Jesus bears the full weight of our sinfulness on himself in the sense that he takes the punishment of God. Our evil deeds, our evil thoughts, our evil deprivations, and our evil nature for all of that. For all of that, the servant of Jehovah. bears the full weight of punishment. Welcome to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. You can probably think of cases where a president has pardoned a convicted felon, but here's something you'll never hear about. a president securing a criminal's freedom by substitution that is by taking the criminal's place, accepting for himself the punishment that the criminal deserved. And yet that sort of punishment, a substitutionary punishment, completely unearned and undeserved, that is exactly what the Son of God accepted and endured in the place of every sinner who would ever trust in Him. Consider that eternal truth in John MacArthur's message today, a part of his study called The Gospel According to God.
But before we continue this series, I have a letter here from a man who wanted to express his gratitude for Grace to U's ministry in his life, specifically from the German translation work that we have done. He writes, I have been a devout Christian for what feels like my entire life. Unfortunately, over the past few decades, I have witnessed how major German churches have increasingly distanced themselves from the Word of God and from God Himself. My heart bleeds to this day. A few years ago I came across a book by John MacArthur.
I can't even remember which book it was. I didn't have high hopes that it would hold any insights for me. When I started reading, however, I was enlightened and a whole new world of faith opened up to me. I bought the next book by John MacArthur, and then another, and so on. Today I have a considerable number of German books by John MacArthur on my shelf.
I also discovered grace to you. When I bought the MacArthur Study Bible, my understanding and faith were lifted to a whole new level. I can't wait for the next book by John MacArthur to be published in German. Your translations of John MacArthur's sermons into German are blessings for souls hungry for God's Word. Keep up the good work.
I'm so delighted that your work is growing and that you are giving hope to believers in Germany.
Well, what a great letter And friend, just know that the faithful support of listeners like you is what makes our ministry possible in English and a growing number of other major languages. To partner with us in ministering to people in Germany and all around the world, express your tax-deductible support at gty.org. I'll have the rest of our contact information for you after the lesson. But right now, here's John MacArthur to continue his look at the gospel according to God. There is a time in the future.
When Israel will look at Jesus Christ and say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. They will recognize their Messiah. That's what Zachariah wrote about. That's when they look on the one they've pierced and mourn for him as an only son, and a fountain of cleansing is opened to them. That's their future salvation.
Now the Old Testament prophets wrote about this. And they wrote about it in no vague terms. Go to Ezekiel 36. Ezekiel 36, some very important insight. In verse 16, here's the message that comes to the people of Israel.
the Jewish people. Verse 16, then the word of the Lord came to me saying, And here's the history.
Son of Man. That's a title given to Ezekiel. When the house of Israel was living in their own land, They defiled it by their ways and their deeds. Their way before me was like the uncleanness of a woman in her impurity. Very gross description.
Therefore, I poured out my wrath on them for the blood which they had shed on the land, because they had defiled it with their idols. And I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed throughout the lands. According to their ways and their deeds, I judged them. And that's exactly what happened. That's called the diaspora, and every Jew knows about that.
And it started with the Babylonian deportation.
However, verse 20: when they came to the nations where they went, when they got scattered all over the world, they profaned my holy name. How did they do that? Because it was said of them These are the people of the Lord. Yet they have come out of his land. What is that saying?
It's saying this. When they were scattered all over the world. They profaned my holy name because people said, What kind of a God? Do these people have who can't even keep them in their land? And they mocked God.
The nations have mocked God. The God of the Jews has been mocked. by the nations into which they have been scattered through human history. And so in verse 21 God says, I had concern for my holy name. which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations where they went.
Jews all over the world, beleaguered Jews all over the world, struggling throughout all their history. It was hard to sell the rest of the nations on the greatness and the glory and the power of their God. He couldn't even keep them in their own land.
Well, this is a picture of the profaning of the name of the true God in the scattering of the Jews through history. Verse 22 is the therefore, therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It's not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I'm about to act. This isn't about you. But for my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you went, I've got to do something to gain my reputation back. That's what God's saying.
I will, verse 23, vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations. which you have profaned in their midst. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when I prove myself holy among you in their sight. The only way that I'm going to be able to put my glory on display in the nations is to put my glory on display through you. How am I going to do that?
First, Verse 24, I'll take you from the nations. and gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land.
Well We have a preview of that, don't we? 1948, they went back, reconstituted their nation. That is a uh Fact. Incontrovertible fact, they are there. This is not the salvation of Israel.
