“Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? ” (Isaiah 53:1, NASB95)

We are going to spend some time in Isaiah 53. Along with Psalm 22, it is the longest connected section of Messianic prophecies about Jesus. Read Isaiah 53 sometime today and tell me if you don’t get the impression that Isaiah was an eyewitness of the crucifixion. It is hard to believe that this was written hundreds of years before the events of Good Friday. This is also a good time to address the Messianic prophecies as a whole. Theologians claim that there were over 90 prophetic statements made about the Messiah over several thousand years of writing. The probability that one man could fulfill each of them in a lifetime, let alone in 33 years, is staggering. The result is not like one in a thousand, but one in a thousand trillion. Despite the impossible odds, our Savior and Redeemer fulfilled each and every one of the 90+ prophecies concerning the Messiah.

With all that evidence, it is surprising that the 53rd chapter of Isaiah begins with some uncertainty of “who has believed our message?”…”to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”  In Jesus, God performed His greatest and most visible act of redemption. He sent His only Son into the world.  Jesus, born of a virgin, rose up in a ministry where He openly proclaimed His divinity, healed the sick, raised the dead, fed the hungry, and forgave sins.  Even among all that evidence, so many were too blind to see the significance. Their spiritual blindness kept them from seeing the obvious. What this tells me is that before we can proclaim the greatness of our God and His redemptive work in Jesus, we need to address the blindness issues. We need to reveal to the world around us that they are being duped into accepting a worldview that is blinding them from the truth. Once we cause the ground they are standing on to be become unsettled, then we can begin to pronounce the truth of God’s Word and replace their sandy foundation with one that is solid.

God went through all the trouble and improbabilities of fulfilling all these Messianic prophecies so that it would be clear, and we would be certain once Jesus came. Let’s work at getting the hearts and minds of those around us ready to see what the arm of the Lord has done for them.  It is vital that they meet Jesus in this life. It is vital that their current worldviews are challenged. As we continue to move through these particular Messianic prophecies, we are going to be introduced to our Savior. We will be introduced to the One that would rather die for us than live without us.

I pray that these devotions on Isaiah 53 deepen your faith and your resolve that the world needs to know Jesus.

Peace!

Pastor Tom

www.firmlyrooted.church