How Can This Be? A Good Friday Meditation

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he had put him to grief (Isaiah 53:10a).

There are four stanzas in Isaiah 53. The first starts at the beginning of the chapter (actually, it probably begin at 52:13) and goes through verse 3. The second stanza covers verses 4-6. The third stanza verses 7-9, and the fourth verses 10-12. There is a problem in Isaiah 53 that builds through the first three stanzas and is not answered until the fourth stanza.

The problem is this: How can it be that one so righteous should be so brutally punished for the sake of the wicked? Verse 1: “Who has believed what he has heard from us?” The message about this Suffering Servant is, it seems, beyond belief.  How can it be that one so righteous should be so brutally punished for the sake of the wicked?

We have on the one side the utter sinfulness of God’s people. Isaiah does not shy away from talking about sin. He does not repackage it as some biological misfiring or the unavoidable outcome of bad society. He does not soften the blow by speaking merely of our mistakes, our errors in judgment, our growth edges, our learning curve. No, he speaks of our “transgressions” twice (v. 5 ,8) and another two times call us “transgressors” (v. 12). He speaks of our “iniquities” three times (v. 5, 6, 11). He speaks of the “oppression” of his people, and not the oppression they endure, but the oppression inflict (v. 8). Isaiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, uses strong words like “wicked” (v. 9) and “guilt” (v. 10). The picture is not a flattering one. God’s people are depicted as selfish, lawless, foolish sinners.

And opposite these transgressors-people like you, people like me-we have the Lord’s Servant. Verse 9 says this man did no violence. There was no deceit in his mouth. There may have been good men in the Old Testament, even good men who suffered. Job may have been a righteous example in all the earth. But Isaiah is saying something more. This Suffering Servant had done nothing wrong. No violence-not in his heart, not in his actions, not ever. No deceitful words. He is as blameless as God’s people are blameworthy.

Which makes his suffering so unbelievable. The torrent of anguish upon this Servant keeps building and building and building. His appearance was marred, beyond human semblance (52:14). He was despised (53:3). He was rejected (v. 3). He was stricken, smitten, and afflicted (v. 4). He was pierced. He was crushed. He was wounded (v. 5). He was oppressed (v. 7). He was cut off (v. 8). He was killed, died and was buried with the wicked (v. 9).

How can this be? How can one so righteous be so brutally punished, and that for the sake of those who deserved to be punished?

Perhaps it was some mistake? Some accident? Some cruel injustice. Some profound misfortune that could not be avoided? Good people suffer all the time, after all. They face injustice. They are wrongly accused. They have to put up with things they want to escape but just can’t. So this is just one of those sad, twisted tales of man’s inhumanity to man, right?

Not at all. Something much deeper is going on here. This Servant sufferers willingly. He chooses to bear our griefs and voluntarily carries our sorrows. No one takes his life; he lays it down of his own accord (John 10:18). He does not go to his death kicking and flailing and bemoaning his inescapable fate. Verse 7 says he opened not his mouth. He endured his affliction silently. He approached his death purposefully. He took upon himself the sins of the people freely.

Did you notice  in verses 6 and 7 that both the sinners and the Suffering Servant are compared to sheep? We are like sheep in that we wander and go astray. The Servant of the Lord is like sheep in that he approaches his shearing, and even approaches his slaughter, without a word. He knows what awaits. He embraces what has been meted out for him. This Servant is not a hapless victim, but a willing participant in his own punishment.

So how can this be?

How can one so righteous be so brutally punished, so willingly slaughtered, and that for the sake of those who deserved to die? This is the problem mounting in the first three stanzas of the chapter. This is the mind boggling plight that has Isaiah asking, “Who will believe this report?!” Who has heard of such a thing? How can such violence, such tragedy, such injustice be tolerated? How can the righteous suffer and the guilty go free?

Verse 10: “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he [the Lord] has put him to grief.” There’s the answer to all our mounting questions. It was God’s hand that pierced him, his purpose that afflicted him.

“This only makes it worse,” you may think to yourself. “I could scarcely accept such punishment befalling an innocent. I could barely embrace the idea that the righteous would suffer in the place of the guilty. But this is altogether too much. How does it help to know that it was the Lord’s will to crush him?”

But don’t you see what good news this is?

Because it was the Lord’s will to crush him we can behold the glory of our Triune God in planning and procuring our redemption. The Father did not punish the Son as a helpless victim of cosmic child abuse. The Son went to the cross freely and willingly. Likewise, the Son did not appease an angry God as some sort of divine good cop to the Father’s divine bad cop. The Father sent his Son to the cross freely and willingly. We do not have to look askance at Good Friday as if there were some rift of purpose, some difference in character, between the Father and the Son. The good news of Good Friday is that the Father did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all (Rom. 8:32) and that the Son drank the bitter cup of God’s wrath for our sakes (Mark 14:36).

Because if was the Lord’s will to crush him we can marvel at the love of God. In the mystery of divine redemption we must not think that the cross changed God’s mind to love us. Good Friday did not happen so that God could love us, but because he already loved those whom he had chosen in Christ. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). God shows his love for us in this that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10).

And finally, because it was the Lord’s will to crush him we can be sure that full satisfaction has been made for our sins. “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities” (Isa. 53:11). If the cross is something other than divine judgment upon the divine Son of God, if Good Friday is not the eternal, redemptive plan of God executed fully and finally on a hill outside Jerusalem, if what we are singing about is something other than the Lord’s will to crush his own Servant, than we cannot know if our sins have truly been forgiven. We cannot be sure that Christ’s death was enough. We cannot be certain that it is finished.

But if Isaiah 53:10 is the answer to all the problems mounting in verses 1-9, then we can say with the Psalmist the words which Jesus himself quoted: “The stone that the builder rejected had become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes” (Psalm 118:22-23; Mark 12:10-11). And then we can say with all our might and savor with all our hearts the very next verse in that Psalm: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24).