Pierced for Our Transgressions | Isaiah 53:4-6
Brian Hedges | December 8, 2019
Turn in your Bibles this morning to Isaiah 53. Last week we began a short series through this chapter of the Bible, which has been called "the holy of holies" in the Old Testament. It really is right at the center of the gospel in all that it tells us about the suffering servant, about the Messiah, who would come and would suffer on behalf of the people of God. It’s one of the most hallowed places in all of Scripture. When we come to this passage of Scripture almost want to take the shoes off our feet because we feel like we’re standing on holy ground.
We’re using Isaiah 53 as a way to help us during Advent to think about what it means to worship and to know Jesus Christ; Christ who has been sent, who has become incarnate and among us, and has suffered and died in our place.
Remember that when we enter into the Advent series, part of what we’re trying to do is remember what it was like for the Old Testament people of God to wait for the Messiah and then to in a waiting spirit join with them to orient our hearts towards the second coming of Christ, waiting for his glorious return. This whole season of Advent is about more than just Christmas day, it’s about more than just the incarnation of Christ; it’s really about waiting and about posturing ourselves to seek Christ in a fresh way. That’s what we want to do as we’re studying Isaiah 53 together.
Today we’re going to be looking at the third stanza in this five-stanza song. It’s verses 4-6 in Isaiah 53, and I just want to begin by reading those verses to us, verses 4-6. Then, before jumping into the passage itself, I just want you to see something about the literary structure of the second part of Isaiah, Isaiah 40-66, and how this chapter fits in. Let me read these verses, beginning in verse 4.
“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
This is God’s word.
Now, as most of you probably know, Isaiah, the book of Isaiah, is divided into two sections. You have Isaiah 1-39, which is a lot of judgment. There’s just a lot of judgment in Isaiah 1-39. There are little glimmers of hope and of salvation, but the real hope really begins in Isaiah 40. That’s where it comes into the forefront of Isaiah’s vision.
Isaiah 40-66, those 27 chapters, are divided into three sections. This isn’t original with me—I’m drawing this from one of the resources I’ve used in preparation for this message. But it points out that it’s roughly divided by these three nine-chapter sections. Now, we know that originally in Hebrew there weren’t the chapter and verse divisions; nevertheless, these divisions basically hold true, and there are even some literary markers that show that this is the case.
So, in these three sections of nine chapters each, you have themes of salvation. In chapters 40-48, the real theme of salvation has to do with salvation from exile. Its rescue of God’s Old Testament people from their exile in Babylon, and it’s a promise of return. It’s going to be something like this new exodus, just as the original generation of the Israelites, as they were rescued from Egypt and they were brought into the promised land, so in a new exodus Yahweh himself is going to come and is going to lead his people back to Zion, back to Jerusalem. That’s chapter 40-48.
Then chapters 49-57, the focus becomes more and more on salvation from sin and from guilt, with the promise of forgiveness.
Then when you get into the last nine chapters, chapters 58-66, by the time you get to the end of those chapters, the horizon is much further in the future, and it’s a promise of a new heavens and a new earth, and it’s salvation from the curse on creation itself, salvation from the very presence of sin and death. So the whole imagery of a new heavens and a new earth that the book of Revelation talks about; that really comes from the end of Isaiah.
Here’s the interesting thing about that middle section, chapters 49-57. The very middle chapter in those nine chapters is Isaiah 53, and Isaiah 53 (as I said, it’s really 52:13-53) is a hymn, it’s a song, and it’s a song that’s divided into five stanzas. We looked at the first two of those last week.
The middle stanza are the verses that we just read, and the middle verse in that stanza is verse 5. Listen to it again, and just get this: this is right at the center of the second half of Isaiah, where Isaiah gives us this glorious gospel in the Old Testament. Right at the center of it are these words: “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”
It is not an overstatement at all to say that this message is the central message of the gospel. This is the central message of salvation. This is right at the heart of the biblical vision of redemption and all that God promises to do for us through his Son, Jesus Christ.
In some ways, this message was one of the easiest to prepare for me, because it’s just the gospel, and it’s what we talk about so often, all the time. There’s probably nothing that’s going to be particularly new to you, if you’ve been around Redeemer for any period of time at all; but I hope what will be true is that it will be very clear, that the gospel will be clear, and that perhaps for some of you it will be clear for the first time. Maybe if you’re new to Redeemer or maybe if your spiritual sensibilities are just beginning to really come into use, you’re just beginning to see and think about spiritual things—maybe you’re a child or even a teenager, young person—you’re just now beginning to think about these things. I hope today that the gospel will be crystal clear.
