Week 25 Isaiah
I finished Isaiah today.
I noticed quite a few great verses and ideas in the second part of Isaiah – chapters 40-66.
All of chapter 53 is really good, but in a sad way. It’s about someone identified mostly as ‘he’ (he’s also described as the righteous one and the Lord’s servant in verse 11, but he still comes across as a shadowy stranger.)
This evasive he isn’t the Lord God. But he’s obviously really important, even if it is important in a terrible and distressing way because of his destiny.
He’s mentioned about 45 times in the twelve verses.
In those 45 times I found about a dozen where he’s described as a substitute, a stand-in for other people, a sort-of proxy, an alternate. But a dreadful alternate because of what he had to stand-in for. The Lord: laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Moses talked about a similar taking-on-someone-else’s-offences-scenario 859-pages ago. It was on the Day of Atonement. There are two goats. One is sacrificed in an act of atonement. The other one, the scapegoat doesn’t lose its life. Instead the collected sin of the nation is ritually loaded onto it and then its driven away: the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities.
The dark load is so far beyond a person’s capacity to carry that it needs to be dumped onto someone else – in Leviticus the scapegoat, in Isaiah the mysterious he.
Note: quotes from Isaiah 53:6; Leviticus 16:22 (NASB version)