Monday, April 10, 2017
Isaiah 53:3 …He is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him. He was despised and we did not esteem Him.
THE SUFFERING SERVANT OF THE LORD (1)
For Holy Week 2017, we turn to this great chapter of Holy Scripture, Isaiah 53, to behold THE SUFFERING SERVANT OF THE LORD.
We need to be careful about romanticizing the scenes of the Passion history. Most depictions of the Savior in Gethsemane have Him kneeling in prayer, with folded hands resting on a rock, with a beautiful, flowing robe. Not very realistic, when we think of the Gospel record telling us that Jesus fell on His face, His spirit and soul in great distress, sweat like drops of blood pouring from Him. He was suffering more as a worm than a man.
Isaiah describes the SERVANT OF THE LORD as a "man of sorrows." Fitting, for every stop along the way, grief, sorrow, suffering characterized Him. After being taken captive in the Garden, He was brought before Annas, then to Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, back again to Pilate, then out to Golgotha, and finally to the cross. And what was it all? All along the way, suffering, anguish, pain of body and of soul.
With that, what this classic chapter from Isaiah, "the Old Testament evangelist," makes powerfully clear is that everything the Savior endured was on account of our sins, to rescue and redeem us from the consequences we deserved! With Paul Gerhardt we unworthy ones, therefore, rejoice to sing:
A Lamb goes uncomplaining forth,
The guilt of all men bearing;
And laden with the sins of earth,
None else the burden sharing!
Goes patient on, grows weak and faint,
To slaughter led without complaint,
That spotless life to offer;
Bears shame, and stripes, and wounds and death,
Anguish and mockery, and saith,
"Willing all this I suffer."
(TLH 142:1)
