The Scandal of the Gospel
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The Scandal of the Gospel
Isaiah 53:7–9 (ESV)
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. 8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? 9 And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Introduction
Everybody knows that God punishes bad people and rewards good people.
The gospel disagrees.
The gospel says that God justifies the ungodly.
What does that mean? It means that
God declares guilty people innocent.
It means that God treats bad people as if they were good people.
That goes beyond the power of miracle. It’s a scandal.
Are you open to the mega-miracle and arch-scandal of the gospel? It doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative person or a progressive person. However you define virtue and vice, you have a sense of right and wrong. You form judgments. You expect God to.
How Does God justify the ungodly?
Jesus
We see four things that happened to him
and hear how he responded.
1. He was “oppressed.”
The word is most often used in the Old Testament of what taskmasters do to make the life of their slaves miserable.
They demand that they make bricks without straw.
They press them hard and bring a terrible sense of pressure and burden and stress and tension and oppression on the slaves.
Jesus was oppressed in the way his enemies continually stalked him and finally captured and tormented him.
It’s an uncomfortable time. The dark stains and bloody, brutal ending of Christ’s Passion are not attractive to a culture that wants feel-good stories. We want to look away to fast-forward to next Sunday.
Yet in the Passion we discover what God is like under incredible pressure; we discover the very structures of love—his compassion, his honesty, his oneness with the Father, his focus on others.
The truth is that even those of us who have walked with Christ for a lifetime can default to seeing Jesus in a way that is either very theological or so God-like that he’s completely unrelatable.
2. He was “afflicted.”
The word implies humiliation,
being brought low,
treating with contempt, shaming, belittling, scorn, jest, mockery, ridicule, derision.
All of that was the gall Jesus sipped during his whole ministry
and had forced down his throat in the last awful week.
That Jesus was “Oppressed and afflicted” describes the single greatest display of human injustice in all history.
Yet amazingly, it is also the greatest display of God’s justice in all history.
[1]
God would rather slaughter his own beloved Son than allow guilty sinners like us into heaven unatoned for!
There has never been a greater display of God’s justice in all history, nor of humanity’s injustice.[2]
3. He was led like a Lamb to the slaughter.
The slaughter doesn’t come until verse 8. Here, he is just led to it.
And that is a terrifying thing.
It is one thing to be oppressed and afflicted if you know that you will walk out of jail in a few hours into springtime breezes and sunshine.
It is different if you know it all leads to the slaughter.
Jesus knew it. For him, there would be no more springs on this side of the resurrection.
He acted as if he were truly guilty.
If we were judged, we could not answer God once in a thousand times (Job 9:3).
Jesus’s silence and his meekly following his captors to his own execution (though he could have destroyed them all in an instant) speaks powerfully of his willingly laying down his life for us all.
Unlike a dumb animal that has no idea what is about to happen, Jesus made a conscious decision to die for us. and thus his work was declared “one man’s obedience,” that of a new Adam, by which the disobedience of the former Adam was overwhelmed (Rom 5:19).[3]
4. He was sheared.
“Like a sheep before its shearers …” He was stripped of his clothes,
his friends,
his honor,
his divine protection.
No one has ever been as naked as Jesus on the Golgotha of Good Friday.
No one has ever been as sheared of everything pleasant and beautiful—except love.
The Response of Jesus
Which leads to the way the Servant responded to all of this.
Three times we are told in verse 7: “He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet
1. he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is
2. silent before its shearers, so
3. he did not open his mouth.”
His response was an amazing silence, patience, and acceptance.
1. The Response of Jesus on Trial
At the mock trial in the middle of the night at Caiaphas’ house, when
False witnesses accused Jesus, the high priest said, “Do you make no answer?
What is this that these men are testifying against you?”
And Jesus was silent (Matthew 26:62–63).
Then, later, early in the morning, Pilate said to Jesus in the Roman headquarters, “Do you make no answer? See how many charges they bring against you.”
But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed (Mark 15:4–5).
Pilate sent Jesus to Herod, and Luke tells us that Herod “questioned him at some length, but he answered him nothing” (Luke 23:9).
Jesus knew his prophecy. He knew his calling.
He was the Servant of the Lord. He was the Messiah.
He was the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.
Therefore when he was reviled, he did not revile in return and when he suffered, he did not threaten (1 Peter 1:23).
But he did not just suffer and respond with patient silent obedience. He also died.
2. The obedience of Jesus in Death
The Death of the Servant
Verse 8: “By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due?”
Slaughtered Like the Passover Lamb
“He was cut off out of the land of the living.”
He was not just led to the slaughter. He was slaughtered.
Like all the other lambs of the Passover or the sin offerings of Israel, he was slaughtered not for his own transgressions.
He was slaughtered for the transgressions of his people. We deserved to be slaughtered for our sin, but he was slaughtered instead.
From the garden of Eden, God established that the “wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), and only by dying could our substitute pay the just penalty for our sins.
Verse 9 also asserts that
Jesus would die an innocent man.
Peter cited this verse to proclaim Jesus’s sinlessness: “He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth” (1 Pet 2:22).
If Jesus had not been sinless, suffering in our place would not have accomplished anything. [4]
This is the heart of the gospel of God: Jesus, the Servant of God, was cut off out of the land of the living, NOT for his own transgressions, but for the transgressions of his people.
It runs all through this chapter. He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement that made us whole was on him and by his stripes we are healed. The Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. And now verse 8 makes it crystal clear: he died.
