The Misunderstood Messiah

By S. Lewis Johnson, Jr.

Lewis Johnson served as a teaching elder and regularly ministered the Word at Believers Chapel in Dallas, Texas for more than thirty years. During his academic career he held professorships in New Testament and Systematic Theology at Dallas Theological Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. At the time of his death in 2004 he was Professor Emeritus of New Testament Literature and Exegesis at Dallas Seminary. Both MP3 files and printed notes of Dr. Johnson’s sermons and theological lectures may be downloaded from the website of the SLJ Institute «www.sljinstitute.net». His recordings may also be downloaded from the Believers Chapel website «www.believerschapeldallas.org/temp/online.htm».

An Exposition Of Isaiah 53:1-3 [1]

Introduction

In our previous study of the first of the five strophes of this famous passage (Isa. 52:13-53:12), the fourth of the prophetic songs of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah, we made the point that the most critical problem of life is not universal prevalence of war and nuclear armaments, nor the increasing violence of the age and its support now from world political powers, nor the rampant immorality and license of our sex-mad twenty-first century, nor the economic problems of the day, such as inflation and the national deficit, nor even the drift to an almost totally consumerist society with its pervasive avarice and greed. We might add that it is not ignorance, as educators sometimes argue, nor maladjustment, as might be argued by a psychologist, nor the sheer sense of the meaninglessness of life and despair, which philosophers and psychiatrists ponder.

We have claimed that the most critical problem of life—for the simple reason that it touches the most critical aspect of human life, namely, the spiritual being of man—is the ancient question phrased accurately and pointedly by Job: “In truth I know that this is so; but how can a man be in the right before God?” (Job. 9:2).

At countless points in its revelation, the Bible provides a key to the solution of the problem, and one of its sterling pointers to the right answer is found in this fourth of the Suffering Servant Songs. The prophet Isaiah found the solution in the ministry of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah, whom the New Testament identifies as the Lord Jesus Christ.

This identification, however, is not undisputed by modern scholars. Some identify the Servant with the nation Israel, others with a man, a leper or martyr, such as Isaiah the prophet, and still others have referred the passage to the Messiah, but not to the Christian conclusion that the Messiah is the Lord Jesus. For example, the Jewish Targum of the passage, with many ancient rabbis, took the passage to refer to the yet future promised Messiah. [2]

The matter is still debated, although the consensus of orthodox Christian scholars through the centuries has referred the passage to Jesus of Nazareth. To illustrate the differences of opinion and the difficulty that liberal professing Christian scholars have had with the matter, take the case of Ernst Sellin, a well-known German scholar of the twentieth century. Sellin is typical of modern biblical scholarship in that his views constantly shifted as new approaches and ideas flitted into his mind. Throughout his career he propounded four views of the identity of the Servant, including a very clever defense of the view that the Servant did not die. At an early point in his career he thought the Servant was Zerubbabel, but then three years later in 1901 he began to teach that the Servant was Jehoiachin, and that he was not represented as having died. Young comments, “To that defense of this position he brought all his vast learning and erudition.” [3] The words of verse 8 of chapter 53, “He was cut off out of the land of the living,” Sellin took to be banishment or exile from the land, which he referred to Jehoiachin. His defense of the view that the Servant did not die, though very learned, did not convince him finally, for in 1922 he began to teach that the Servant was Moses, murdered at Shittim! Finally, in 1937 the aging scholar changed his mind again. He had come to the view that the Servant was the prophet, so-called Second Isaiah, the author of the latter part of the book. Such are the vagaries of modern scholarship.

We are taking the position that the Servant is the Lord Jesus Christ and that Isaiah, the Fifth Evangelist, who stood with his head in the clouds and his feet on the solid earth, with his heart in the things of eternity and his mouth in the things of time, found the solution to the problem of life in the ministry of the Servant who, in the prophet’s words, “will justify the many, as He will bear their iniquities” (v. 11).

