Surely he has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed him stricken,
Smitten by God and afflicted.
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. Is. 53:4-5
One of my favorite childhood books is The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman. The story is set in a kingdom where it is unlawful to raise a hand against a prince, so a whipping boy, Jemmy, is found who will receive the punishments that the prince deserves. After running away and encountering a classic case of mistaken identity by kidnappers, Prince Horace begins receiving the beatings that Jemmy incurs and suddenly understands the cost of his own actions. The story’s moral promotes personal accountability and thoughtfulness of action; it teaches us to be good boys and girls.
The idea of a whipping boy, someone who would receive a punishment that they did not earn, is a bit outrageous to our sense of fairness. After all, Western culture has historically valued personal accountability – the positive of the self-made person, which contrasts with the penalty of failing to exceed social standards or, even worse, the punishment of criminals who transgress legal codes.
Just Desserts.
We cry out for fairness, but truthfully, our yearning is a pre-wired seeking for justice. God has programmed our souls to rail against injustice and to crave justice. However, our sinful nature has so corrupted this God-given desire that we can scarcely differentiate justice apart from self-promotion and gain. So often, we are simply fighting for our own benefit under the guise of justice. This leaves us wanting to find something more, something deeper, because any victory that grants our preference, when disguised as justice, is shallow and a temporary high that can never fulfill that which God has placed deep within our beings – the desire for God himself.
Justice is not merely something that God does; it is part of his nature, and as such, it delights him (Jer. 9:23-24). When we crave and clamor for justice, we seek the eternal source of creation. Though often manifested sinfully, the desire for justice that we see in our hearts and the hearts of people around us reflects the very imago dei (image of God) with which mankind is gifted. The presence of this broken form of justice within the hearts and minds of all people points to a glorious standard, a perfect image from which our sense of justice is derived – a Justice that permeates through the universe, emanating from the creator who is just in all things (Rom. 3:26).
In Isaiah, we encounter several prophecies of God’s servant, a messianic figure who will serve God so perfectly and fully that the result will grant universal benefit to all servants of God and even creation itself (Is. 60:19-22). However, amid the Isaianic Servant Songs, there is a thread pulling where we would never expect. It is a dark specter that finds its home among the suffering and injustice which inoculates the world against hope – the perfect servant must suffer. A suffering that we later see finds fulfillment in Christ on the cross. But how can this be? How and why would the perfect servant suffer a tremendous injustice as one who uniquely deserved no such punishment?
This should shake us to our core! On the surface, this is an appalling truth that embeds itself into doctrines of grace and mercy. It is a truth that is so theologically crucial that the risen Christ called it necessary (Lk. 24:25). It was necessary for the forgiveness of sins (Heb. 9:26), to save the spiritually helpless (Rom. 5:6), to establish eternal peace (Eph. 2:14), to create a new people (2 Cor. 5:17-21; Titus 2:14), to turn strangers into beloved children of God (Eph. 2:13), and to prove Christ worthy to consummate creation and restore what was lost (Rev. 5:12-14). In other words, the servant had to suffer – it was an eternal necessity demanded by God’s very nature.
When I was (much) younger, I would often struggle with the idea that it was necessary that Christ suffer. I could only wonder at how an infinitely wise and supremely powerful God was perhaps unable to devise a plan other than one by which the only servant ever to follow him perfectly would experience torture, which left him looking inhuman (Is. 52:14). It gave me a small and inaccurate view of a god who was unable to control creation, rather than the God who stands above all creation (Ps. 90:2). Even today this can disrupt the rhythm of my spiritual life.
However, we struggle to understand much of life because of our theology’s perspective. Yes, theology! We are all theologians – we think thoughts after and about God. Theology, though, requires order. There must be a proper order to our thoughts about God. If we begin to try and understand the person of God considering what we understand about ourselves, then we will skew God’s nature into that of a supremely powerful human, no better than the Pantheon of deities in Ancient Greek mythology. This god we devise will be like us, perhaps slightly better and more powerful. A Byronic hero, a character with good qualities but necessary flaws – an amplified image of broken human greatness. A reflection of our best intentions, yet still plagued by our deepest common failures.
While these heroes and gods we devise could earn billions at the box office, they can never save us or help us make sense of reality because they themselves are tangled in the same struggle in which we find ourselves. Furthermore, an improper view of God – one in which we seek to understand God by first understanding ourselves – will always lead to incorrect conclusions. If we try to understand the love of God through the lens of how we love, then God’s love will always be partial and conditional. If we try to rely on God’s care and provision for us as a reflection of how we provide and care for people in our lives, then we will always flirt with or succumb fully to the anxiety of the unknown. Indeed, if we try to understand the justice of God considering our sense of justice, then God will always appear capricious, temperamental, and selfishly cruel. To properly understand these things, we must flip our perception and understand our love as a grainy image of God’s perfect love, care, and provision, and human attempts to image our creator and sense of justice as a sinfully flawed desire for an eternally perfect standard.
