The Divine Plan for His Servant

 Isaiah 42:1-7

"Behold, My Servant, whom I uphold; My chosen one in whom My soul delights. I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice to the nations.  He will not cry out or raise His voice, Nor make His voice heard in the street.  A bruised reed He will not break, And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice.  He will not be disheartened or crushed, Until He has established justice in the earth; And the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law."

Thus says God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread out the earth and its offspring, Who gives breath to the people on it, And spirit to those who walk in it, "I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you, And I will appoint you as a covenant to the people, As a light to the nations, To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the dungeon, And those who dwell in darkness from the prison."

Sermon for Ash Wednesday                                                           02/14/24

The Servant of Isaiah

The Divine Plan for His Servant

My Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

One of the great themes of the Bible is the theme of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah.  The Servant is a prophetic image for the Messiah, our Savior.  Isaiah paints a beautiful picture of the Savior and of the Gospel He is charged with bringing in his prophecies.  It is this Old Testament Gospel that we are going to spend our Lenten evenings with this year.  Our Lenten Theme is the Servant of Isaiah.

Modern Christians often see the Gospel in a rather one-dimensional light.  I suspect that it is often viewed as a simple thing, easily detailed on a single sheet of paper with very few paragraphs.  God took centuries, and wrote an entire book about it.  In addition, we, the people of this point in time, tend to look at everything from our time and our prejudices and overlook the fact that the Gospel is deeply rooted in the Old Testament, and the prophets taught everything we can teach, only they did it without knowing the word "Jesus", and without having a cross in view.  They had the back-story, as it is called on television today.  They talked about the rationale of God and the fulness of the promises. We don't have time to review every prophecy during Lent, but we will take a closer look at those Servant passages and gather some of the Old Testament flavor of the Gospel as they knew it.  Hopefully it will deepen your understanding of the Gospel and strengthen your confidence in God, who did all this for you.

Tonight we begin with something of an overview.  Our sermon theme is, "The Divine Plan for His Servant".  In the prophecies, you may note, Isaiah switches from God speaking directly to us to Isaiah speaking about what God says.  God's revelations sound at times like He is talking to His people, and other times it sounds as if He is talking directly to Jesus, the Servant.  All of it is meant for our learning and all of it was meant for Jesus as He served and worked out the plan of God for our salvation.

We begin by noting that the Servant is pleasing to God.  This is where the ministry of Jesus begins as well, with God declaring that He is well-pleased with Jesus at His Baptism – and again at the Transfiguration.  Isaiah writes, Behold, My Servant, whom I uphold; My chosen one in whom My soul delights. I have put My Spirit upon Him; He will bring forth justice to the nations.  It is striking that after saying, in the Old Testament, what God speaks at the baptism of Jesus, He then says that He puts His Spirit upon Him, which is precisely what happened at the Baptism of Jesus as well!

Clearly, this is the plan of God being laid out before the people of God carefully, somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred years before any of this plan comes to pass.  He even describes the mission of the Servant as to be, "as a covenant to the people, As a light to the nations, To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the dungeon, And those who dwell in darkness from the prison."  These words are similar to the words of Isaiah 61:1: The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, Because the LORD has anointed me To bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to captives, And freedom to prisoners;   To proclaim the favorable year of the LORD, And the day of vengeance of our God; words which Jesus reads at the synagogue in Nazareth in Luke, chapter 4, and then declares that they have heard that prophecy fulfilled in their hearing.  This is the divine plan for the Servant, which Jesus fulfills.

He even describes the character of both the Servant and of His Gospel.  He will not cry out or raise His voice, Nor make His voice heard in the street.  A bruised reed He will not break, And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice.  He will not be disheartened or crushed, Until He has established justice in the earth; And the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law.

Jesus did not cry out when He was taken and crucified.  He was humble, and He allowed all that was to happen to Him according to the plan of God happen.  He actively stood in the way of any effort to stop what was happening to Him.  He stopped Peter, and healed the ear of Malchus, when Peter took up arms against those who came to arrest Jesus.  He refused to speak in His trials, such as they were, when speech should have set Him free, and He spoke the truth, often to the offense of those who heard it, when it served to spur on those who held Him to commit such atrocities against Him.  He was not disheartened or crushed until He accomplished His mission.  Instead, He steadily worked to accomplish what the plan of His Father set out before Him to do.

That same passage also describes the Gospel, A bruised reed He will not break, And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish.  Jesus established a Gospel which did not depend on us or the quality of our faith, but on Him.  Jesus turns no one away who hears His invitation and believes the promise.  Trust in the Lord, that is all that is said – not "trust mightily."  God looks for no great faith and dynamic, aggressive spirit.  He knows the measure of His people, and faith and spirit are His gifts to us, not something we must work up in ourselves.  We are asked to simply trust Him and take Him at His Word.  The power and glory are all His.

What He establishes is truly justice.  He paid the penalty.  He took our place.  We are not merely excused for the sins we have committed, but we are redeemed.  Jesus made atonement.  God didn't brush our sins under the rug, He punished them according to His wrath and all that they deserved.  He laid that punishment on His Servant, Jesus.  Our forgiveness is not injustice, but divine justice, bought at terrible price by the suffering and death of the very Son of God.  Your sins are forgiven, and you are given everlasting life in connection with Jesus Christ, because it is just to do so.  That is the justice that the Servant was charged with establishing.

The rest of the prophecy identifies whose plan this is, and whose work is being done – whose Servant this is all about:  God the LORD, Who created the heavens and stretched them out, Who spread out the earth and its offspring, Who gives breath to the people on it, And spirit to those who walk in it.

You see, what we have in Jesus Christ is the careful working out of the divine plan, established in eternity, before the foundation of the world.  God could have named the Savior in the prophecies, told us precisely when and where it would happen, and given us all the details we know from the New Testament.  He could have, but He did not.  If He had, it would not have changed a thing about the way the world receives the Gospel.  The problem of the world is that it is God's plan, and the world is ruled by - dominated by – the devil, who is the enemy of God and the adversary of all mankind.

If we had the details any clearer, the world would simply ignore them, as they do what they already have.  They would tell us that no one could have known the future from the past, particularly with such precision, and called it a counterfeit.  How do I know?  Because that is what they do today.  They say that it is not so.  They say that the church invented the stories and details of Christ's life to align with the words of the Prophets.   They say that the prophecies do not mean what they clearly say.  The world rejects it out of hand, and chooses any fiction or fable instead because it insulates them from dealing with the true God and the reality of what they are, slaves of sin and Satan.

Besides, the Bible does tell us where.  The Magi got that information from the Scribes in Jerusalem when they searched for the one who was born to be King of the Jews.  The Bible tells us who - it doesn't give us the name Jesus until Matthew, but it says that He will be called Immanuel, which means God with us, or God living among us, which is what and who Jesus was.  It tells us about how people will treat Him.  It describes in detail His death.  It tells us that the issue is righteousness – those words are in our text – and justice, and about the tender, gentle mercies of our God.  It is all there and the world refuses it.  They deny it means what it says.  They deny that God could have been speaking about Jesus, Then they even deny that there is a God at all.

But the truth is there, plainly in prophecy and plainly in history.  Isaiah laid it all out for us.  It wasn't His idea.  God inspired him.  And He wrote down for us, the divine plan for His Servant.  And for us.  And in the coming weeks we will read more and hear more of just how carefully God laid out that plan before His people.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
(Let the people say Amen)