We read the short chapter earlier in our service this morning, but I'd like for us to pay special attention to these verses together, so I ask you to follow along. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and is one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he's 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. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Let's pray together. Our Father, help us to hear Your words. the words of your great gospel, the great good news that Isaiah is preaching to us today. Help us to take the words of your scripture and apply them to our hearts, to be doers of the word and not hearers only. I pray that you would overcome the weakness of the preacher and let the glory of your spirit shine through. We ask these things in the name of Jesus Christ, the head of the church. Amen. With so many great themes and messages in this very small section of Isaiah's prophecy, it was really hard to think where we should begin this morning to consider this handful of verses. And so I decided that we'll take them in order that the Holy Spirit has given them to us. We finished last week with verse 3 as the completion of a thought that was begun in the 13th verse of the previous chapter. But this morning I'd like to look at it as the jumping off point for these next verses. And the main reason for that is the very first word in verse 4, surely. Please bear with me if I give you a short grammar lesson, because this word is a conjunction. It's a word that ties the things before it to the things after it. But it's a really special conjunction, used only a dozen or so times in the Old Testament. At its core, we often translate it as but. So why didn't the translators just say but here? And that is because this word, as a special conjunction, is also an interjection. Now, if you used to watch Schoolhouse Rock as a kid, all that song is running through your head, and I forgive. Forgive me for that. But an interjection are the kind of words that we often put an exclamation point after, like, holy cow! Or, oh, wow! We see it in places like Genesis 28, 16 when Jacob awoke after having the vision of the angels ascending and descending on the ladder of God. He said, surely the Lord is in this place and I didn't know it. Here I think it does no violence to scripture if we think of Jacob simply exclaiming, holy cow, the Lord is in this place and I didn't know it. Or in Exodus 2.14, when Moses was telling one of the Hebrews in Egypt not to fight with his brother, and the Israelite answered, who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian? Moses thought that was hidden. Then it says, then Moses was afraid and thought, surely, holy cow, the thing is known. You get the idea. And so when we get to verse 4 of our passage today, when it begins with, Surely He has borne our griefs. Isaiah is looking back to the verse before, the verse that describes how the Messiah was treated on this earth. 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. We looked at Him and thought, Nah, not worth it. I'll keep my own life. Thank you. Not only are we not grateful to Him, we reject Him. John 1.11 says we came into His own and His own people didn't receive Him. And that's exactly where we ended last week. We esteemed Him not. But then Isaiah tells us, but holy cow! He has borne our griefs. We rejected Him, we despised Him, but here He is bearing our griefs. We undeserving, ungrateful people, He bore our griefs. We who hid our faces from Him, He carried our sorrows. We who brought God nothing but grief. He loved us. We really have difficulty thinking about a love that selfless, even when we've experienced it in Jesus Christ. Here on earth, everybody wants something. We might think we have selfless love for our spouse. Sorry, Freudian slip there. We might think we have selfless love for our spouse. but just scratched the surface and we discovered that we often want our needs met by them. Often we do the kind and loving things so we can get them in return. We may do kind things, but we almost always expect some reciprocation. We might think of our love for our children as being selfless. But when our children disobey or disrespectful to us, we're pretty quick to ask, how in the world can they be so ungrateful? Or we may think, how dare they treat me like this? You see, even our best love is wrapped in our own selfishness. It's hard for us to see selfless love in action. And with very few exceptions, I'm only saying few, I don't know of any. Every love we give here on earth, we expect to be reciprocated. We expect every good gesture or kind action to be acknowledged or thanked and cherished. Even I fear in the love we have for God. How many preachers are there who exhort us to love God so He'll bless us? How fickle, how tarnished is that kind of love? So let me tell you the truth. Even if God never did a single kind thing for you except saving you for Jesus Christ, you are still overwhelmingly blessed. You are still ahead if you live the rest of your life here on earth in excruciating pain. You are ahead if every person in the world reviles you. You are still unimaginably blessed even if you're persecuted and wounded every single day. Jesus is enough. Everything else is just God adding blessing. Why would we be drawn to love God because of what God will do for us? Is the sacrifice of His Son not enough? Do we require comfort from Him? Do we require wealth from Him? Do we require peace from Him, or ease from Him, or health, or happiness, or satisfaction, or vacations, or full bellies, or anything else? Is there anything greater than the fact that God has sent His Son to save you from His wrath? Now, there may be some here who love God and man more selflessly. But for most people I've known in my life, they may help and love for a little while. But if the person that they help is ungrateful, they'll move on to somebody else. because they weren't getting anything from the person they were helping. It reminds you of the story that Jesus tells. And He says, when you throw a dinner, invite people who can't pay you back. Because if you