We turn now to the second strophe, the first having set the tone of the passage, namely, that the Messiah shall have a gloriously successful career, although the glories shall only come after suffering (cf. 52:13-15).

The Complaint Of Unbelief, Verse 1

Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?

The prophet begins with two questions, “Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” The two questions raise a third question: Who are the penitent speakers? While some have held them to be the pagan Gentiles, grammatically and exegetically the answer can only be Israel. In verse 8 it is stated that the Servant was stricken for the sins of “my people.” This must be a reference to the speakers, who in verses 4 through 6 admit that the Servant bore their sins. Further, the Old Testament knows nothing of a bearing of the sins of the Gentiles by Israel. In fact, that is an impossibility, for in this section of Isaiah in the Songs of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah it is plainly stated that Israel is a sinful nation (cf. 42:16-25; 53:4-6).

What is the prophetic viewpoint of the speakers? It is clear that they are looking back, in the light of the Servant’s exaltation, to the time when they observed his humiliation. And they are saying, Yes, what the prophet has just said is true. We were there when the Servant was here, and we heard the message, but who of us believed what we have heard? [4]

They acknowledge their unbelief and, further, imply in the second question that only a remnant of the people did respond to the message.

Thus, Isaiah 53, then, becomes the lament of the future redeemed remnant of Israel as they sorrow in godly repentance at the time of Messiah’s second advent over the tragedy of their unbelief at the his first coming. Confirming this is the fact that, in the original Hebrew text, the verbs of verses 1 through 9 all refer to past time.

There is a remarkable passage in Zechariah which may be helpful in understanding this part of Isaiah 53. Zechariah, describing how Yahweh will bring about Israel’s conversion through effectual grace, writes: “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplication, so that they will look on Me whom they have pierced; and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn. In that day there will be great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the plain of Megiddo” (Zech. 12:10-11). Zechariah does not provide his readers with details of the content of the repentant mourning of the nation when they see and recognize that they have slain their own Messiah, but it has been suggested that Isaiah 53 (particularly verses 1 through 9) represents the vocalization of their painful confession. [5] They, like Joseph’s brothers, will lament their wickedness and unbelief, and Isaiah 53 contains that lament.

There is an important spiritual truth that is placarded here. It is that the plainest teaching, earnestly delivered, is darkness to the unregenerate mind until the Holy Spirit enlightens the rebellious heart of man. No one could say that our Lord did not preach the word plainly, nor can anyone say that he did not earnestly preach it in love, and yet only a remnant responded. In John’s words, “He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11).

Calvin points out that the message of the gospel is not received for two reasons. First, the very loftiness and sublimity of the message is one reason it fails to obtain credit in the world. It so exceeds “all human capacities” that it is reckoned to be folly. Second, the prophet, like John (John 12:37-38) and Paul (Rom. 10:16), points out that no man can come to God “but by an extraordinary revelation of the Spirit.” These are important points that our modern evangelical world has not properly emphasized. And listen to these final words on the point from the great Genevan: “These words refute the ignorance of those who think that faith is in the power of every person, because preaching is common to all. Though it is sufficiently evident that all are called to salvation, yet the Prophet expressly states that the eternal voice is of no avail if it be not accompanied by a special gift of the Spirit. And whence proceeds the difference, but from the secret election of God, the cause of which is hidden in himself?” [6] The order is set in heaven: first, divine election; second, effectual grace; third, the revelation of the truth to the elect one (cf. John 6:44; 1 Thess. 2:13-14).

There come to mind the words from Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”:

Earth’s cramm’d with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes—
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. [7]

Earlier interpreters referred “the arm of the Lord” to Christ, but it is better taken as symbolic of the might and power of God. [8] The might and power, however, are ultimately the work of God in the saving ministry of the Mediator, the Son, and thus in that sense one might think of God’s arm as his work in the humiliation and exaltation of the Messiah (cf. 51:9; John 12:37-38).

The Course Of The Messiah’s Life, Verse 2

For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.

