We're going to go down today to Bethlehem or Jerusalem, and we're going to visit with Isaiah. We're going to look at Isaiah, and we're going to spend Christmas with Isaiah. So I hope you'll enjoy that. Years ago, I did a whole series of messages from Isaiah 53, and it was such a blessing to my heart. Isaiah 53 is kind of called the mountaintop of Bible prophecy. Isaiah 53 is a whole chapter about the Messiah. And we're going to be looking at that. So if you've got your Bibles handy, we'll look at Isaiah chapter 53 and turn there in your Bible. Do we have any visitors today? I think I know everybody. And you've all kind of gotten settled into your favorite seat now. It's a little bit different from the Taylor Chapel, but you're all in the right place today, so I can... Pastor learns where people sit in his auditorium, and you kind of learn if people are there, what's going on. Okay, you got Isaiah 53. Let's read the chapter. Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dark, dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. And we esteemed him not. And we'll stop on verse three, because that's what we plan to cover today. So let's ask God to help us. Father, help us to realize we're opening the eternal, divinely given word of God, that God superintended over this in Isaiah's day. 700 years before Christ was even born, God told all this. And we pray that we'll just enjoy this. Our hearts will be blessed as we open your scriptures. So speak to our hearts. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. Well, what do you know about Isaiah? You say, well, he's a book in the Bible. That's right. In fact, it's one of the largest Old Testament books besides Psalms. Isaiah has 66 chapters. Now there's a book that we have that has 66 chapters. What's that? That's the Bible. The Bible has 66 chapters and Isaiah has 66 chapters to it. Then the book of Isaiah has two divisions, the first 39 and then the last 27, 39, 27, and that's the book of Isaiah. There are four major prophets. Can you think of them? Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Now we call them the major prophets, four major prophets. And then the rest of the prophets we call minor prophets. Now why do you think we call them that? They're smaller books, right? The books are very much smaller, but they were just as important and just as inspired as the big prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and so forth. So Isaiah is considered the major of the major prophets. So the big prophet is the book of Isaiah. Isaiah is quoted, this is interesting, quoted 41 times in the New Testament. Isn't that amazing? 41 times a writer will say this was said by Isaiah, this was said by Isaiah, and there are many, many prophecies in the Old Testament prophesied and fulfilled in the New Testament. In fact, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, and Romans all refer back to Isaiah chapter 53. Isaiah lived during the time of four different kings. The last king was a really bad king, and that was Manasseh. Manasseh was the last king of the nation of Judah, and he's the one that was so bad. In fact, he killed Isaiah, executed him. And you read about that in the last chapter of Isaiah. So that's the book of Isaiah, and we're going to spend some time, and I hope you'll get to know him. a whole lot better. Isaiah told about the virgin birth of Christ very clearly. Isaiah talked about Jesus being spat upon, about him being crucified, about him being buried, and about him rising again. So all of this is in the book of Isaiah. 53, the chapter we're going to study for the next few weeks, is considered the mountaintop of all the prophecies in the Bible, the mountaintop of Old Testament, and the many great prophecies of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me give you a little outline that I have followed for many, many years. It's a four-point outline, and since you did not get an outline today, if you want to jot it down, you might. You have in the first three verses his rejection. Who had believed our report? To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? So that's his rejection. Then four through six talks about his redemption. All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquities of all. Then you have his resignation. where he's our sacrifice, which is verses 7 to 9. And the last set is his reward, and that's in verses 10 to 12. So you have the four points for the whole book of Isaiah. Now, when the unsaved Jewish people read Isaiah, it's interesting. The scholars will tell them, well, that's not a person. That's talking about the nation. That's a prophecy about the nation of Israel. And what we want to do is look at it, and we're going to see Jesus. We're not going to see the nation, because this passage, it all talks about Jesus Christ. Now, who is this one in Isaiah 53? Who hath believed