Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Isaiah 53:2 For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him.
OUR LOWLY SACRIFICE
When we first bought our house I transplanted some lilac bushes around the back of the yard. We wanted to have something like a hedge all the way around the yard so I planted the bushes a couple feet apart and waited for them to grow in between the bushes. After a while the seedlings began to sprout up between the bushes I had planted. But I had to be careful, because it was easy to mow over the seedlings with the lawn mower when I was cutting the grass.
This is the picture that Isaiah uses to describe the Savior of the world: "For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground." At first that may seem strange. Jesus, a tender plant? Jesus would appear unexpectedly and be unnoticed to the people around him. He wouldn't be some well known prince whom everyone was expecting to become King. He was an unlikely Messiah, the kind of person people weren't looking for and didn't expect. The Savior was to come from the seed of David, but the long line of kings following David had long since dried up and shriveled away. From this dry ground the long awaited Savior would come -- in God's perfect timing.
Who would this Servant be? He would be a nobody. The NKJV has, "He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him." This Savior would be so simple that the world would look right over Him without even seeing Him. He was not what they were looking for. Even some of the disciples had this same first impression. When Philip came to tell Nathanael about Jesus, Nathanael asked, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
Isaiah prophesied about the person and the work of the Servant of the LORD so that they could take comfort in the assurance that their salvation was coming, and so that they would know what to look for. For us, living after the time of Jesus, it is a reminder that our salvation has come, and through whom it has come. Many people still overlook Jesus as their Savior, but through faith, we know that with the words of that tender plant, "It is finished." God's plan of salvation for us was completed. Jesus was our Lowly Sacrifice! 