A Wild Saviour, able to bear our burdens
Jock Stein
April 09, 2024
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Isaiah 53: 3-4, 10 (NRSVA)
3
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.4
Surely he has borne our infirmities
and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
10
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.
When you make his life an offering for sin,
he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days;
through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
The prophets often behaved like wild men. Isaiah went about ‘naked and barefoot’ (Isaiah 20: 2) at one point. And chapter 53 must have seemed wild to those living in Jerusalem – indeed, who could believe what the prophet heard (53: 1)?
But the Lord Jesus took that teaching into his heart and soul, and turned it into something that Isaiah could only have dreamed of, even if he ‘saw his glory’ (John 12: 41), as Abraham rejoiced to ‘see his day’ (John 8: 56).
Jesus took our sins and weaknesses into the wild, like the scapegoat of old (Leviticus 16: 7-10), so we should never need to fear the wild again – it is like the dark, in which the light now shines (Psalm 139: 11-12).
Pray:
Lord Jesus, as those writings pierced the hearts of two friends on a road near Jerusalem, may these old Scriptures go wild with their witness to our lives and to our generation, for your name’s sake, Amen.
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