I want us to see three things. These are three things that are right at the heart of the gospel. I want us to see our sin, the suffering substitute, and the salvation he brings. Our sin—that’s the need for the gospel; the suffering substitute is all about Jesus, who through His death brings us salvation; and then the salvation, of course, is the result itself. So, these three things.
I. Our Sin
Number one, our sin. It’s interesting, when you read these verses, verses 4-6, that the first half of each verse gives us an insight into sin. I want you to see three. There’s something about the symptoms of sin, there’s something about the nature of sin, and then there’s a very clear and vivid picture of sin.
(1) Here are the symptoms, in the first part of verse 4, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”
Now, you know that we live in a world where lots of people just don’t even believe that there’s such a thing as sin anymore. We live in a postmodern world, right, so we live in an age and a society that denies the reality of absolute truth and moral absolutes and absolute right and absolute wrong, and morality is constructed by societies, and what’s true for me may not be true for you, and so on. That’s the argument.
I think it’s complete nonsense, and I think that if you press hard on it I think anyone is going to have to step back and say, “No, there has to be some things that are absolutely wrong.” I mean, Holocaust, right? There are some things that are just absolute wrong. Then it begs the question, “Okay, what is the standard?”
But when we’re talking about sin, when we’re sharing the gospel with others, sometimes a starting point doesn’t have to even be establishing those absolutes; sometimes a starting point can just be talking about the symptoms of sin, because we all live with that. Whether you recognize absolute standards of right and wrong or not, you at least know what it is to experience grief and sorrow. It begs the question again, doesn’t it; where do these griefs and sorrows come from? Why do we live in a world that is like this? Why do we suffer in the ways that we do?
Well, the Scripture tells us why. The Scripture tells us that those griefs and those sorrows are the result of sin, they are the result of the fall, they push us back to the ultimate problem, which is not our suffering, but it’s the cause of all that suffering, and it’s man’s rebellion against God.
Right here in this passage you see right at the beginning that the suffering servant came and he was bearing that, he was bearing the consequences of sin, the symptoms of sin. He bore our griefs and he carried our sorrows.
(2) We can’t talk about the gospel for very long without talking about what sin actually is. We do have to get there. So you see something about the nature of sin in the words that Isaiah uses in verse 5: “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities…”
Those two words, “transgressions” and “iniquities,” are two of the three main Hebrew words for sin. You have all three of those words together in Psalm 32:5, where David says, “I acknowledged my sin, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgression to the Lord.’” So you have sin, transgression, and iniquity.
In some ways they’re synonymous, but they have different shades of meaning, and when you look at them in their distinct meanings they help us get a picture of what sin really is.
The word “sin,” that carries the idea of missing the mark. You might think of an archer who’s shooting at a target and the arrow falls short. You remember how Scripture says that “we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We’ve missed the mark. We’ve missed the target. We haven’t hit what we were aiming at. We’ve somehow strayed away from dead center. That’s the word “sin.”
The word “transgression” is a stronger word that really carries the idea of trespassing a boundary, of an offense against a person or against a standard, breaking a rule or breaking the law. It’s an infraction. It’s a transgression. It’s crossing a line. It’s not only that we have failed to hit the mark and we’ve fallen short, but it’s also that we’ve gone outside the boundaries, it’s also that we’ve actually done those things which we should not have done.
A lot of the older writers talked about sins of omission and sins of commission. Well, sins of omission, those would be falling short. Those are neglecting to do the things that we should do. That’s the failure to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and the failure to love our neighbors as ourselves. But it’s not only our failure to love, it’s also that we have hurt God. It’s also that we have blasphemed God. It’s also that we have sinned against God. It’s also that we have committed crimes, high crimes, treasons against the Creator of the universe.
It’s not only that, but we have hurt other people. We have sinned against other people. It’s not only that we have failed to love them, but also that we have said things that were malicious or hurtful. We’ve gossiped, we’ve slandered, we’ve said words out of anger that have wounded people deeply, to the core of their beings. Often we do this, don’t we, to the people we love the most. We’ve done that with our children or with our spouses.
Not only that, but we have sinned in other ways. We have objectified people with lust, right? We have sinned against people by withholding good from them when it was in our power to do it. Scripture tells us that when you have the power to do good for someone and you don’t do it, that’s a sin. We’ve sinned in terms of injustice, by withholding from people what we could have done that would have helped them. All of these things are transgressions.
