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Episode 674: In this episode, we read Isaiah 53, which vividly describes the suffering and sacrifice of the servant, often interpreted as a foreshadowing of Jesus Christ. We reflect on the imagery presented in the text, particularly the lines that describe the servant as being so disfigured that he was hardly recognizable as human. This leads us to discuss the brutality of the crucifixion and how the passage encapsulates the weight of sin and the necessity of repentance.
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You're listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun in practical ways. Hey, everybody, welcome to the Bible Guys, and thank you for doing And if this is your first time, my name is Chris Zarbaugh and this is Jeff Forrester. Wow. What is your full name? Michael, Jeffrey Michael Forrester. That's right. And Christopher. John how did you know that? I don't know. It just felt right for real? Yeah, or did you see my lips about to say, Jay. No, I didn't see it. You were like, so, No, I didn't know. It just Christopher Johnson's great son of a gun. Well you know what, Jeff, that is the thing about me. I just feel right. Yeah, well something like that, yes, so something so. Yes, Christopher John Zarba, that's it. So h. And by the way, I was supposed to be Jonathan. You know that. No, I didn't up until the second I was well, not the second, but the hour I was born. I was born at twelve fifty eight am. And uh. And so we led into Palm Sunday. And my mom grew up Catholic, so she named me after Saint Christopher because it was Palm Sunday. Oh okay, so that's what that's the story there. Okay. So rather than the disciple Jesus loved you would have been impossible to deal with if your name was John. Yeah, right right, that's yeah, that's really funny. But yeah. But but instead, you know, Christopher means christ like. Is it like christ Like? No? That's yeah, christ like, that's what it means. Yeah. The fact that you questioned the meaning, if you will. Well, I get confused sometimes because my son is named Stephen and that means crown and for some reason I get the too confused. I see, but his name's crowned. And then Sarah's name means princess. So Jeffrey means God's peace, oh, old old English. And then Michael means God's warrior. Oh so I'm a little conflicted. Yeah, no peace by the warrior? Well, I mean warrior. Does warriors bring peace? That's right, it's true. So hey, well, walk softly and carry a big stick, Keddy Roosevelt. There you go. So enough about that, let's move right into our segment. This is a would you rather segment? Okay, And so I like these because we have to choose between two terrible options. Number one, would you rather be an Olympic athlete, which would that'd be nice? Or a world famous scientist? Do you know that I don't like the existence of either one of those people. You don't like scientists or athletes? No, no, no, I like them for the benefit of the world. I don't like their existence. You said, no, no, no. Let me let me clarify, Like an athlete is only phenomenal because he spends or she spends every waking moment on the one thing. Right, Look, if it's a gymnast. The power of focus. Yes, it is, just like. It was like, the existence of an athlete is actually like it's sort of okay. I hate it. But we talked about this before. I think you had another one one time, and it was about that would you rather be great at one thing or good at lots of things? And you said you'd rather be good at lots of things? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and a scientist, think about it. At least a scientists, though, would have a little bit of variety, right, because science is pretty wide topic. I don't know what what what if you were like a Bunyan scientist, a world famous Bunyan scientist. You know it doesn't say it doesn't say what kind of world famous science. Well, and to be honest, most scientists really specialize in sort of one thing. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean you don't make flower by accident. Right? Oh wait, no you do. Okay, So which would you rather be? Uh? I think you asked me scientist, scientist? Yeah, yeah, I think it'd be the athlete for me, to be honest. With you, Yeah, I only want scientists because of variety. I mean, I mean athletes are awesome. Don't get me wrong, you know what I mean. Scientists are nerds. Okay. Would you rather live in an escape room or a game of Clue? Oh? Wow? An escape room or a game of Yeah, I live in an escape room or live in the game of Clue. I'm assuming they're meaning the mansion, so I would change clue me. Too, That's what I was just gonna say. I would rather live in the mansion. And by the way, I love escape room solely for the secret passages in the mansion. I love escape rooms, though I do, I do like them, and I'm differ for them. All right. Number three? Would you rather be able to see only in the dark or only see in black and white. So every time the sun is out, you can't see and you. See it kind of the same. We're not really seeing much color in the dark. At least you can see at nighttime after the sun goes down. Yeah, but in black and white you can see everything all the time. But the other option is indicates that fifty percent of your life you're blind. Right, that's what I'm saying. I think I'd rather only see in black and white because the end of the day daylight, you couldn't see at all. Right, right, which, by the way, is the time that you want to see. Yes, big fan, big fan, see end of the daylight? Can you imagine only seeing when people sleep? Yes? Right, there's nothing to do. He I can see everybody. Let's do something. Yeah, that's so. Would you rather swim with sharks or walk through a lion's