Shall we pause for a moment's prayer as
we come to this gigantic passage of scripture
tonight?
Let us again turn to the Lord together.
We pray, our Heavenly Father, that we may
metaphorically know what it is to take off
our shoes.
For the ground whereon we tread is holy.
As we move into this holy of holies
of the Old Testament, into the sacred place
of suffering, as depicted by the prophet, you
alone know the extent of our need rightly
to understand and having understood to honor such
a massive revelation, you know our need now.
O Spirit of God, help us to the
glory of the Savior's name.
Amen.
We come this evening to the most remarkable
chapter, perhaps, in the whole of the Old
Testament literature.
And I'm going to begin now by reading
from the King James Version, the first three
verses of Isaiah 53, and you will see
that there are some differences there that we
shall have to touch upon as we come
to try and discover for ourselves what God
is saying here.
Who hath believed our report?
And to whom is the arm of the
Lord revealed?
For he shall grow up before him as
a tender plant and as a root out
of a dry ground.
He hath no form nor calmliness, and when
we shall see him there is no beauty
that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men, a
man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid, as it were, our faces
from him.
He was despised and we esteemed him not.
Now there are two or three things here
that stand right out on the very surface
of the passage and demand our attention.
First of all, I would like you to
look at a report that apparently demands a
response.
The prophet asks, who has believed our message?
Or, in the language of the King James,
who has believed our report?
Now the connotation of that word translated report
or message is important.
We need to get the point that the
prophet wants us to get at this stage.
Actually, the words underlying the sentence before us
could mean either a report about us, as
if the prophet will speak on his own
behalf along with other prophets, the report about
us prophets.
Or it could mean the report which we
the prophets have received.
Or it could mean, thirdly, the report which
we the prophets or which I the prophet
Isaiah proclaim, deliver, declare.
It could mean one of three things.
What's the background?
It would seem that the background is this.
Every true prophet of God is distinguished from
the false prophets.
Every true prophet of God was taught by
the spirit of God to listen to the
voice of God.
And this was one of the essential characteristics
of a genuine prophet.
He had learned to listen for and to
the voice of God.
True, true as many of the Old Testament
prophets tell us, they were also disciplined in
the art of listening to men and of
hearing the significance of what people were saying
and how they were saying things, what they
were saying about one another, the way they
performed their religious acts.
They were told and they were taught how
to listen to men, how to assess the
acts of men as well as the words
of men.
But fundamentally, the prophets were schooled, the prophets
were taught in this supreme art, listening to
the voice of God.
And in listening to hear and in hearing
to be prepared to bring the message from
the inner chamber of his presence out into
the outer court of the world and there
to declare it in the name of the
God that had given it.
Now that's the prophet.
He is first of all a person who
knows or who knew how to gain access.
And having gained access, how to listen, having
listened, how to receive, having received, how to
go out in the strength of the Lord
and impart the report of what he had
heard in the inner place, the innermost recesses
of fellowship with God.
Now that's what we have here.
Isaiah is asking, who is it that has
believed the report that we have given?
We've been in your presence.
We've heard your word.
We've delivered the message.
We've tried it aloud.
But who has believed our report?
Now the content of that report or of
that message is, I think, to be described
in two senses.
If you were to ask the question, what
was the report that Isaiah brought to the
people, it can be answered in two ways.
One, and we shall not pursue this, but
we could reply and say, in general terms,
the report that Isaiah brought was the sum
total of the book that bears his name.
He didn't write this book.
He's not the author of this book.
The Holy Spirit of God is.
God is the author of this book.
It was God who gave these ideas to
the man of God.
It was God who spoke to Isaiah.
And it was Isaiah who responded to the
work of the Spirit of God, first of
all in delivering and then in writing this
word.
But the ultimate authorship of the book is
not Isaiah.
It is God.
And therefore, in this larger sense, it is
true to say that the report that Isaiah
brought to the nations comprises the whole message
of the book that bears his name.
But the answer can also be given differently.
It can be viewed more particularly in this
particular context.
