I went to a high school founded in 1600 by Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift, forty years after Thomas Cranmer had been executed at the stake for his Protestant beliefs by Queen Mary. It is perhaps not surprising that Whitgift chose as the motto for his new school Vincit Qui Patitur, “He Who Suffers, Conquers.” His generation knew all about the kind of victory that can be won only through suffering.
This concept is very different from the models of victory we’ve become accustomed to. For us, victory generally means standing tall and strong, fighting off all comers with one hand tied behind your back. Growing up, our heroes were comic book characters like Superman and Captain America, who could hold off entire tank divisions with their steely gaze, who emerged from every encounter with barely a scratch on their hand or mark on their pristine outfit. Or perhaps Barbie, who managed to combine working as a veterinarian and moonlighting as a model, while still having the energy at the weekends to drive her pink jeep to Malibu to go surfing with Ken. She had babies without stretch marks or gaining an ounce ”and she did it all with perfect hair and in high heels.
We tend to identify victory in similar terms in our own lives. We feel we are victorious if our careers are successful, our homes are large, our families are beautiful, and our children well behaved. In spiritual terms, we are victorious if our churches are growing and thriving, if we are personally somewhere close to being free from all known sin, and our perfectly catechized children know the answers to every Bible trivia question.
The reality we inhabit, however, is often entirely different. Perhaps your career is in a slump, your marriage is a mass of tensions waiting to explode, and the last time you left your children home alone they found a bottle of alcohol and got drunk. Perhaps you have just discovered that your wife has terminal cancer. Maybe you are in the midst of losing your home to foreclosure, bringing your dreams of a comfortable retirement to an end. Perhaps your church is a frustrating mess, rent asunder by schisms and distressed by heresies, as the old hymn-writer Samuel J. Stone so eloquently described in it “The Church’s One Foundation” (1866). Life is not like the comic books we grew up with. It is a hard grind, a wrestling match with sin and brokenness ”your own and others around you ”in which bruising losses accumulate and victories often seem few and far between. What does victory really look like in a fallen world like this?
“Comfort My People”
We are perhaps so familiar with the most quotable verses of Isaiah 53 we forget that the prophecy had a context into which it was originally spoken. God’s people were so broken by their own sin and its consequences that they found themselves in exile in Babylon. They felt cut off and abandoned by God; they were helpless and hopeless, unable to do anything to redeem the mess their lives had become. But that was not the end of the story. God sent his prophet to speak a message of good news into the pain and brokenness of their lives:
“Comfort, comfort my people. Tell them that their God reigns. Tell them that I myself am coming to bring light into their darkness and hope into their despair. Tell them that their hard service is over, their iniquity is paid for and there is a new future ahead of them. Tell them about the new heavens and new earth that I, the Lord, will bring into existence. Tell them that I myself will put on my armor and free them from their bondage.” (See Isa. 40:1-2; 42:16; 45:13; 52:7; 59:17; 65:17.)
How could God take a weak and sinful people, who had failed over and over again, and change them into oaks of righteousness, transforming rebellious and hard-hearted Israel into the Lord’s faithful servant? These are the questions this passage addresses. It depicts a triumphant victory that comes through crushing pain and suffering, an amazing deliverance that comes through apparent defeat, a glorious hope that comes through utter helplessness. The Lord provided beautiful robes of righteousness for his defiled bride by afflicting his obedient Servant in her place. The victory that Isaiah foresaw becomes the pattern for our redemption as Christians, as well as for the shape of our renewed Christian lives. Vincit qui patitur is our motto too. Through Christ, we have the victory ”but it is a victory that comes to us and lives in us through suffering.
“Behold My Servant”
This Isaiah passage has a distinct structure that helps us grasp its message. There are five stanzas of three verses each (52:13-15; 53:1-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12), arranged in chiastic order around the center. Stanzas 1 and 5 are parallel, showing us the triumph of the Servant; stanzas 2 and 4 are also parallel, focusing on the depths of the Servant’s suffering; while the central stanza, stanza 3, shows us the reason for his suffering.