den? I'm assuming this is professional like swimming sharks meaning with safety. I don't know. Are you walking through a lions down with safety? It depends. Yeah. Do you ever see like the line of. The Gods doesn't say yeah, she doesn't give us the she doesn't give us safety. She just says right, yeah, it's all exposure here. Okay, if it's danger then I think I would rather face a shark. Oh, I don't know. Depends on what kind of sharks. I guess, so, yeah, but but I mean, lions are going to get you, like wild lions. They're going to get you sometimes. Yeah, I think I would choose sharks. Yeah, I think I would too. Yeah. So my grandfather was friends with Jacqusto Jacques Cousto, that's right, and they discovered a cave called the Cave of Sleeping Sharks and yeah, and it's in don't sleep. Well, I know that's what they thought, but it turns out there's this current that makes it just right, and they'll line up along the edges of the of the cave and just stay in kind of a NonStop state right there, and the current blows all the water, the water through their gills in the way that works, So they think they sleep there. So Jack Cousto found out My grandfather was with him, and they were grabbing great big sharks and just smacking them, grabbing by tell because they were sleeping, and they grab them by a tail and then they take off and pull them through. So my grandfather grabs one, and it was a bull shark and it turned on him and he was one of the guys that was helping develop those underwater cameras, and he smashed the camera in the shark's mouth and the teeth all come up to the top and the bottom of the photo. Yeah, it's a pretty crazy picture. Yeah yeah, wow. So anyways, yeah, yeah, with sharks all the time. Well, my mom's cousin is boom boom man seeing these brother in law. Wow, So you know that makes me a boxer. Walking through Lionstone. Yeah. Yeah, Well, I'm just trying to live up to your claim of you know, your gran. I was the same thing. I was just saying that my grandfather used to swim with sharks all the time. Yeah. I know, But I'm overwhelmed with your connection to Jacques I. Okay, so what's the last one? Now? Am I reading the last one? Sure? Go ahead? Would you rather have a vivid imagination or a photographic. Memory, implying that what you trade one for the other? Yes, it's oh, I would rather This is hard, actually, but I would rather have a vivid imagination. Really, yes, I would choose photographic memory. Yeah, vivid imagination could lead you to insanity. I think I have a vivid imagination case in point. Okay, that was too easy, Chris, I'm just walking around. That was great. Hey, listen, I I think that life would be horrible without a vivid imagination. Yeah, I really do. I love vivid imagination. By the way, you would hate that because you read books all the time, and books are only great with vivid imaginations. Sure, so you're going to trade that for on page eighty five, I just know exactly what it's Yeah, yeah, I want to sacrifice life for facts. Okay, yeah, so the facts of life, the facts of life for us. I knew it. I knew it. Hey, that should be the next that should be the next theme song. You take the good, you Take the Bad. I don't even know that one. The facts are life. It was crazy, the facts. Okay, Hey, we should move on. We went long on that segment. Yep, we did. We went a minute and a half over, but we should have. We're going to be reading, uh and not for a long time. In this next chunk Isaiah chapter fifty three, there it is. There's a transition, and this passage is the Lord's suffering servant, right yep, And you know what I think. I might go back to Isaiah fifty two thirteen and read through, because that's where it starts. It says, see, my servant will prosper. He will be highly exulted. But many were amazed when they saw him. His face was so disfigured he seemed hardly human, and from his appearance one would scarcely know he was a man. And he will startle many nations. Kings will stand speechless in his presence, for they will see what they had not been told. They will understand what they had not heard about. Who has believed our message? To whom has the Lord revealed his powerful arm? My servant grew up in the Lord's presence like a tender green shoot, like a root and dry ground. There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care. Yet it was our weakness he carried. It was our sorrows that weighed him down, and we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins. But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be here, all of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God's paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all. He was oppressed and treated harshly, Yet he never said a word. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as the sheep is silent before the shears, he did not open his mouth. Unjustly condemned, he was led away. No one cared that he died without descendants, that his life was cut short in midstream. But he was struck down for the rebellion of my people. He had done no wrong, and he had never deceived anyone. But he was buried like a criminal who was put in a rich man's grave. But it was a lord's good plan to crush him and cause him grief. For when his life is made as an offering for sin, he will have made many descendants. He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord's good plan will prosper in his hands. When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied. And because of experience, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, or he will bear all their sins. I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier. Because he exposed himself to death, he was counted among the rebels, he bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels. Well, I