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Welcome to the Daily Blade. The word of God is described as the sword of the Spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

The World’s Picture Of A King

Isaiah 53 Shatters Expectations

Jesus Fulfills The Rejected Servant

A King Who Knows Grief

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All right, good to have you back today. This week we are looking at Isaiah 53. So yesterday we did a summary of the first 52 chapters of Isaiah. We talked about how Israel had turned toward wickedness and had no way of saving itself from the ruin that was to come. And now we start getting into the answer, right? One thing that is interesting about the time period that we're really discussing here is how every culture essentially had an idea of what a king was, right? Especially a conquering king and what they would look like, right? So kings were typically these massive figures, right? And they were flanked by large and powerful armies. And at that time in the Near East and even today, that is what we expect from a conquering king, isn't it? Like we, like those back in Isaiah's day, were hardwired to look for a king that looks like that. But the first three verses of Isaiah 53 absolutely destroy that picture and that expectation. Let's read the first three verses here. Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of the dry ground. He had no former majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. 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. So is the Savior coming as a fully established, great big tree? Well, no. He grew up before us like a young plant, like a root out of the ground, as it says. And there was nothing spectacular about his appearance, right? He didn't look majestic, he wasn't beautiful, he wasn't handsome. He did, you know, and how did the people respond when they saw him in this state? They despised him. They held him in low esteem, they rejected him, right? Does that sound like somebody you know? And again, we have to go back to the expectations of what the coming Messiah would even be like. So the dominant expectation in the Second Temple period, which was, you know, the 400 years following the final words from Malachi, was that the king from the line of David would use military force to drive out the oppressors of Israel, which would be Rome in this case, restore the Davidic throne, and establish Israel's supremacy among the nations and do it via force, right? This is what everyone was expecting and looking for. But then Jesus arrives on the scene. And he didn't enter the world as a conquering king, but as a baby. He was born in a manger in a barn in Bethlehem to a lowly family. He was the son of a construction worker. He was raised in Nazareth, which was an unremarkable place to be from, to say the least. Jesus nor his family had any powerful political connections. They didn't have the backing of a large military, and he lived the first 30 years of his life in relative obscurity. And when his public ministry began at the age of 30, he was ministering to the dregs of society. Fishermen, tax collectors, lepers, prostitutes, and the like. And when he even went back to his hometown to preach, you would think that would he would have at least gotten a warm welcome, right? But that's not what happened at all. They took offense at him even being there. The Apostle John actually wrote about this in his gospel and hearkened back to Isaiah 53. So we see this in John 12, verses 37 and 38. Though he had done so many signs before them, they did not believe in him, so that the words spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled. Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? And guys, look, the rejection that Jesus experienced in his hometown was not just some sort of accident, right? It was the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy. And here's something that you can easily miss as you start reading Isaiah 53. In verse 3, it says that the servant was acquainted with grief. So the Hebrew word here means to know something through deep personal experience, right? So it's not something that you are acquainted with or that you know in some sort of secondhand kind of ethereal way. You know it personally. This is not theoretical or observed suffering. This is a man who understands grief from and on the inside. So I mean, just do a quick survey of some of the events that are described in the Gospels. We see Jesus weeping at the tomb of his good friend Lazarus, and he's weeping, even knowing what he's about to do. And why was he weeping? Because he was so angry at sin and death. And then if we go to the garden at Gethsemane, he was in such utter inner turmoil that he was sweating drops of blood. And he didn't just stiff arm that weight away. Like he bore it on his shoulders. So this may not have been the king that was expected, but it was the king that was sent. And this is not the king that you would have designed if you were living back in that day and thinking through how to solve the plight of your nation or the people of Earth. But luckily, the designer of this entire situation was God and not you.

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