our report? To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? And you may read Isaiah 53 and say, well, is this really talking about Jesus? And the way we know is because Philip tells us that. So I want you to turn in your Bible, keep your marker in Isaiah 53. We'll come back there in a moment. But in Acts chapter 8, Acts chapter number 8, We have a man by the name of Philip, Acts chapter 8, and we'll go down to verse 26, Acts 8, 26. In Acts chapter 8, there's a great revival and great persecution of the Christians. This is in the early book, early part of the Nation of Israel. and the disciples, and in Isaiah 8 and verse 26, you have the story of Philip the evangelist, and let's read what happened. And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south, and go down to Jerusalem, which is desert. Now Philip is in the midst of a great revival. People are getting saved, everybody's excited, and God comes to him and says, Philip, I want you to leave the great crowd. There's one man I want you to go see, and he's down in the desert. So Philip goes down there, and he arose and went, and behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Canis, the queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for her worship. So here's a man who was an Ethiopian, but he'd been up to Jerusalem to study and to learn things. Verse 28, he was returning and sitting in his chariot and he read Isaiah the prophet. That's what we looked at, Isaiah 53. And the spirit said to Philip, go near and join thyself to this chariot. So Philip sticks out his thumb, the chariot stops, Philip hops in and gets in by the Ethiopian unit. Verse 30, and Philip said to him, And he heard him read the prophet Isaiah, and he said, understand this now what thou readest. The man had been to Jerusalem. He had gotten a portion of the scripture. He was reading Isaiah 53, but he didn't know what he was talking about. And so Philip says, do you know what you're reading about? And the man said, how can I except some man should guide me? And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him. And the place of the scriptures which we read was this. He was led as a sheep to the slaughter. like a lamb before his shears and dumb, so he opened not his mouth, no resistance. And in his humiliation, his judgment was taken away, and who shall declare his generation, for his life is taken from him? And the eunuch answered Philip and said, I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet? Not what nation, but of whom is he talking about? And verse 35, and Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture and preached unto him, what's the next word? Jesus. So how do we know that Isaiah is talking about Jesus? Because Philip said, so we have the authority of the, of a man in the new Testament named Philip, who says Isaiah 53 is not talking about a nation. It's talking about Philip, about the Lord Jesus Christ. And, uh, when that man listened to all of that, he was gloriously converted. And then Philip goes on back to his revival meeting. As I mentioned, The Gospels in Matthew chapter 8, Peter's talking, he says Isaiah 53 is talking about the Lord Jesus Christ. In Mark chapter 8 or Mark chapter 15 tells he was talking about the Lord Jesus. When I was a boy, I used to get a little magazine called Boy's Life. It was put out for scouts. Did any of you guys get Boy's Life? Okay, well it was a wonderful magazine written for boys and on the back page it had jokes. That was the thing I always turned to first. was the back page, kind of like you all get the Reader's Digest and read all the jokes. Well, the back page of Reader's Digest was a whole page of jokes. And then, every once in a while, they'd have something different. And they had a picture, a line drawing, and it was a hidden something in the picture. And they said, now in this picture, there is a rabbit. and see if you could find the rabbit in this picture. And I remember getting that, still remember reading that, that was about 70 years ago, but I still remember looking for that rabbit, looking and looking and looking, trying to find the rabbit. It was in a tree, and it was upside down in a tree. And I finally found the rabbit and found out where he was, where he was hiding. And then after that, Anytime I'd open that page and see that picture, I'd see the rabbit immediately. The rabbit just kind of jumped out because it was right there and I knew where it was. Well, Isaiah 53 is kind of like that because when you study Isaiah 53 and you know it's about Christ, it is amazing to read this wonderful, wonderful chapter in the Bible and see the Lord Jesus Christ. So that's what we're going to look at as we consider this. So, Look in verse one, Isaiah 53, you can go back there now, and we'll look at Isaiah 53, verse one. Isaiah preached for many, many years. He warned the people