It Is All Grace

As I’ve thought about Isaiah 53, I was remembering a time when I heard a statement from a preacher…it really haunted me and haunts me still. He was talking about grace and he said that he didn’t understand it—he couldn’t understand why God would love him. I was with him—I don’t understand how a holy God could love me. I know my sin and I know my unworthiness and I have always found God’s grace to be amazing. I was with the preacher up to that point and then he said something that grieved me to the core of my being—I just can’t get over what he said. He said he didn’t understand grace and then he said, “That’s why I don’t mess with grace.” I was stunned—what do we have if we don’t have grace? I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but nothing he said in the rest of the sermon led me to believe that I had heard him wrong—I have to tell you I feel sorry most of all for his people because they are being robbed of the source of our salvation and the source of our relationship with a holy God.

As we turn to the last stanza of Isaiah’s song (53:10-12) we come again to the most Gospel centered passage in the OT. Isaiah is wrestling with a question that you and I must answer—how can a holy God have a relationship with sinful people? Job asked that question…in the midst of his suffering he said, “Truly I know that it is so: But how can a man be in the right before God?” (9:2). We have seen the answer to that question throughout this song, but we specifically saw it in verses 4-6—we saw that we were sinners, that we deserved punishment, and that God punished Jesus in our place. That last thought is developed further in this stanza.

The first thing we see in verse 10 is the delight of God.

“Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief.” I think the KJV and NASB say it better, “But the LORD was pleased to crush him.” It delighted Him to do it because the death of Jesus was not a human plot—it was a divine strategy that was planned before time began. God made us knowing that He would have to redeem us and He also knew that the only means of redemption was substitution. The heart of God is revealed in this passage—He was pleased to crush His Son and to put Him to grief. He willingly paid the cost so that we could see His glory, so that we could be forgiven, and so that we could worship Him.

It pleased the Father to crush Him—”crush” is the same word we saw in verse 5. It speaks of being torn apart and being mangled. The first stanza of this song spoke of the Servant’s appearance being marred beyond human semblance and his form beyond that of the children of mankind. I cannot stress it enough that this goes beyond what man did to Jesus—we need to see that the Jews didn’t kill Jesus, the Romans didn’t kill Jesus, Pilate didn’t kill Jesus, we didn’t kill Jesus—God the Father killed Him. The Father crushed Him and put Him to grief because He treated Him as our substitute.

God gave Jesus the wrath we deserved.

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

That is the grace of God! God crushed Jesus and that saves us from the wrath of God and reconciles us. I am going to come back to the second half of verse 10 in a moment, but let’s move down to verse 11 and be reminded of the means by which God reconciles us.

“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.”

Here we find The Atonement. In fact one commentator said, “Isaiah 53:11 is one of the fullest statements of atonement theology ever penned.” Let’s save the first statement for the next point, but look at the next three lines tomorrow and see what was required and involved in the atonement of Jesus.