It begins to show us a little more what the nature of sin is. Sin is not just neglect, but it’s also these offenses and transgressions against God’s law and against God’s standard.
But then you have this third word, “iniquity.” This is from a Hebrew root that means, essentially, to twist or to be bent, or it can carry the idea of being irritated or confused. There’s a related word that comes from the same Hebrew root that means to be devastated. So it was often used to describe a city that was in ruins. The prophet Micah talks about Jerusalem being in ruins, and it comes from the same root as this word.
I think that’s a great picture of what sin is. Sin leaves someone in ruins. Have you ever visited the ruins of an ancient city? What you see is that there was once greatness, but now it’s been destroyed. So you see the vestiges of greatness, you see the remains of the great city, the great culture, the great civilization, that once was there, but it no longer remains.
You might think of it in this way, that iniquity has to do with the deep perversion in the core of our nature. It’s what St. Augustine described as concupiscence, or inordinate desire, disordered desires. He talked about how our loves are disordered; that is, that we love things out of proportion to their true worth. We love things that we shouldn’t love. We pursue things that are forbidden to us. Then there are some things that maybe deserve a lesser kind of love, but we elevate them and we love them more than we should, while we love God and people less than we should. This is all the result of iniquity.
It means to be twisted, to be bent. C.S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, his science fiction trilogy, when he describes the human beings on planet earth, they are described by the angels as “the bent ones.” That’s true. We’re bent. We’re distorted. We’re twisted. There’s a perversion at the core of our being.
Here’s just one more illustration. This is going to seem like an aside for a minute, but it’ll circle back. Holly and I recently went to see this new movie that was made with Tom Hanks, about Mr. Rogers, right? A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It was a great movie; I enjoyed it a lot.
But I was reflecting afterwards; I didn’t really like Mr. Rogers growing up. I’m probably the only kid that can admit that. I didn’t like Sesame Street, either. I was thinking, why didn’t I enjoy watching these?
I actually think that one reason is because when we grew up, I didn’t have cable, we only had what you could get with the rabbit ears on TV. So it comes on PBS, public TV, but we didn’t have good reception. So every time I tried to turn to channel five, when I was a kid, to watch something on PBS, I was getting lots of static, lots of distortion, lots of interruption, lots of fuzz. You remember that? Fuzz on your TV? You don’t have that anymore with digital TV and so on. But that’s what we had, so it was always distorted. The image was never coming clear.
I was thinking, that’s also a picture of iniquity, because you and I are created to image the glory of God. We’re created to show the world his glory in bright and living color; but there’s a distortion. We’re not catching the signal correctly, and therefore what people get from us is static. They get buzz, they get a fuzzy picture at best. They don’t get that clear picture of the glory of God.
The reason for that is iniquity. It’s because of this distortion at the core of our beings. That’s the nature of sin.
(3) Then Isaiah also gives us a very clear picture of sin, and you see this in verse 6 when he says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way.”
Lots of authors have pointed out that sheep are the perfect animal for describing human beings because they’re really stupid. Sheep are not smart creatures. He doesn’t say, “All we like cats are mischievous or sly” or whatever; he certainly doesn’t call us dogs, you know, man’s best friend. The animal he chooses is sheep.
Why sheep? Well, because sheep are completely insufficient, because they’re stupid, because they have a herd mentality, because they’re really dirt and filthy, and because if they’re not tended to by a shepherd they’ll wander right off a cliff, or they will get themselves in a situation that they cannot get themselves out of. Sheep tend to go astray, and that’s what the author here says about us. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way.”
Now, right there, “We have turned—every one—to his own way,” that verse, that phrase, as much as anything else, gives us the very heart of sin. Sin is turning to our own way rather than God’s way. It’s self-centeredness. It’s self-concern. It’s a fallen, an aggravated self-interest. That’s the heart of sin. It’s self to the exclusion of God and to the exclusion of others; and every time we sin, that’s what we’re doing. We are putting ourselves first, and God and others either second or far behind. We’re pursuing our own interests.
Here’s a quotation, from one of Jonathan Edwards’ books, that I think gives us another picture of sin. Edwards said, “Immediately upon the fall the mind of man shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness to an exceeding smallness and contractedness. Sin, like some power astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness, and God was forsaken and fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired within himself and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings.”
I wonder how much that describes our own hearts. Rather than being large-hearted, with love for God and for people, our hearts are narrow, constrained, constricted, and governed only by self-interest. That’s the heart of sin. That’s iniquity, and it leads to transgression and further sin.
