Jan 16 - Isaiah 53:4

 

Surely he has

borne our infirmities

and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him

stricken, struck down

by God, and afflicted.

Isaiah 53:4

 

The first time I ever really paid attention to this verse was when I read Lee Strobel’s excellent and accessible Case for Christ.

 

Strobel was an atheist. And when his wife converted to Christianity, it through his nice, comfortable, secular life into a tail spin. A decorated reporter, started researching the evidence for Christianity … in order to disprove it. (There’s an excellent movie about his story, available on Netflix right now.) But after interviewing scores of experts in fields like history, religion, archeology, etc., Strobel actually proved to himself that God does exist and Christ is real!

 

One of the experts that Strobel interviewed was a Jew who converted to Christianity. “Why?” asked this reporter. “Isaiah 53” was one of his answers.

 

This converted Jew had been spiritually adrift and searching for answers when a friend pointed him to Isaiah 53. The Prophet was writing hundreds of years before the crucifixion, and yet with “amazing specificity” – his words – the prophet described how the Messiah would be “5 crushed for our iniquities” and “5 by his bruises” “6 all we [who] like sheep have gone astray” would be “5 healed.”

 

And as this Jew, now a pastor, was reading Christian theology in the Old Testament – including how “the Lord … laid on him the iniquity of us all” – the seeds of conversion were taking place. (Though he had to go home and read his grandmother’s old Jewish Bible to make sure this wasn’t a Christian addition. It wasn’t, of course. This was Jewish doctrine prophesying the coming Messiah.)

 

On him the seeds of conversion were taking place. On Lee Strobel, the seeds of conversion were taking place too!

 

Christ has “borne [y]our infirmities” and “5 by his bruises [you are] healed.”

 

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who recommends

the movie and the book

The Case for Christ