Isaiah 53:10

Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.

For the past 6 and a half weeks, we’ve listened to Isaiah, and God himself, introducing us to the figure of the Servant. We’ve seen that the Servant will come to rescue wayward people, reconciling them to their loving, holy Lord. We’ve seen that this rescue will be achieved through the willing suffering of the Servant. And we’ve seen how all these promises are fulfilled in the coming of Jesus, who fleshes out and makes real what the people of Isaiah’s time must have been longing and hoping for.

There was a tension for Isaiah and his generation. Even as they trusted in the promises of the Servant to come, they still had to live through the experience of the coming exile which Isaiah also foretold. Similarly, we who live after the coming of Jesus have a much clearer understanding of the life and work of this promised Servant. Much of what was ‘future’ for Isaiah is now ‘history’ for us. We have seen (in the pages of the gospels, if not with our own eyes) Jesus be born, live, die and rise again. But we are still caught in the tension between the ‘now’ of life in a fallen world, where sin still entangles us, and the ‘not yet’ of the heavenly kingdom which we are still waiting to experience. And so today and tomorrow, as we end our time together in this book, these verses turn our attention to what is still to come.

The Servant who suffered and died is already alive again – he is already ‘seeing his offspring’ (those who are born into God’s family because of him) and ‘prolonging his days’ in the present. Today and every day stretching on into eternity, the will of the Lord continues to prosper in his hand. And so, even as we continue to battle with our sin, and struggle with our brokenness, we can do it with hope. So much of what God promised through Isaiah has already been fulfilled that we can trust he will finish what he has started. The Lord Jesus, who suffered and died and is now risen and reigning in glory, WILL come back and take us to be with him forever. The ‘will of the Lord’ will continue to be done, on earth as it is in heaven, every day of our lives and beyond.

Let’s pray that we would continue to trust in that great promise today.