That’s our need. That’s why we need the gospel, that’s why we need salvation, that’s why we need a suffering substitute, which is our second point.
II. The Suffering Substitute
I want you to see several things about him.
(1) First of all, just briefly, the suffering itself, his suffering. We see this in the verbs that are used to describe what he did. Verse 4, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” Verse 5, “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace; and with his wounds we are healed.”
Old Testament scholars Keil & Delitzsch said that this word “pierced” means to be pierced through, and he says that this is the strongest term for violent and excruciating death in the Old Testament. It is a literal description of what Jesus experienced on the cross, as his body was pierced, his hands and his feet pierced with nails, his side pierced with a spear.
But he was also crushed for our iniquities. This carries the idea of being pulverized by some heavy weight, of being broken into pieces. It describes metaphorically what Jesus experienced as he bore the weight of our sin on the cross.
John Oswalt, in his commentary on Isaiah, points out that the language used here, especially the language in verse 4 (he bore our griefs, he carried our sorrows), it’s language that comes directly out of Leviticus 16.
Leviticus 16 is that great chapter in Leviticus that talks about the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, where the priests, the one time of the year, he would go into the Holy of Holies, right, he would sprinkle blood there on the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies to atone for the sins of God’s people; but also the priest would confess sins over this goat that would be sent into the wilderness.
Here are some of the key verses, Leviticus 16:21-22: “And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins [there are the three words again]. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.”
That’s the language that Isaiah uses when he says that the suffering servant bore our griefs and our sorrows, that our iniquities were laid upon him. That’s the background to Isaiah’s language.
(2) It points us to this great doctrine, this important doctrine, right at the heart of the Bible, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement; that Christ, when he died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice, he died for our sins. You see that in the pronouns, don’t you, in this passage.
Why is it that he was pierced? Why is it that he suffered? Just look at it again. “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows…” Verse 5, “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace; and with his wounds we are healed.”
Sometimes we sing a wonderful hymn by Philip Bliss with words that go like this (I’ve quoted these many times):
“Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned he stood,
Sealed my pardon with his blood;
Hallelujah! what a Savior!”
That’s the heart of substitutionary atonement. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what the suffering servant did.
(3) The other thing I want you to see here is God’s role in this. It’s not only that Jesus suffered and that he suffered as a substitute, but it’s that God appointed him for this and that God had an active role in what Jesus suffered on the cross. You see it in the end of verse 4: “Yet we esteemed him stricken; smitten by God, and afflicted.” Then the end of verse 6, “...the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Then again in verse 10, “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief.”
Do you know what this means? It means that it was more than just physical suffering! What Jesus experienced on the cross was more than just physical suffering, it was divine judgment. It means that God punished Jesus for the sins that you and I have committed. It means that the wrath that I deserved he bore. This is the heart of substitution.
Listen to John Stott, from his wonderful book The Cross of Christ. “The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation; for the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.”
This is the heart of the gospel. It means that mine was the sinning, but his was the suffering. It means that “mine was the transgression, but [his] the deadly pain.” It means that mine was the wickedness, but his was the wrath. Mine was the guilt, his was the sacrifice. Mine was the penalty, his was the punishment. Mine was the ruin; he bore the retribution. The suffering substitute.
III. The Salvation He Brings
Now, what results from this? This leads us to the third thing, the salvation he brings. Again, the words are here. I mean, you have the gospel here in a nutshell. The salvation he brings. I think we could summarize it with just two words. There’s more than can be said, and in fact, by the time we get to the end of Isaiah 53 we will see more; but for this morning, just two words linking to two phrases in this passage.
(1) The first word is reconciliation, or peace with God. Again, we see it in the passage, especially in verse 5. “...upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace…” The word is shalom. Of course, this word shalom is a word that means much more than just the absence of conflict. In the Hebrew mind, the word shalom means the full flourishing of all of creation. It carries with it the idea of the weaving together in harmony of everything that God has created, so that human beings are in harmony with God and human beings are in harmony with one another, and also in harmony with the created world, the created order itself. Peace in all of those dimensions.
Now, especially it’s peace with God. When you look at the New Testament language and how the New Testament talks about peace in relationship to the cross of Christ, you see all of these dimensions. Just listen to a few passages.
Ephesians 2:13, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” He’s talking especially about non-Jewish people. He’s talking about Gentiles who have been brought into the family of God. He says, “For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, killing the hostility.”
