The Crushed Servant of the Lord
The following is an excerpt from The Servant of the Lord: An Expositional Devotional on Isaiah 53 by Dan Sardinas
“Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt,” (Isaiah 53:10a)
Isaiah 53 is about a central figure known as the Servant of the Lord. In Isaiah 52:13, the Lord says, “Behold, my servant shall act wisely.” He also calls this figure a Servant a second time in 53:11. The Lord God says, “by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” The word “servant” comes directly from the text of the passage, and both times we learn that He belongs to the Lord. The word servant could also be translated as “slave of the Lord.” So, this central figure belongs to the Lord, obeys the Lord, and does the Lord’s will.
The tension in Isaiah 53 has been building through the first twelve verses. The Servant is oppressed, afflicted, and crushed. One might be asking where the Lord is while all of this is going on? Why doesn’t the Lord stop this? Why does the Lord allow His Servant to suffer so that His “appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind.” (Isaiah 52:1) The answer is as shocking as what happened to the Servant. The Lord has not been absent or ignorant of His affliction or death.
In fact, we learn in verse ten that it was the Lord Himself who willed all of this to happen. The Lord was not surprised but in fact planned the suffering of the Servant. Yes, it was evildoers who were the instruments to inflict such suffering, but it was ultimately the Lord behind it all. The Lord crushed His own Servant. The Lord put Him to grief. The Lord made His soul an offering for guilt. The Lord is not only observant of the suffering, but He is also the planner and the executor of this suffering.
The Apostles recognized this truth, God crushing His own Servant, that Peter preached on the Day of Pentecost, “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” (Acts 2:22-23) The Jews didn’t kill Jesus. The Romans didn’t kill Jesus. It was God who purposed, planned, and used their evil desires to accomplish His divine will.
When Peter and John were released from prison, after healing the lame man at Beautiful Gate, they gathered with the church and prayed. Their prayer also brings out the truths of Isaiah 53:10a. They prayed, “in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.” (Acts 4:27-28) They saw the death of Jesus as being the plan and will of God. They knew that there was nothing that happened to Jesus that God did not want to happen.
It was the will of the Lord to crush Him. However, the word behind “will” is even more meaningful than the English indicates. MacArthur writes, “The Hebrew word translated ‘will’ in verse 10 by the English Standard Version literally means, ‘to delight in,’ or ‘to take pleasure in.’ The New American Standard Bible translates the phrase more literally: ‘The LORD was pleased to crush Him.’”[1]
It’s one thing for the Lord to plan the suffering of His Servant, but He also delighted in this suffering? Why? It’s because of what this suffering accomplished. Paul wrote to the Romans of Jesus, “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance He had passed over former sins.” (Romans 3:25) It pleased God to crush His Son so that His Divine wrath would be satisfied.
Jonathan Edwards once wrote, “God dealt with Him as if He had been exceedingly angry with Him, and as though He had been the object of His dreadful wrath. This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to Him, because they were from the hand of His Father, whom He infinitely loved… It was an effect of God’s wrath, that He forsook Christ. This caused Christ to cry out once and again, ‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’”[2]
The Lord is pleased because His “soul makes an offering for guilt.” The Servant doesn’t bring a sacrifice; He himself is the sacrifice. Gary Smith explains, “This verse indicates that when the Servant gave up His life, He functioned as a compensation or restitution (similar to the reparation or guilt offering in Lev 5:14–6:7) to God for the damages done against Him by those who sinned against Him. The rebellious deeds and iniquities of others (53:5a, 6b, 8b) led to the crushing of the Servant to pay the restitution for the guilt incurred by these sins.”[3]
Louis Berkhoff expounds on the nature of penal substitution, “The sufferings of Christ, which have already been described, did not come upon Him accidentally, nor as the result of purely natural circumstances. They were judicially laid upon Him as our representative and were therefore really penal sufferings. The redemptive value of these sufferings results from the following facts: They were borne by a divine person who, only in virtue of His deity, could bear the penalty through to the end and thus obtain freedom from it. In view of the infinite value of the person who undertook to pay the price and to bear the curse, they satisfied the justice of God essentially and intensively. They were strictly moral sufferings, because Christ took them upon Himself voluntarily, and was perfectly innocent and holy in bearing them.”[4]
Jesus is the crushed Servant of the Lord!
[1] John MacArthur, The Gospel According to God, (Crossway, Wheaton, Il, 2018) pg. 140
[2] Jonathan Edwards, Of Satisfaction for Sin in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, (Banner of Truth Trust, Carlisle, Pa: 2017) pg. 5
[3] Smith, Gary. 2009. Isaiah 40-66. Vol. 15B. The New American Commentary. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
[4] Louis Berkhoff, Systematic Theology, (Banner of Truth Trust East: Carlisle, PA, 1958) pg. 381