It could well be that the prophet is
here thinking of the divine message given him,
especially concerning the servant of Jehovah, the Lord's
servant that we have been dealing with, the
message of the servant songs, the message particularly
of the passage beginning at the end of
chapter 52 and going on to the end
of chapter 53.
This remarkable capstone to the series of servant
songs that we have been considering together.
Now, I personally subscribe to the view that
Isaiah is here referring very especially to what
we may call the overarching emphasis of Isaiah
52-12 to the end of Isaiah 53.
There is one magnificent emphasis which runs right
through the passage that Mr. McLeod was expounding
last Sunday evening and the whole of this
53rd chapter.
And I tend to the view that what
the prophet had in mind when he asked
in this way, Lord, who has believed our
report, is this.
He's referring to the main thrust of his
message.
Well, what was that?
Well, now here it is.
There are two strands that are brought together
and they don't make sense.
To a man with no faith, they just
don't make sense.
The first stress, and this is how the
servant song in chapter 52, that is verse
13, this is how it began.
See, my servant will deal wisely or will
act wisely.
He will be raised and lifted up and
highly exalted.
Right?
Notice what comes next in chapter 52.
The servant verse 14, just as there were
many who were appalled at him and the
sentence isn't finished.
His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of
any man and his form marred more than
human likeness.
And now notice the switch again back to
the subject with which he began.
So will he sprinkle many nations.
Kings will shut their mouths because of him.
For what they were not told, they will
see.
And what they have not heard, they will
understand.
Have you got the two strands?
The first strand is this.
With categorical and divinely given assurance, the prophet
says, my servant, the Lord's servant is going
to gain supremacy and Lordship.
And he's going to succeed.
And he's going to startle the nations as
well as sprinkle the nations.
And if you go right through to the
end of chapter 53, chapter 53 ends on
the same note.
So that having gone through death and suffering
and anguish and bloodshed and all the rest
of it, he is the one who is
going to share the spoil with the strong.
In other words, he's the victor.
It's the victor who shares the spoil.
It's the mighty in war who shares the
spoil.
And this passage, this servant song ends up
at a place where the servant, whatever else
you want to say about him, he's there
right on top of things.
He's Lord.
He's King.
Now that's one strand.
It's the reiterated statement of verses 13 and
15 in chapter 52.
He will be raised up.
He will be very high.
He will be exalted and there's nothing that
can stop him.
But now here's the other strand.
It's this strand of terrible suffering.
His visage was marred more than any man.
We hid our faces from him.
There was nothing in him to attract us.
There was everything in him to repel us.
His physical condition as seen by human eyes
was such as to put everybody away.
And he turned everybody off.
Nevertheless, and this is the message it seems
to me, this is the report he's bringing.
My servant is going to succeed.
Suffer, yes.
In a manner in which no one has
ever suffered before and no one will ever
suffer after.
But, but, but he will succeed.
Now there comes then of necessity the challenge
of the report as delivered.
Who has believed our report?
You can understand.
You can understand in the light of what
I've just tried to say very briefly.
You can understand that this is a very
real challenge.
Talking about a deliverer like this, who is
going to suffer as this one is going
to suffer, who can, who can honestly believe
that he'll come out on top?
Who can honestly believe that a person who's
going to suffer as this person is going
to suffer according to Isaiah 53, who can
possibly see him coming out on top and
dividing the spoil with the strong?
The thing is monstrous.
Of course, we know the answer.
But Isaiah, you see, was aware of the
natural unbelief of his contemporaries.
He had been long familiar with this challenging
feature in the experience of men and women
schooled in the providence of his, schooled in
providence and schooled in history as they were,
schooled by the law and schooled by the
prophets.
Nevertheless, Israel of all people was stubbornly unbelieving
and proclaiming to them such a deliverer who
was going to deliver in such a way,
says Isaiah, who has believed our report?
It's all been in vain.
That would seem to be the sense of
it all.
Yes, Isaiah had his finger on the pulse
of the generation.
He knew that the hearts of his contemporaries
were unbelieving hearts.
And he was right in his assessment of
the situation.
Believers in such a messianic deliverance as Isaiah
was announcing in these chapters was very, very
rare.