The passage begins with the cry, “Behold my Servant.” This declaration connects the poem back to the first of the Servant Songs in Isaiah 42:1. The figure who appears in this description is the Lord’s chosen Servant, who faithfully does the Lord’s will and achieves his purposes. This Servant will “act wisely” ”that is, in a way that will succeed or prosper. Indeed, he will be “raised and lifted up” (52:13), attributes that are elsewhere applied only to the Lord (see 6:1). His victory is the Lord’s ultimate triumph, the great demonstration of his sovereign kingship. Notice, however, that we start with the end of the story: the triumphant outcome of the Servant’s suffering. If you don’t see the Servant’s victory at the outset, you might easily be confused by what happens next. The poem also ends on exactly the same note of victory in 53:11-12, when the Servant finally sees the results of his sufferings and is satisfied. That makes it clear to us from beginning to end that this song is not a tragic dirge over an unfortunate defeat, but rather a glorious exultation in victory.
Having established that this is a triumphant victory song, we abruptly cut from the exultation of victory to the agony of apparent defeat ”a defeat so awful that it astonished the people: the Servant was broken and bruised by his sufferings to the point that he barely appeared human (52:14). Yet somehow this grotesque disfigurement was the means through which he would carry out his priestly work of sprinkling the nations, purifying them through his own sufferings. The nations, who had previously neither seen nor heard the message of the prophet, would now hear and see, and as a result, they would believe and be saved (52:15).
A “Root Out of Dry Ground”
Yet would God’s own people come flocking to the Servant and believe? After all, the problem earlier in Isaiah was not the nations; it was Israel’s own hard-heartedness. Sadly, the answer still seems to be no: those who had not heard the message believe, while those who are closest to the prophet remain unbelieving. Many nations would understand and respond, but “we” ”God’s own people ”did not esteem him (Isa. 53:3). This was not the kind of salvation they expected: a Servant who comes not in power but in weakness, not like a green and fruitful tree of the kind depicted in Psalm 1, but rather as a gnarly, dried-up root, sprouting out of dry and cracked soil (53:2).
This “root out of dry ground” is nonetheless a messianic figure. In Isaiah 11:1, the Lord promised to bring a branch from Jesse’s root (shoresh in Hebrew). But this new root doesn’t look like any of the original sons of Jesse. He has no extraordinary beauty or attractiveness like Eliab, Jesse’s oldest son, or even David himself, who was ruddy and handsome (1 Sam. 16:12). Instead, the Servant takes into himself all of the negative aspects of life here on earth. He is despised and rejected by men, thoroughly acquainted with sorrows, someone who knows what it is to experience choli, a Hebrew word traditionally translated as “grief” but which more precisely means “sickness” (Isa. 53:3). Whereas we flee from pain and suffering because it reminds us of our own vulnerability and weakness, the Servant moves toward suffering, pain, and weakness, and embraces them as his own defining characteristic. He is a “man of sorrows”; that is, a man whose entire life experience was characterized by sorrows.
“By His Stripes”
One could understand why an unfaithful servant might experience such chastisement and severe discipline from his master, even to the point that it might define his life. Sin has consequences. In Isaiah 1:5-6, rebellious Israel was described as being “struck down,” “sick,” and covered with “wounds” as a result of the Lord’s judgment, words that all recur here in Isaiah 53. But the way of the obedient Servant surely ought to be smooth and pleasant, beside still waters, in green pastures. The obedient Servant should flourish like a green tree, not struggle for his very survival like a root out of dry ground, shouldn’t he?
The central section of the song unfolds the central mystery of the passage, and indeed of the whole Bible. It is our sorrows the obedient Servant was bearing; it is our sickness he was enduring; it is our suffering he took up (Isa. 53:4-5). His life-disfiguring agony was the bitter fruit of my sin and yours, which the Servant bore in our place. We all went astray like sheep, wandering away from beside the still waters and green pastures, bringing ourselves into the valley of deep shadow, which ought to have been our tragic final resting place. Yet the Lord laid the punishment for our iniquity on the Servant (53:6).