about judgment. He warned them to turn back to God. He warned them because of their sin, and they would not listen. They would not listen to anything Isaiah said, and so now the people are in captivity. And Isaiah 53 is written during the time of the people in captivity in Babylon under Belshazzar or no, not Belshazzar, Sennacherib was king. And so these 10 tribes are in captivity and Isaiah begins writing chapter 53. Have you ever heard of the lost 10 tribes of Israel? You ever heard about the Lost Tribes of Israel? Well, there's a whole study about the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. When Sennacherib invaded Israel, he carried out 200,000 of the Jewish people and took them in captivity and Today, people look for the lost ten tribes, and Jerusalem was besieged, the people were killed, and many of them taken into captivity. And Isaiah had warned about this. He said, if you don't turn back to God, judgment's going to fall. But they wouldn't listen. They would not listen to anything that Isaiah said. And then when you read in the book of 2 Kings, the last chapter of 2 Kings, tells about the people being carried into captivity. All right, Isaiah 53, verse 1. Who hath believed our report? The word report is the word message. So I said, who has believed our message? And the answer is nobody. Nobody believed Isaiah. Isaiah said, judgment's coming. God's going to send you into captivity. And nobody listened to what he said. No nation in this world that I know of is as blind to the truth as the Jewish nation. It's really very, very sad. John 1 says, he came into his own and his own did what? Received him not. They rejected Jesus Christ. Paul went to the synagogue. And Paul said to the Jewish people in the synagogue, Jesus is the Messiah. He's the one that God sent. And the people didn't believe him. They mocked Paul. In some instances, they drove him out of the temple because they did not believe what he was saying. So they have rejected this. Who hath believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? The arm of the Lord is used in the Old Testament to speak of the power of God. You understand, of course, that God doesn't live in a body. Some people have the idea that when they die and get to heaven, they're going to go around and shake hands with Jesus, and they're going to shake hands with the Holy Spirit, and then they're going to go into the throne room and shake hands with God. That's not so. There is one God, but he manifests himself as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So the one God and the personification of God is Jesus Christ. So when you die, whatever that is, you're going to enter the gates of heaven and you're going to meet Jesus. The first person you will see will be the Lord Jesus Christ. I thought of Don last night, I got the call that Don had left this earth, and I thought Don is up there shaking hands with Jesus. He's meeting the Lord Jesus Christ in heaven, and he's met him right now, and others who will die today the same way. So God doesn't occupy a body. God is a spirit. Now, we occupy bodies, and so God, so that we can understand about him, God uses expressions. For example, we read about the fingers of God. Bible talks about the heavens or the fingers of God, talks about the hand of God, the strength of the hand of God, talks about the arm of God, that's his great strength. Deuteronomy 5 talks about the Lord and says, where you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand. and by an outstretched arm. So God uses that expression to help us understand about the Lord, the arm of the Lord, to whom is the arm of the Lord. Now when Jesus was here on the earth, he demonstrated his arm, his power. They watched Jesus do these great miracles. Jesus turned water to wine. Have you ever thought about that? Wine has a totally different chemical makeup from water. Water is H2O and wine will have the grape juice and have a lot of other ingredients in it. So Jesus turned water to wine instantly. Jesus healed people. Somebody came and they were sick and he didn't have to send them to the hospital, he didn't have to send them to ER, they didn't have to do an x-ray, they didn't have to send it to a doctor and wait a week, Jesus just instantly spoke and the disease was gone. He created fish, the arm of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the great power. When they fed 5,000, who caught those fish? Who scaled those fish? Who cooked those fish? Got them all ready. Who baked the bread? I guess they had fish sandwiches, that's what I've heard. But anyway, who took the bread and harvested the wheat? Who did? Jesus did that. He just spoke and instantly there was fish. When the storm was raging and they were in that little boat in the Sea of Galilee, Jesus spoke. Boom, it stopped silent, the waves went down like little puppies. And the Lord