This is simply a preview and an indication of what is to come. I'll bring you back and then it will happen. When I get you back in the land. And this is coming as we watch, isn't it? Jewish people from all over the world migrating in, rolling in.
Some of them even coming to Christ now as individuals.
Some of them uh Embracing the gospel now, embracing Jesus as their Messiah now. But but the nation remains fixed against Christ. as a people. But the day will come in the future, and he's talking about the people, the nation, the house of Israel. Verse 25, here's the key.
I will sprinkle clean water on you. And you'll be clean. I'll cleanse you from all your filthiness and all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart, put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will be careful to observe my ordinances. That is a. That is a statement of salvation. That that's dramatic. In concern for his own holy name, To vindicate his faithfulness and demonstrate his glory, God will one day save the Jews.
He is already in the process of regathering them. And in the future... He will save them.
Now look at the components of this. These are all elements of salvation. Verse 25, I'll sprinkle clean water on you, and you'll be clean. I'll cleanse you from all your filthiness and your idols. That's what salvation is.
It's the washing of regeneration, isn't it? It's the cleansing of sanctification. And then he says in verse 26, the second of these two verses, I will give you a new heart. That's regeneration. You could say that the cleansing is the sanctification and the new heart is the regeneration.
Now new heart means new life. Then I'll give you a new spirit. A new disposition, a new attitude, a new nature. That's conversion. A new mind.
New affections. I'll give you new power. A new power. What is that? I will put my spirit within you.
And based on the power of the Spirit in you, cause you to walk in my statutes and to be careful to observe my ordinances. A new behavior. Obedience. A new condition, sanctification cleansed from sin. A new heart, regeneration.
A new disposition or spirit, conversion. A new power, the indwelling Holy Spirit. A new behavior, obedience. All that will come to Israel in the future. That is the salvation of the people.
I love this. Verse 28: You'll live in the land that I gave to your forefathers, so you will be my people, and I will be your God. Moreover, I will save you from all your uncleanness. Down in verse 31. He says, You will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and your abominations.
That's the stuff of real repentance, isn't it? They're going to look back over their sins and transgressions, and they're going to hear the preaching of the gospel. Who would they hear it from? 144,000 Jews, converted Gentiles out of every tongue, tribe, and nation that happens during the time of the tribulation. Angels in the heavens, two witnesses.
The gospel will be everywhere during that final time of divine judgment on the earth before the return of Christ. They will hear the gospel. They will see their sin. They will repent of their sin. They will look on the one they've pierced.
They will mourn for him as an only son. They will be sanctified, regenerated, converted, spirit-empowered, and turned into obedient followers. of Christ. This is the real stuff. Verse 32, I'm not doing this for your sake.
Yeah. For my sake. On that day, verse 33, I'll cleanse you from all your iniquities. This is salvation. This is promise to Israel here.
True conversion for the glory of God.
Now I want you to look at Jeremiah 31. Jeremiah 31:31, this is the high point of Jeremiah's prophecy. Behold, the days are coming. Future, declares the Lord. When I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.
My covenant, which they broke, although I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. What covenant is that? That's the covenant of the law, that's the Mosaic covenant given on Sinai. And they broke it even before Moses could get down and read it to them. When he came down holding in his hands, they were breaking it.
They couldn't keep it. It's a covenant no one could keep.
So, I'm going to give you a new covenant. I'm going to make a new covenant, not like that one. What's the nature of the new one? Verse 33. I'm going to make this covenant with the house of Israel after those days, at the end of history.
Here's the difference: that law was on the outside. This one is different. I will put my law within them, and on their heart I will write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Same thing that Ezekiel said. And they will not teach again each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, No, the Lord, evangelism will end in Israel.
Because they'll all know the Lord. They'll all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, declares the Lord. I will forgive their iniquity and their sin, I will remember no more. That's the conversion of the nation. The components are the same.
There is Here. forgiveness, regeneration, conversion. True knowledge. Obedience. They will believe.
themselves to be wretched sinners. And they will believe the Lord Jesus. is the only Savior. They will believe it collectively as a nation. That in itself, folks, is a testimony to the sovereignty of God in salvation.
The only way people get saved individually is by the sovereign work of God. The only way nations get saved, because there's only one nation promised salvation in one moment, would be by a sovereign act of God, because not all individual Jews are going to come to the same conclusion. by some act of personal free will in the same moment. God saves them. And wonderfully, this new covenant was made with Israel, but.
