Man of Sorrows | Isaiah 52:13-53:3
Brian Hedges | December 1, 2019
Well, turn in your Bibles this morning to the book of Isaiah, to Isaiah 53, the chapter that we have just heard read together. For those of you who know your Bibles, you know that Isaiah 53 is one of the greatest chapters in all of Scripture. It is one of those chapters that the New Testament writers meditated upon and thought much about; in fact, even Jesus quotes directly from Isaiah 53, applying it to himself.
You remember when Phililp the evangelist, in the book of Acts, Acts 8, meets an Ethiopian eunuch who’s riding in his chariot, and he’s reading from the scroll of Isaiah, he’s reading Isaiah 53, and he doesn’t understand it. Philip asks him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?”
He says, “How can I, unless someone teach me?” So Philip climbs up into that chariot and from that very Scripture preaches to him Jesus.
When you read the book of Romans you see that Paul more than once quotes from Isaiah 53. The same is true in 1 Peter. So the apostles, Jesus himself, all understood the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, in light of this great chapter, Isaiah 53.
For the next four weeks during Advent we’re just going to slowly work our way through this great chapter of Scripture. It has been called the Mount Everest of Old Testament prophecy.
Polycarp, who was a second-century church father and probably a disciple, we believe, of the apostle John, called it “the golden passional of the Old Testament.” Another church father, named Jerome, said that Isaiah should be called Isaiah the evangelist rather than Isaiah the prophet, because what he writes looks so clear—it is so clear that it’s more like an evangelist in the New Testament, who’s describing for us what has already happened, than like a prophet of the Old Testament.
But we know with certainty that the book of Isaiah was written hundreds of years before Christ. In fact, we have a full copy of the book of Isaiah, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, that predates the birth of Christ by at least a hundred years. We believe that Isaiah was written some 700 years before Christ. But it’s a gospel, a gospel in the Old Testament. In fact, St. Augustine called it the fifth Gospel. Martin Luther said that “every Christian should memorize Isaiah 53.”
Did you know that this passage is probably the one Old Testament passage that has been used more than any other to bring unbelieving Jewish people to faith in the Messiah? And yet it’s a passage which is almost never read in the synagogue. In the synagogues today they follow something like a lectionary of Old Testament readings, where they read through all of the Law, all of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, and selections from the prophets, but they almost always skip Isaiah 53.
Keil and Delitzsch, in their Old Testament commentary, said that “this chapter looks as if it was written beneath the cross itself,” as if it was written right there at Golgotha. D.L. Moody was one time asked if his creed was written down anywhere, and he said, “Turn to the 53rd of Isaiah.” That was his creed. Charles Haddon Spurgeon said that “Isaiah 53 is the very holy of holies of divine writ.” He said, “It is a Bible in miniature, the condensed essence of the gospel.”
This is a wonderful chapter, and it’s a chapter that repays close meditation and reflection, and I hope this morning as we dig into these verses together that you will pray that the Lord will open our eyes so that we will see clearly the beauty of the Messiah in his life, in his death, and in his exaltation.
This morning I want us to look at three things as we just look at the first two stanzas of this song. This is one of the servant songs in Isaiah. It goes from Isaiah 52:13 all the way through chapter 53, and I want us to look at three things about the servant: the identity of the servant, the humiliation of the servant (I’ll explain that word when we get to the second point), and the exaltation of the servant.
1. The Identity of the Servant
First of all, the identity of the servant. Just note Isaiah 52:13. It begins with a command. “Behold, my servant…” “Behold, my servant shall act wisely, he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.” Then again in 53:11 he is called the Lord’s servant.
So, who is this servant of the Lord? John Oswalt has written perhaps the best commentary, the best evangelical commentary, on Isaiah that I know of, and in his commentary he says that the overarching theme of the book of Isaiah is servanthood. He said this is the theme that binds the book together.
It’s interesting, because earlier in the book of Isaiah, Israel, the nation of Israel, is identified as the Lord’s servant. They are the people who would trust in God in such a way that they were to become a light to the nations, they were to be the means of bringing God’s deliverance to the whole world.
