God Knew It All Along

Isaiah 53:1-6  (The Message)
Who believes what we've heard and seen? Who would have thought God's saving power would look like this? The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling, a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look.  He was looked down on and passed over, a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.  One look at him and people turned away. 
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.  But the fact is, it was our pains he carried-  our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us. We thought he brought it on himself, that God was punishing him for his own failures.  But it was our sins that did that to him, that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed.
We're all like sheep who've wandered off and gotten lost. 
We've all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we've done wrong,  
on him, on him.


Some 700 years before the birth of Christ, the mighty prophet Isaiah wrote these words describing what the Messiah would be like and how he would be treated.  God knew all along that a sacrifice would have to be made.  God knew that we could never be reconciled to Him through the law- that our efforts to "be good" would never be good enough.  A blood sacrifice would be required to save us.  And yet, when the Messiah arrived, the very people He came to save did not know Him.  The NIV verse 3 says, "Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not."  Little has changed, has it?  We still hide from Jesus.  We still do not "esteem" His name in our world. In so many ways, He is still the rose we trample under foot. In order to live the WIDE OPEN life God wants for us, Jesus must be lifted up in our lives. Scripture tells us that "the stone that the builders rejected will become the cornerstone."  Which will it be for us?  Will Jesus be the one around whom we build our lives, or we will too "esteem him not?"  It is time to choose...


Because of Jesus,