Day 4 — The Starting Point: Who Jesus Is, and What He Has Done
Today’s Passage: Isaiah 53:1-12
Isaiah was a prophet in Jerusalem. He lived roughly seven hundred years before the events the rest of this series will describe, and he spent his life saying things his neighbours did not want to hear: that the nation was rotting, that armies were coming, that God saw all of it.
Then, in the middle of the long book that carries his name, the tone changes. A figure appears who is called simply the servant. Four separate poems describe him, and the last of them is today’s reading. It is not a story. It is verse, and most of it is written in the past tense, as though the poet were remembering something that had already happened to somebody he knew.
Twelve verses. Read them slowly, and out loud if you can. Nobody is going to ask you to agree with anything today.
As you read, hold this: The guilt was ours, and the punishment for it fell on someone who had none.
Context What the first hearers already knew
Isaiah’s neighbours lived with sacrifice the way we live with traffic. You did wrong, and you brought an animal, and someone else’s blood went onto the altar instead of yours, and you went home. Once a year a goat had the nation’s guilt confessed over its head and was driven into the desert carrying it away. None of that needed explaining to a first hearer. So when this poem says a person was led like a lamb and made an offering, the picture lands instantly, and it jolts, because the arrangement had always run on animals. In 1947 a shepherd found jars of scrolls in caves above the Dead Sea, and one was a complete copy of Isaiah, hand-written more than a hundred years before any of the events this series describes. The poem is older than the thing it describes. That is not an argument. It is just the date.
Isaiah 53:1-3 (BSB)
¹ Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? ² He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no stately form or majesty to attract us, no beauty that we should desire Him. ³ He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
He is not impressive. That is the first thing said about him. A green shoot pushing up out of cracked, dry ground is the sort of thing you step over without looking down. He was not the one anyone would have picked.
He was not merely ignored. He was despised. People looked away from him the way you look away from someone whose life has visibly gone wrong. Notice who the poet counts among those people: we esteemed Him not. Whoever is speaking here is confessing, not reporting on somebody else’s bad behaviour.
Isaiah 53:4-6 (BSB)
⁴ Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered Him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. ⁵ But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. ⁶ We all like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.
Here is the turn, and everything in the chapter rests on it.
The onlookers had a theory. They saw a man suffering and assumed God was settling an account with him for something he had done. That is the usual explanation, and it is wrong. He was pierced for our transgressions. Crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that bought us peace landed on him.
That little word for means in the place of. Five times in two verses the wrong belongs to one party and the wounds belong to another: our, our, us, we, us all.
Verse six explains how a whole crowd managed to go wrong at once. Sheep do not organise a rebellion. They drift, each one after its own patch of grass, and the flock is scattered before anyone notices. Each one has turned to his own way. That is why it so rarely feels like rebellion from the inside. Everyone’s own way looks reasonable to the person walking it.
And the last line is the one to sit with. The LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. God is the one doing the laying. He takes what belonged to the flock and sets it down on the servant’s back, the way a man loads a weight onto a back willing to carry it.
Isaiah 53:7-9 (BSB)
⁷ He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth. ⁸ By oppression and judgment He was taken away, and who can recount His descendants? For He was cut off from the land of the living; He was stricken for the transgression of My people. ⁹ He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in His death, although He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth.
He says nothing. Twice the poem says it, so you cannot miss it. A lamb is silent because it does not understand what is happening. He is silent knowing exactly what is happening, which is not the same thing.
Cut off from the land of the living means he dies. The trial is crooked, the sentence is unjust, and the reason is given plainly: He was stricken for the transgression of My people. That is God speaking now, and He calls them His people while saying what their wrong cost.
Then verse nine puts down two details that do not belong in the same sentence. He is executed among criminals. He is buried in a rich man’s grave. And the poem insists, in the same breath, that he had done nothing to deserve either: no violence in his hands, no deceit in his mouth. He is the one person in the chapter with nothing to answer for.
Christians have read this chapter, from the very beginning, as a description of Jesus of Nazareth: passed over, despised, silent in front of the men who tried him, executed between two criminals, and laid in a tomb belonging to a wealthy man who asked for the body. It is the reading the first followers of Jesus gave it out loud, in public, within weeks. Jewish readers who do not share that reading have long understood the servant as the nation of Israel, suffering among the nations. You do not have to settle that today. Read the chapter, then read Day 6, and see what you make of it.
Isaiah 53:10-12 (BSB)
¹⁰ Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush Him and to cause Him to suffer; and when His soul is made a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, and the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand. ¹¹ After the anguish of His soul, He will see the light of life and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant will justify many, and He will bear their iniquities. ¹² Therefore I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the spoils with the strong, because He has poured out His life unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors. Yet He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.
Verse ten is the hardest line in the chapter and it should not be smoothed over. It does not say God allowed this, or stood back while men did it. It says it was the LORD’s will to crush Him.
If the servant were a bystander seized and handed over, that sentence would be monstrous. But read verse twelve: He has poured out His life unto death. He poured it out. Nobody drained it from him. The Father wills it and the Son wills it, the same thing, for the same reason, at the same moment. Not a strong will overpowering a weak one. Two wills agreeing to pay for what the flock owed.
Then the poem does something a funeral poem has no business doing. The man who was cut off in verse eight is seeing in verse eleven. He sees the light of life. He sees offspring. He is satisfied. The chapter refuses to end at the grave, and Day 8 will come back to that.
Justify many. That is the courtroom word from Day 3, the verdict a person cannot earn: declared in the right, with the court’s own authority behind it. And the poem says exactly how that verdict becomes possible. He will bear their iniquities. The debt does not evaporate. It is carried, by him, away from them.
The last line is the strangest kindness in the chapter. He is counted in with the guilty, and from among them he speaks up on their behalf.
Word study "guilt offering" — asham (Isaiah 53:10)
Hebrew: אָשָׁם (‘asham), pronounced ah-SHAHM. Strong’s H817. This is not a general word for sacrifice. It names one particular offering in Israel’s law: the one brought when someone owed a debt that an apology could not cover, where the wrong had to be paid back in full with more added on top. Every other time the word appears it is an animal. Isaiah puts it on a person.
Study notes Somebody else asked first
Six centuries later a court official from Ethiopia rode home with a scroll of Isaiah open on his knees, at this chapter, and put the obvious question to the first person who could answer it.
Acts 8:34-35 (BSB) — “Tell me,” said the eunuch, “who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” Then Philip began with this very Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.
Today’s Decision
Read Isaiah 53 through one more time today, out loud and slowly. Then say to God, in your own words, what you honestly make of it. If what you honestly make of it is “I do not know whether You are there, and I do not know what to do with this,” say that. Honest is enough to start with.