wonder who that's talking about. Yeah, yeah, this is as you know, we just got through Easter, yes, and so on Palm Sunday, we did a journey of the passion of the Christ and we read much of this passage here. And you know. What is what is not referenced a lot I think in Sermons is where he says that he's barely recognizable as a man, right it says it says his face was so disfigured that he hardly seemed human. From his appearance, one would scarcely know he was a man. So it just goes to show you that when the Lord was you know, when Jesus broke the bread and said, this is my body which is given for you, and the symbolism of breaking to pieces. You know, that's it's just part of the imagery of like when you try to imagine, you know, listen, when you've seen the Passion of the Christ the movie remember when that came on the scene two was a four something like that. It really was the closest movie. The movie that's closest probably represented the brutality for us. Yeah, and and. It was so and even then it wasn't No, even then. It probably fell short, right, yea by a lot. Well, you can still tell that Jim Cavizel was a man, right, right, And this says that you could not even tell he was a man. Yeah, yeah, barely recognizable. And so yeah, it's just a sobering thought. And it's a sobering scripture. And then and then the scripture talks about normally the brutality of it, but then places it, you know, the guilt. It's for us, right, because of us and for us right, yeah, so it's it's it's he was eat all this because of my sin, so in other words, my fault and uh and and that's one of the most sobering things ever, right, And there's so many songs and so many uh, you know, writings and so many different sermons, famous sermons that that point back to that idea that it was because of my sin they put Jesus on the cross. And it's not designed to make us feel guilty other than repenting for our sins. Right, So like, the guilt isn't supposed to be like shame for the rest of our lives because of our character. It's more like we have shame for our sin, and then that guilt propels us to repentance. And then when we repent, you know, we we shouldn't live underneath that guilt, I don't think any longer. But we should always carry with us the reminder that it's that that Jesus died for us and because of us. But without repentance, right, without forgiveness of sins, we should be guilty of our sin. Right, and God is like frustrated that humanity is not guilty, right, acknowledging the fact that they're sinners. But it's because of the repentance turning from our way and turning to Christ and accepting his sacrifice and forgiveness for us sins that then lets us walk out of the guilt and out of the shame because He bore it for us, right, he took it. That's what this passion, that he took it for us, that's right. And then that's what lets us walk past that get out of that thing. Otherwise that the guilt for sin is. It should be a natural, normal thing. It's not. Humanity just goes on and does whatever they want to do, right, right, But God is horrified by that fact, and we should feel guilty for us in and that's what killed Jesus. But Jesus did it willingly. And then you know it hints that here, this is the one of the hints at the resurrection, because it says he had done world wrong. He was struck down for the rebellion of my people. He was condemned and led away. No one cared that he died without descendants. So there's his death. But then you get down to verse ten. But it was the Lord's good plan to crush him and cause him grief. Yet when his life is made is an offering for sin. He will have many descendants, he will enjoy a long life, and the Lord's good plan will prosper in his hands. There's the resurrection. Yeah, right, So there's the death on the A few verses earlier. Then it begins to hint at a resurrection. And the people reading this could not have totally understood this, right, they couldn't understand it, and that's the nature of prophecy. But when we look back we can see, Wow, there's so many accuracies. So I've got the idea that his beatings were so bad. He didn't look like a human. You've got the fact that he grew up in the Lord's presence, but there was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance. Nothing. He wasn't a handsome man. He was just man, and he was despised. We didn't care all those those things. He was pierced for our rebellion. There's the nails, right, he was crushed for our sins. He was beaten. That's the cat of nine Tales, this mention. He was whipped so we could be healed. And then we've all gone our own way. We've done our own thing. The Lord laid on him the sins of us all. That's what happens when when the sun goes dark and the veil splits, right, that's what's happening there. It's also what happens when God turns his back, yes, and Jesus says, why have you forsaken me? Jesus literally and the New Testament says he became our sin. Yeah, it says he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep is silent before the shears. He didn't open his mouth. It's interesting before Herod, he didn't even answer Herod's questions right at all. When he was on the when he was getting ready to go to the cross, he had told the disciples, listen, nobody takes my life from me. I'm going to lay it down freely. And so he didn't fight, He wasn't screaming, he wasn't casting judgments on the governor, on the soldiers, as matter of fact, that his father forgive them. Right. It was this gentleness there where he didn't open his mouth in a negative way. It was unjustly condemned. Remember the faults trials and the fake accusations, and they brought in people to write and then. Even the proceedings. It was illegal to rush it the way that they did, but they wanted