Israel rejected their Messiah. And after the death and resurrection of Christ, the new covenant was opened to embrace everyone.
So the new covenant has been Ratified in the death of Jesus Christ and extended past Israel to the church. There was no church when it was promised to them, but now that the church has come, we are saved in the same way by the same new covenant. That's why Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:6 says we are ministers of the new covenant. And Paul was talking to Gentiles when he said that in Corinth. And after the fullness of the Gentiles comes in by the new covenant, Then comes the salvation of Israel.
You get the picture. When they come to this point in the future. They will make the confession That is here in Isaiah 53. These will be their words. And let's just go to our text, verses 4 to 6.
They're going to look back at Christ whom they pierced. They're going to reevaluate the attitude. They didn't believe verse. One says Who believed the message given to us? Few Who actually understood the revelation of the arm of the Lord, the power of God in the Lord Jesus Christ?
Very few. We weren't impressed with his origin. He was like a sucker branch. He was like a root in parched ground. We weren't impressed with his life.
He had no stately form or majesty. Nothing about him attracted us. We were certainly not impressed with his death. Despised, forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. He was so despicable in his death that we wouldn't even look at him.
He was despised, and we thought of him as nothing. He was a nobody. That's what we thought. But now everything's changed.
Now we know. All those griefs, all those sorrows. We're ours. Surely our griefs he himself bore, and And our sorrows he carried. We had Esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
We thought that God was punishing him for his blasphemy.
Now we know he was pierced through for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, chastened for our well-being, scourged for our healing. Complete reversal. of the estimate Concerning Christ. They admit their horrible error in that future day. They will confess.
They know the history of Jesus. They know he was pierced. They know he was. Crushed or bruised, they know he was punished at the end of a mock trial, they know he was scourged, that's part of their history. Every Jew knows that.
But one day they're going to admit that it wasn't for his blasphemies, it was for theirs. They're going to say We understand our transgressions. We understand our iniquities. Our transgressions. Our iniquities, those are negatives.
They will confess that Jesus was punished by God for their transgressions. That means violations. Transgressions means to step over the line. Violating the law of God. Iniquities, that's a different word.
Essentially, it's a word that means to bend double. twisted like a pretzel. to bend double. It's perversions. We we now know that he suffered for our Violations and our perversions.
That's the negative. The positive is. He suffered to bring about our well-being. See it there. middle of the verse, our well-being.
Punishment for our well-being fell on him. And by his scourging, we are healed. There's the positives. He died. Under the weight of the punishment of God against our transgressions and our iniquities, our our violations and our perversions.
And in so doing, He purchased for us well-being and healing.
Well-being is shalom in Hebrew. Shalom. Peace. Full blessedness. And healing.
Spiritual wholeness, spiritual health. The death of the physician made the patient well. We were sinful and thus sick. grieving, sorrowful, guilty. Gilly, if Violations, guilty of perversion, separated from God, no peace, no spiritual health.
But he took our sins. and our griefs and our sorrows and everything that comes with sin. Any s placed himself under the Voluntarily under the judgment of God to be punished for our sins. and to then purchase our peace with God. and our true blessedness.
Thus does the whole nation of Israel, at least a third after the two-thirds of the rebels are purged out, according to Zachariah. One-third of the nation Confess its long, long rejection of Christ. It's a long blasphemy of God. and they will be saved. This is the stunning reality of the future for the nation Israel.
There's one other thing that I want to do to help you see verse 6 in another way. In verse 6. We have the deepest recognition of sin. They talk about their attitudes. They will.
When they say we had the wrong estimation of him, we esteemed him or considered him or thought of him or reckoned him. In other words, our thinking was corrupt, we were wrong in what we thought about him. They talk about behaviors. That's the transgressions and iniquities. And they talk about deprivations.
Sinners recognize this. They lack well-being. They lack shalom. They lack peace with God. They had no, as Isaiah 54 calls it, covenant of peace which couldn't be shaken.
And they also lacked wholeness, spiritual health. They were sick. Chapter 1 says, sick from head to toe. Second sin.
So they understand those issues: the corrupt thinking, corrupt behavior. And the absence of all that is good. They know that. But there's something else that a sinner must come to grips with. And that is that it isn't just a matter of how we think, attitudes, it isn't just a matter of what we do, it isn't just a matter of what we lack.
