Messianic Perspectives

Chris Rodriguez: Shalom and welcome to Messianic Perspectives, a daily program where we look into the scriptures from a distinctive first-century Jewish point of view. Today, our Bible teacher, Steven Ger, continues his five-part series on the Servant of the Lord. And now with today’s teaching, here’s Steven Ger.

Steven Ger: Shalom, this is Steven Ger. Welcome back to our series on the Servant of the Lord and Messianic prophecy. In our previous session, we really got into the great prophecy of Isaiah 53. We read verse by verse how the Messiah was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows, and forsaken without esteem. We saw how the Servant of the Lord was to be rejected by the people of the Lord, but nonetheless, intercession would be made on behalf of all people through His suffering.

We saw in verse 10 that the Lord was pleased to crush Him, not in a gleeful way, but that the fact that Messiah would suffer was central to the divine master plan. Because it is the crushing of the Messianic figure that allows Him to render Himself as a guilt offering, and He will see His offspring. If He is dead, if He is rendered as an offering, how does He have offspring? That really is mysterious. He will prolong His days. How is He prolonging His days? He was put to death. And the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in His hand. How is any of that possible if He is crushed?

If through His death, the Servant is enabled to do the unprecedented, to render Himself as the ultimate and final guilt offering, how then can He still be alive? If He died, yet through His sacrifice, made perfect intercession for all sinners by carrying their sins, how is He alive? Verse 11 says, "As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see and be satisfied." Again, I ask the question: if He died, how is He seeing? How is He satisfied? By His knowledge, the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, as He will bear their iniquities.

Verse 11, I don’t know if you noticed, when we asked the question: who, what, where, when, how, why? Who's talking? All of a sudden, it’s the Lord once again who is speaking, not Isaiah. And He continues in verse 12, saying, "Therefore." When you see a "therefore," what are you supposed to ask? What it’s there for. And you must understand the previous context. It is always in recognition of the previous context.

The previous context is the death and the suffering of the Messiah and His successful ability to make perfect intercession for all sinners by carrying their sins. Therefore, verse 12, "I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the booty with the strong, because He poured Himself out to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He Himself bore the sin of many, and interceded for the transgressors."

So you see the sprinkling allusion that we had at the end of 52, the priestly concept leads us to the ultimate priestly pouring out of Himself as a sacrifice, the ultimate and final guilt offering. The Lord Himself calls the Messianic figure the Righteous One. Why should He be called the Righteous One? Because He bore the penalty for the sins of others, and by doing so has justified His people. But I still get to verse 12 and I have to say, He will divide the booty with the strong. How is He dividing booty? He's dead, and dead men divide no booty.

Unless, as the reward for His suffering and death, as the reward for His self-sacrifice, He will be, as Isaiah tells us here, exalted and glorified. You see, for Isaiah 53 to be true in every aspect, it is necessary that the murdered Messiah must be raised up. We'll talk about the rabbinic opinion of this passage shortly, but regardless of the volume of rabbinic opinion, and there is quite a lot of it, it is incontestable that one particular rabbi, Jesus Himself, explicitly identified Himself in the New Testament as the prophetic fulfillment of the Isaiah 53 passage.

Jesus identifies Himself very clearly as the one who would suffer, be treated with contempt, and be numbered with the transgressors. In verse 12 of Mark 9, He says to them, "Elijah does first come and restore all things. Yet how is it written of the Son of Man that He will suffer many things and be treated with contempt?" Well, yes, where is that written? Isaiah 53, of course. And in Luke 22:37, "For I tell you that this which is written must be fulfilled in Me," and He quotes, "and He was numbered with transgressors. For that which refers to Me," Jesus says, "has its fulfillment."

Jesus’ identification with the suffering servant is also implicit in foretelling His death and resurrection in Matthew 26, Mark 9, 10, 23, Luke 24, and in His silence like a lamb before Pilate in Mark 15. And of course, Acts 8, the famous passage of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch: "Who is this passage about?" Philip says, "It’s about Jesus." Frankly, if you cannot find allusion to Isaiah 53 in the New Testament, you're just not paying attention. You're not looking very carefully.

