Behold Jesus Christ, the Suffering Servant

Articles

May 31

This is a series trying to provide a basic answer to the question, “How do we counsel suffering brothers and sisters in Christ?” In part one, I introduced the idea that suffering is never simplistic. In part two, I argued that suffering saints need God above all else. In this post, I hone in on Isaiah 53:3-6 to show that God has indeed given us Himself in Christ, the suffering servant.

Christ, the Suffering Substitute

Isaiah 52:12 to the end of Isaiah 53 is rightly called the passage on the Suffering Servant. In verses 5–6, we see the Suffering Substitute.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Who is this suffering Servant, this suffering Savior? It is Jesus Christ. He is Immanuel, the Incarnate God. Immanuel: God with us. Incarnate: God in flesh. That matters because in Jesus Christ, God gave Himself. In a moment in time, Christ humbled Himself and became the Suffering Servant of God. Why?

Look at verses 5 and 6. So that He would be pierced through for our transgressions of God’s Law. That He would be crushed under the wrath of God for our blatant disobedience. That He would beaten that we might have peace. That He would scourged, mocked, crucified, that we might be healed. We are the sheep who have wandered away from God our Shepherd and bowed down to our idols of money, sex, ambition, pleasure, food, drink, girls, boys, whatever. But the LORD God has placed our guilt, our sin upon the shoulders of His Son.

If ever your heart lies to you and says, “Oh sin doesn’t hurt anyone,” preach to your deceitful heart: Lies! Jesus died for that sin! The crucifixion is just a small picture of what we, for our sins, deserve in the eternal torment of hell! How then can we who are in Christ and dead to sin still live in it?

This is what it means that Jesus Christ is my substitute: Jesus Christ gave His life to save my life. He died the death I should have died to pay the penalty I could not pay, and gave me the righteousness only He possessed so that I could receive the inheritance only He deserved. Or as 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, God made Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Dear Christian, don’t you know that in Jesus you are saved from your greatest peril? He drank the cup of wrath for your sin, so there is no more wrath for you. In Christ, your heavenly Father looks upon you with steadfast, unceasingly, endless, relentless love. You are His beloved child, forever part of the family of God, never to be pushed away by sin, sickness, suffering, devastation, disease, or death. He cannot love you more; He will not love you less. His love is conditional upon one thing and one thing alone: Himself. He will not violate His own promise to never leave nor forsake His people. Rest in that, beloved child of God!

Dear unbeliever, don’t you know that the Father loves you? He welcomes all who would come to Him through Jesus Christ. Don’t waste your life living for the deceitful pleasures of sin. Why won’t you come to Christ? What love could possibly be better than His? Do not say that you are too religious, or too moral, too good, for Jesus. Do not puff yourself up. Your righteousness is rags compared to the holiness of God. Do not say that you are too dirty, too sinful, too lost for Jesus. He came for the worst of us—prostitutes, traitors, thieves, and fools. We are sinners; this is true. But He is a great Savior.

This gospel truth comes home to sufferers, because Jesus’ death for our sins does not just give hope for eternity, but also today in the midst of our everyday suffering—our anxiety, loneliness, fear.

Christ, the Sympathetic Sufferer

In verse 3, we see Christ, our sympathetic sufferer.

3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Whereas verse 5 focused on Jesus suffering on the cross as our substitute, verses 3 and 4 focus on the social, emotional, and relational suffering Jesus bore through His entire life. Verse 3 says that He was despised, rejected, a man intimately bound to sorrow and grief, that He was an outcast, treated as scum of the earth, a pariah, a loser in the eyes of the world.

Oh, the irony! He is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Maker of heaven and Earth and all that they contain, yet He, King Jesus, entered into our world of suffering.

Have you been hated and rejected because of your faith? So was Jesus. His enemies called him Satan’s accomplice, an illegitimate child of his mother, a law-breaker, a friend of sinners, even a blasphemer.
Have you lost friends and family to death? So did Jesus. We don’t see much of Jesus’ earthly father Joseph in the gospels, which probably means he died young. When Jesus’ friend Lazarus died, Jesus wept. Even now, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints” (Ps 116:15). No one cares more about death than Jesus.
Have you been violated and abused, unjustly condemned? So was Jesus. He was arrested and assaulted by the religious elite, beaten and scourged by soldiers, scorned and jeered by the crowds—yet blameless, to the very end.
Have you been betrayed by a friend? So was Jesus. Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve; Jesus even washed his feet! But Judas sold Him for a mere thirty pieces of silver.
Have you been utterly abandoned by friends and family? So was Jesus. His own brothers thought He was crazy. Hundreds of disciples abandoned Him when He taught that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood. Even the Eleven abandoned Him when He was arrested, to be condemned and crucified alone.
Do you feel forsaken by God? Yours is a feeling, but Jesus was truly forsaken by the Father. Why else do you think He cried out on that cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Mt 27:46)

There is no suffering that you, I, or anyone else could go through that Jesus does not intimately understand. He is the sympathetic sufferer. And it is to you, dear suffering Christian, that He says, “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). I will never leave you nor forsake you (Heb 13:5). Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need not fear any evil, for I am with you” (Ps 23:4). Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand” (Is 41:10).

