Perhaps the most poignant and striking expression in Isaiah 53 comes in verse 10, when the prophet describes Christ, and tells us that it “pleased the Lord to bruise Him.”
Given such an expression, we might be prone to think as many have, that this passage describes a cold, cruel God who delights in the suffering of his subjects and who requires gory violence if He is to be appeased. This view is held by many not only in regard to Isaiah 53, but also in regard to the entire Old Testament in general. People, sometimes pastors in the pulpits, from Enlightenment era Europe on down to what's called the liberal church in our day, have been horrified, embarrassed, indignant and ultimately offended at the concept, the language, and the emphasis the Bible places on substitutionary atonement, the idea that God would require the bloody death of His innocent Son to spare us from Hell and to reconcile us to Him.
And yet it is precisely that concept and emphasis which Paul put squarely in front of the Gentile converts to whom he wrote.
And far from apologizing for it, Paul makes it the central thrust and the animating principle of his command in our passage, the command to love like Christ loved. For in this command and in the Old Testament context which gives it scope and significance, we see the loving heart of God the Father, and the self-sacrificing love of God the Son, and it is only in the context which Paul gives us that these truths can be truly understood and the Christian life lived in light of them. |