But the problem, Oswalt notes, is that "proud, arrogant, sinful Israel is anything but the servant of God. This poses a nearly unanswerable question: How can this Israel become that Israel? How can the Israel described in chapters 1-39 be the Israel that will be the light to the Gentiles?" Oswalt says, “The rest of the book functions as an answer to that question. In short, the answer is God, God who has the power and the grace to make the impossible possible.”
That theme really comes to the focus, into sharp focus, in the servant songs in Isaiah, and in the second part of the book of Isaiah, Isaiah 40-66. You see it in several passages, and I just want to trace the thread leading up to this servant song with you through a few passages.
In Isaiah 41:8-9 you have Israel identified as the servant. Look at these words. “But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend, you whom I took from the ends of the earth and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, ‘You are my servant; I have chosen you and not cast you off.’”
But again, there are problems with Israel. Israel is actually in exile, Babylonian exile, in the prophetic forecasting of exile, and they are in exile because of their sins, because of their iniquities, because of their transgressions. They’re functioning in no way as the light to the Gentiles. There are qualities, then, that describe the servant of the Lord that are not seen to be true of the nation of Israel, even at its best.
Then in Isaiah 49 you begin to see that the servant is somehow distinct from Israel. In Isaiah 41 the servant is Israel, but in Isaiah 49 the servant is the one who’s actually going to do something for Israel. Look at these verses, verses 5 and 6.
“And now the Lord says, he who formed me from the womb to be his servant [so now the servant himself is speaking], to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him—for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord, and my God has become my strength—he says: ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel, I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Here you see the servant is distinct from Israel. The servant is the one who will actually rescue Israel. The servant is the one who will be the light for the nations.
Then you drop down to Isaiah 49:8: “Thus says the Lord, ‘In a time of favor I have answered you; in a day of salvation I have helped you; I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people…”
So now the servant is actually the one who secures God’s covenant promises for Israel. When you get to Isaiah 52-53, you get to this last servant song, it becomes clear that this servant is someone who is a single, solitary figure who will suffer on behalf of the nation and through whom the Lord will bare his holy arm to bring salvation. “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” Isaiah 53:1, and again, that’s referring back to other passages in Isaiah.
Isaiah 40:10, “Behold, the Lord God comes with might and his arm rules for him. Behold, his reward is with him and his recompense before him.”
Then Isaiah 52:10, “The Lord has bared his holy arm before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God.”
This servant, the identity of this servant, is none other than the Messiah. He is the root from the stem of Jesse, he is the righteous branch. He is this child that was prophesied of in Isaiah 9. All of these figured begin coming together and coalesce in the person of Jesus Christ.
The very first thing for us just to understand practically speaking is this: that in the book of Isaiah we have one of the clearest prophetic descriptions of Jesus anywhere in Scripture, and it is one of the greatest evidences for the authenticity of Jesus Christ, for the authenticity of the truthfulness of Scripture. Here, seven centuries before Jesus was born, you have detailed prophecy of this one, the servant of the Lord. As we’re going to see this morning, it is detailed prophecy that describes even the crucifixion of Christ in amazing detail.
The identity of the servant is Jesus himself.
2. The Humiliation of the Servant
Then we come to the humiliation of the servant. Now, some of you may remember, a few months ago when Andy Lindgren preached a wonderful message from Philippians 2, that he showed a chart that comes from the ESV Study Bible, and it’s a chart that shows the humiliation and the exaltation of Christ. There’s this descent called humiliation, and it refers to Christ’s incarnation and his life, culminating in his death on the cross; and then you have the upward curve, right—the exaltation of Christ.
These are technical words in Christian theology. Most of the time when we hear the word “humiliation” we think of someone who’s really embarrassed, right? Someone’s humiliated, to have a humiliating experience, they’re really embarrassed.
That’s not the meaning of the word in Christian theology. The humiliation of Christ is the self-humbling of Christ. We almost call it the humility of Christ, but it’s more than just the virtue of humility, it’s all that Jesus, it’s all of his actions, it’s everything from his birth, his incarnation, his virgin birth, throughout the entirety of his life, culminating in his suffering and in his death. This is what Isaiah brings to our attention, especially in the servant song here in Isaiah 53. Let’s just a notice a few of the verses here.
Isaiah 53; look at verses 1 and 2. “Who has believed what he has heard from us? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.”
