The Servant - Part B

It just means substitutionary atonement. Somebody died in your place because the wages of sin is death.

So somebody's got to die. And the reason we're blessed is because He said, I'll do it. He became your substitute. Today on Connect with Skip Heitzig, Skip wraps up his message, The Servant, and shows you that as a servant, Jesus came to take the place of all mankind, including you. But first, here's a resource that'll help you confidently answer tough questions about Jesus' life, ministry, and divinity. Josh McDowell has written books that rank among the best-selling Christian works of all time. Now with his son, Sean, Josh has released Evidence for Jesus. God gave us our mind and our heart to work in unity.

To what? To glorify Him. The Bible, I call it fact, fiction, or fallacy. I want to answer two questions about the Bible.

This is what I struggle with as a non-believer. One, is what we have written down the same as what was written down 2,000 years ago, or has it been changed? Second, was what was written down true? In Evidence for Jesus, Josh and Sean McDowell have adapted and updated the Evidence for Jesus section from their classic apologetics book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, into a concise, readable, and accessible resource for those seeking answers about Jesus. This powerful new resource is our thanks for your gift of $50 or more to support the broadcast ministry of Connect with Skip Heitzig.

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Give online securely at connectwithskip.com slash offer, or call 800-922-1888. All right, we're in Isaiah 53 as we join Skip for today's lesson. There's a great story.

It's true. Back in the late 1800, D.L. Moody, Dwight Lyman Moody, the evangelist, had a home in Northfield, Massachusetts. He used to hold Bible conferences back there. And leaders from all over the country, in fact, from all over Europe, would get on boats, on ships, and come to America to attend one of those conferences. So one time the place was packed. The grounds were filled with European visitors, guests, who were there to hear the world's only famous evangelist at the time, D.L.

Moody. Well, there's a European custom, and that is, at night, the gentlemen take their shoes off, and they put them in the hallway. And during the night, a hall servant comes by, collects the shoes, cleans them, polishes them, and puts them back in front of the door in Europe.

But this is America. There are no hall servants in America. You clean your own stinkin' shoes, right? Well, Dwight L. Moody noticed that all the shoes were out in front of the door, so he collected them all.

He told some of his ministry students about it. They didn't have any time to do that. They had all sorts of excuses.

So D.L. Moody took those shoes to his own room, and personally, one by one, pair by pair, cleaned and polished every pair of shoes, put them back in front of the doors. So when they opened their doors in the morning, they didn't think anything of it.

It was protocol in Europe. They saw cleaned, polished shoes. They put them on, and they went to the meeting where D.L. Moody was speaking. That's why they came. They had no idea that the one who became the hall servant was the evangelist they came to listen to. There was one man, one friend of Moody, who saw what was happening out of his window, and he told it to a few people.

By the end of the week, people were fighting over polishing those shoes. But Moody's esteemed position as conference leader and as evangelist made his service all the more dramatic and lovely. Think of Jesus now. Paul the Apostle said, Paul the Apostle said, he was God in human flesh, but he made himself of no reputation, taking on the form of a bond servant. That's the word he used, a bond slave. So his esteemed position as the sinless servant of God made what he was about to do all the more dramatic and lovely.

There's a third characteristic I want you to notice. He's a suffering servant. Go back to chapter 52. Look at verse 14. His visage was marred. His visage means his face, marred more than any other man and his form more than the sons of men.

Listen to that again from the living Bible. They shall see my servant beaten and bloodied, so disfigured one would scarcely know it was a person standing there. Do you remember the crowd standing before punches, Pilate? They wanted blood. They shouted, crucify him. Pilate thought he could placate them by just having Jesus beaten, so he handed him over to the Roman soldiers to scourge him. We've told you before that a Roman scourging, sometimes people died from just that died from just that. There were two soldiers, a whip in each one of the soldiers right hand usually. It was a short handle with leather strips embedded into the leather was pieces of glass, metal, bone. The idea is that when the whip went across the back of the victim, it stuck into the flesh and the soldier would pull back lacerating the flesh into ribbons.