Confession of sin gets down to the bottom line. It is a matter of who we are. The problem is in our nature, and that's where verse 6 comes in. It's in our nature. It is more profound than most would recognize looking at this section.
This part of the confession looks not at the manifestations of sin, but the cause. Here's the problem. All of us are like sheep and we've gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way. And he says it's in our nature.
Sheep act like sheep. Sheep don't act like anything but sheep. We're acting consistently with our nature. And the In fact, they will find a parallel in sheep. Sheep are stupid, defenseless.
Helpless. Wanderers Uh they don't um They don't get in flocks like geese, and they don't hang around in herds like Cows, they don't stay together.
So they're a good analogy. They have built into them a tendency to wander away from security and safety and provision and wander off not in a group, but all by themselves. Each going his own way. They follow that internal impulse that leads them away from all that is safe and secure and helpful. Our problem is deep in our nature.
We're like sheep. Defenseless, stupid, helpless. Wanderers. Remember in Matthew 9:36, Jesus looked at the people and said, They're like sheep without what? Shepherd, they're just going their own way, following their own sinful path that their nature dictates.
They follow the intuition of their own wretched fallenness. That's what sinners do. It's what sinners do. I mean, how many options do sinners have? Huh?
Today, how many do you have? There's no end to the options. You can follow your own way. And without Jesus Christ, you will. You'll follow the path of sin that you choose.
You'll go your own way like a sheep does. Oh, there'll be some others that are going your way, so you'll eventually bump into them. But it's all very personal and very independent. This is how sheep function. This is part of a true confession, folks.
This is a genuine repentance that recognizes that the evidences of sin betray a nature of sin. Gathering all that guilt and all that just punishment. And As it were, dying for not only what we've done, but who we are. Jesus bears the full weight of our sinfulness on himself in the sense that he takes the punishment of God. That's what the verse says at the end.
The Lord has caused the iniquity of us all. Fall on him. Our evil deeds, our evil thoughts, our evil evils. our evil deprivations, and our evil nature. For all of that.
For all of that. the servant of Jehovah. bears the full weight of punishment. That's what it says. The Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.
The Lord God Himself chose the sacrificial lamb. The servant Messiah The sacrificial lamb. The servant Messiah was voluntarily willing to submit himself to become the vicarious substitute. God caused him then to pick up All the guilt. that belong to us.
and take the full fury of divine wrath. Five different ways in those verses. Five different ways. It speaks of the vicarious substitutionary provision of Jesus Christ dying in our place. This is the heart of the gospel.
Now, just a footnote, it wasn't the sin that killed him. It was God who killed him. Wasn't the sin. He didn't have any sin. He was sinless, holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners.
Sin did not kill Jesus. God killed Jesus to pay for sin. that he never committed. But that you did. And I did.
Jesus didn't die as a moral influence. Showing the power of love. Jesus didn't die as an example of sacrifice for a noble cause. Jesus didn't die as nothing more than Christus Victor. That was a theory that came out in the 1930s.
It's still around. Jesus didn't die because we are victims trapped in unjust circumstances and need to be rescued. There's only one way to understand the death of Christ. and that is under the principle of penal substitution. He was our substitute to take the penalty for our sins, to satisfy the justice of God.
Um You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. Today we continued John's series from Isaiah chapter 53, titled The Gospel According to God.
Well, friend, before the lesson, you heard from a man from Germany who told us how grace-to-use resources are helping him grow in Christ. And the fact is, this verse-by-verse Bible teaching is available because of the support of listeners like you.
So, as you are led and able to give, express your support when you contact us today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace2U, Box4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. or call us at 80055 GRACE. And thank you in advance for your partnership. You play a crucial role in this ministry.
Our phone number, one more time: 800-55GRACE. and you can also donate online when you visit our website gty.org. That's gty.org. And please take a moment to let us know how John's teaching Has encouraged you and helped you apply biblical truths to your everyday life. Your letter will encourage us.
We may even use your story on the air to strengthen others. You can write to Grace2U, Box4000, Panorama City, California, 91412, or send an email to letters at gty.org. That's letters at gty. The majority of the Now, for the entire Grace TU staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question. Is there anything more tragic than when someone is sent to jail or worse, executed for a crime he didn't commit.
Of course, that's exactly what happened to Christ at Calvary. And if you're a Christian, that miscarriage of justice is cause for your rejoicing. See what I mean tomorrow. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. on Brace to You.
