with the suffering Servant, it becomes so clear. So many prophecies were fulfilled in what He did at Golgotha. Isaiah 53 focuses on the suffering and His sorrow leading to His death, along with taking on Himself the wrath of God in the form of our sins and bearing them and making intercession for us.
I want to draw your attention to verse 5, the phrase, "the chastisement for our peace was upon Him." Just kind of single this out. It may be a little bit unclear what is being spoken about here and I thought I would try to clarify it. We can paraphrase (I was going to say translate) this particular clause to mean or to read, "God disciplined Him to bring us peace." Or we could say, "God chastised Him," God spanked Him, God gave Him discipline for our well-being. Or another way to think of the concept of peace here is that He was chastised. He was given the sentence in our stead and made to suffer to restore us to wholeness. It is parallel to the next clause, "by His stripes, we are healed." It really gets to the point that when we sin, we are wounded, we are sick and we need healing. And God allowed Jesus Christ to be the object of His wrath to help restore us to good health, to well-being.
So He did not just restore sinners to legal innocence, if you will, and remove their guilt. But He did the major work of restoring their ability to have a relationship with God. See, that was the missing part of it. They can have peace but only when Jesus took their sins and God granted that sacrifice, the ability by grace to cover our sins.
The Creator God's blood shed for all of us was worth more than what was required to cover the sins of mankind. And so God said, "Okay, I am satisfied. We can have peace now. The guilt is removed. But only for those who believe."
These verses contain two references to the second function prefigured in the azazel and performed by the Messiah, that of bearing sin. As it says in Leviticus 16:22, the azazel was to bear on itself all the iniquities of the people. Its primary role was bearing sins as a substitute. Verse 11 teaches that justification results from the Messiah bearing iniquities. Verse 12 uses the prophetic past-tense, saying that the Messiah bore the sins of many. When this prophecy was given, His work was as good as done. Here are two more clear scriptures about Christ that directly link to the role of the azazel. We are already on our third witness of a Messianic fulfillment of the azazel.
We went through the scriptural fulfillment of the azazel last time, so I will just mention the verses. These all correspond with what happens with the live goat:
This is how sins are removed - through Jesus Christ becoming sin and being separated from the Father for what must have seemed like eternity. Like the first goat, His sacrifice opened the way into the Holy of Holies. His sinless blood has given us access to and satisfied the Most High God. Like the second goat, Jesus also bore our sins. Through piercing, bruising, and wounding while hanging on a tree for hours outside the gate, our transgressions are removed as far as east is from the west (Psalm 103:12).