Nevertheless, God has never been without a nucleus,
without a remnant of people who by the
Holy Spirit working in their hearts and in
their minds have had faith in him and
been obedient to him and served him.
Now, can I pause for a moment and
say something in parenthesis?
In a sense, it's unrelated in another sense,
it is.
What I want to say is this.
You see, there is a continuity between the
Old and the New Testament in many, many
ways.
But in this sense, for example, New Testament
preachers can identify with Isaiah, particularly on the
score that we too have to announce a
report.
And when we've announced our report, we've got
to look around and see who has believed
that report.
You will find this coming out very clearly
in the writings of some of the apostles.
Paul, for example, writing to the Corinthians, he
says in chapter 15, verses 3 and 4,
this classical passage of his, what I received
I passed on to you as of first
importance.
Well, what is that, Paul?
Here it is.
That Christ died for our sins according to
the scriptures.
That he was buried, that he was raised
on the third day according to the scriptures.
It's the report.
Paul reported to the Corinthians that Messiah Jesus
of Nazareth had died according to the scriptures
and was risen again according to the scriptures.
And bearing that report, men must receive it
or reject it, must believe it or deny
it.
You know, it's still the same.
Don't you think, my friend, that having heard
the word of God, you can just sit
comfortably in your pew and just shrug it
off your shoulder.
You can't do that.
That luxury is not yours nor mine to
enjoy.
The man or the woman that hears the
report of what God has done in Christ
has got to do something and is responsible
for that action, be it positive, be it
negative.
You find this again, of course, in the
writings of the apostle John, for example.
He stresses this very much.
As, for example, in 1 John 1, the
first three verses, you can see this element
of report coming in again.
That which was from the beginning, which we
have heard, which we have seen with our
eyes, which we have looked at and our
hands have touched.
This we proclaim concerning the word of life.
You can hear the report coming through.
We've touched him, says John.
We've seen him.
We've handled him.
And what we're telling you is what we're
sure of.
We were there.
We were witnesses.
If you believe the record of the prophets
and of the apostles announcing what God has
done in and through his son, there is
this element to the record.
There is this element of the gospel.
It's the element of a testimony to truth,
to fact, to history, to what is done
and cannot be undone because it is done.
You cannot wipe out history.
You cannot undo what God has done in
Christ.
Calvary cannot be blotted out of the globe
or out of history.
It is done.
If you believe.
But now that brings me to the second
main point here.
The response that is accompanied by a revelation.
And to whom is the arm of the
Lord revealed?
Now, get the point.
Who has believed our report or our message,
and to whom is the arm of the
Lord revealed?
Of the many differing interpretations of this statement,
it would seem to me that two in
particular commend themselves.
Both are true to the general teaching of
scripture, and both ought to find some place
in our view of things too.
But probably one predominates here, and I don't
want to be dogmatic as to which one
it is.
I leave it to you.
But we'll look at the two of them.
The first interpretation.
Among a number who embrace this first view
is the renowned Edward J.
Young, to whom we owe so much, for
he was called to his reward at a
young age.
Now, Edward J.
Young has got a wonderful little volume on
Isaiah 53, and student folk here would treasure
it if they had it.
Young and others believe that we have the
same essential truths enunciated in the opening question
of verse 1, who has believed our report,
almost identically the same thought again in the
next part of the verse, stated in the
words now before us, albeit the terms are
quite different.
And to whom is the arm of the
Lord revealed?
What he's saying is that the prophet is
saying exactly the same thing in different words,
or almost the same thing in different words.
Now, upon first hearing, you may feel that
there is scant basis for a view such
as that, because the words are so different,
are they not?
The first half of the verse refers to
believing, the believing of a report, and the
second half to the revealing of an arm,
the arm of the Lord.
What is there?
What connection is there?
How can the one mean the other?
How can the two be in any way
the same?
Well, now, Young and others would reply that
here we encounter what is called the phenomenon
of parallelism, which is encountered in Hebrew poetry.
You know that it wasn't easy to write
the scriptures before the printing presses came into
operation, and the Jews had found a way
of teaching scripture and teaching truth, and that
was by memorizing it.
And in order to get the truths home,
they often used this principle of parallelism, by
which they said the same truth twice over,
sometimes three times over.
