Behold, My Servant will prosper;
He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.
Just as many were appalled at you, My people,
So His appearance was marred more than any man
And His form more than the sons of men.
Thus He will sprinkle many nations,
Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him;
For what had not been told them they will see,
And what they had not heard they will understand. (Isaiah 52:13-15)
Isaiah 53 is the fourth of a series of specific prophecies of the servant. Chapter 42 is one, chapter 49 is another, and chapter 50:4-11 is the third.
This is the fourth of what we would call Isaiah’s “servant songs.” It is the most complete, most powerful, most important revelation of the Messiah in the entire Old Testament.
The prophets were regularly told that there would be an age when God would reign and rule from Israel over the world. This, of course, had connections to the promises to Abraham and to David. And here’s the key: This would happen through a righteous king. This king would deliver Israel from its enemies and its sins.
Because of these promises, the hopes of the Jews had been high. They wanted that king. They looked for him. You can go all the way back into the era of Samuel and see that they wanted a king, so they chose Saul and put their hopes in him.
Saul, however, was rejected by God for his gross intrusion into the priestly function — his overreaching and overstepping his bounds. He was a sinful man. And not only was he rejected, but his line was cut off from ever reigning again in Israel.
Hopes then shifted to David. But David had his own problems. David was such a bloody man that God didn’t even allow him to be the one to build the temple. He wasn’t going to be that righteous King.
But the promise came in 2 Samuel 7 that the righteous king would be a son of David. Hopes must have been set immediately on Solomon. And it must have looked really good when Solomon came along, because he enlarged the kingdom vastly and became the wealthiest person in the world by a large margin. And not only that, God gave him abundant wisdom so that he was able to be successful in everything he did.
But it turned out that Solomon was a total tragedy. Solomon had his heart turned away from God because he married so many wives and concubines. He was not going to be the righteous king.
Soon, the whole kingdom splits in pieces and the northern kingdom goes away. Every king after that in the northern kingdom is wretched and corrupt. There’s not one good one. And the southern kingdom struggles to survive, with a long list of mostly corrupt kings and a few decent ones sprinkled in.
People were beginning to lose hope in the human king, even the sons of David. No human king seemed to be capable of fulfilling this anticipated promise.
Isaiah wrote this prophecy of hope and grace and salvation at a moment in the history of Judah which was as dark as any moment had ever been. They had wicked Manasseh as a king and they were going into captivity. The northern kingdom was gone permanently, and they were next.
In a time when the line of David was the most corrupt, God steps in and gives to Isaiah a dramatic new revelation about the righteous king.
And here was the astonishing news: He would not only be a reigning king, but a suffering slave.
His glory would not come until He had suffered. And further, He would not suffer for any evil that He had done, because He would be a righteous king. Rather, He would suffer for the evil that others had done. He would suffer vicariously.
The righteous king would suffer and die for the sins of the people. He would be a substitute who died in His peoples’ place. And we will see that the minute details of Isaiah 53 are exactly fulfilled in the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, intercession, and coronation of Jesus Christ.
You can find more insights into Isaiah 53 in Dr. MacArthur’s book “The Gospel According to God: Rediscovering the Most Remarkable Chapter in the Old Testament.” For a limited time, the book is available for 25% off from The Master’s University’s bookstore, here.
This post is based on a sermon Dr. MacArthur preached in 2012, titled “The Astonishing Servant of Jehovah.” In addition to serving as the pastor of Grace Community Church and the voice of Grace to You, Dr. MacArthur is the chancellor of The Master’s University in Santa Clarita, Calif. You can learn more about TMU at masters.edu.
