Wednesday, March 3
Like a vulnerable plant, apparently of no special value, and despised (Isaiah 53:2, 3)—that’s the depiction we are given here of the Suffering Servant. Isaiah has quickly brought us through innocent youth to the brink of the abyss. Even with the background provided earlier, we are not prepared in the sense that we are resigned to the Servant’s fate. To the contrary! Isaiah has taught us to cherish the Child born to us, the supreme Prince of Peace. Others despise Him, but we know who He really is.
As someone has said: “We have met the enemy and they are us.” The servant is not the first to be despised, rejected, or a man of suffering. King David was all of those when he fled from his son Absalom (2 Samuel 15:30). But the suffering borne by this Servant is not His own and does not result from His own sin. Nor does He bear it merely for another individual; “the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6).
The answer to the question “Why?” is Isaiah’s testing truth: Because of God’s love, His Messiah would choose to suffer. But why? Isaiah drives the “golden spike” to complete the unthinkable truth: He would choose to suffer in order to reach the unreachable, and the unreachable is us!
Those who do not understand regard the Servant as “Smitten of God” (Isaiah 53:4). Just as Job’s friends thought his sin must have caused his suffering, and just as Jesus’ disciples asked Him “who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2), those who saw Jesus on the cross assumed the worst. Didn’t Moses say that “he that is hanged is accursed of God” (Deuteronomy 21:23; compare Numbers 25:4)?
Yet, all this was God’s will (Isaiah 53:10). Why? Because “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Because God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
“What a price has been paid for us! Behold the cross, and the Victim uplifted upon it. Look at those hands, pierced with the cruel nails. Look at His feet, fastened with spikes to the tree. Christ bore our sins in His own body. That suffering, that agony, is the price of your redemption.” Ellen G. White, God’s Amazing Grace, p. 172
The weight, the guilt, the punishment for the sins of the whole world—every sin, by every sinner—fell upon Christ at the Cross, at once, as the only means to save us! What does this tell us about how bad sin is, that such a price had to be paid in order to redeem us from it? What does it tell us about God’s love that He would do this for us, even at such a great cost?
