The Servant Who Suffers

Read it: Isaiah 9; 53; Malachi 3–4

To understand what the people coming home from exile were waiting for, we need to step back about two hundred years, to the prophet Isaiah. He lived in Jerusalem in the 700s BC, when the brutal Assyrian empire was swallowing nation after nation. Much of his book is warning. But again and again light breaks through.

A child on David’s throne

In Isaiah 9, Isaiah looks at the northern region of Galilee, the first part of Israel to be crushed by Assyria, and says: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned” (Isaiah 9:2). Then comes the reason: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

Look at those names. A baby who will be called “Mighty God”? Isaiah goes on: “He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from that time and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:7). This is the promise God made to David (chapter 16 of this book) growing brighter. A King is coming, and His kingdom will have no end.

A man of sorrows

Then, later in Isaiah, comes a very different picture. It opens with God saying, “Behold, My Servant will prosper; He will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted” (Isaiah 52:13). So far, so royal. But the next lines are a shock. This Servant has “no stately form or majesty to attract us” (Isaiah 53:2). “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

Why does He suffer? Not for anything He has done. The prophet speaks for all of us: “Surely He took on our infirmities and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). “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” (Isaiah 53:5). And then the line that takes in every one of us: “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” (Isaiah 53:6).

He doesn’t fight back. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53:7). Remember the lambs of this story so far: the ram caught in the thicket for Isaac, the Passover lamb, the sacrifices on the Day of Atonement. Now the lamb is a person. His life is made “a guilt offering” (Isaiah 53:10). He dies, and yet afterwards “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” (Isaiah 53:11).

Here was a puzzle that readers wrestled with for centuries. A King who reigns forever, and a Servant who is crushed and dies. Could they be the same person? Some thought the Servant was the nation of Israel, or the prophet himself. It would take an empty tomb to show how the two pictures fit.

Christians differ over how the book of Isaiah came together. Many scholars think its later chapters, including chapter 53, were written by prophets who came after Isaiah and carried on his message; many others hold that the whole book is Isaiah’s own. All agree on this much: a complete scroll of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls was copied more than a century before Jesus was born. These words were waiting before He arrived.

The last prophet, and a long silence

Now jump forward to the time after Nehemiah. The people were home, the temple stood, but their hearts had gone cold. Through Malachi, the last of the prophets, God complained that they were offering blind and sick animals in sacrifice, scraps they wouldn’t dare give their governor. Marriages were being broken. People said serving God was pointless. God’s reply was patient: “Return to Me, and I will return to you” (Malachi 3:7).

And He made a promise: “Behold, I will send My messenger, who will prepare the way before Me. Then the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple” (Malachi 3:1). For those who honour Him, “the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings” (Malachi 4:2). Before that great day God would send “Elijah the prophet” (Malachi 4:5), to turn hearts back to one another and to Him.

In most English Bibles that is where the Old Testament ends, with a final warning that without this turning God would “strike the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:6). (Jewish Bibles arrange the books differently and end with Chronicles, but the waiting is the same.)

Then: silence. For about four hundred years no new prophet spoke. Empires rose and fell. Alexander the Great swept over the region, and Greek became the language everyone used for trade, so the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek. A Greek king defiled the temple, and Jewish fighters called the Maccabees took it back, which Jews remember at Hanukkah. Then Rome arrived. Through all of it, faithful people kept reading Isaiah and Malachi, and kept waiting.

Where Jesus is in this

The New Testament leaves no doubt who the Servant is. In Acts 8 an official from Ethiopia is riding home in his chariot, reading Isaiah 53 aloud and puzzling over it. “Tell me,” said the eunuch, “who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” (Acts 8:34). Then Philip “began with this very Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35). Peter, who saw the cross with his own eyes, quotes Isaiah too: “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness,” and then he uses Isaiah’s own words: “By His stripes you are healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

Malachi’s “Elijah” turns up as well. Before John the Baptist was born, an angel said he would come “in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children” (Luke 1:17), and Jesus said of John, “he is the Elijah who was to come” (Matthew 11:14). The silence ended with a messenger, and then the Lord Himself came to His temple.

Think about it: Isaiah says “each one has turned to his own way.” What does your “own way” look like, the thing you most often choose over God’s way?

Go deeper: On the Incarnation by Athanasius — In this short section Athanasius sets Isaiah 53 beside the story of the cross and marvels at the kindness of God’s Word, dishonoured for our sakes so that we might be brought to honour. (He quotes Isaiah from the old Greek translation, so the wording looks a little different.) Start with chapter 34, “Prophecies of His passion and death in all its circumstances”.