This is descriptive of the very ordinary and unassuming and unremarkable circumstances of the birth and the upbringing of the Lord Jesus. You remember he was born in this tiny little village of Bethlehem, and then he was raised in Nazareth. Do you remember what one of the early disciples, Nathanael or Bartholomew, said when he first heard about Jesus of Nazareth being the Messiah? He said, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”
Now, I grew up in west Texas, and there was a town in west Texas called Big Spring, Texas. Anybody ever been to Big Spring, Texas? You don’t want to go there. We used to call it the armpit of Texas. That’s how bad it was. It was just a really awful town. Nobody really liked to go to Big Spring. I’m not even sure if the people who lived in Big Spring liked Big Spring. Well, Nazareth was kind of like that. It was this small, podunk little town in little Galilee. It wasn’t even one of the great cities of Judea; it certainly wasn’t Jerusalem. Yet this is where Jesus is raised.
He was raised in pretty much a lower middle-class family. Remember he was the son of a carpenter, and you remember that when Jesus begins his earthly ministry the people are scratching their heads and saying, “Who is this guy? Isn’t this Joseph’s son? Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Who is this person who thinks that he can teach?” “A prophet is without honor in his own country,” Jesus said.
But it’s a fulfillment of this prophecy, this root out of dry ground, who had no form or majesty that people should look upon him, no beauty that they should desire him. Some people even suppose from this that Jesus was not particularly physically attractive. He didn’t really cut a great figure. He wasn’t someone that you would just see and think, “That’s a leader!”
You know how sometimes you meet someone and you think, “That person’s a born leader”? You know, they have a great personality, they’re great with people, they’re decisive, they’re intelligent, they’re smart, they’re articulate, they’re wonderful communicators, and you think, “That person’s a great leader!” But I think in the beginnings of Jesus’ life and ministry it wasn’t those natural leadership qualities, it wasn’t that natural persona that attracted people to him; in fact, people pretty much overlooked Jesus for most of his life. This is the humiliation of Jesus.
Of course, when we think about just the reality of the incarnation itself, the very fact that here was the Son of God who became man, this was the divine word by whom and through whom the worlds were created, and he became flesh and dwelt among us. We think about that, the scandal of the incarnation, and we begin to see something of the humiliation of Christ.
I think it was C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, who compared it to a man becoming a slug. That would be a lowly step, wouldn’t it? Yet the step that Jesus, the very eternal Son of God, took to become one with us in our humanity is an infinitely greater step.
Perhaps no one has put this better than St. Augustine in one of his sermons. He said, “Man’s maker was made man that he, ruler of the stars, might nurse at his mother’s breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that the Truth might be accused of false witness, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak, that the Healer might be wounded, that Life might die.”
The incarnation of Christ. We must never forget that when Jesus was born in that lowly manger in Bethlehem, the shadow of the cross loomed over him, even at that moment. He was born to die. You remember how Mary was told that “a sword will pierce through you.” She was to know the greatest torment that a mother could know: to see her son die a painful death. It was there right at the beginning.
When we enter into this season of Advent, this season of Christmas, it is a season of celebration, yes. “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!” We celebrate the Advent, the first advent of Christ; but it’s also a season that calls for great reflection and for sober meditation on the reality of the incarnation and what it cost the Lord Jesus to be one of us.
Then look at verse 3. We see not only his humiliation in the incarnation, but in the sorrows of his incarnation. Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” “Man of sorrows, what a name…” Jesus Christ lived his life marked by sorrow.
Spurgeon preached a whole sermon on this called “The Man of Sorrows.” He looked at how Jesus was a man, and then he was a man of sorrows and how that title, that term, peculiarly fit Jesus. Listen to his words. He said, “Tears were his insignia, and the cross his escutcheon. He was the warrior in black armor, and not as now the rider upon the white horse. He was the lord of grief, the prince of pain, the emperor of anguish, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Affliction emptied his quiver upon him, making his heart the target for all conceivable woes.”
You think about the afflictions of Jesus, you think about the sorrows of Jesus, not even getting to the cross yet. Just think about the sorrows of his life. Here was someone who was hated, who was persecuted, who was scorned. When Jesus began his earthly ministry, even his family thought he was insane. They tried to lock him up! They tried to take him in Mark 3. They thought he was crazy.