Now, there are various kinds of parallelism.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to give you
a lesson on grammar, but it's necessary to
see it at this point, I think, in
some measure.
The simplest form of parallelism is when you
say exactly the same thing twice over.
For example, in Psalm 49.1, the first
line says, Hear this, all peoples.
The next line says, Give ear, all inhabitants
of the world.
Now, you see, you have exactly the same
thing said, but the words are different.
Why are they said in two different ways,
the same truth?
Well, for this reason, because the Hebrews wanted
the people who read the scriptures or heard
the scriptures to remember the scriptures.
This is a major phenomenon in Hebrew mind,
that they meant the message of the scriptures
to be memorized.
God meant the scriptures to be memorized.
The Spirit of God meant the scriptures to
be memorized.
That's why we have phenomena such as these.
But you may say, What on earth has
this got to do with what we're talking
about?
Well, there's a very practical point here.
This is what Jung and those who take
his view say.
Whenever anyone has believed the prophet's report, and
having believed the prophet's report, is then looking
by faith for a deliverer, for the servant
of the Lord, who will suffer and through
suffer, become sovereign and savior.
There, says Jung, the arm of the Lord
has been revealed.
What's he saying?
What he's saying is this.
Let's put it in our own terms, our
own contemporary idiom.
Whenever and wherever you have a genuine believer
in the Word of God, that faith is
brought into existence by an act of God.
God himself creates faith.
The human heart has been so radically affected
by sin, that though you can report the
very words of God in the power of
God to men, there will be many, many,
many who will not believe it and not
receive it.
I mean, just think of it.
The incarnate Lord himself could preach to men
and they didn't believe him.
Now, what chance have the rest of us
got?
Come and fry as we are, the best
of us.
The Son of God, the incarnate, and Paul
says in the epistle to the Colossians that
all the fullness of the deity was pleased
to dwell in him.
He preached to men and they just shrugged
it off and didn't believe.
Now, what chance have the rest of us
got?
Unless the mighty Spirit of God, who brought
out a nucleus after the Lord Jesus, and
who gathered the ecclesia around him during the
days of his flesh, will also use our
feeble words in reporting the truth and likewise
move upon the hearts of men and bring
faith to birth.
Now, whether that is the main truth here
or not, certainly it is a biblical truth.
And it is something that we need to
stress, and we need to stress it for
this reason.
You see, if the Spirit of God is
working upon your heart and conscience at any
given time in a service such as this,
don't deal lightly with it.
Don't say, I'll attend to this business tomorrow.
Don't do that.
You can't act when you want to.
Save only when the Spirit of God is
upon you and drawing you and wooing you
and illuminating you.
Insofar as it is applicable, that is how
we are to understand the words of the
poet, that there is a time in the
affairs of man when, if taken by the
flood, we can make the right decisions.
Insofar as it is applicable at all.
Now, you have echoes of this in many
places in the New Testament.
For example, we read that when Apollos arrived
in Achaia, we are told that he was
a great help to those.
I like this description of the Christians.
He was a great help to those who,
by grace, believed.
Acts 18, 27.
Isn't that lovely?
You see, you can't believe when you want
to.
Sin is too great and its power too
mighty and Satan is too strong.
You and I just cannot get rid of
our chains as and when we please unless
the Spirit of God come upon us, as
Jesus said, to convict the world of sin
and of righteousness and of judgment.
It is only in that atmosphere, in that
ethos, when the Spirit of God is working
upon us, that we are free to believe
and able to believe.
Faith, then, is the gift and the fruit
of the Spirit of God, not a humanly
cultivated phenomenon.
And insofar as Isaiah meant that, then it
certainly applied there and it applies today.
Can I use an illustration of this?
Because it is so practically irrelevant.
The late Dr. F.
B.
Murr spoke of a visit he once made
to a firm of lawyers in the city
of New York and the city of London.
He doesn't tell us what he was doing
there, of course, but he went to see
this firm of lawyers.
And the head, the senior man of the
firm, took him to their strong room, which
was quite an experience for him, because it
meant going down underground and the strong room
comprised a long, narrow passage excavated under the
street.
