The Servant on the Throne

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Isaiah 9:6 gives a newborn titles no reigning son of David ever wore: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. Two chapters earlier the sign to Ahaz was a child named Immanuel, God with us, offered to a king too frightened of Aram and Israel to ask for anything wonderful at all (7:10–14). By chapter 11 the royal line has been felled like Judah's oaks under Assyrian axes, and what's left is a stump. A shoot comes up from Jesse's roots anyway (11:1), and the Spirit of Yahweh rests on him: wisdom, might, the fear of Yahweh (11:2-3). Isaiah is describing what the throne of David was built to hold and had never yet managed to bear.

The word "servant" shifts under your feet across chapters 41 to 53. In chapter 41 it names the nation, Jacob whom Yahweh has chosen (41:8–9). By chapter 49 the servant's mission includes bringing Jacob back to Yahweh, restoring the very people he was named after (49:5). A servant who exists to save Israel can't simply be Israel. Isaiah lets that stand unresolved for a while, then answers it: this servant is light to the nations, Yahweh's salvation to the end of the earth (49:6), a vocation the exiled, unfaithful nation itself was never able to carry.

Then the servant songs turn brutal. He is marred beyond human likeness (52:14), with no beauty that should draw the eye (53:2–3). Yahweh names the reason outright: He has laid on this Man the iniquity of us all (53:6), and was pleased to crush Him (53:10). The verbs are sacrificial and penal at once, pierced, crushed, the punishment that brings us peace falling on someone else's back. This is the text every theory of the atonement eventually has to answer to, and Isaiah answers plainly: substitution, one for many, the righteous for the unrighteous, willingly borne (53:11–12).

Isaiah 61 hands the same figure a different task: the Spirit of the Lord Yahweh is upon Him, because Yahweh has anointed Him to bring good news to the afflicted, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives (61:1–2). When Jesus reads this in the Nazareth synagogue, He stops mid-sentence, before "the day of vengeance of our God" (Luke 4:18–19; Isa 61:2). That line isn't omitted, only deferred. The government that grows without end (9:7) hasn't yet grown without end. The shoot from Jesse's stump hasn't yet struck the earth with the rod of His mouth (11:4). Isaiah's Messiah comes twice in one book because He comes twice in history, humbled first, and only afterward given the name above every name, the throne David's line kept losing.

Isaiah names one man twice, humbled first and exalted after, and everyone united to Him by faith inherits both halves of the story: His humiliation counted as their own, so their guilt has somewhere to go; His exaltation guaranteed as their own, so their hope has somewhere to land. "He shall see the labor of his soul and be satisfied" (53:11), and what satisfies Him is the people He bore. The crushing had a reason. The reason was joy set before Him, and part of that joy is you.

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