The Wounds That Heal
Isaiah 53:1-6
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 53:4-5 Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… Tonight is the night that we mark the sacrifice for sin. I am always surprised, although I should not be, about the number of so-called Christian teachers who cannot wrap their heads around the simple truth of the vicarious atonement – the fact that Christ was our substitute sacrifice, that He took our punishment in our place.
These people are not, in fact, Christians of course, but they do parade around as pastors and professors of religion and theologians. They come out from under their rocks at this time of year to tell us “the truth” about Christ and Christianity. They tell us how they cannot agree that blood was needed for our salvation; they tell us they cannot accept that our redemption required the grisly sacrifice of Jesus. They wonder aloud and in print about what sort of God would require such a sacrifice. One wonders, viewing their annual discourses in disbelief, why do they bother with church and religion, and the Christian religion, especially.
Of course, the answer is simple. They are servants of the one whose entire purpose of being is to destroy God and all His works. They oppose sound doctrine and they oppose the historic Christian faith because their lord and master, Satan, demands it of them. Naturally, they do not consciously realize this fact most of the time. They invent their own rationalizations for pursuing their satanic ends, but that is the reason. They are true believers, just not believers in Christ. And they are out to convert the world, particularly the part of it that is Christian. They emerge from their shadows at this time of the year because this is the day, not Halloween, when evil was once at its peak of power, and then was decidedly and summarily crushed under the wheels of its own labor. Today is the second-most significant day, second only to Easter. Today is the day that the devil delivered the wounds that heal.
Isaiah 53 begins with a question that fits so appropriately: “Who has believed our message?” Clearly, it is not those who cannot accept the thought that the suffering of Good Friday was actually necessary. The answer could not be those that accuse God of monstrosity because He tortured and killed Jesus in such a marked fashion for the sake of rescuing and redeeming sinful man.
The prophet Isaiah had the same sort of problem in his day; people just could not imagine that what Isaiah was saying was true. A suffering servant? The Messiah being something less than desirable in appearance, and being hated and abused? That just did not fit their preconceptions. It did not match their hopes and desires either. It’s not the kind of “god” they wanted.
These were people who wanted a beautiful image; they wanted a triumphant and glorious savior, just like so many so-called Christians today. They want all the glory but none of the blood and sacrifice. There were some who believed; Isaiah is simply wondering who they are, and where they are. But he acknowledges that those who believe do so because God made them believe; they are the ones “to whom the arm of Yahweh has been revealed.”
And what was revealed to them? Jesus was revealed to them. They hadn’t learned the name yet, but they heard the prophecy. They heard about the one who would grow up in hostile and unbelieving times, among people who generally had no time for God – that is the parched ground of the prophecy. He would come with humility, and He would claim no special notice for who He was. There would be “no stately form or majesty That we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.”Jesus was the first, “what you see is what you get” sort of guy.
Worse yet, Isaiah says that not only would people not recognize Him for who He is, but they would reject Him and hate Him: “He was despised and forsaken of men.” His life, and particularly His death, is described for us by Isaiah like this: “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.”
All of the wounds fell on Christ on our behalf: “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”Jesus died to redeem us. The wounds He bore He bore on our behalf. Modern thinkers try to paint Jesus as this revolutionary who got caught and died for leading a philosophical revolt against the status quo. That is simply not so.
Other thinkers try to pretend that Jesus was paying some debt owed to the devil, as though the devil has some position roughly equal to God and we had stumbled into a position where the devil owned us and Jesus had to buy us back. There is a bit of truth in that, as there is in any really good lie. By sinning, we have sold ourselves into slavery to sin, and therefore to the inventor of sin, Satan. But he doesn’t own us, and Jesus did not die to buy us out of his ownership. The devil leads the pack of the condemned on the road to hell, and he is none too happy with consignment to that place, either. The price Jesus paid with His wounds and His blood was not paid to the devil, it was paid to the justice of God. Isaiah points to that truth with the words, “Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” This was all done to rescue us from our own deeds and what we have justly earned and deserve.
And these are the wounds that heal: “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.” Jesus endured the nails through His hands and feet for those who would not lift their hand to help Him or anyone else, for that matter. We often lose sight of that reality while we prattle on about the details of the crucifixion. It is almost as if we imagine that crucifixion was somehow easy for Him to bear. It is almost as if we can say that it was no big deal for Him to suffer, and so we casually turn away from it.
But how could anyone turn casually away from that torment? How could anyone nonchalantly wander away from the cure for death? The answer is that some don’t believe it; some have never actually considered the love of God that moved Him to such extravagant lengths to save sinful mankind. Listen to the words again, “But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities.” Then there are the milder “chastening” and “scourging.” This was torment and agony endured deliberately to set you free. These are the wounds that heal you.
Part of the problem is that we often have trouble thinking of ourselves seriously as all that evil. We say it, but we consider ourselves to be basically decent people. Sure, we have sinned, but it is nothing compared to the next guy! Truth be told, some of our sins we actually enjoy. But that is because we don’t understand, and because we cannot see what they are doing to us and what they mean. The cross of Jesus, therefore, is the proper measuring stick when you want to measure the depth and intensity of your sin and how serious even the ones you find pleasure in really are. “All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.”
Go to dark Gethsemane if you want to see and hear how terrifying your sins are, and then follow to Golgotha and see the price that was exacted because you sinned and did not take the business of evil seriously. Sickness and death are bits of the trouble that sin causes; those things remind us that it is not just a word game, and that we really do need a Savior. I don’t mean to say that this or that sickness is caused by this or that sin, or that because you are sick, you must be worse than that healthy person across the way; not at all! We each must face sickness and death in our own time, and none of us is pure and righteous of ourselves.
But because “the iniquity of us all” fell on Jesus, sickness and death are not the final answer for us. Forgiveness, life, and salvation are the final answer! Our sins are paid for because Christ, the Innocent One, died for us, the guilty. We shall rise from the grave and live in eternal glory because of Jesus. His are the wounds that heal. Each of us were terribly sick with sin, a sickness unto death. And Jesus took care of us in love, and pours out His redemption upon us all, that he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved!
“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.”
We know it is so because Jesus said so. He said, Tetelestai!, that is, It is finished! He declared that everything that needed to be done to save us and pay for our sins has been done completely, perfectly, and eternally by Him. It IS finished! The payment for sin is finished. Death is finished. The work done to save us is finished.
In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