And then he describes that on entering the
passage, this particular lawyer took into his hand
what looked like an unlit candle attached to
a coil of wire.
The one end he deftly fastened to a
switch, and in no time the power traveled
along the coil of wire and the light
flashed in the china candle, which served as
a bulb, so that he could see where
to go.
It was thus that he found the materials
that he was looking for on the occasion
of my visit, and it was likewise that
he found his way out again from that
long, long passage underground.
Now, says Dr. Mayer, and these are his
words, man is like that dead, lifeless flex,
until the current of God's power flows into
his heart.
When that power is turned on, however, the
light of faith and hope and love begin
to burn.
The light of faith and hope begins to
burn.
Thus it is that believing or the exercising
of faith synchronize with the experience of God's
arm of power being revealed.
Who has believed our report?
Do you say you have?
Then Isaiah would say, if this is the
right interpretation, yes, very well you have, but
you have because the arm of the Lord
has been working upon you and within you.
It's not purely an act that you have
expressed in and of yourself.
It wasn't a purely natural act.
Oh, you were in it, your will was
in it, your whole being was behind it,
but it was God who gave you grace,
both to will and to do according to
his good pleasure.
But now there's a second possible understanding of
that same key passage.
The key to the second view is that
the phrase, the arm of the Lord, is
not used here as a mere metaphorical reference
to God's power employed in creating faith, but
that rather it is a designation of the
servant, the servant of God, the servant, the
Messiah.
So the meaning is this.
Who has believed our report?
And to whom is the Messiah, the servant
of Jehovah revealed as God's arm?
Now the more you think of it, the
more remarkable a statement or an understanding this
is.
Those who believe the divinely inspired report concerning
the servant of Jehovah will in due course
recognize him as God's arm in action.
And whether this is what Isaiah had in
mind here or not, certainly this is a
divine truth.
Certainly this is true.
Jesus spoke in one occasion of him casting
out demons by the finger of God.
Do you remember that?
If I by the finger of God cast
them out, then what about your own sons
and daughters?
I'm not concerned about the detailed exegesis of
that, but just the reference.
In other places our Lord Jesus was the
outstretched hand of God coming down to people
in their needs, bringing the gift of God
from highest heaven to lowest abysmal depths.
There is much that our Lord may be
able to do.
There is much that God may be able
to do by his word, by his influence,
the influence of the Spirit.
But scripture does depict God as the God
whose arm is strong.
It was by his mighty arm that he
delivered the Israelites out of Egypt.
And again it was by the might of
his arm that he called them back from
Babylon.
And it was by his arm that he
nursed them through the wilderness.
It's the mighty arm of God, and underneath
are the everlasting arms.
Scripture's got a lot to say about God's
arms.
And I think there is much to be
said for this understanding, that our Lord Jesus
Christ is here depicted as the arm of
Jehovah.
Perhaps, of course, we should not think of
the term quite as literally as we have,
and take it as a reference to God's
instrument for the fulfillment of his purposes.
Without an arm, you see, there are certain
things that you cannot do.
You can do many things, but without an
arm there are some things that remain undone.
Our God is able to do exactly what
he has determined to do because he has
an arm that is strong as himself.
And that arm is the Lord Jesus.
He is the extension of deity into time.
Now this second understanding of the words before
us, take Isaiah saying then that provided you
have received the prophet's report in good faith,
you have already been given the revelation of
the one who is to be God's arm
in the accomplishment of his task.
You see that the servant of Jehovah is
not just a servant who is told, go
here, do that, but he is actually one
in and through whom God is active.
God's arm.
God extended.
And this, of course, is what the New
Testament insists upon.
I and the Father are one.
Jesus Christ was not a messenger separate from
God.
Even in his incarnation, he wasn't cut off
from God as you send an ambassador from
one country to another and he's severed from
the base.
Jesus was no such ambassador from heaven to
earth, separated from base.
Not at all.
He talks about his being in heaven even
when he's on earth.
The son of man who is in heaven,
he says in John chapter three.
In other words, I and the Father are
one.
There is this vital abiding union between them.
And when he speaks, the Father speaks.