There was hostility between us and God because of our sin, and what Paul says in Ephesians is that Christ on the cross killed the hostility so that we could be reconciled, we could be made right with God, we could be restored to his fellowship, to his friendship. We once were enemies, but now we can be seated at his table as family once again.
Or listen to this passage, Colossians 1:18-20 (speaking about Christ): “He is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
He goes on to say he’s also reconciled you. So here the cosmic dimension seems to be the forefront of Paul’s mind, that through Christ things in heaven and earth, all of the discordant elements of creation, the fall as we see it in all of its varied aspects, that all of this is brought to ultimate cosmic reconciliation through the cross of Christ. Again, it connects to the vision of a new heavens and a new earth at the end of Isaiah. The lion will lie down with the lamb, right? There’s going to be peace. Swords beaten into plowshares, the end of all sorrow and sin and suffering in the world. Peace in the entire creation.
Isn’t that what the angels said when Jesus’ birth was announced in Luke 2? “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace towards men.” That’s the heart of the message of the gospel.
Then Romans 5:1, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Peace, reconciliation with God.
How is that possible? It’s possible because at the cross God put away our sins. Listen to Spurgeon.
“Dear friends,” he said, “for a moment think of the result of all this. Sin meets on Christ and Christ is punished for sin, and what then? Why then, sin is put away. If the penalty be endured, justice asks no more. The debt discharged; there is no debt. The claim made and the claim met, the claim ceases to be. Upon him the gathered tempest has spent itself, and not a single cloud lingers in the serene sky. Though the waters came, his love has dried them up. His suffering has opened the sluices and made the floods forever spend themselves. Though the bills were brought, he has honored them all, and there is not one outstanding account against a single soul for whom he died as a substitute.”
We just sang about this this morning. “Now my debt has been paid, it’s been paid in full.” That means reconciliation, peace with God.
(2) Here’s the other thing, really quickly. We’re close to the end. It’s not just reconciliation, but it’s also restoration, because Isaiah also uses the language of healing again in verse 5. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”
What is healing? Healing is restoration of health, as we saw in 1 Peter. Peter applies this to the issue of sin, and I think that’s primarily what’s in mind here. It’s healing of the wounds of sin. Christ bore our sins, and by his wounds we have been healed.
You know what that means? It means that we are restored to health. So get this: it’s not just—this is what’s so important here. It’s not just that the debt is cancelled, it’s not just that the sins are forgiven; it’s also that Christ begins to make us well again.
You see, he doesn’t just save us and then leave us in the sin. He begins to make us well again, he begins to make us new again, he begins to heal us from the inside out. Now, of course, ultimately this encompasses healing in every possible dimension: all sickness, all sorrow, all of it will be put away. There will be complete and total healing for every person who is in Christ on the morning of the final resurrection. Our bodies will be made new. But it begins with this inside-out renewal, this restoration, as God heals us from the wounds of sin, he begins to make us new again.
To go back to the illustration before, where the signal has been distorted and we’ve just been giving the world a very fuzzy, staticky picture of the glory of God; when a person becomes a Christian, God begins to fine-tune the signals, so that we more and more begin to image his glory. That’s part of what it means to be renewed according to the image of God in righteousness and true holiness, to use Paul’s language from Ephesians 4. This is what results, this is what encompasses salvation. It involves both reconciliation with God and restoration, as God makes us new again.
Now then, how should we apply this? You know, the Puritans, when they would preach their sermons, they often would end with what they called “use.” They would have use one, use two, use three, use four, and they would just go on and on and on. These guys preached for two hours.
So, what’s the use? What is the use of the sermon? How do we apply this? I’ll just give you two, okay, two uses.
(1) Here’s the first. This is application for the unsaved. If you’re not a Christian this morning, if you’re here and you’re listening and maybe this has made sense for the first time, or maybe you’ve heard it many times but it’s just never really struck home, so that it’s become personal to you—again, maybe you’re a child or a teenager and you’re just wrestling with these things and you’re trying to understand these things—what does this mean for you? It means that you need to see your sin so that you can trust in the suffering substitute.
You can start with they symptoms. Can you see that there are things wrong in your life, that there are griefs and sorrows, that there are problems, that things are not everything that they should be, everything you would want them to be? Dig a little deeper. Can you acknowledge that you’ve missed the mark, that you’ve failed to do things that you should have done, that you have not loved God, and that you have not loved people?