invite people who can, then they're going to pay you back. But you go out and you find the ones that have no hope of paying you back. Why? Because that's what our Father has done. He has come to us. We can't pay Him back. He came and sought us. We don't give Him anything that He doesn't have. We despised and rejected Him, but holy cow, God loves us in the same circumstance. He loves us when there's nothing to be gained from us, because He gains nothing from us. Even our praise is tarnished. Even our thanks proceeds from sinful hearts and is lifted on breath that He Himself gives us. There's nothing we can ever in all eternity do to enrich Him by a single penny. He doesn't feel any better when we love Him. He doesn't gain anything when we worship Him. He doesn't need us. And we've got to understand that. We've got to get that through our heads and our hearts. God doesn't need us. He loves us with a selfless love that gives because He never needed us. He will never need us. And He still loves us. When we were ungrateful, unlovely and unloving, He gave His Son. It is proof that His love is selfless. His love is completely merciful. His love for us is not based on what He can gain from us, but precedes anything that we can do. We are the corpse lying in the tomb like Lazarus. No praise, no life, no breath. And God through Jesus Christ gave us everything that we need. for life and for godliness. But we need to move on. So let's take a look at verse five this morning. 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. Now, you may be pointing your Bible right now, perhaps not physically, you may be doing it with your head, saying, hey, that verse starts with a but too. And it does. You see, that conjunction is tying the last thought of verse 4 to these next verses. It goes from, we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. We watched Him be struck down by God. And even 600 years before, Isaiah is telling us by the Holy Spirit that Jesus wasn't coming to be attractive. He wasn't trying to woo us with His words or with His appeal. Who in the world wants to follow a Savior who has problems? We want a Savior who can teach us to conquer all of our adversity. One commentator puts it this way, and I like the way he put it. The revelation of the arm of the Lord that will deliver the Lord's people is met with shock, astonishment, distaste, dismissal, and avoidance. Such a one as this can hardly be the one who can set us free from that most pervasive of all human bondages, sin, and all its consequences. To a world blinded by selfishness and power, He doesn't merit even a single thought. You see, if Jesus Christ was the Messiah, some opponents may say, how do you explain where his followers came from? Fishermen, not exactly known for speaking words of grace. Tax collectors, rebels, women. And who was it that came to Him, who sought Him out? It was the afflicted, the blind and the deaf, the lame, the demon-possessed, the terribly sinful. Where were the religious leaders? Where were the influencers? Where were the nobles? Where were the pro-athletes and celebrities of that day? Where were the ones who could legitimize this Jesus of Nazareth? He was so poorly regarded that a few years following His resurrection and ascension, a Roman historian referred to Jesus, whom he called Crestus, as a slave, because he couldn't imagine a free man being that despised. Surely the life of Jesus, His rejection by the wise and learned and powerful, appeared to everyone that God's hand was striking Him every day of His life. because Jesus Christ is not a Messiah designed and made for the masses. He is the Messiah of God for God's particular people. Yes, He was afflicted, but verse 5 tells us why. He wasn't afflicted because He had done anything wrong. He wasn't marked by God for difficulty in trial to pay for some great error He made or He would make. He wasn't humiliated for His own training or discipline or preparation. He was pierced for our transgression. He was crushed for our iniquities. Now in church we use these words often, transgression and iniquity. They're all the way through this chapter in Isaiah. And we read them all and we consider them just another word for sin. And sometimes we even nod and think, I get it. I get it. Sin is bad. Let's move on. And when we think something like that, we prove just how much we really don't get it. We don't understand the magnitude of these words, transgression and iniquity. And without understanding that, we can never understand the first step of the magnitude of God's mercy toward us. Transgression means nothing short of rebellion, revolt. It means betrayal in its highest form, treason against God. We look back in history, and we look at people like Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr, and we call them traitors, we sneer at them. But he was bruised for our betrayals. And those betrayals may be open, like shaking your fist in God's face, but much more often, they're covered up, hidden in secret places where we just tell ourselves, I don't want to do what God tells me to do. That's not what I feel like doing today. That's not what I want to do right now. You see, we're very good at disguising treason. Sometimes we make it even sound like it's a good thing. Like a book I read some years ago, I don't recommend it, called Situational Ethics. In it, the author put together a hypothetical dilemma. Suppose you met a murderer who's intent on murdering your friend. He asks you for your friend's address. Do you give it to him? And if you do, you know he'll go there and kill your friend. So do you lie? Because lying would be the best option, right? You see, in this book, you're taught to justify your lie by saying it serves the greater good. That's his thesis. But I remember when I was discussing it with my best friend, Don, he helped me to see through the haze that the author made. See, Don just said, tell the murder, I'm not going to tell you where they live. It really is that simple. But you see, our enemy doesn't want us to know that there are godly options. And we don't really want to know that there are