Our Magnificent Substitute

So I'll begin reading in um chapter fifty-two, verse thirteen, and we'll read all the way through fifty-three.

Behold, my servant shall act wisely.

He shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.

As many were astonished at you, his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance and his form, beyond that of the children of mankind.

So shall he sprinkle many nations.

Kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which has not been told they see, and that which they have not heard, they understand.

Who has believed what he heard from us?

And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground, the servant had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hid their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.

Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that is before his shearers silent, so he opened not his mouth.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

And as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?

And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he'd done no violence and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him, to put him to grief.

When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring, and he shall prolong his days, for the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.

By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.

Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death, and he was numbered with transgressors.

Yet he bore the sin of many, and he makes intercession for the transgressors.

The word of the Lord.

You know his name, Rembrandt, and he just finished his last and most impressive painting of his lifetime.

This painting was not something small or timid.

It was on a canvas six feet by nine feet.

So the figures are really more than life size here.

And it depicts Jesus' moving parable of the prodigal son.

I was thinking about art and images, and I was thinking about what an image-saturated generation we are.

In our day, we barely give a passing glance to the images that come before us on our phones and all around us on billboards and in media.

And yet, this painting was meant to do something deeper.

It wasn't meant to merely showcase Rembrandt's skill, and he had great skill, but it was meant to do a work as we enter into the painting.

Rembrandt intended for us to see and feel a host of things that he worked hard and intentionally portrayed.

This kind of painting was meant for us to ask questions about and to look into the features of what he's written, or of what he's painted.

What's going on in the painting?

Who is this uh this figure in the center?

What why is lighting as it is?

Why is he all lit up?

Who is this ragamuffin that's at his feet?

And why is one shoe off?

Why are the central figures wearing red?

And who is this imposing figure on the right that's elevated above the old man?

And their faces.

I wish you could see them more closely.

The pained look on the father's face.

What emotion is in the other figure's face, the elder brother?

And can you see in the background, in the shadows, the other faces?

There are other figures, they're secondary figures in this painting.

The hands of the father, they're kind of strange.

One is one is larger than the other, one is masculine and one looks feminine.

What does all this mean for me?

Uh what does it mean for the world?

See, it's only as we ask these kinds of questions that this painting can deliver the blessing that it was designed to give.

Well, we're gonna look at a passage this morning that is a masterpiece par excellence.

It's not just any portrait, but it is a shocking portrait of the singular, most important figure in human history, the singular, most costly love in human history, one that has the highest relevance to each of us.

And I wonder if we think of Scripture in that kind of way as many portraits.

Portraits meant to do a work in us as we enter them.

See, just like Rembrandt had a design, so Isaiah the prophet, inspired by God, has a great design in his word picture, in his portrait of the suffering servant.

And he's inviting us to not merely take a quick glance at this or not to kind of meander through a gallery and move on to the next picture.

He wants us to stop and to enter this work and to courageously let ourselves be caught up in the questions that it raises.

And it will take courage to enter the questions of Isaiah's portrait.

Well, my goal this morning is to help us focus on a few of the more central questions from his portrait.

We'll look at uh first the central figure of the portrait.

Who is he and what has he done?

Then we'll spend a little time on the secondary figures in the portrait, namely, where are we in this picture?

And finally, I'd like us to look at the design of Isaiah's portrait.

What is God's intended takeaway?

Well, let's begin with the central figure of the portrait.

You can go ahead and take off the screen portrait.

In Isaiah's painting, there are figures at the very front, figures you're meant to see, and there are some in the back.

I'd like to set the stage a little bit before we begin to look at the central figure.

Isaiah wrote his book, his prophecy, around 700, 750 BC, 700 years before Christ.

And in his work, he presents many portraits.

And he has one theme in particular that of a theme of portraits that he presents that are called the servant songs.

There are four, maybe five of them, depending on how you count them, and they are very prominent songs or poems about a servant.

And that's all we know about this individual to start with.

He's just called a servant.

He's a mysterious figure.

He's meant to be.

Because he's not a contemporary man.

He's a future man.

And his identity would be known century later, but not in Isaiah's day.

Well, as we come to this, I'd like to, uh we're going to be looking at the fourth servant song, and it is the greatest of all the songs.

It is the most well-known, the most well-loved song, and for good reason.

As we begin asking the question, who is this central figure and what is said about him, the portrait actually begins with two contrary voices that move us in different directions.

