It was the will of the Lord... By His knowledge...
For Their Sake
(Isaiah
53:10-11, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, March 31, 2013)
[10] 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,
he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
God
has an eternal purpose. From before the creation of the world, the
Lord of glory has had a plan. That plan has now been revealed to us
in the coming of His Son and confirmed for our faith in words of
reconciliation with God, words that we can hear and receive.
The
plan was not one we would have made up. It was not only victorious,
but also tragic. All of it was the will of the Lord. It was the will
of the Lord that Jesus should rise from the dead. It was also the
will of the Lord that Jesus should die before He rose from the dead.
Why
would the Father crush His beloved Son? Why would He put Him to
grief? The Father made the perfectly sinless life of Jesus “an
offering for guilt.”
What
was this offering for guilt? The Lord prepared His people for the
death of a Substitute through centuries of liturgy. The guilt
offering was a part of that liturgy. The Israelites were to
understand through the offering of a sacrifice something about their
sins against God and against one another. Their transgressions had
brought damages upon themselves and others, damages that required
restitution and repair. This was the message of the guilt offering
that we read about in Leviticus, Numbers, and in the prophets.
In
Isaiah 53, we see a clear prophesy that an offering for guilt will
come, not by an animal, but a Person. His death will take away our
guilt and will pay what is necessary in order to bring about the
complete repair of creation. This too is the plan of of God, not only
that His Son would save us, but that the order of Life would be
firmly established forever in a renewed world.
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.
[11] Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;We see this in the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. Graves are not a part of the final plan of the Lord. Immortal bodies are fitting for those who will know and love the Lord forever. Bodies do not live in empty space. Resurrection bodies live in a renewed environment appropriate to the glory of the God who has solved our sin problem through the death of His Son.
According
to the Lord's prophet, the Suffering Servant would not only die, but
He would live again. He would have offspring. We who receive a new
liturgy of resurrection are His children.
As
Jesus was going to the cross, Luke tells us that He said,
“[23:28] Daughters
of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for
your children. [29] For behold, the days are coming when they
will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and
the breasts that never nursed!’ [30] Then they will begin to
say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover
us.’ [31] For if they do these things when the wood is green,
what will happen when it is dry?”
Since
sin came into the world, childbearing has involved pain. As Jesus
went to the cross, He warned of a day when that pain would be much
worse, not the birth pains of physical labor and delivery, but the
birth pains of a new resurrection world coming in the midst of
another world that is falling apart. Yet despite all that pain that
families would experience, Jesus, the Suffering Servant, would have
offspring. Not only would He have people that would be sons of God
through Him, but He who died for them, would see them with His eyes.
He would “walk before the Lord in the land of the living” in the
words of one of the songs He would have sung just before His death
(Psalm 116). He would see His offspring because it was the plan of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to prolong the days of the
Man who became a guilt offering for us.
God
has a will. He made a choice long before Jesus was born. That choice
was recorded for us in Isaiah 53 and secured for us in the death and
resurrection of the Servant of the Lord. This will of the Lord is not
a meager existence of weeping and distress, but a world of the
greatest bounty beyond anything you have seen or even asked for. All
this perfection of will is in the hand of the Lord who experienced
great anguish in His soul for our sake. He shall be satisfied.
by
his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.We may consider ourselves or someone else as exceptionally clever, but our knowledge or our ability to express ourselves in ways that bring the approval of others will never achieve for us the resurrection world that we long for. This environment of blessing has come to us through the knowledge of Jesus, the Righteous One, the Servant of the Lord.
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.We may consider ourselves or someone else as exceptionally clever, but our knowledge or our ability to express ourselves in ways that bring the approval of others will never achieve for us the resurrection world that we long for. This environment of blessing has come to us through the knowledge of Jesus, the Righteous One, the Servant of the Lord.
He
knew what the Lord required and He accomplished it. He knew what
would be necessary for you and I to be counted as righteous, and He
has provided from heaven all the gifts necessary for us to be a part
of the prosperity that He has secured for us.
He
bore our iniquities on the cross, but He did more than that, since He
knew that more than that would be necessary for us to be citizens of
heaven. We not only needed the debts from our offenses against God to
be paid for, we needed to be counted as righteous. To be righteous is
not only to have the absence of sin. We must have the presence of the
fullness of obedience. The cross was the crowning obedience of a
perfectly obedient life that Jesus lived for our sake. When we call
upon the Name of the Lord, not only are our sins forgiven, we are
credited with the perfect righteousness of the Son of God.
Jesus
knew what was necessary. He told His disciples that it was necessary
that He ascend to the Father. He poured out His Holy Spirit upon the
church. He gave us gifts of faith and repentance. He is with us so
that we can learn to follow Him. The Guilt Offering is working His
will.
Thirty
years ago, Candy and I were invited to an Easter service with some
friends. That was the beginning of an adventure that has continued
now for three decades. In some ways these thirty years have been all
about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This life that
we all have been given is not an environment for living out our own
agendas. The resurrection of Jesus was a bold divine display of the
victory of God's eternal purpose.
God
is using us, not according to our own definitions of happiness, which
would only end in death, but according to His, which can only end in
the fullness of resurrection life. He is using all of us as His
servants who go forth in the Name of His One Suffering and Victorious
Servant. Our lives bring His message: “Be reconciled to God through
Jesus Christ.” God made Him, who had no guilt of His own, to be a
guilt offering for us, so that we might become the righteousness of
God, in Him. His victory over death has become our victory over
death. His will is best.
Reading
from the Gospels: Luke 24:1-12
Reading
from the Epistles: 2 Corinthians 5:11-21
Sermon
text: Isaiah 53:10-11
Sermon
Point: The Lord's victory over death has become our victory over
death.
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