He was disavowed by the religious leaders of his people. When he first taught in the synagogue, actually reading from the scroll of Isaiah and applying the words of Isaiah 61 to himself, do you remember what they did? They were ready to throw him off a cliff! Even at that very moment, at the very beginning of his earthly ministry, ready to kill him. Many times throughout his ministry the Pharisees and the Sadducees are conspiring with one another to figure out how they can get rid of this guy.
But not only was he persecuted and endured sorrow in that way, but think about the sorrows of working with people, even his disciples, who, though they were in a sense his friends, yet they were so slow to learn. They were constantly squabbling with one another, they were always fighting. Jesus was constantly having to teach them the same lessons again and again and again. And then in Gethsemane, in the moment of his greatest need, he asked for them to pray with him for just one hour, and they can’t do that; they fall asleep. He’s about to go to the cross, he’s about to die, he is sweating great drops of blood, such are his agonies, such are his sorrows in that garden; and his friends fall asleep. They’re not there for him.
Then think about how Hebrews says that he “endured the contradiction of sinners against himself.” Have you ever had the experience where you see something, you see some aspect of human sin, of human iniquity, and it just pains your heart? Even as desensitized as we are to sin, because we see so much of it, don’t we, in the world—we see it in the newspapers, we see it online, we see it in television shows and movies and such—we’re so desensitized to it, but yet sometimes you see something, you hear something, some terrible crime that’s been committed, some great tragedy; you see it, and it grieves your heart. It just almost turns your stomach.
But here is Jesus, the "holy, harmless Son of God, separated from sinners," and every time Jesus saw sin, every time he encountered it, which was all the time, every day, how must his heart have grieved!
He also knew all of the ordinary forms of human grief. He knew what it was to be hungry. Probably very few of us in this have ever had to skip a meal because of poverty, but Jesus did. He knew what it was to be thirsty. None of us have had moments where we thought we were going to die of thirst, but Jesus found himself very thirsty, sitting at a well, needing someone to give him a drink of water; and of course, the thirst he endured on the cross.
Most of us have probably not been homeless, or if we were it wasn’t for very long; but "the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head." Jesus knew poverty. He knew those kinds of griefs, and he knew what it was to lose friends. Do you remember how he wept at the grave of Lazarus, his friend? Jesus knew sorrow. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
But get this. His humiliation is not just the humiliation of his incarnation, it’s not just the humiliation of the sorrows throughout his life; but it is especially the humiliation he endured at the cross. Look at Isaiah 52:14. “As many were astonished at you—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind—”
This is a description. It is "a graphic, one-verse description of our Lord’s extreme disfigurement," as one commentator says. In fact, it’s probably the most graphic description found in a single verse anywhere in Scripture.
Isn’t it interesting that when you read the New Testament and you read the descriptions of the crucifixion, the details are pretty sparse. We’re not told great detail about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, but when you get into the Old Testament prophecies—for example, Psalm 22, or here in Isaiah 53—you have a description of Jesus in his suffering, in the chastisements, in this disfigurement, his appearance so disfigured that he’s unrecognizable; in fact, so disfigured that people would look at him as he’s hanging on the cross and they would think not only, “Is this the Son of God?” but, “Is this human? Can this be a man?” That’s how disfigured he was. Such descriptions of the crucifixion of Christ, again, written hundreds of years in advance.
All of this, I think, is very tightly summarized for us in a New Testament passage that also speaks of the humiliation of Christ. You know these words. It’s almost an outline of what we’ve just covered together in Isaiah.
Philippians 2:5-8, where Paul says, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a think to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The humiliation of our Lord.
There are so many applications to this for our lives, and we’ll tease out more of these as we work through the rest of Isaiah 53 and the rest of this series; but here’s one for today. Maybe this will strike home with some of you who are enduring something in your own life, some grief, some hardship, some sorrow.
I know that the Christmas season, while it is a season for joy, it is often a season of pronounced grief for many people. Sociologists tell us that suicide rates go up during the Christmas season. Why is that? Well, it’s because of so many broken hearts, because of so many disappointed dreams, because of so many broken relationships and families, because of a memory of so many losses of children or of grandchildren.