When he acts, the Father acts.
God was in Christ.
Now we have something here probably of the
order of what we have.
There is a difference, but something of the
order that we have when Simon Peter made
his epochal confession at Caesarea Philippi.
Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, said Jesus.
Flesh and blood doesn't reveal that to you.
You didn't get that in school.
You didn't get that in the college.
You didn't get that here, there, or elsewhere.
My Father who is in heaven.
Believing the report means seeing the Messiah, seeing
the servant of Jehovah as the Lord stretching
out his arm to deliver.
Now just a few words about the third
main point here.
The bulk of our text remains, and I
haven't dealt with it.
But what I want to do is to
give you a picture.
The result of the revelation of the servant
of Jehovah as the arm of the Lord
to believers.
Believers, that is, in the prophetic report.
You will notice a difference here.
Depends what translation you have.
The NIV and the RSV will have one
tense.
The King James Version has a different tense.
Quoting from the NIV, it goes like this.
He grew up before him like a tender
shoot, and like a root out of a
dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract
us to him, nothing in his appearance that
we should desire him, etc.
It's in the past tense.
In the King James it's all in the
future tense.
He shall grow up before him as a
tender plant, and as a root out of
a dry ground, etc.
In the future tense.
Now, here is a problem, and I've got
to say something about it, because I know
some of you are involved in giving serious
attention to this passage of scripture.
What's the difference?
How does one put in the past and
another in the future?
Well, now, first of all, perhaps something we've
said already gives you a little cue here.
This servant song began with the future.
My servant will act wisely.
He will be raised and lifted up and
highly exalted.
That's 52.13. And then right at the
end of chapter 53 again, we are back
with the future.
Therefore I will give him a portion among
the great.
He will divide the spoils with the strong,
etc., because of certain things he did in
the past.
But now, we have a different tense.
Actually, this is in the Hebrew.
It is the past tense.
It is a perfect tense, which describes something
in the past.
Now, why then do the translators of the
King James translate it as if it were
in the future?
What right did they have to put in
the future what the Greek tense unequivocally puts
in the past?
Well, now, the reason is this.
They, and not only they, many people before
them and many people after them, believe that
you have a phenomenon in the Old Testament
which is called the prophetic perfect.
Now, the prophetic perfect is this.
The prophet is seeing the things of the
future with a mind illumined by the Spirit
of God.
And the things that he sees which are
really in the future, they haven't yet come
to pass.
He sees them so clearly and so certainly
that he speaks of them as if they
had already come to pass.
And so he speaks of them in the
past tense, as if they are already finished
and done with, whereas as a matter of
fact, they are yet to come.
Now, let me give you a beautiful example
of that.
You remember the words in Isaiah chapter 9.
We often use them and even sing them
at Christmastime.
For a child has been born to us,
and to us a child is born, and
to us a son has been given, literally.
And the government has been put upon his
shoulder, and his name, etc.
Now, a child has been born to us.
That's what Isaiah said.
But if you read the context, the child
was not yet born, the child was not
yet given.
And insofar as it referred to the Lord
Jesus Christ, there were five, six, seven hundred
years to transpire before the child was to
be born of the Virgin Mary, and this
was to be fulfilled.
But can you see why he used the
perfect tense?
It was because it was certain to him
that the reality was still in the future.
So when we speak of the reality, it
is legitimate to speak of it in the
future tense.
So, though the translators of the King James
Version do not translate what we find in
the Hebrew, they interpret it at this point.
Nevertheless, they do so legitimately.
Because if this is what we have there,
then they rightly understand and rightly interpret the
mind of the prophet.
Now that's all about that.
I want you to look at the primary
statement that we have here.
I want to take leave to employ the
future tense as the King James Version does,
and I want you to notice the main
thing that is said here.
And the main statement that we have in
the rest of the passage before us tonight
is this.
He shall grow up before him as a
tender plant.
The main statement, grammatically and otherwise understood, is
that.
Who has believed our report?
To whom is the arm of the Lord
revealed?
Well, he shall grow up before him as
a tender plant, etc., etc., etc.
He shall grow up before him.
But the main clause in the whole that
follows is this.