It begins first with the voice of God in verse 13 of chapter 52.

God is speaking through Isaiah, and he says, Behold, my servant.

Behold, it's a look word, it's a word for the eye.

Behold, my servant.

He's going to act wisely.

He's going to prosper.

He is going to accomplish the purpose for which I've sent him.

And he is going to be high and lifted up, and he's going to be exalted.

So, wow, this word from God, we are expecting a very majestic, stately figure.

God goes on to say in verse 1 of 53 that this individual, this servant, was going to be God's saving power.

He was going to be the arm of the Lord to deal effectively with human rebellion.

Wow.

Can't you wait to see this guy?

What must he be like?

God's instrument to effectively deal with sin.

The arm of the Lord.

But in the midst of this, you have another voice.

More colors, if you will.

More paint that runs in a different direction.

And this is really what the people thought about this figure.

If you look in verses 2 and 3, the way this is summed up is he's not so impressive.

We would have thought God's saving power would have looked a little different than this portrait.

He actually reminds us of a kind of a sapling or a volunteer if you're a gardener.

It just kind of grows up out of dry ground.

I had a watermelon plant grow up between the cracks of my sidewalk this summer.

Just unwanted.

A sapling came out of dry ground.

He wasn't a tree, a stately cedar.

The people said he was unimpressive.

In fact, their assessment of him, a loser.

A loser.

This guy's got problems of his own.

He's a man of sorrows.

He is acquainted with grief.

The people dismiss him.

Dismiss him of no account.

They treat him like someone they don't even want to look at, right?

Think of how that works in your own soul with someone you really despise or have contempt for.

When you see their face, instinctively you turn away.

And finally, what the passage goes on to say is that they disgraced him all the way to the very end.

They let him die, identified with the wicked.

So what happened to this servant that created such opposing assessments?

And as we look into the passage, what we see is something very horrible happens to him.

And I'd like for you to just hear these words.

You could look at them later, but I'm not going to call the verses out.

But I want you to just hear what is said about this servant of the Lord.

He has borne our griefs.

He was stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.

He was pierced.

He was crushed.

He was chastised.

He was deeply wounded, afflicted, oppressed.

He was judged.

He was cut off from the land of the living.

He was stricken.

He was assigned to the grave with the wicked.

He was crushed.

He was brought to grief.

His soul was made to anguish.

He poured out his soul to death.

And he was numbered with transgressors.

We're told as well that what happens to him he doesn't deserve.

This servant is righteous, we're told.

This all was an injustice, in a sense.

From the human perspective, it was an injustice.

He didn't deserve it.

And yet there's something very amazing about this picture.

I hope we don't lose.

Here you have this righteous man who, if I could pick one word that would just describe him here, it would be the word marred.

He's a man who is marred at the deepest levels, outside and on the inside.

It's so unfitting for this man.

And yet, what he came to do, his maring was perfectly fitting.

Because we're told that he comes as a substitute.

We're told that he has come not to just suffer unjustly in a random human kind of way, but to suffer by design.

We're told that he actually volunteered and chose this path to be the servant of the Lord.

And that he put himself under this course.

And that he chose to be marred because he came to rescue people who were made beautiful, but who had become marred by sin.

Who had become so twisted and marred from our original design that we're scarcely identifiable anymore as men and women made in the image of God.

The brokenness and the twistedness of our souls and our heart and our world.

Just open a paper.

For God's sake, do you see the marring that is on this world?

It even extends to our bodies and our faces as we degenerate year after year after year physically.

We just ebb away.

Oh, how fitting.

A servant who comes to be the arm of the Lord and to deal with sin, but not to deal with it in a way that people would have expected.

But he already begins to show what he's doing by the very visual that we see of him.

One thing you need to catch in this passage is the language of substitution.

It's critical in this portrait.

It is as critical as identifying in Rembrandt who that old man is and who that son is.

You'll never enter into that work if you don't catch this.

You've got to catch that this servant stood in the place of sinners.

He stepped into their place.

And that his suffering and his injustice was really the justice of God that was due to them.

And he let it be poured out on him.

He took it.

And don't think that the mere external violence that you read in this passage is the whole of what happened to this servant.

It's really only a picture of what happened at the deepest levels.

You get a hint of this in the passage.

It's not unfolded in detail.

But we're told that it was the Lord's will to crush him.

We're told that he poured his soul out to death.

And death in its fullest form is to be forsaken completely by God.

