Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for this daily challenge. It’s Thursday, the day we try to apply and live out what we’ve learned this week from the Bible. This week we’ve been studying a section from the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament, where he describes a “suffering servant.”  This may well have described events happening at the time as well as events still to come.  Over 500 years later, after Jesus walked the earth and died a horrible death, people started to notice the obvious con” to mean.  Why was this suffering servant’s death important?

There is something wrong with the collective “people” mentioned in this passage.  The passage says, “We all like sheep have gone astray.“

This is something we can all know intuitively, even if we wouldn’t use that language.  We all fall short of who we were made to be.  Many of us long for a different kind of world, a different kind of life.  Why?  Because we were made for something different.

However, we as a human race broke from the relationship with God that was meant to sustain and nourish this way of life.  Meant to be made in the image of God, we were now marred, broken images.

There was a very real cost to this – death.  But the sacrificial system we’ve already studied allowed sacrifices to stand in for humanity.   For example, a person would lay hands on an animal like a lamb,

The song continues – “The Lord has lain on him the iniquity of us all.”

The song describes the Messiah as a being like a lamb to the slaughter – day of atonement.  The death of an innocent could stand in for the death of a whole group of people.

We can see how this was part of the Messiah or Suffering Servant’s identity – he would be a sacrifice to stand in for all of humanity.  Many of the New Testament authors recognized these connections, and our challenge will look at these!

Challenge:

Read through the following passages – what echoes of Isaiah 52-53 do you hear?  Do you think the authors did this intentionally?

• Luke 22:37
• John 12:38
• Acts 8:32
• Romans 10:16
• Romans 15:21
• 1 Peter 2:22
• 1 Peter 2:24