Jesus Christ did that. The arm of the Lord, to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? Nobody revealed the arm of God like Jesus. Did Mohammed ever do any miracles? Not that I can read about. Buddha do any miracles? Not that I know about. Only one person in the human history ever did miracles like Jesus. He was the arm of God, the arm of the Lord. But in his day, they rejected him. They said, we will not have this man rule over us. They rejected the Lord Jesus Christ and all of his power. And then let's go to verse two. Verse number two says, For he, speaking of Jesus, shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground. He hath no form to come on us. When we shall see him, there's no beauty that we should desire him. Jesus grew up as a tender plant. Now, what does that mean? Well, in Bible times, they divided plants into three categories. There were tender plants. There were hardy plants, and there were half-hardy plants. This is very interesting. I'd like to have Jack Watson here today. He's our resident farmer, and Jack does a great job raising corn and tomatoes and sharing them with all of us. But anyway, if you were to get a seed catalog, do any of you men get seed catalogs? I heard a definition of an optimist. It's a farmer in January looking at a seed catalog. That's a definition of an optimist. He pictures this beautiful, you see all these beautiful pictures in the seed catalog. And my father used to get Burpee's seed catalog every year. Go through it all, look at the corn, look at the beans, look at the tomatoes and all of that. But there were plants, some plants were called hardy plants. That is, they were native to the area. The cold weather didn't bother them. They kept on growing. The climate was just right. They belonged in that environment. And then some plants were not hardy plants. They were half hardy. That is, they were not native to the area, but they would grow. If you took care of them, they would grow. And then there were some plants that were tender plants. And tender plants were from a different area, a different background, a different time zone. The soil was not good. The water was not necessarily good, the climate was not good, and it was a tender plant. You put out flowers by spring, and you found out now that they're tender plants. The frost gets them and it dies them, and they die. So Jesus was a tender plant. Jesus was from a different environment. When Jesus came, he left the glories of heaven. Jesus left heaven where he was worshiped, he was adored, the angels sang about him, and he left home and came to this earth. And this earth was not his home. We feel at home down here. We're used to this. We like the temperature, Indiana, we like the The culture, the climate of Indiana, we're home here. But Jesus was not home. He was a transplant from heaven. And the Lord Jesus Christ, can you imagine the glories he left when he came to this earth? We talked about Don Bryan a bit ago. Don going to heaven. Imagine the culture shock for leaving this old body. The liver was cancerous and full of cancer. Don was really hurting a lot. And immediately, all the pain, all the suffering's gone, and he's in a brand new environment forever and forever. That's where he's going to be. So the Lord Jesus, though, was a tender plant. in a dry ground. And also it says in verse number two, he was a root out of dry ground. Now, if a root is in dry ground, that's not a very good environment for it. This world did not sustain Jesus. This world did not feed Jesus. This world did not help Jesus. This world was nothing to the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, in the days of Jesus, the culture was a Greek culture. The Greeks had philosophers, but that didn't help Jesus. The Greeks were pantheists. That is, they thought everything was God. Trees were God. Stones were God. Snakes were God. Everything was God. That was pantheism. And there were the Epicureans of the day. You know about them. We have the Epicurean philosophy today. Enjoy life, just enjoy, go for all the gusto. None of these things help the Lord Jesus Christ. He was a root out of dry ground. Terrible conditions for the Lord Jesus Christ when he came to the earth. So he was a root out of dry ground. And then it also says in verse two, that he had no form or comeliness. Now the word form is the word for an impressive body. He was not a real attractive person. Sometimes you see a man or a woman, they have a nice body, they're put together well, but not the Lord Jesus Christ. He was in the glories of heaven, but he came to earth, and the earth received him not. Jesus was the uncreated one, the self-existent one. If he had come, in glory it would have killed everybody. Remember Moses wanted to see Jesus and he asked the Lord let me see you and God said I can't let you do that. I am so glorious that if you saw