This servant literally is forsaken by God on behalf of sinners, and in their place, he takes what they deserve.

He not only does that, but the passage goes on to say some things that help us understand some of the opening words of this passage, where human wisdom portrayed in Kings, who else would have wisdom in that day, their jaws on the ground.

There is astonishment, is the word that's used.

Because not only not only does this servant deal with sin this way, but he brings healing and peace to his people.

He wins our acquittal, it says in verse 11.

Many are going to be accounted righteous because of what he did.

Many, when they stand before the Lord someday, who are twisted and marred all their life, are going to be accounted righteous.

The charges are just going to be gone.

I visited with a number of people lately who have been under legal problems, and they've faced real charges.

And they had hearings, and one in particular I remembered was elated because in the hearing, some of their charges just went away.

In the American legal system, to expedite things, sometimes it's more beneficial to let things just go.

That's not how these charges went away.

But they went away at great cost.

And the real astonishing thing in this passage is what's behind the servant.

It's really the hidden figure in this passage.

It's the living God.

It's the living God who chooses to deal with sin in a remarkable way that cost him so deeply, it cost him everything.

And that brings us to a final thing under this first question of who is this guy and what did he do?

The true identity of the servant.

We're New Testament people.

We have sung amazing songs here this morning about the true identity.

We know it's Jesus.

We know from Scripture it's Jesus.

We know that in the days after Jesus ascended back into heaven, there was an African, for example, who was on a chariot, just riding along, and he must have been a God figure.

He had a scroll of Isaiah.

And guess what?

He's at this portrait.

And you know what the passage says?

It says a disciple of Jesus came along, came up in the cherry.

His name was Philip, and he starts asking questions.

You see, the African is asking questions.

He's entering the portrait.

And he says, Whose picture is this?

Who's Isaiah talking about himself or someone else?

In beginning with that passage, Philip talked to him about Jesus.

The love of God displayed in the Lamb of God.

The reason it cost God everything is because Jesus is no mere man.

He's the very Son of God, God of God, the eternal Son of God, who becomes one of us voluntarily.

And he enters human history and he allows himself to be a substitute, to stand in our place, and to win our release.

Well, we'll come back to some of the implications of that, but I want us to quickly look at the secondary figures in this portrait.

Namely, where are we?

If you really want to get all it's meant to be gotten in Scripture, pay attention to where you see yourself in Scripture.

You're really meant to ask that question.

Ask the Holy Spirit when you read Scripture to open your eyes to see yourself.

Well, this passage is no exception.

This passage is interesting because the voice of the passage goes to Isaiah.

He begins to speak, and he starts speaking in a different voice.

He starts using pronouns of plurality, of we, we, we, us, we.

He's including himself with his audience that's reading this.

He wants the listener, he wants the onlooker to identify with what he's saying.

I want you to look at verse six.

I really want to just focus my comments here on verse six.

One of the most profound statements in Scripture about who we are.

I love this verse.

God has just spoken to me through this verse over many weeks.

Kind of showing me who I am.

All we like sheep have gone astray.

We have turned everyone.

We have turned everyone to his own way.

To his own way.

I not a sheep farmer.

I've read about sheep.

I know they're skittish.

I know they they run from danger, they they run off.

They but I know they have an appetite.

They run to satisfy.

I I thought of my dog, Poppy, my wife's dog.

She's a in-the-house dog.

When she gets outside, Poppy goes her own way.

No amount of voice will veer her.

Her desire to smell, her desire to mark, her desire to relish and satisfy canine desires are powerful.

And she makes her way as she chooses.

Isn't that what we do?

You see, a way is a conduit.

Away is a way to something.

It's not the destination, it's moving somewhere.

And this passage says that every one of us are like sheep.

We're like poppy.

In this life, we're marred by our sin.

And we have these deep desires in us that move us on ways they're different from each other.

Paul's way is different than my way, maybe, and Mark's way and Julie's way.

But our ways have the same function.

Our ways are ways to make our lives work, to give ourselves some kind of meaning, to find significance and satisfaction, security.

Our ways are idols, our ways are medication.

Think of it how you like, but you have ways.

Oh, do I have ways?

We have ways.

And we turn to them.

And turn to them and turn to them.

And they're such hollow ways, aren't they?

They promise so much.

They promise so much.

Well, I want to move on to the design of the portrait.

What is God's intended takeaway here?

Isaiah is not just showcasing his literary skill.