Delitzsch, the famous German evangelical commentator, takes the questions of verse 1 as an introduction to the confession of Israel that follows. “We must not overlook the fact,” he insists, “that this golden ‘passional’ is also one of the greatest prophecies of the future conversion of the nation, which has rejected the servant of God, and allowed the Gentiles to be the first to recognize him. At last, though very late, it will feel remorse. And when this shall once take place, then and not till then will this chapter—which, to use an old epithet, will ever be carnificina Rabbinorum—receive its complete historical fulfillment.” [9]

Verse 2 follows: “For he grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; He has [10] no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.” This statement describes how God’s arm showed itself in the Servant and how the nation failed to see in him the majesty he possessed.

The “tender shoot” suggests the insignificant. The arm of the Lord did not manifest itself in a prince royal or an erudite philosopher professor. Herod mocked him (Luke 23:11); the Pharisees plotted against him, accusing him of being in league with Beelzebub, the prince of the demons (Matt. 12:14, 24); the scribes and the chief priests mocked and challenged him (27:41-42); the people pronounced him worthy of crucifixion and called down his blood upon their heads (27:22, 25); Caiaphas thought he should be a political sacrifice and die for the people (John 11:50); and even his fellow-townsmen were offended by him (Mark 6:3). To them all he was, indeed, an insignificant “tender shoot,” but he nevertheless lived his life “before Him,” i.e., before God (cf. Luke 2:40).

The “root out of parched ground” is a figure that suggests that he owed nothing to his environment. This root derives nothing from the soil! Although of Davidic descent, he derived little from it. In fact, he was born in a stable as if banished from all of human society. He derived nothing from his nationality in the eyes of men. He was born a Jew, not as an intellectual Greek or a mighty Roman. And nothing was left to the Jewish people now, for the tabernacle of David had fallen into ruins and the Messiah’s family also had lost its stature, wealth, and repute. Joseph was only a carpenter, and his mother a village maiden of “humble state,” as she admitted in her Magnificat (Luke 1:48).

Spurgeon points out:

Mentally, among the Jews nothing was left; no harp resounded with psalms like those of David; no prophet mourned in plaintive tones like [Jeremiah], or sang in the rich organ tones of Isaiah; there remained not even a Jonah to startle, or a Haggai to rebuke. No wise man gave forth his proverbs, nor preacher took up his parable. The nation had mentally reached its dregs, its scribes were dreaming over the letters of Scripture, insensible to its inner sense, and its elders were drivelling forth traditions of the fathers, and sinking lower and lower in an inane superstition. It was a “dry ground” out of which Jesus sprang. [11]

He derived nothing from his followers, who were only fishermen for the most part. He did not rush to Athens and the Areopagus or to Rome and the Forum to find disciples. He found them by the side of the lake mending their nets. And he carried on his ministry without the benefit of a travelling entourage of singers, musicians, and media men.

No beauty or stately majestic form caused men to look upon him and be attracted to him. He had relinquished the use of the insignia of his majesty for a time by virtue of the personal union of the divine and human natures in the one person (cf. Phil. 2:5-11). His beauty could only be judged by the instrumentality of faith. Those who were given that virtue could say of him, “You are fairer than the sons of men; grace is poured upon Your lips; therefore God has blessed You forever” (Ps. 45:2). Others, however, were blind to his beauty.

The Contempt Of The Nation, Verse 3

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

In the nation’s eyes the Servant of the Lord was possessed of the things that repelled the unbelieving men and women about him. “He was despised and forsaken of men,” Isaiah writes in verse 3, adding, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him” (cf. Isa. 49:7; 50:6). This attitude is represented in the New Testament in the attitude of the Jews to Paul and his ministry in Antioch (cf. Acts 13:41).