me you would die. You wouldn't be able to stand the glory of God and so God put him in a in a cleft of the rock, and then God passed by, and Moses saw the afterglow. And then when he came back down from the mountain, his face was so glowing that he had to put a veil on his face. But that was just not even seeing God, just seeing the afterglow of God. But Jesus, when he came to the earth, hid all the glory that he had. Instead of Jesus coming in his glory, How did he come? Came as a baby, came as a little helpless baby. And you've seen pictures of little babies just so, so helpless. That's how Jesus came. His father was a carpenter, had a carpenter shop. Jesus probably swept the floor of the carpenter shop, cleaned up all the sawdust and trimmings. He lived in, in Nazareth for 30 years in an out of the way little town. He labored in the carpenter shop. The town despised him. And his mother, Mary, was mocked. They made fun of her because she said she had gotten pregnant by God, not even her husband. She wasn't even married and had a baby. And all of that took place in the Lord Jesus Christ. And then he was born. in a cave, not in a normal house, not attendance, but he was born in a cave. He grew up, probably wore homespun clothes. He spoke Aramaic. Aramaic was the language of the farmers. It was a, we probably could say had a language like the hillbillies, but that was the Lord Jesus Christ. No record of his birth, no record of his growing up. God knew the idolatry. of the human heart if that were all the case. And all we know is from Isaiah. And Isaiah says that he has no form or commonness. And when we shall see him, there's no beauty that we should desire him. Let's go to verse three. Let's go on to verse three. 53, verse three. He is despised and rejected of men, and notice the next expression, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from him. He was despised and we esteemed him not. To be despised, we esteemed him not. The word esteem means to highly regard, to look at someone and just really have great admiration for them. We esteemed him not. Jesus was a man of sorrows. Now, was Isaiah mistaken? Was he wrong to call Jesus a man of sorrows? He said, this isn't the Messiah, but Jesus was a man of sorrows because he knew the eternal destiny. If people rejected him, if people did not claim his savior, Jesus knew their eternal destiny. We sing a song here at our church. Man of sorrows, what a name for the son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim. Hallelujah, what a savior. That song was written by a man named Philip Brooks. Philip Brooks was a great poet and also a musician. And he had great talent. He wrote Almost Persuaded, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning, Wonderful Words of Life, Singing Them Over Again to Me. Philip Brooks wrote all of those. Philip Brooks was in a revival meeting. Philip Bliss, I want to say Brooks. Philip Brooks, P.B. Bliss, was in a revival meeting and the, preacher was a guy named Henry Morehouse. He was in the same group with D.L. Moody. And he talked about Jesus coming as a man of sorrows. And that little phrase really stuck with P.B. Bliss. And as he thought about that, he went home and wrote a poem. and came back and had a song that he'd written with the man of sorrows. And that's the song we sing today. Man of sorrows, what a name for the son of God who came. And then the last verse, when he comes, our glorious king, all the ransomed home to bring, then anew this song we'll sing, hallelujah, what a savior. So with that, we're going to end today. Jesus Christ came as a man of sorrows. And what did we do? Verse three. We hid our faces from him. Isaiah said, here came the Messiah, here came God, and we turned our back upon him. He was a spies and we esteemed him not. We did not recognize the Lord Jesus. Next week, we're going to take verses 4, 5, and 6. And verse 6, you've all heard, and we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. We'll be looking at that particular verse next Sunday in our class. So if you'll read Isaiah 53, verses 4, 5, and 6, We're going to look at those verses next Sunday. Thank you for being here today. It's wonderful to look out and see a really good crowd today. Appreciate all of you being here. Let's pray. Heavenly Father. Help us, we pray, as we read Isaiah 53 to see Jesus, to realize that God wrote 700 years before the event and wrote all about these things about Christ and how true they are. Help us, we pray, to just be thrilled at the writing of God and what God has done for him. And now we ask your blessing in our service that follows. Be with Pastor Phelps as he preaches today. Give him power. Thank you that we have a good pastor and a man that loves the word. And we ask your blessing now as the rest of the day. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Thank you very much.