I'm going to tell you it's going to be really easy to read this scripture like some others.

Fearful of the heart work that you're being invited to.

It's easy to do that.

And so you'll just glance it.

You won't look deeply.

It's going to also be easy for others to deal with this in a very academic way.

I'm going to master this passage.

And yet, in both of those kinds of ways, it's very possible that we don't enter the passage.

We don't let this thing impact us.

We don't face our fear of going in and seeing what it really has to say about us, what it has to say about this God who made us and what his design for us is, how amazing he is, and what the implications of that are for us.

Well, I'd like to just have two words about God's takeaway.

One word is be reconciled to God.

Some of you, I'm sure, are here today, and you're not reconciled.

To put this differently, you're not one of the benefactors of the substitute we read about in this passage.

Not yet.

But you can be.

You're being invited to be one.

Don't dismiss him.

Don't dismiss the images of his marred beauty.

Don't dismiss him because of the cultural opinions that he's a fraud.

May I remind you that this portrait was written 700 years before he was ever born?

That tells you something about this God who made us.

And think about your way.

Think about the way you're on.

Haven't you been on that way long enough?

How's that been for you?

How well has your way served you?

It's a dark way.

It's beat you bloody.

It's promised you everything, and you've received nothing.

Do you know your way will betray you in the end?

And the word is either the servant stands in our place and bears the just wrath of God, or we do.

And this passage gives us some language to begin to get a little flavor of what it would look like to face the wrath of God.

Don't put it off.

If you have eyes to see today, know that evil is going to be working against you to lead you to put that off, to lead you to move away from courage.

Have courage, face your fear, enter into this place.

What do you need to do?

You need to come and own.

Own your brokenness, own your sinfulness, own your iniquity, own your rebellion to God between you and he.

Own it to him.

And trust in his mercy, in the substitutionary work of the servant.

That's the way to be a beneficiary of this servant.

Come let us reason together, Isaiah says in another portrait.

Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow.

Though they're red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

Well, finally, one last short word.

Second hour, we'll have to get this longer.

I think it's more important than short, but too many of you here are reconciled.

What do you do with this passage?

I wonder how you connected with the words we sang this morning.

Many times I sit here unconnected.

It's me, it's not the worship leaders, it's just me.

My heart is it's just disconnected.

I'm a sheep.

I wander.

I've turned my own way lots of times.

But here's what I want to get at.

We start off with a good beginning.

We start off and we look at this portrait, we enter it and we think our work is done.

Yes, we're reconciled.

Our work is finished.

This portrait is meant to serve you every single day of the rest of your life.

In fact, you'll sabotage your way if you don't stay close to this portrait.

The truths of this portrait are food for your soul.

It's in this portrait, in ones like it in the Bible, where the love of God is powerfully portrayed for you, not on the basis of your merit or what you've done.

And that's where the rub begins to come in.

Because it turns out that many of our ways that we turn aside from at first to come right back into the house.

And we try to merit and earn our favor with God.

You do it, I know you do.

You do it in all kinds of subtle ways.

You won't come before God because you feel ashamed.

You might not even be aware that you're feeling ashamed.

You just know you feel crappy and yucky, and I just don't want to go there.

Because your disciplines haven't been enough.

Because you've had a week that's just been, I've gone my own way this week.

Wow.

We do that, don't we?

It twists our whole sanctification, our growth life gets twisted and marred and ruined in ways it shouldn't, in ways it doesn't have to, because we forget every day that we start in this very place.

We need the servant of the Lord.

The love of God for us, for us, for you, by name, was manifest in the Son of God.

And he took your shame and your sin.

You don't need to stay in hiding.

You can't merit favor with him or a better life by being moral.

Start here every day.

This is where the songs of our heart are going to come forth.

This is where the cries of our soul are going to come out to God when we sit at the cross.

Why do we have so many crosses?

Why do we never tired of presenting Jesus, his work for us?

Because it is the cornerstone.

It's the very cornerstone of life and light.

Our Father, we're aware of the help we need, the divine help of your Holy Spirit to open up our eyes wherever we are, and to enter in to this portrait of the suffering servant, and to let it minister to our soul in the deepest places.

Lord, give us an openness.

Take our fingers off of manipulating and managing.

Lord, let us have the brokenness to see ourselves as sheep gone astray, and yet let us have the grace to see your love for us.

And may that be a great transforming work in us.

We ask it in his name.

Amen.

Thank you for worshiping with us this morning.