Mm-hm. The next time you read Isaiah, try this experiment. Read the whole book in one sitting. Don't parse out one or two verses, read it all together.
“The next time you read Isaiah, try this experiment. Read the whole book in one sitting. Don’t parse out one or two verses, read it all together. “
Yes, please do. And when you get to Isa 53:11, where it says, “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities,” ask yourself, if Israel is the nation that God has claimed it to be in the book of Isaiah and throughout the rest of the OT scriptures (with all its waywardness, backsliding, idol-worshipping, God-forsaking),how could it possibly be called “my righteous servant”? How could a nation, so frought with sin, “justify many”? (It says in Is. 53:6 - All we [Israel] like sheep have gone astray; we [Israel] have turned every one to his [each Israelite’s] own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all [all of us Israelites]. Who is left of the nation of Israel to serve as the “him” upon whom the Lord lays the iniquity of Israel?
How could “the travail of its [the sinful nation of Israel, as established in 53:6] soul” satisfy God’s holy requirement for sin, since we are told in Ezekiel, “The soul that sinneth, it shall surely die”?
The problem with your exegesis is that you fail to “hear” the shifts in the text, whether they are shifts in time, tone, subject. This is borne out of a stubbornness of heart (my way must be correct - because, well, because that’s the way I [choose to] see it. Next time you read Isaiah in one sitting (which, first of all, indicates a mind which isn’t dwelling on/meditating on/contemplating the word of God very carefully), try examining how individual parts of the text fit/don’t fit your own exegesis of the text entire. If and when they don’t, you must either adjust your thinking, or disregard what you’ve read. You’ve chosen the latter. Do you understand what I’m after here? Do you understand my question? I ask because you haven’t chosen to respond to this yet. A satisfactory answer would, of course, include scriptural support for your position.
Aside from the problem of “the righteous servant” which you have never addressed, here are some other, simpler questions to ponder. If, as you believe, Christ is not the messiah Israel was to be waiting for, has he [messiah] appeared yet? The answer would have to be “No,” as we see no evidence of his kingdom having been established. Well, since he has not yet appeared:
If Israel is still waiting for its messiah, how will TODAY’S Jews recognize him?
Where are the 12 tribes today and which of today’s Jews even know what tribe they belong to?
How will they be able to determine that he is of the household of David?
How will they know he was born in Bethlehem?
How can Israel TODAY be thought to be God’s righteous servant when they no longer make atonement for sin in the temple? “Without shedding of blood, there is no remission [of sin]”
And what would be the effect of doing that?
I’ve done that before...well it took several settings...this is what I came away with.
He loves all men and women. He also loves every man and women INDIVIDUALLY. If you were the only lost sheep in God’s creation, God in Flesh would have died for you personally so that your sins are forgiven and so that you could be established in God’s family. He loves you that deeply and that severely.
He wants not to compress your humanity but to expand it. In the day of your resurrection
you will be made more HUMAN than you possibly could ever have imagined, the same humanity that Christ is now, fully and PURELY human(not this stinking shell of corruption we are wrapped in now) and fully a daughter of God and you will experience the things of God and heaven in ways you never will have dreamed of. Your relationship with Christ and the entire God head will be such that even the angels will have longed to look into but will never know of it. While you’ll enjoy the company of other souls with you, your relationship with God will be yours uniquely and not like anybody else’s.
And that is what I came away with after reading Isaiah. God loves you and if you were the only one he needed to die for just to spare your soul from the pit...then God would have sent his Son...just for you! We can ply scriptures and spin explanations...but the final distillation of everything in the Bible comes down to the love God has for the world and for every individual in it, past present and future, so much love that God came as the incarnate son of God, and sacrificed himself as that final perfect sacrifice, so that you might not die but have life eternal with him. Isaiah is just a variant of Joshua or Yeshua...they all mean “Saviour”. When I look at Isaiah, I see Jesus Christ wooing the lost like a suitor woos a woman to be his bride.
God loves you “Lady”...