The prophet continues to unpack that idea in the fourth stanza. We all went astray like sheep, but he was the one, with lamb-like submission, who paid the penalty: he was slaughtered like a defenseless and submissive animal, which had been chosen to become the atoning sacrifice (Isa. 53:7). The Servant was deprived of justice, deprived of descendants, and in the ultimate ignominy, buried with the rich and the wicked, sharing the fate of those who earlier in the book were comprehensively judged for their oppression of God’s people. Yet his fate was without any foundation within himself: unlike those rich and wicked oppressors, the Servant didn’t open his mouth in deceit or to pursue violence, any more than he had earlier opened it in his own self-defense (53:9).
What would be the outcome of this undeserved suffering? There is a play on words in verse 10. It was the Lord’s will to crush the Servant, because only by doing so could the will of the Lord prosper in his hand. Yet the will of the Lord is not some cold, abstract decree: the word used for “will,” haphets, elsewhere means “to be pleased” or “to delight.” The Lord actually delighted to crush his faithful servant because he knew the incredible outcome that would result, as his broken relationship with humanity was gloriously restored. The Servant does not wrestle sinners to safety out of the hands of an angry God: on the contrary, the achievement of their salvation has been the Father’s delight and purpose from the beginning.
The Servant, too, understood the reason for all of his suffering. After his anguish, he was promised that he would see the light of God’s salvation and be satisfied (53:11). Through his knowledge ”his own personal experience of sickness, suffering, and sorrow ”he would make many people righteous and thereby acceptable to a holy God. Through his sufferings, the Lord gave his Servant the joyful inheritance he had earned.
Our God Saves through Suffering
How should we respond to this picture of victory through unrelenting suffering? To begin with, it addresses us as those in need of salvation ourselves. If nothing less than God himself taking flesh and sharing so deeply in our sufferings is needed to redeem us, then our best attempts to please God cannot possibly win us salvation. Our salvation is by grace alone, not because of anything in us. If all that is needed for your salvation is for you to turn over a new leaf and try harder to be a good person, then the Servant’s suffering was a monumental waste of a life.
On the contrary, this passage shows us the utter hopelessness of our case, if left to ourselves: We are all sheep that have deliberately wandered off; we are all sinners who have broken God’s holy law; and we are all rebels who have transgressed against his rule in our lives. The wages for these things is death (Rom. 6:23). This reality was not news to Isaiah’s hearers, who were experiencing the “death” of exile in Babylon for their nation’s sins. But it is news to many people around you ”those who think that, of course, God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their lives. They are aware that they may need to get their act together and work on upping their religious achievement score to win God’s favor, but how hard can that be?
Impossibly hard, says God. His standard for life is perfection, and none of us could ever measure up to that standard. If giving it your best shot is all that you have, then you are completely without hope. Nor are we instantly transformed after we are saved. We continue to wander off on our own and rebel against God’s perfect law daily. Yet God doesn’t leave us to ourselves. The Good Shepherd came looking for the lost sheep (John 10:11). The Suffering Servant entered the dark and broken reality inherited from our first parents, and he tasted all of its bitter dregs for us. He came and experienced headaches and colds, flu and diarrhea, broken relationships and mourning at the graveside of a loved one. He knows these things, not merely as abstract intellectual concepts, but through his own costly personal experience. Even more profoundly, on the cross, the Servant took into himself the full depths of our sin: he truly was pierced for our transgressions and wounded for our iniquities in ways we will never know. He became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). The agonies of hell that we deserve were embraced in their fullness by the Servant, so that we, the guilty ones, would never have to drink that cup.
The Identity of the Servant
But who is this mysterious Servant? In Acts 8:34, the Ethiopian eunuch asks Philip that question: “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” And beginning with this passage, Philip tells him the good news that Jesus followed the path of suffering necessary to free us from our deserved punishment. As a result, we see the promise that the nations would be sprinkled and cleansed through the work of the Servant being fulfilled, just as the eunuch trusted his life to Christ. Through baptism, the eunuch was added to God’s kingdom and went to his home in a faraway land rejoicing.