By the time it was done, the subcutaneous tissues had been broken through and one historian says even the vital organs could be viewed by those around. As I say, many did not even survive that. When they brought Jesus back from the Roman scourging and he stood a second time before punches, Pilate said those famous words in Latin, esche omo, behold the man. As if to say, do you not now pity this poor bloodied creature? Have you not had enough of his punishment? But of course that wasn't it, was it? There was more. He was given a cross or the upper beam of the cross known as the patibulum, 75 to 100 pound beam placed on his back to carry to the place of execution. He didn't even make it all the way.

He had to have help from a man from North Africa who carried it the rest of the way. Isaiah, look at verse 4 of chapter 53. Look at some of the words to describe the suffering. Stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. Verse 5, wounded, bruised, his stripes. Verse 7, oppressed and afflicted is again. Look at that phrase in verse 7, led as a lamb to the slaughter.

Verse 10, the word bruise and the word grief. Now as you see this in your mind's eye, it should take your breath away because you realize this is Christ. This is the Messiah. This is God's sinless servant experiencing great suffering.

It takes our breath away because no other religion has at its heart the humiliation of its God. He is a sovereign servant, a sinless servant and a suffering servant, but there's more. And this is really the heart of the passage.

He is a substitutionary servant. Verse 4, surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement for our peace was upon him. And by his stripes, we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray.

You wonder what you do? That's your part. You and I, we've gone astray like sheep. We've turned everyone to his own way and the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all. Throughout this whole section is the language of substitution. There's a problem that the human race has.

It's a fatal disease. Paul summed it up in a single verse, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That is the collective problem of the human race.

Isaiah touches on that. He mentions in the verses we just read our griefs, or literally our sickness, our sorrows, our transgressions, our iniquities. That's our stuff.

That's our stuff. To put it in a single sentence, we all have a sorrow that comes from a sickness that is brought on by sinfulness. We all have a sorrow that comes from a sickness that is brought on by sinfulness. So our disease called sin requires a specialist.

It's not a quick fix. It requires a substitute, somebody who's going to take the wrap, the punishment, the guilt for us. When we say Jesus died for you, another and better way of saying that is Jesus died instead of you.

That's what we mean by for. He died instead of you. He died instead of you. The theological term is vicarious atonement.

You want to impress your friends, throw that one out. Yeah, I believe in the vicarious atonement. Well, if you're a Christian, everybody does. It just means substitutionary atonement. Somebody died in your place, because the wages of sin is death.

So somebody's got to die. And the reason we're blessed is because he said, I'll do it. He became your substitute. I told you before, when I first heard the gospel, I was watching that television program. Billy Graham was explaining the gospel.

I remember thinking these thoughts as he was explaining the sacrifice on the cross and being born again. I'm listening and I'm thinking from God's perspective, not a good deal. This is not a good deal. God is not getting a good deal. In the art of the deal, God's getting a bad deal. He's going to give up his son. He's going to let his son suffer like that to get me.

Not a good deal for God, but a great deal for me. And I'd be stupid to pass it up. So I didn't. I needed a substitute and I knew it. I knew I wasn't good enough.

I knew I needed someone to stand in for me. Let me relay a story to you from 1946. I wasn't even alive then. But here in New Mexico, up at Los Alamos in 1946, they were going through what they called the Manhattan Project. And one of the physicists by the name of Louis Slotin was part of that experiment. He wanted to determine how much uranium-235 it took to start an atomic chain reaction. Scientists call it critical mass. So they take two hemispheres, or they did take two hemispheres of uranium, and bring them close together just until they're about to reach critical mass, at which point the scientist would separate those two hemispheres of uranium.

I'm using my hands as an illustration, but that's lethal. So they did it under careful circumstances, using a tool, kind of like a screwdriver, to pry the two hemispheres of uranium apart. Well, on one day in 1946, as Louis Slotin and others are in the room, the two hemispheres were brought close together. And just as the tool was being put in to pry them apart, the tool slipped, and the two hemispheres of uranium came together and the room filled with a bluish haze. Critical mass had been reached.