Look even deeper than that. Have you transgressed? Have you broken the law? Have you gone outside the boundaries? Have you colored outside the lines? Have you done things that you should not have done? God’s law says, “Thou shalt not do this,” but you did it? God’s law says, “Thou shalt do this,” but you have not?
Look even deeper than that. Do you see that there is a distortion right at the core of your heart, that there’s something wrong, there’s something that’s just off? How can that be changed? There’s only one way, and it’s through the suffering substitute.
This is what it requires. It requires personal confession. Have you noticed in reading Isaiah 53 that this is all spoken from the perspective, from the vantage point, of someone who witness the sufferings and recognized that it was for them?
It is perhaps a prophetic description of the nation of Israel, when many ethnic Jews will recognize the suffering of the Messiah, which I think will happen in the future, as we’ve seen in Romans 11. Romans 10 and 11 actually quote from this very passage, Isaiah 52-53. It’s the idea here of those who crucified their own Messiah, and they begin to recognize that he was pierced for their transgressions.
Listen: this must happen for every single person who becomes a Christian. You have to hit the point where you’re able to say, “He was pierced for my sin! It was for me! He did that for me! It was my transgression, it was my iniquity that was laid on him. He bore my judgment.” Can you say that this morning? Can you say with Paul (1 Timothy 1:15), “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”
Have you gotten to the point where you start to feel that way, that you’re the worst sinner you know? No matter what someone else has done, when you look at your own heart, when you examine your own motives, when you look at your own lawbreaking, your own iniquity, your own sin, you say, “It’s me! It’s me, oh Lord. I need salvation.” That needs to happen in your life if it hasn’t. My hope is that today will be that day, the day of salvation. Confess, believe, and be saved.
(2) What’s the use, or what’s the application, for believers? I just want to end by giving you another couple of nuggets that I’ve gleaned from some of the reading of these old guys, because I think this doctrine, if you want to know how to do personal devotions, if you want to be able to experience personal, daily communion, fellowship with Christ, this doctrine will help you with that. I’m drawing it mainly from John Owen and his book on Communion with God.
He discusses how we have communion with the triune God (Father, Son, and Spirit), and then when he gets to the Son in particular, how we have communion with Christ in what he calls “purchased grace.” He gives us steps; I’m just summarizing the argument here, and I’ll give you one quote. He says we have to make an actual exchange. He uses a big word, commutation, but it means an exchange, an exchange of our sins for his righteousness.
He says there are three things the saints do: (1) they continually keep alive upon their hearts a sense of the guilt and evil of sin; (2) they gather up their sins and lay them in the balance of the law, see and consider their weight and desert; and (3) they make this commutation, this exchange, with Jesus Christ.
Then listen to what he says. “Hereupon, they lay down their sins at the cross of Christ, upon his shoulders. This is faith’s great and bold venture upon the grace, faithfulness, and truth of God, to stand by the cross and say, ‘Ah! He is bruised for my sins and wounded for my transgressions, and the chastisement of my peace is upon him.’” He’s using Isaiah 53. “He is thus made sin for me. Here I give up my sins to him that is able to bear them, to undergo them. He requires it of my hands that I should be content that he should undertake for them, and that I heartily consent unto. This is every day’s work. I know not how any peace can be maintained without it. This is to know Christ crucified.”
Have you learned how to do that? Have you learned how to take your sins and say, “Lord, these are my sins. You bear them, because I can’t”? That’s what it means to know Christ crucified. That’s what it is to be in daily communion with God. Let’s pray together.
Our gracious Lord Jesus,
“What language shall [we] borrow
To thank thee, dearest Friend,
For this, thy dying sorrow,
Thy pity without end?”
Lord, we don’t quite even know what to say when we think of these realities. We just know that we need to feel it more deeply in our hearts, we need to see our sin more clearly, and we need to believe more firmly in this life-changing, heart-renewing truth of God, that you have borne our sins, that our iniquities have been laid upon you, that there is peace with God through your death and resurrection, and that there is healing and restoration for our own hearts, and it’s found at the cross.
So, Lord, would you just burn it into our minds this morning? Would you press it home to our hearts? Especially as we come to the Lord’s table, as we come to eat this bread, this symbol of your broken body, to drink the juice, the cup which signifies for us your blood shed for our sins, may this symbolic action be an expression of our hearts, that we are saying, “Yes, my sin deserved this, but I’m trusting in what Christ has done.” Lord, I pray that would be true for us this morning and that you would draw near to us in these moments together. Be glorified, be honored, and continue with us in our worship. We pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
