The Devotional - The soul of the Man of Sorrow

The Devotional

Comment: Isaiah 52:13-15 – Behold, My Servant shall deal prudently; He shall be exalted and extolled and be very high. Just as many were astonished at you, so His visage (appearance) was marred more than any man, and His form more than the sons of men; so shall He sprinkle (startle) many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths at Him; for what had not been told them they shall see, and what they had not heard they shall consider. 

Devotional: Isaiah: 53:1-12 – Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He has no form (stately) or comeliness (splendor); and when we see Him, There is no beauty (appearance) that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected (forsaken) by men, A Man of sorrows (pains) and acquainted with grief (sickness). And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. 

Surely He has borne our griefs (sicknesses) and carried our sorrows (pains); yet we esteemed (reckoned) Him stricken, smitten (struck down) by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded (pierced) for our transgressions, He was bruised (crushed) for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes (blows that cut) we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. 

He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison (confinement) and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of my people He was stricken. And they made His grave with the wicked-- But with the rich at His death, Because He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth. Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise (crush) Him; He has put Him to grief. 

When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied (From the labor of His soul He shall see Light, (see Psalm 22:21b)). By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide Him a portion with the great, And He shall divide the spoil with the strong, Because He poured out His soul unto death, And He was numbered with the transgressors, and He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. 

The physical body of the Christ/Messiah was wounded, crushed and put to death, yet as the LAMB for the slaughter He did not open His mouth. The torture of this sacrifice in time is beyond what we could imagine, but pointedly the scripture is clear; He did not cry out in pain. However in this section of Isaiah 52 and 53 we also see the Christ/Messiah’s soul in verses 10 and 11 too, as satisfying to God for the SIN of mankind. My point – yes Jesus died physically for our sins, but in that torturous physical event, He did not cry out.

But when God the Father and God the Holy Spirit turned away from The Christ/Messiah, His soul was separated from God. At that moment He was alone and God was allowing His Son’s Soul to face what it is like without the existence of God: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46 and Psalm 22:1) in this suffering He did cry out in extreme agony. For my personal thinking, this for Him was to experience hell. And I think to myself as we ponder this Christmas and the Birth of the Man of Sorrows, what will a soul cry out when the Father, Son and Holy Spirit turn away from that soul that rejects the message of the Christ Child from birth to death.

May your remembrance of the Birth of Christ be filled with the Glory of God, now and throughout the coming year. This will conclude the devotionals until Monday, December 28, 2015.