The expression “forsaken of men” suggests the attitude of the rich and influential to him, for the Hebrew word for “men” is one that is used of that type of man. His rejection calls to mind our Lord’s parable of the nobleman who went to a far country to receive a kingdom for himself. His citizens hated him, the Lord said, and sent a delegation after him, saying, “We do not want this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:12-14). In similar fashion our Lord, the true nobleman of God’s kingdom, was rejected by the men of his day, the chief priests, the Pharisees, and the majority of the citizens of the land. He was, indeed, “rejected of men” (NKJV), including the rich and powerful.

Isaiah calls the Servant a “man of sorrows” (cf. Ps. 69:9, 19-20; Matt. 26:37-38). Mr. Spurgeon calls the term “man” one of those gospel church-bells which must be rung every Sabbath day, simply because it reminds us that man’s breach of the law of God must be repaired by man. [12] And he was that, as well as the Son of God. The one who made the seas is also the one who asked of the Samaritan woman, “Give me a drink” (John 4:7). “Lord of glory” and “man of sorrows”—Jesus of Nazareth was both, and this is why we sing:

“Man of Sorrows! what a name
For the Son of God, Who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!” [13]

Isaiah says that the Servant was “acquainted with grief,” a phrase that seems to mean that the Servant has been made to know sickness. The sickness, however, is not that of bodily weakness. The word “sickness” stands here for sin, as in Isaiah 1:5-6 (cf. 53:4; Hos. 5:13). [14] The sin that he knew was not his own, but ours, both imputed and original (cf. Rom. 5:12-21; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13).

“And like one from whom men hide their face” is the common interpretation of the next words. They could mean “as a hiding of faces from us,” the thought being that he hid his face from men. But that seems very doubtful. Thus, it is better to take the words to refer to men hiding their faces from him because he was despised. The attitude of men is reflected in the contempt of the chief priests and the rulers who, when Pilate told them that he would punish Jesus and release him, cried out, “Away with this man, and release for us Barabbas!” (Luke 23:18). They despised him and that for which he stood, rejecting out of hand with no examination his claim to be the Messiah.

In our day men express their disfavor by denying his claim to be coequal with the Father. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969), a leading liberal Protestant preacher of the earlier part of the twentieth century and pastor of the famous Riverside Church in New York City (from 1930-46), rejected his deity. His sermon “The Peril of Worshiping Jesus” was often cited, particularly the following statement: “I think God was in my mother, the source of all loveliness that blessed us there. And I rise from that with a profound sense of the reality of what I am doing when I profess my faith that God was in Christ.” Among other things he said was this: “Of course, the divinity of Jesus differs from ours in degree, but not in kind.” [15] Since our Lord claimed deity, Fosdick was in effect calling him a liar or unwittingly suggesting he was deceived.

Many no doubt were guilty of a superficial evaluation of our Lord, thinking that the insults he received and the suffering he underwent must have come for good reasons, when the real reason was simply rebellion against the Father, whom he represented. George Adam Smith warns us against making the superficial appraisal of Jesus. Speaking of the reasons for the disregard of the Servant, he writes: “They are the confession, in general language, of an universal human habit,—the habit of letting the eye cheat the heart and conscience, of allowing the aspect of suffering to blind us to its meaning; of forgetting in our sense of the ugliness and helplessness of pain, that it has a motive, a future, and a God.” [16]

Finally, the prophet concludes with “and we did not esteem Him.” Luther, in his German translation, put it this way: “We have estimated him at nothing.” Peter’s term, used twice in his sermon given after the healing of the lame man, is “denied” (KJV), or “disowned” (NASB; Acts 3:13). Actually the price for our Lord was reckoned at “thirty pieces of silver.” That is what Judas sold him for (cf. Matt. 27:9-10).

