Isaiah 53:1-12

This prophecy of the Suffering Servant, or the Sin-Bearing Servant as the New King James has it in my Bible, is an obvious prophecy of Jesus Christ offering Himself as our atoning sacrifice, shedding His innocent blood to pay for the sins of all those who come to believe in Him and then bearing them away. This passage, this 12, 13, 14, 15 verses here, links Leviticus 16 with the Gospels, and with Romans 3 and Romans 5, and the book of Hebrews and lot of other places in the New Testament. And they and others all testify that Jesus is our sacrifice for sin. The one who gave Himself so that we can be clean.

Now a careful reading of especially verses 4 through 12 here, upholds what it says in Leviticus 16 about the sacrifice coming in two distinct parts, like the two goats. For instance, verse 10 tells us specifically that His life, or His soul, as it says in in the New King James, was made an offering for sin. That was the life that was extinguished when He shed His blood, when the first goat was killed as the offering for sin. While verse 7 compares Him to a lamb led to the slaughter. He was the Lamb of God, of course.

Verse 8 He says that He died for the transgressions of His people, for all Israel, for spiritual Israel. Verse 9 verifies He was sinless. He did not do any violence, He spoke no deceit. It is a poetic way to say He did not sin. He did nothing wrong. And verse 6 says that God laid on Him all our iniquities.

So that is the first goat, the first part. What about part two?

Well, verse 11 tells us that He bore the iniquities of those He will justify. They were placed upon Him to be borne away. And verse 12 repeats it saying that He not only bore the iniquities of those who you will justify, but He bore the sins of many.

So we have these two major activities contemplated in the supreme sin offering: the shedding of an innocent sacrifice's blood in death and the bearing away or removal of the sins. Jesus Christ performed both parts through shedding His blood in sacrifice and removing human sin in His death. He bore them to the grave and they are gone.

Isaiah 53:1-12

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."