He shall grow up before him as a
tender plant.
Now, what we have there is exactly the
same kind of statement as we had in
chapter 52, verse 13.
What do we have in chapter 52, verse
13?
See, my servant will act wisely.
He will be raised and lifted up and
highly exalted.
But now the same truth is put in
agricultural or horticultural terms.
He shall grow up before him as a
tender plant grows up.
Like a tree thriving in unconducive environment, as
we shall see here.
But it's a tree growing, sprouting and growing
and getting taller and bigger and greater.
And its roots spreading and its branches spreading.
But the tree's growing, you see.
And that's the point.
Now, if you take that as the key,
you've got an understanding to this and a
very enriching one.
The very eyes of those who had believed
Isaiah's reports were now destined to see the
Lord's servant growing up.
And now this is what we have in
the rest of the passage.
Growing up despite the obstructions.
Growing up into lordship and sovereignty and saviorship.
Being made perfect through sufferings.
All kinds of sufferings are going to frustrate
him.
All kinds of experiences are going to stand
in his way.
And each one of them should hinder him.
But they can't.
Nothing can stop him.
He's like a mighty commander in chief of
an army.
And he's going on in all the might
of his divine power.
And whoever tries to stand in his way,
he moves them aside and he moves majestically
forward to his destined glory until at last
you see him dividing the spoils of his
victory with other people.
That's the message.
Now, I can only refer to some of
the things that would hinder his path to
victory and to glory.
Let's just look at them.
And you must meditate upon them yourselves.
There are five of them.
He shall grow up before him despite his
unwholesome environment.
And let me explain this in case I
haven't.
He, that is, the first reference, the first
he, is to the servant of the Lord.
Who, if we accept one understanding of the
phrase, who is the arm of God outstretched?
But at any rate, it's the servant of
the Lord.
He shall grow up before him.
Who is the second him?
Well, the believer.
The person who's received the message by faith.
The person who's received the report.
The believer.
He, the servant of God, shall grow up
before the believer.
How shall he grow up?
How will the Messiah?
How will the servant of God grow up?
As a tender plant, as a root out
of a dry ground.
Now here's a miracle here, right at the
beginning.
The reference to the dry ground can be
a very general one, can be a particular
one.
People have generally interpreted it in this way,
that this is describing how our Lord Jesus
Christ grew and emerged in a civilization that
was totally corrupt.
The Greco-Roman world did not make Jesus
of Nazareth what he was.
Neither did Judaism.
Even the best of it.
Even the noblest Judaism of his day did
not make Jesus of Nazareth the person he
was.
He grew up like a sapling, like a
wilderness.
Everything was desert and dreary and dark and
dismal.
Death reigned.
Jesus thrived in the midst of death.
He shall see him growing up.
As a root out of a dry ground.
Again, the second, he shall grow up before
him despite his physical unattractiveness.
Look at the second verse.
And I deliberately read this in the King
James to get the tense.
But there are values in reading it in
another version.
He hath no form nor comeliness.
And when we see him, there is no
beauty that we should desire in him.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, don't let's miss
that.
Almost everything in life is judged today by
the physical qualities of the other person.
A man is looking for office or a
woman, it doesn't matter.
Unless you're attractive, you're of very little use
today.
It's your face, it's your countenance, it's your
body.
God save us from despising the body.
But we are living in a day and
an age where the body is worshipped.
And if you're no body, you're no good.
And the scriptures are so challenging.
They tell us that Jesus had no body
to attract man nor woman.
And the ordinary sensual fallen human creature saw
nothing in the face of Jesus of Nazareth
to attract him to him.
If Jesus walked among the crowd, I'm not
suggesting for one moment that Jesus was ugly
or misunderstand me.
What I am suggesting is that he was
one of the hoi polloi, very much like
other people.
Nothing to distinguish him.
And if you rubbed shoulders with him in
the post office in Jerusalem, you wouldn't know
that you had touched the Son of God
unless by the Spirit of God he desired
to communicate with you.
He was so like other people.
In other words, God didn't send Mr. Universe
here whose biceps you can examine and watch
him juggling along on the stage of the
television screen.