The uniqueness of the Suffering Servant shows us the uniqueness of the Christian message. No other religion has the same gospel to declare, because no other religion proclaims that their God has suffered in our place to atone for our sins. Many religions speak words of moral reformation and trying hard to win God’s favor, but only Christianity proclaims peace with God through the death of his own Son. What is more, this same gospel of the suffering and risen Servant, Jesus Christ, is the good news we have been commissioned to bring to all nations. The one who bore our sins in his body on the tree has many other wandering sheep that have yet to hear the message, respond in faith, and be saved by him. How will they be saved unless they hear this unique gospel, and how will they hear unless someone is sent by God to bring them this glorious good news (see Rom. 10:14-17)? What a high and beautiful calling it is to bear such incredible and joyful tidings!
The Cross-Conformed Life
But this Isaiah passage also says something to us about the nature of the task of bringing the good news to the nations. The servants are not greater than the master. If Jesus’ pathway through this world involved embracing suffering and pain, seeking out and identifying with the lost and the broken, then so also will ours. His progress through life was not a stately glide from glory to glory, but a messy taking up of his cross and suffering in our place, so that through his death and resurrection he could enter glory with many redeemed brothers and sisters. If that is true, then our calling as those entrusted with the gospel is not to be constantly impressing people with our personal strength and glorious accomplishments. Rather, we too are called to take up our own crosses and follow after him along that same road of weakness, brokenness, and inability (Matt. 16:24), which is how God does his remarkable work. We are all chipped and cracked clay pots, even though we contain a treasure of enormous value in the gospel (2 Cor. 4:7). We are all weak and insufficient witnesses, even though by God’s grace our words contain the power to transform hearts and lives as the Spirit chooses to use them.
Indeed, it is God’s plan for us that we should walk through this world in great weakness ”physical and spiritual ”so that we might never forget our desperate need for the one who walked this path perfectly in our place. His primary goal is not our perfect obedience and success, which might allow us to claim some of the glory for ourselves. His goal is Christ’s glory, which becomes all the more visible through our great weakness, and even through our ongoing struggles with indwelling sin.
That is why Paul reminds the Ephesians not to lose heart over his sufferings and imprisonment (Eph. 3:13). Those sufferings were not a sign of Paul’s failure or God’s failure. On the contrary, his sufferings were the means by which the gospel was coming to the Gentiles, just as the Old Testament had anticipated. It is true that our sufferings are not redemptive in the way that Jesus’ were. We are not pierced for others’ transgressions, and we cannot bear their iniquities. But the task of bringing to others the good news of Jesus’ sacrificial sufferings will necessarily involve us in lives that are patterned after his. Our sufferings are redeemed by God, made into opportunities for him to show his love and his care for us, and the sufficiency of his grace for us in our weakness.
That reality challenges our thinking about missions, reminding us that we need to recover the call to sacrificial service. Today there are many voices telling us that we can serve God without cost. It is regarded as a strange suggestion that we might actually need to sacrifice something to follow the Lord, whether it is in going as a missionary or supporting others on the mission field. In contrast, the pioneer missionaries who went to West Africa in the nineteenth century packed their goods in a coffin, because their life expectancy was so short ”a few months at most. They knew that they were on a one-way trip, literally giving up everything in this world to die in response to the Lord’s call.
The message of Christ’s victory through suffering also challenges us to rethink our definitions of success and failure in life as a whole. We tend to measure our lives in terms of our victories and accomplishments: we have succeeded if we can point to a successful career, raising a model family, getting a nice house, and everything that goes with that. But what if we are called to lives that are patterned after the Suffering Servant? In that case, maybe success will not always look like a green tree but sometimes like a root planted in dry soil ”a root that glorifies God not by the size of the harvest it bears but simply by the fact that, against all odds, the gospel enables it to survive in what is otherwise utterly barren soil.