godly options. We want to cover up our treason by saying, well, I made the best choice I could. When we know in our hearts we really didn't. We're really good at making our sinful choices look like they're the best choices. All the while knowing they are feeding our covetousness or our pride or our lusts. Now sometimes if we know we can't disguise our sin as good, there's no amount of lipstick you can put on that pig. We just claimed that we had no choice at all. I was forced into it. I was in that situation. I couldn't help it. And it's undoubtedly the oldest excuse for transgression, for betrayal. In the garden, Adam told God, the woman you gave me handed me that fruit. It's your fault. I'm the victim here. How many times do we hear that? No matter how we paint it, our transgressions, our treasons are a purposeful insult to God who gives life and every good thing. And we justify them every single day. But then there's this other word. If you didn't feel bad enough, if I don't feel bad enough, There's this other word, iniquities, and not just one iniquity. He talks about transgressions, and he talks about iniquities, not just one, over and over and over again, it's plural. And what iniquity means is to warp something, to disfigure it, to pervert something. This is no mere missing the mark. Oops. It is taking the good things of God, the blessings of this world, and using all our strength to deform them into something we can use to sin and rebel against God. That is iniquity. It's taking those good gifts of our Heavenly Father and warping them into weapons to hurt others or to hurt ourselves. It's using the good things we have in His mercy and grace and taking them to advance our sin or our deformity from His holiness. He was pierced for our rebellions. He was crushed for our perversities. There is within us, each one, a core of flesh that is desperately wicked, that left to itself without the grace of God to restrain us, would try to remake this world in our image. And I am convinced that is the very definition of hell. It was for our grave offenses, these capital crimes, that Jesus, the Messiah, was punished in our place, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That torture He endured on the cross and the eternal, unfiltered wrath of God that He faced, they brought us peace. By those very wounds, those bruises, those welts, we are restored to God forever. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. Now please hear this. It is a tragedy if those words comfort us. If we somehow take the fact that everybody in the world is a rebel and perverse in so many different ways, is that a word of comfort? How could it possibly be a comfort to us that we live in a world that ignores God and warps the good things He gives into unholy objects to satisfy our own lusts? That should make us tremble before God. Can it comfort us that the height of the creation of God, a person, is debased and degraded or degrades themselves in their slavery to sin? We shouldn't be comforted. We should weep. How can we possibly comfort ourselves when we do the very same things only to a lesser extent than someone else? When we harbor the same lusts and approach the same deformation of creation, but we do it in a subtler way. When I talk about the 8th commandment, thou shalt not steal. I don't know what comes to your mind. Very often, it's a thief sneaking into a house to get all the valuables out. But who is the greater thief? The one who breaks into a house and steals? Or the one who withholds wages from a worker? The thief who breaks in and takes all the jewelry? Or the banker who robs the poor through fees that make the bank rich? Who is the bigger thief? The thief who would steal from someone's pocket or a believer who will pursue another for a debt that they have loaned to them. I could list a thousand examples, and every one of them is an example of trampling on the Eighth Commandment. That's just one commandment. But some of those things we're scratching our head and saying, is that really wrong? When the Bible says, absolutely, it is. We might be subtler, we might be more socially acceptable, but our sin is never acceptable to God. It is always twisting the good gift of God into a perverse object of desire. How could we ever entertain the thought that God could or would or should excuse our sin? that because God forgives sin, He just wipes it away. Oh, that's okay. I love you anyway. He is entirely right and good and just to destroy our sin, to crush it, to punish it with all His mighty power. And as for us, When we are in our right minds, the minds that are set on God's glory, we must confess His holiness and righteousness and perfect justice are perfect and good. Because Jesus Christ didn't come to give His life to excuse our sins. He came to pay for our sins. He came to free us from our sins. He didn't come so that God could be more like us. He came to make us more like Him. To return us to God. We who are fallen. We who are warped and ruined. We who have no hope other than the hope that God will be merciful. And He has shown mercy for His people through Jesus Christ. Because the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Folks, if you're in Christ, you are forgiven. But not because your sin means nothing. It is because the grace of God means everything. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ means everything. and the mercy that God delivered as he came and sought us out from this fallen and darkened and warped and deformed world means everything. Let's pray. Our Father, we take our sin far too lightly. We look at what you have done. And we think, ah, He'll just keep on doing it. We justify ourselves, forgive us. The pains that our Savior endured were for our gain. Ours was the transgression. His was the deadly pain. We confess before you we deserve that fate. We deserve that wrath. It is only by your grace that we are saved. And we trust you. Because you have shown us a selfless love through Jesus Christ. Let us walk. In that love. We ask all these things. Because our Lord has brought us to your throne. Through his blood. I mean.