Here’s what I want you to know: you serve a Lord who understands. You serve a Lord who understands. He sympathizes with us in our weaknesses, because he was tempted in every point, yet without sin. You know what that means? It means that Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief! It means that he knows our pains, he feels them, he knows them. He knows them well.
I was reminded of a poem I read many years ago, written by a young man who had served in the trenches of World War I. Of course, that war was the Great War, it was a horrific war, as thousands upon thousands of people died on the battlefield. Here was a man who had seen so much of it. He knew firsthand the horrors of the machine guns, the artillery, the trench warfare. But he survived and he became a Christian, actually became a pastor, and years later he wrote a wonderful poem called “Jesus of the Scars.” Listen to what he said.
“If we have never sought, we seek thee now.
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars.
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on thy brow;
We must have thee, O Jesus of the scars.
“The heavens frighten us; they are too calm.
In all the universe, we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by thy scars we claim thy grace.
“If when the doors are shut thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of thine.
We know today what wounds are. Have no fear;
Show us thy scars; we know the countersign.”
Listen to this verse.
“The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak.
They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne.
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has scars but thou alone.”
This is the unique claim, or one of the unique claims, of the Christian faith: that we serve a God who is not remote from our suffering. “Not a god has scars but thou alone!” Our God has scars. Our God is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He endured the humiliation of the incarnation, and all the sorrows of his life, and of his death through crucifixion; and therefore he is a God who sympathizes with us in our weaknesses.
3. The Exaltation of the Servant
So we’ve considered the identity of the servant, the humiliation of the servant; and now thirdly, and very briefly, the exaltation of the servant. Humiliation is followed by exaltation, suffering leads to glory, life to death; and it’s prophesied right here in this servant’s song, Isaiah 52:13 once again. “Behold, my servant shall act wisely,” and then listen to this. “He shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted.”
When you read the rest of the hymn, the rest of the song, Isaiah 53, when you get to the end, the final stanza, verses 10-12 of Isaiah 53, it’s again a note of exaltation. We’ll see that in detail in a few weeks.
Here’s what I want you to note about this. This is a really interesting thing, because the exaltation that is here is both the exaltation in Christ’s work following his incarnation and his sorrows and his suffering and his death; he’s exalted, the exaltation covering his resurrection from the dead and then his ascension to God’s right hand and his reign from heaven now and his return in glory in the future. All of that is part of the exaltation of Christ.
But there’s more here than just that, because these words, “high and lifted up” and “exalted,” in Isaiah 52:13, those words used to describe the servant are only used three other times in the book of Isaiah. They’re only used together three other times in the book of Isaiah; in fact, only three other times in the entire Old Testament. So, four times the Old Testament uses these words, “high and lifted up,” speaking of exaltation.
Every other time, it is a direct description of God himself. You remember these words, Isaiah 6:1? “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.” You remember that vision that Isaiah describes there in that chapter as he sees the glory of the Lord and he sees the seraphim crying out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty! The earth is full of his glory!” Do you remember that? Those are the very words that are used here now to describe the servant of the Lord.
What is this? The servant of the Lord, this one who will be disfigured through crucifixion, this one who is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief? This root out of dry ground is also high and lifted up? Yes! Because here’s the great mystery of the incarnation, that it is the word made flesh. It is God who became man. This is the divine one himself, this is God himself, in the person of the Son, Jesus Christ.
Once again, Isaiah 57:15 uses these words to speak of God himself. “For thus says the one who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’”
In other words, what you see here is you see language that is used only of God, yet it is used to describe the servant of God, the servant of the Lord. Listen. The New Testament writers understood this. They understood this. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the deity of Christ is a doctrine that was invented 300 years later at the Council of Nicea. That’s what all of the critical scholars want to say. They want to say the deity of Christ came later; nobody in the New Testament believed it. That’s not true.
I’ll give you proof of it. In John 12, John reflecting on the rejection of the Jewish people of Jesus. He quotes two passages of Scripture. He quotes Isaiah 53:1, “Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom as the arm of the Lord been revealed?” Then he quotes the end of Isaiah 6, “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.”
Then, in John 12:41, this is what John says. “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” Isaiah saw Christ’s glory and spoke of him! The New Testament writers understood what was going on. They were clear on what was going on. Even Isaiah, even though he didn’t understand it as clearly as we understand today, yet he saw the glory of the Lord, the glory of the Lord Jesus, the servant of the Lord, who would be exalted, high and lifted up.