In Christ, we have a Friend who knows. We are never alone. But in Christ, God isn’t just with us in our suffering. He is even more intimate. Christ Himself bore our sufferings to the cross.

Christ, the Suffering Bearer

In verse 4 of our passage, we see Christ, our suffering bearer.

4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

Matthew quotes this verse in Matthew 8. After showing that Jesus cleansed the unclean leper, healed the centurion’s paralyzed servant, took away the fever from Peter’s mother-in-law, and cast out the demons from those were oppressed we read this: “he took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”

What could be more everyday suffering than griefs, sorrows, illnesses, and diseases? This means that Jesus carried not only our sin, but also our suffering to the cross. Yes, He absolutely suffered under the wrath of God for our sin; that is the dominant note of Isaiah 53. But He also took even the temporal effects of sin—earthly suffering—for us. Cancer, depression, loneliness, disability, abuse, sickness, sadness, betrayal, abandonment, conflict. As Rebecca McLaughlin says in her book Confronting Christianity,

In this prophecy [Isaiah 53], grief, suffering, and sickness are rolled up together with sin and guilt and loaded onto the Messiah's back. And when Jesus comes, he carries that load. He bears the moral weight of guilt and sin in our place. But he also bears the heartbreak of our suffering. Jesus holds us close as we lament. He weeps with us as we weep. He knows the end of the story, when he will wipe every tear from our eyes. But this does not stop him from cleaving to us in our pain. [1]

In Jesus, God gives Himself. In Jesus, God comes close as personal, compassionate, Father. In Jesus, God suffers with sufferers. In Jesus, God suffers for sufferers. In Jesus, God crucifies the curse of sin on this world. In Jesus, we have not only eternal salvation, but also the hope of deliverance from suffering, sadness, pain, death—forever. In Jesus, we are free to live for God in everlasting joy.

Don’t misunderstand me. On this side of eternity, we are still under the weight of cancelled sin and suffering. This text does not teach that if we believe in Jesus we will stop suffering on this Earth, no more than it teaches that if we believe in Jesus we will stop sinning. Don’t be a prosperity lie heretic.

Instead, this verse teaches us at least these two things:

Jesus conquered sin and the effects of sin (i.e. suffering), thus inaugurating the kingdom of Heaven.

On that day, the day of His return, the consummation of all the promises of God will finally be complete. This gives us a confident hope. We look back at the cross of Christ, the central event not only of Christianity but of the entire history of the world, and rejoice that Christ has conquered sin, death, and the grave—and all of the effects of Adam’s sin. We look forward to the consummation of the ages, the full realization and establishment of God’s kingdom, when God will be King and He Himself will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away (Rev 21:4).
We never “move on” from Jesus Christ.

Christians ought to be a Jesus-obsessed people. We ought to talk about Him, think about Him, enjoy Him, pray to Him—as if we worshiped Him. His death and resurrection isn’t just a ticket to get to heaven; He is ours for eternity and for right now—and that transforms every-day life.

Christ is everything to the saints. Scripture says that Christ is our hope (1 Tim 1:1). He is our life (Col 3:4). He is our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption (1 Cor 1:30). He has brought us to the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort (2 Cor 1:4). Jeremiah says, the LORD is my portion, my inheritance, my only possession.

Thus, in Isaiah 53:3–6, we find that the end of our sin and suffering is not a solution, or an abstract truth, but rather a person—God Himself made flesh, come to redeem us not only from the guilt of sin but also from the curse of sin. Save us to the uttermost, our God! Praise be to the gracious, lavishly generous, Almighty and good God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

I started this series by asking the question, “How do we counsel suffering brothers and sisters in Christ?” Finally, after laying the foundation in the first and second article, I can address the question: Show suffering saints Christ, our suffering Savior—our suffering substitute, our sympathetic sufferer, and our suffering bearer. There is much more to do to be effective counsel, but it is certainly not less than showing people Jesus.

In the next post, I’ll list some practical suggestions for counseling suffering people.