You know, he didn't do that.
Because the attraction of Christianity is not sensual.
There's meaning to this.
The attraction of Christianity is not to the
sensual in man or woman, nor is it
sexual.
He shall grow up before him, despite his
own physical unattractiveness.
Thirdly, he shall grow up before him as
a tender plant, despite the fact of his
unpopularity.
Our Scripture is very clear.
He was despised and rejected, not received, but
rejected.
Rejected of men.
He was despised, it's repeated later on in
verse 3, and we esteemed him not.
He was despised and rejected of men.
Oh, I know there were moments when he
was popular.
There were waves of popularity, but they were
very few and far between, and they came
when they did come at the beginnings of
his ministry, when people didn't really know what
he was after.
However, clearly he declared his message.
They didn't know what he was after, but
the moment they saw that he was talking
about a cross and about death and about
their dying to themselves and to sin and
to the world and to Satan, they didn't
want it.
They hid their faces from him.
The servant does not gain success because of
any wave of natural emotion in his favor.
He's not popular at the polls.
He wasn't there yesterday.
He isn't today.
He can be voted out from the Constitution
yet.
He's not popular, your Savior and mine, and
a wave of popularity.
If you want to make Jesus popular, then
you've got to titivate him, and you've got
to cut him down to size.
You've got to get rid of this teaching
of his and that teaching of his and
this aspect of his doctrine and that, and
you've got to cut and excise.
You can't do that with him.
He shall grow up before him as a
tender plant despite his unpopularity.
How on earth is it going to take
place?
Oh, I'll tell you, he's the servant of
Jehovah, that's why.
He's not the weakling you think he is.
Men may nail him to the tree, but
he is Jehovah incarnate.
He shall grow up before him as a
tender plant despite his undisguised sorrows.
Verse 3, the second bit, a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief, a man of
sorrows.
I don't know how to say this without
being misunderstood one side or the other, but
it may need to be said that Jesus
of Nazareth is only heard laughing, smiling, once,
I believe, in the whole of the New
Testament.
Now, I'm not suggesting that he was a
morose, unhappy person.
I'm not suggesting that.
But what I am suggesting is this, that
the anguish of sin and the awareness of
the plight of unbelieving men and women cast
away from a holy God for all eternity,
burned like a cinder in his soul, how
could he smile?
And insofar as our world has lost the
consciousness of the holy, we have lost the
awareness of the sobriety of things that was
evidently underlying the life and the work and
everything that Jesus did and was, a man
of sorrows.
Do you ever think of the damned?
Tell me, my friend, do you ever think
of hell?
You may call me a square, well, you
do so.
But I tell you, every man and woman
in Christ should spend some period listening over
the edges of the caverns of Gehenna to
the wars of the damned.
Take the smile, the superficiality out of so
much of our spirits.
And if my Lord was a man of
sorrows, it's not because there was anything wrong
with him and in him, but because he
was bearing the sin of the world.
He shall grow up before him lastly as
a tender plant, despite the fact that he
is naturally unacceptable and unwanted.
Look at the way the prophet puts it,
as one from whom men hide their faces,
we hid from him.
Now he doesn't try to elaborate, he doesn't
try to go into details, but you know,
there are some types of people and you
hide your faces from them.
Somebody's been involved in an accident, some of
you people don't like to see blood flowing,
you hide your face.
There are other things that put you off,
you just can't look at them.
And this passage goes so daringly far as
to say that the corrupt human heart looks
upon the Lord Jesus Christ as someone so
repulsive in his sufferings, saving though they be,
men turn away from him.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless,
nevertheless, and this is the burden of the
message, nevertheless, doesn't matter what obstructs his way,
he shall be very high, he shall be
exalted, he shall cause kings to be startled,
he shall sprinkle the nations, he will divide
the spoiled with the strong, he will be
the savior of his people, he will, he
will reign, this Lord Jesus, servant of the
living God, he will, that's the message.
That's why Isaac Watts pulls no punches when
he sings, Jesus shall reign, wherever the sun
does his successive journeys run, put anything in
his path, he's moving forward.
My God is marching on in Christ, risen,
reigning, coming.