Once again, to return to Philippians 2, that great Christ hymn in the New Testament, it begins with the humiliation of Christ (we already saw that), but do you remember how it ends?
Philippians 2:9-11, “Therefore,” because of his humility, because of his obedience, because of his death, because of his death on the cross, “Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Early in Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s ministry (this was maybe a few years in), he and his congregation suffered a tragedy. It was a tragedy that almost drove Spurgeon insane. He was preaching to crowds of thousands of people, and they had rented out a music hall where thousands of people were coming. Someone, as a prank, with thousands of people loaded on the ground floor and in the balconies of this music hall, someone cried out as a prank, “Fire!”
Everybody panicked, and people started trying to rush to get out. I think some people fell out of the balcony, some people were stampeded, and six people were killed.
Of course, the newspapers blamed young Spurgeon, who was probably only 21 at this time. He couldn’t enter into his pulpit for weeks after that. It was weeks. It just completely laid him out. The stress, the anxiety of it, it just absolutely destroyed him. There were some of his friends who thought that he died at a relatively young age (I think he was 54 when he died); some of them think he died so young because of the stress and the lingering effects that that whole episode had on his health.
But do you know what pulled him out? You know what pulled him out of the anxiety and the sorrow and the stress and the regret and the—he probably had PTSD, honestly. They didn’t call it that back then, but he probably had post-traumatic stress disorder. You know what pulled him out? What pulled him out was Philippians 2:9-11, what we just read.
It was when he was walking in his garden one day and those words came into his mind, “Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him a name that is above every name.” The exaltation of Christ, knowing that Christ is exalted, the same Christ who suffered was exalted, that’s what rescued Spurgeon from his sufferings. You can go read the sermon when he came back to the pulpit, and that’s the sermon he preached on and that brought such help and changed him and his life.
Brothers and sisters, we need to know today that whatever it is we’re going through, whatever tragedies befall us, whatever suffering we encounter, whatever sorrows etch our lives with indelible pain; whatever it is, here’s something to encourage you. The same Christ who has endured suffering in our place and for us, who is acquainted with our sorrows and griefs, he is exalted, and he is exalted as the head of his people. He is exalted for you. He is exalted for you, and in his exaltation you also will be exalted.
In fact, you remember how Paul says in Ephesians 2 that we are also raised with Christ, and we are seated with him in the heavenlies. That’s our comfort. That’s our consolation. That’s our hope, that’s our encouragement.
Let me exhort us, as we go through this Advent season this year, which—I think Advent is a wonderful season, and yet it’s a season of great temptation, isn’t it? The whole Christmas season, with all the commercialism of it and the busyness of it and the conflicted family relationships that we often encounter during this season, it’s so easy to lose our focus and to not be thinking about Christ. Let’s keep our eyes on Jesus, the servant of the Lord, who endured humiliation for our sake and who has been exalted to the right hand of God for us. He was born to die, that he might be raised, that you and I might be saved, and that God might be glorified. Let’s pray together.
Merciful, heavenly Father, we pause to thank you for your word and to thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for his death, his resurrection, we thank you for his incarnation. We thank you that he came, that you sent him, and that he came. He came to die for us. He came to rescue us, to save us.
Lord, we’re not worthy of that grace, we’re not worthy of that love, but you are good and merciful. We thank you for it.
Lord, as we come to the table this morning, we can only come as the sinners that we are. We can’t come claiming any righteousness of our own. Even that which is good in us is a result of your work, it’s the result of your Spirit; but the only thing that we have to contribute, apart from your grace, is our sin. So we come as sinners, but we come as believing sinners. We come as sinners who are trusting in the crucified and risen Messiah.
We pray that you would receive us for Jesus’ sake. We pray that you would enable us by faith to enjoy a true fellowship with Jesus in these moments. As we take the bread and as we take the juice, may we in our heart of hearts feed on Christ, the bread of life. I pray that you would meet the needs of our hearts in this room today, for grace, for strength, for encouragement, for hope, for pardon, for renewal. We pray that you would be glorified in all that we say and do. We pray all this in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