Speaking of those not looking very carefully, or specifically turning their heads from where the evidence will lead them, let's look at the Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53. The first thing you need to note is that the ancient rabbinic literature strongly attests that it is the overwhelming consensus of the Jewish rabbis that the suffering servant passage of 53 speaks of the Messiah. When we look at the Targums, the Aramaic paraphrase, the translation is, "Behold, My Servant, the Messiah shall prosper. He shall be exalted and great and very powerful."

So he inserts the term "Messiah" for any who were confused about it. He goes on to say, "It is the will of the Lord to purify and to acquit as innocent the remnant of His people, to cleanse their souls of sin, so that they may see the kingdom of their Messiah, and He shall seek pardon of the sins for many, and for His sake, the rebellious shall be forgiven." That document was read by the populace of the Jewish people in the time of Jesus. That was the understanding.

If we look at the Babylonian Talmud, in Tractate Sanhedrin 98b, the question is raised: what is the Messiah’s name? One guy says His name is Shiloh, because of Genesis 49, "until Shiloh come." One guy says His name is Yanun, "His name shall endure forever ere the sun was, His name is Yanun." The rabbis said His name is the leper scholar, as it is written, "Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him a leper, smitten of God and afflicted."

But in taking this passage at face value, the question eventually arose as to how to square this suffering, rejected and executed Messiah with the supernaturally endowed, victorious conquering hero of other alternative Messianic texts. It was at this point that the rabbis devised an ingenious solution of dividing the Messianic figure into two separate Messiahs. One Messiah, Ben Joseph, the son of Joseph, would die. The other, Ben David, the son of David, would reign. And conveniently, Messiah Ben David would then resurrect Messiah Ben Joseph from the dead. What a partnership.

Historically, it’s unclear when this little handy device gained interpretive ascendancy. I think likely it followed the apologetic success of the early church's evangelists in demonstrating the identity of Jesus from the Scriptures, as was their normative method. This near-monolithic consensus regarding Isaiah 53 referring to a personal, suffering Messiah remains the case until the renowned Rabbi Rashi, in the 11th century, makes an innovation. He identifies the suffering servant not as the Messiah, but as corporate Israel.

Again, this was in reaction, most likely, to the evangelistic use of the prophecy by Christians. It’s a powerful prophecy because it’s a powerful prophecy. It’s so powerful that Isaiah 53 has been for some time absolutely eliminated, excised, and censored from the synagogue's liturgical cycle of public readings. But in the 14th century, three centuries after Rashi, Rabbi Moshe Kohen ibn Crispin, a famous rabbi, apparently in reaction to the popularity of Rashi’s interpretation, wrote, "I am pleased to interpret Isaiah 53 in accordance with the teaching of our rabbis of King Messiah, and I will be careful, as far as I am able, to adhere to the literal sense, thus possibly I shall be free from the forced and far-fetched interpretations of which others (meaning Rashi) have been guilty."

We could discuss at great length an entire additional segment in our series of rabbinic literature that is very clear in interpreting Isaiah 53 as speaking of the suffering of the actual Messiah. Not the nation of Israel, nobody else, but the Messiah. Now, of course, they don't recognize that Jesus is the Messiah, but they nonetheless interpret Isaiah 53 in reference to a personal, suffering Messiah. The ancient rabbinic literature is deafening regarding that fact. And it is the paradoxical tragedy of the Jewish people today that the vast majority is unable to perceive and unwilling to receive that the prophet Isaiah spoke so manifestly of Jesus in Isaiah 53.

Chris Rodriguez: Thank you, Steve. And thank you, listening friend, for joining us today. It's always good to have you with us. If you missed part of this series or would like to share it with a friend, you'll be glad to know that it's available on one convenient compact disc for the suggested gift of just $6.

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