The physicist instinctively and knowingly reached with his bare hands and grabbed with his fingers the two hemispheres of uranium, pulled them apart. He knew the consequence. Nine days later, he was dead. Lethal dose of radiation. But in doing that, the seven other people in the room lived. 2,000 years ago, Jesus stepped into the most concentrated form of radiation.

Critical mass. Stopping the chain reaction that sin brought to humanity by taking all of that punishment on himself. He was slaughtered so I could be saved.

He became a substitute. This is the atonement. This is substitutionary atonement. If you think about it, the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God. It's the essence of sin. But the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man.

He paid the debt that I did not owe. But there's another thing I want you to see here, another characteristic, and that is, through it all, he was silent. He is a silent servant. Look at verse seven. He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was led as a lamb to the slaughter as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. Now Isaiah is writing this 680 years before Jesus ever experienced that in real time.

But that's exactly what happened. He's brought before the chief priests, the high priests, and the Sanhedrin. They hurl accusations at him that were not true. We are told that Jesus kept silent. He was also in that trial brought before Herod, who questioned him with many words, we are told, but Jesus answered him nothing. He even stood before Pontius Pilate. He had had some words with Pilate. He had told Pilate that he is a king. He had told him that he has a kingdom, and he had told him that he had come for the sake of the truth. He had told Pilate that he is a king. He had come for the sake of the truth. But there came a point where Jesus said nothing, and when Pilate asked him more questions, we are told, but Jesus answered him not one word. At that point, it says Pilate was astonished. Why was he astonished? Because he had seen many prisoners go to a cross before, but none of them were silent. They were all talking. They were all yelling, saying, I'm innocent. I don't deserve this.

You got the wrong guy. He had heard all of that before. Never had he seen someone peppered with questions and accusations, and he's silent. Now, silence can be intimidating.

You can't, can it? It's like, oh, this is getting kind of awkward. You're having a conversation with somebody, and you're talking. All of a sudden, they look at you right in the eye, and they're completely silent. You're wondering, what are they thinking?

What did I do wrong? What are they going to say? Uh-oh. You're all freaked out about silence, but at the same time, silence is when you can think, and could it be that Jesus said nothing to Pilate because he had said enough already for Pilate to think about? Maybe he wanted Pilate to process that before he did anything, and the reason I bring that up, because some of you worry when you say God isn't speaking to you. You say, I'm experiencing the silence of God. God is not speaking to me. Could it be that God's silent so that you can think about what you already know to be true before you act on something?

Just a thought. He was the silent servant. Sixth and finally, and I'll close with this, he's the saving servant. The good news found in verse 15 of chapter 52 is, so shall he sprinkle many nations. That's a Levitical term. That's when the priests used to sprinkle the mercy seat in their ceremony of cleansing with the blood of a lamb, signifying cleansing in that system.

That's how he saves. He will sprinkle many nations. Go down to verse 11, chapter 53. He will see the labor of the soul and be satisfied by his knowledge. My righteous servant shall justify many.

There's that word again. He'll sprinkle many nations. He'll justify many people. But it's a troubling word because many means not all. Not all will be sprinkled. Not all will be saved. Many will, but by virtue of the fact that there are many, many won't. And why is it that many won't? Many won't because many won't allow Jesus to be their substitute. Many won't admit that they're sinners. Listen, God is a big eraser, but you've got to admit that you've got some smudges for those things to get erased.

And as long as you say, I'm good enough, I'll take my chances when I stand before God, I've done a few good things in life, he'll let me in. Foolish as that is, that's how many people live their life. They just don't see that they need a substitute for their sin. They don't admit that they have a sin. It's big enough, it's bad enough, they're wicked enough. So they live their life that way.