1 Corinthians 15:3 sums up the gospel with these simple words: “Christ died for us according to the scriptures.” “Christ died”—“he was cut off out the land of the living.” “For us”—“for the transgression of my people.”
“According to the scriptures”—just as Isaiah 53:8 said, 700 years ago.
3. The Response of His Generation
And what was the response of his generation when he was cut off? Isaiah said, “Who considered it?” “As for his generation, who considered …
” The word “considered” is not a word for “notice” or “perceive.”
It’s a word for muse or ponder or meditate.
The point seems to be that we can see the greatest event in the world happening and yet not see it.
We can hear without hearing.
We have an incredible capacity for assessing spiritual things wrongly.
One of our greatest weaknesses—probably more today than ever—is that we do not meditate on the great things. We do not stop and ponder the things of God.
Let us learn from Isaiah’s indictment of the generation of Jesus:
Consider, ponder, muse, meditate, reflect, study, contemplate the great things—and this is the greatest of all: the Servant of the Lord was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgressions of his people.
4. The Burial of the Servant
Verse 9: “His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet he was with a rich man in his death, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth.”
Verse 9 speaks of the servant's burial. Verse 7 says he suffered patiently; verse 8 says he died for his people, and scarcely anyone took it to heart; now he is buried.
he is mixed up with wicked men in his dying,
but unlike all common criminals of his day, he ends up in the tomb of a rich man. “He was with a rich man in his death.”
Matthew 27:57–59 tells us about Jesus’ burial: “There came a rich man [!] from Arimathea named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus … and Joseph took the body … and laid it in his own new tomb.”
Why Is This Significant?
Why did God plan it that way and prophesy 700 years ahead that it would be that way? Perhaps the reason is this:
When Jesus died, the work of redemption was done. He had cried, “It is finished.” He had suffered; he had been assigned a place with the wicked, dying like a criminal between two thieves, and the expectation was that he would have his grave (if any grave at all) with the wicked.
But he didn’t. The work of redemption was done.
There was no more need for humiliation.
Instead, God signified the honor of his servant by arranging for him an honorable burial in the grave of a rich man, the disciple Joseph of Arimathea.
And when the work of suffering like a sacrificial Lamb and dying for the transgression of his people was done,
God began to honor him even in the way he was buried.
When you pass through the winter seasons of your life, and especially when you come to that last winter of death, I pray that you will remember the Servant of the Lord—his suffering as a Lamb, his death for your transgressions, and his honorable burial with the rich. We walk out into the sunshine of this new spring day and know that when it fails—as fail it will—God will not.[5]
Conclusion
According to Isa. 53:7–9, he died childless amid life, deprived of justice, and treated as though he had been violent and deceitful.
But he was content if he was doing his father’s will.
The same must be true for servants today.
“If we make success as the world counts success our goal, we run the serious danger of losing everything. If we are to walk in the footsteps of Isaiah and of the Son of God, we need to be prepared to leave the outcome of our servanthood in God’s hands, bending everything in us to one end, being faithful.” Tim Keller
Salvation, because it is achieved through weakness and received through weakness, pulls off a complete reversal of the values of this world with regard to power, recognition, status, and wealth.
When we understand that we are saved by sheer grace through Christ, we stop seeking salvation in these things (recognition, status, wealth, and power).
The reversal of the cross, the grace of God, therefore, liberates us from the bondage to the power of material things and worldly status in our lives.
The gospel, therefore, creates a people with an upside-down set of values, a whole alternate way of being human.
Racial and class superiority, accrual of money and power at the expense of others, yearning for popularity and recognition, all these things are marks of living in the world, and are the opposite of the mindset of people whose lives have been changed by the gospel.”
When you see what it cost to remove your sin, when you get that restructuring of your identity, it will lead to the reversal of values, or you haven’t really had that restructuring of identity.
You will look at people of other races differently than you did before, because you have cultural freedom. You don’t make an idol out of your culture.
You will look at your own money differently than you did before.
You don’t need to have a lot of it anymore, because that’s not how you get your security and your significance.
When Jesus Christ gave Himself away on the cross, to win us, He then got the name which is above every other name. He deserves, rightly, far more honor for having lost His honor.
He has a kind of honor that only comes from somebody who is willing to give up all of His honor and glory.
Now, you go, live that way.
At the end of his great book was a series of radio talks, Mere Christianity. CS Lewis says this:
“The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
Submit it to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day. Submit with every fiber of your being and you will find eternal life.
Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really ever be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be rationed to dead.
Look for yourself. And you will find in the long run, only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him and with Him, everything else thrown in.”
Mere Christianity. CS Lewis
See what Jesus Christ did on the cross. Now, you take up your cross and follow him. [7]
[1] Davis, A. M. (2017). Exalting jesus in isaiah (p. 321). Holman Reference.
[2] Davis, A. M. (2017). Exalting jesus in isaiah (p. 322). Holman Reference.
[3] Davis, A. M. (2017). Exalting jesus in isaiah (p. 322). Holman Reference.
[4] Davis, A. M. (2017). Exalting jesus in isaiah (p. 322). Holman Reference.
[5] Piper, J. (2007). Sermons from John Piper (1990–1999). Desiring God.
[6] Oswalt, J. N. (2003). Isaiah (pp. 591–592). Zondervan Publishing House.
[7]Keller, T. J. (2016). The Sin-Bearer. In The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive, 2016–2017. Redeemer Presbyterian Church.