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,

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.

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.