Many years ago, just after I became a Christian, I heard Dr. Herbert Lockyer, a well-known Bible expositor from Britain, give a message in Birmingham, Alabama on Judas’s betrayal of Jesus Christ. As I remember, he linked the passage in Matthew with the passage from Zechariah 11:12, where the prophet, speaking for the Lord God, and asking for an evaluation of the gifts of grace that he had given Israel, says: “Give me my wages.” Zechariah then writes, “So they weighed out thirty shekels of silver as my wages.” The prophet then gives God’s ironical evaluation of the nation’s response, “Then the Lord said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter, that magnificent price at which I was valued by them’” (Zech. 11:13). The thirty pieces of silver was the price of a slave gored to death by an ox (Ex. 21:32). Mr. Lockyer made the point that the prophecy was fulfilled in Judas’s selling the Lord for thirty pieces of silver. He went on to talk about the paltriness of the price in the light of the majesty of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he suggested that the value of the thirty pieces of silver was the present-day equivalent of the money required to buy a man’s suit. The title of the sermon that he gave had been announced as, “Selling Christ for a Suit of Clothes.” Such is the evaluation of the Lord of Glory by those who know him not. But those who do understand their sin and know the burden of it; who know the longing for release from it; and who find that release in his saving cross, sing joyfully,

“Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.” [17]

Conclusion

We began this study by saying that the most critical problem of life was posited by Job: “In truth I know that this is so; but how can a man be in the right before God?” The prophets and the apostles proclaimed God’s answer to the question, and it is simply this: We are “justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24). He is the one who is Isaiah’s Suffering Servant of Jehovah and the Messiah who has come and is to come again. And Paul states that this righteousness is for all that believe (Rom. 3:22, 25-26). May the God who gave the Messiah for sinners enable you to believe and rejoice in his solution to life’s critical problem.

Notes

1. This is article eight in a twelve-part series, “Anticipations of the Messiah in the Old Testament.”
2. The Targum viewed the Servant not as Jesus of Nazareth who died in the first century, but as a person who has yet to come.
3. Edward J. Young, Isaiah Fifty-Three: A Devotional and Expository Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), 64.
4. The Hebrew word translated in the KJV as “our report” (“our message,” NASB) is rendered in the RSV as “what we have heard.” It is not at all certain, however, that that is the correct view of the word. It may mean “our report,” that is, the report we are now bringing. In that case the words reflect the present confession of the penitent nation. Cf. Henri Blocher, Songs of the Servant (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1975), 62, although I am not satisfied with Blocher’s general conclusions regarding the verse.
5. David Baron, The Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (London: Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel, 1918; reprint ed., Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1972), 450; Merrill F. Unger, Zechariah: Prophet of Messiah’s Glory (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1963), 218.
6. John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 4: 112-13.
7. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Aurora Leigh,” Book 7, lines 821-24, in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 372.
8. John Calvin, Sermons on Isaiah’s Prophecy of the Death and Passion of Christ, trans., T. H. L. Parker (London: James Clarke, 1956), 46.
9. Franz Deitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah, trans. James Martin (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1877; reprint ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), 2:311. The Latin expression means “the torture chamber, or rack, of the Rabbis.”
10. The “has” of this clause probably should be translated by “had,” as Delitzsch does (Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah, 2:312).
11. C. H. Spurgeon, “A Root Out of a Dry Ground.” in The Treasury of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 3:721.
12. C. H. Spurgeon, “A Man of Sorrows,” in The Treasury of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 3:726.
13. Philip B. Bliss, “Hallelujah! What a Savior,” Hymn 96 in Hymns of Worship and Remembrance (Kansas City, KS: Gospel Perpetuating Publishers, 1950).
14. Cf. Edward J. Young, The Book of Isaiah: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 3:344; Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah, 2:314.
15. Harry Emerson Fosdick, “The Peril of Worshiping Jesus,” in The Hope of the World: Sermons on Christianity Today (New York: Harper, 1933), 96-106 (esp. 103-104).
16. George Adam Smith, The Book of Isaiah, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1927), 2:366.
17. Isaac Watts, “When I Survey the Wonderous Cross,” Hymn 188 in Hymns of Worship and Remembrance (Kansas City, KS: Gospel Perpetuating Publishers, 1950).