Was it “success” for those pioneer missionaries to give up everything they had to go to a place where they would die of tropical fever within a few months? Was it “victory” when they buried their children and their wives, and had nothing glorious to report in their letters back home? If the goal of missions is to see the world converted and to plant the maximum number of churches, then their lives were wasted and would have been better spent elsewhere. But if the goal of missions is to bring glory to God by being conformed to the likeness of Christ, the Suffering Servant, then few people have ever lived more successfully. They laid down their very lives to the glory of God, even if no one today remembers their names. They conquered through suffering, in lives patterned after that of their Savior.
The Fruit of His Labors
At the end of his suffering, the Servant saw the results of his labors and was satisfied. That is a remarkable statement. The Lord of Glory left the comfort and adulation of heaven and came to earth, where he experienced pain and suffering, rejection and ridicule, beating and physical abuse, before being nailed to a cross where he eked out his last breaths in intense physical and spiritual agony, the like of which the world has never seen. Yet when Jesus looks out at his redeemed people, the church, he is satisfied. Jesus does not look at the mess that is our lives or at the struggles and challenges of each local church and say, “What was I thinking?” He looks at you and me and says, “I love the outcome of my sufferings. I love these people, with all of their problems and failures, with all their sins and their weakness. They are so precious to me that every single bit of what I suffered was worthwhile.”
Today, God calls you to delight in the gospel and its fruits in the same way he does. Look upon Jesus, the Servant who suffered and lost everything in your place, and who conquered through those sufferings. Behold the Lamb of God, raised up and exalted to heaven, where he has been given the name that is above every name! Let your heart thrill afresh as you ponder the cost and the reality of your salvation, which has been accomplished and finished in his death and resurrection. Respond to the Spirit’s call to be a witness to that glorious good news of victory through suffering wherever he has placed you: in your home, your family, your school, your workplace, or to the ends of the earth. Pray that he will give you a heart that is willing to serve and to suffer for the sake of the greatness of Jesus. And look forward to the day when you too will behold the fullness of God’s harvest: the great multitude of people from every tribe and nation who have been saved through the suffering of Jesus. On that day, all our sufferings will finally come to an end, and we will join the victorious Servant in his triumph. And on that day, both Jesus and we will be fully satisfied by the reward he has gained through his faithful labors.
Iain Duguid is professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary and pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church (ARP) in Glenside, Pennsylvania.
Merit
Merit is the idea that one who performs a good work is entitled to a reward. Demerit is the opposite, that one who performs an evil work deserves punishment.
The medieval church distinguished between condign and congruent merit. When a person does a work that is inherently worthy of reward, medieval theologians called that condign merit. An act that God decides to reward that is not inherently worthy of reward was called congruent merit. Congruent merit allowed the church to conclude that salvation was a process of cooperation with grace. At the end of life, God would reward the Christian with eternal life (after many years of purging sin in purgatory). Lutheran and Reformed theologians often ignore the distinction between condign and congruent merit, arguing that it sidesteps the real issue. Instead, they argue that salvation is not a process of cooperation with grace; it is a free act of God’s grace from beginning to end. Christ merited salvation for all who believe. Christ obeyed the law perfectly in our place so that God could count us as righteous by faith alone.
Faith
Depending on the context, faith can mean to believe, to know, to trust, or to accept as true. Scripture speaks often of faith in the context of salvation (see Rom. 1:17; 3:22, 25-31; 4:16, 19-20, 22; 5:1-2; 9:30).
In James 2:14-26, the apostle distinguishes saving faith from a general faith. There are three aspects of saving faith: knowledge, assent, and trust. For salvation, first, one must know the facts about Jesus’ life, death, burial, and resurrection for the justification of anyone who would trust in him. Second, one must assent, accepting that the facts are true. Third, one must place trust in Christ for salvation. Saving faith necessarily results in good works. Those who trust Christ know that their sin is forgiven and that they are justified, and as a result are free to do good works as a loving response to God’s mercy. Both Lutheran and Reformed theologians teach that one is justified by faith alone in Christ alone.