The great Reformer John Calvin wrote concerning all wisdom and the pursuit of true understanding:
“For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves…the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone…those blessings which unceasingly distil to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.”
That is to say that we cannot understand ourselves without first understanding God’s mind, as he has objectively revealed it to us through Scripture as he is the source of our being. We do not need to understand God exhaustively, as we never can, but we must understand God rightly. Upon this right view of God and theology, we find incredible symmetry in God’s nature and his actions as they relate to man. These help us to understand not only why the perfect servant suffered but also why he had to suffer and why we can hold dear this aspect of redemptive history that seems so abhorrent at first glance. There are two misconceptions that we hold regarding suffering.
We view suffering as the greatest evil possible.
Trillions of dollars are spent annually to alleviate suffering, grant comfort, obtain luxury, and insulate against the possibility of calamity or suffering. Much of our lives is spent accumulating and insuring against future suffering. For many of us, myself included, comfort and security are idols we worship devoutly with the first fruits of our energy, time, and resources. The negative connotations we assign to suffering and loss are so ingrained in our nature that the disciples wondered if anyone could be saved after Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler (Mark 10:23-27).
Scripture shows us that suffering, though not part of God’s original design, is not evil. In God’s economy, suffering has great value and purpose. God will indeed remove all suffering and restore creation to his glorious design by his presence one day (Rev. 21), yet for now, suffering is a part of God’s plan for his people (2 Cor. 1:8-10, 4:16-18; 2 Pet. 1:6-9; many more). Suffering is an indispensable part of God’s work to grow, develop, and mature his people into the image of Christ. C.S. Lewis writes, “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
In the suffering of the perfect servant, God was accomplishing something far beyond the understanding of our short-sighted philosophical objections. God used the abject suffering of Christ to highly exalt him and reveal him as the worthy redeemer and consummator of redemptive history (Is. 52:13; Acts 2:22-36; Phil. 2:4-10; Rev. 2:5). When we decry the work of God through suffering and declare it meaningless, we, like those who witnessed the suffering of Christ, “esteem(ed) him as stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted” (Is. 53:4). Suffering is not the greatest evil, a life lived ignorant the refining fire of God’s holy work amid our suffering is.
We believe that we do not need to suffer.
When I was in basic training, there was an activity in which we were lined up in a gas chamber with masks on and instructed, line by line, to step forward and remove our masks. The purpose of the exercise was to teach us to trust in our safety gear. Before the event, during the classroom portion, I expressed my feeling that I could place my trust in the mask without the exercise – that I felt the whole process was unnecessary. It was not received well!
In the Christian life, we have so many things to learn. Our nature is violently divorced from God through sin and continually distorted through our lives before Christ. Once we are born again, God begins renewing us and shaping us back towards the image of Christ – the perfect man. As we saw above, not only is suffering not evil, but it is also, in fact, necessary. It is so integral to our Christian walk that it is even to be viewed as a blessing from God (Phil. 1:29). Peter and John rejoiced after they were beaten by the council for preaching Christ (Acts 5:41).
The reality is that we need to suffer well so that God can work mightily in our lives. Likewise, it was necessary for the servant to suffer so that he would become the perfect “source of eternal salvation” to the ones who follow in his steps (Is. 53:11-12; Heb. 5:7-10; 1 Pet. 2:21). The servant suffered well to give us this pattern to follow, he trusted God in his suffering so that we could do the same and count ourselves as blessed when we do suffer. It was God’s will for the servant to suffer for our salvation but also to show us how to live and suffer (Is. 53:10; Ja. 1:2-4; 1 Pet. 3:18). Brothers and sisters, if the perfect Son of God needed to learn through suffering as our example, how much more do we?
Jesus inaugurated a new kingdom when he came to earth to live as the perfect servant. His ethic was as contrary to the teachings of the first century as it is to ours today. Jesus flipped conceptions around and challenged people to trust God as a loving father. Jesus understood the fullness of joy (Ps. 16:11) that was present in God’s promise and lived a perfect life, suffering well for our sake to the glory of God (Heb. 12:1-2).
The sufferings of the perfect servant prophesied in Isaiah 53 and fulfilled in Christ on the cross are a horrific picture of the reality of sin in contrast with the holiness of God discussed in the previous post. However, this should not embarrass Christians or a doctrine we neglect. The cross is foolishness to the world but a sweet reality necessary for the triumph of our risen, ascended, and exalted savior (1 Cor. 1:18-19, 25). The suffering of Christ should be a truth dear to Christians because it is through this suffering that we have privilege with God.
You may struggle to make sense of suffering in your life, the lives of those around you, and the world. Yet through the suffering of the perfect servant, we understand God’s heart in these things. He is sovereignly working in and through all things for the good of those who bow to him in full surrender, both in joy and suffering (Rom. 8:28-30). Turn to the savior who suffered for us, Church, and rely on and trust fully in the God who is our source of life, being, and joy as you walk through this life. May we lean on one another, fellowship in the Spirit, and suffer well.
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