They don't allow the servant to be the substitute which would indeed bring salvation. Well, I want to close on a lighter note. This is from a newspaper, a classified ad in Pretoria, South Africa. It's taken out. Now, there's a mistake in it, but they didn't catch the mistake till the next day, so it went to print. And it read thus, the Reverend AJ Jones has a color TV set for sale.

Telephone 5551313 after 7 p.m. and ask for Mrs. Donnelly who lives with him cheap. You caught the mistake. Next day, the paper printed the correction and they said this, we regret any embarrassment caused to Reverend Jones by the topographical error in yesterday's editions. It should have read, the Reverend AJ Jones has a color TV set for sale cheap. Telephone 5551313 and ask for Mrs. Donnelly who lives with him after 7 p.m. Twice they blew it. The next day, the paper put, the Reverend Jones informs us that he received several annoying phone calls because of incorrect advertisement in yesterday's paper. It should have read, the Reverend AJ Jones has a color TV set for sale cheap.

Telephone after 7 p.m. 5551313 and ask for Mrs. Donnelly who loves with him. That's three strikes, right? So on the fourth day, the dear old Reverend put this in there. Please take notice that I, Reverend Jones, have no TV set for sale. I have smashed it. I have not been carrying on with Mrs. Donnelly.

She was, until yesterday, my housekeeper. Now the moral of that little story is that it's awfully embarrassing to be thought of as guilty when you're not. But you know what's worse? To not think that you are guilty when you are. To not think that you are guilty when you are.

It's far worse. And that's how vastly the human race lives. Under the sentence of guilt and death, unknowingly, and they will not admit, I need a stand-in.

I need a savior. Isaiah 53 answers the most important question and issue ever asked. The most important question ever asked. More important than who's going to win the next election. More important than will my taxes go up. More important than who am I going to marry. More important than what am I going to be when I grow up.

What school am I going to go to. Far more important than any of those questions. The most important issue in the world is dealt with in Isaiah 53. And by the way, I should say the most avoided question. That is, how can a sinner be made right with God so as to escape eternal punishment and live in eternal heaven. That's the question.

That's the pressing question. It's answered here by a stand-in, by a substitute, by the sinless servant of God, Jesus himself, taking by his suffering and death the punishment the punishment for our sin dying in our place so that we could be sprinkled, justified. But until you admit that you have a need and ask him to do something about it, you're under the guilt sentence, the death sentence. And just like this little want-had, I don't want there to be any miscommunication. You only get to heaven by one thing only, and that is your faith in a single person, the Lord Jesus Christ. That's Skip Hyten with a message from his series Against All Odds.

Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskipp.com. Now, here's Skip and Lenya to tell you about a trip they're planning to Israel. I'm guessing that many of you have thought about, talked about, maybe even dreamed about visiting Israel.

Well, let's make that happen. Lenya and I are taking a tour group to Israel next summer in 2024. And I can't wait. We'll start in Tel Aviv, head north to Nazareth, the Sea of Galilee, and the Jordan River. We'll spend several days in Jerusalem and see the Garden of Gethsemane, the Upper Room, and so much more. And we'll wrap it all up with a swim in the Dead Sea. Now, I've been to Israel many times, like over 40. In fact, I can honestly say, though, that visiting the places where the scriptures unfolded, where Jesus lived out his earthly ministry, it never gets old.

No, it doesn't. The incredible sightseeing will be punctuated by times of worship and teachings that you'll never forget. And Jeremy Camp and Adie Camp will be with us to lead worship, make plans to join us next summer in Israel. See the itinerary and book this Israel tour with Skip Heitig and Jeremy Camp today at inspirationcruises.com slash c-a-b-q. That's inspirationcruises.com slash c-a-b-q. We hope today's program has encouraged you in your Christian walk, and we want to invite you to help encourage others on their journey with a gift to keep these biblical teachings on the air. Just call 800-922-1888.

That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Thank you. Join us next time as Pastor Skip brings you more timeless truth from the unchanging Word of God. Cast your burdens on His Word. Make a connection. A connection. Connect with Skip Heitig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.