to do it before the Sabbath, right, so even the proceedings were illegal because of the time constraints. So this is what's so amazing for me. There's a couple things I wanted to highlight. One, this is written seven hundred years before it actually happened. And while you could say Jesus could orchestrate a few of his things, he couldn't orchestrate that he wasn't handsome. He couldn't orchestrate that he would be crucified necessarily, or that he would be whipped to the point where you couldn't tell he was human. He couldn't have orchestrated that he could have orchestrated. You know, he could have decided he wasn't going to say anything to anybody. He could have decided he wasn't going to have any descendants. Those two things he could have done. But there's so many of these things that he could not have orchestrated. And this is one of the things I love about the Bible is some prophecies we don't recognize until afterwards, but when you see them, you realize he didn't orchestrate that he was born in Bethlehem, like we talked about, right, he couldn't orchestrate so many of the prophecies about the Messiah, and yet he fulfilled every single prophecy about the Messiah. Yeah, so in the past, I've done this and you've heard this. This was made famous by another mathematician. But they had taken out of the hundreds of prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, it took just twelve of. Them, right, you remember that it took just twelve of them. Now think about that, just just that alone, twelve of the how many prophecies were there? Some people say four hundred. Three, yeah and something. Yeah, so so out of just twelve of them. And they said, the odds that. One day they isolated out twelve that could not have been or randomly orchestrated, right, And they said or intentionally orchestrated. And they said, the odds of Jesus fulfilling those just those twelve is equivalent mathematically. So it's not this isn't this isn't this is this is proven math that this is calculated ods. They said it'd be equivalent to filling the entire state of Texas one feet deep full of They said, silver dollars. Silver dollars, Yeah, so one foot deep. You know, you know, how how many silver dollars would it take to fill this room? Yeah? Yeah, right, get one foot deep. Yeah, one foot deep. I mean, come on, I mean you almost couldn't count them. Right, But you fill the state of Texas, Texas to drive from where I lived to El Paso, so I lived on the eastern border, that's eighteen hours. Yeah, to drive from the top all the way down to the bottom of the boot is eighteen hours. That's how big it is. It's almost fathom about how huge. And I probably couldn't count the number of silver dollars it would take to fill this room. Yeah, I don't know that there's a number we could say. Yeah, so you have to fill the entire state of Texas one feet deep with silver dollars and then mark one of them with an X, and then shuffle them all up, and then give a person one chance, not multiple chances, one chance wait out to find the one silver dollar on the first try. And the odds of that person finding that silver dollar in the first try are the odds of Jesus fulfilling those twelve prophecies. Yeah, and amazing, And that's just twelve. Yeah, So when you read a passage like this, it should just give you confidence that, hey, God knew what he was doing. Yeah, then one of the other things that I love that God included this prophecy in the Book of Isaiah is you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls really changed. Did you go see where Kumran, where they fill the Dead Seas grows. Yeah, So in nineteen forty seven, the first of the Dead Sea scrolls were found in Kumran, which is near the Dead Sea and in Israel. And a little shepherd boy was just throwing rocks up into caves and heard some pots break. He climbed up in there and found all these old texts that began digging in. Well. One of the texts was the Book of Isaiah. And they begin to dig into the Book of Isaiah and they discover up to that point, the oldest version that we had of a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah was was from one thousand a d. The Massoretic text from one thousand and eight when we found nineteen forty seven, when we found Isaiah in the Dead Sea scrolls, it was from somewhere around one fifty BC. Yeah, so one hundred and fifty years before Jesus right right, as opposed to eleven one hundred and twenty five years later. So this this new text is word for word. This new text was eleven hundred and twenty five to eleven hundred and fifty years older than the oldest version, and it was almost exactly the same, almost exactly the same. So it really drove home for us the fact that over a thousand years there were almost no variations, and the variations that were made were spelling variations, but it was almost word for word exactly the same. And so the book of Isaiah that you and I are reading today is the Book of Isaiah and Jesus read right, right, right, exactly the same. And that copy that we found in Kumran was one hundred and fifty years before Jesus was born, only what five hundred and fifty years after it was written right right. The accuracy of this book Isaiah is beyond comprehension in ancient archaeology, in the ancient history. Yeah, it's word for word, almost letter for letter. And so when you and I read a passage like this, we go, well, maybe the christ You know, sometimes prior to the Dead Sea scrolls, people say, well, Christians change this passage. We did not. We have copies of it from before four Christians even existed, one hundred and fifty years before Christians existed. Right, that'd be like us going back to the Civil War ages. Right, that's what we're talking about. And so when you read a passage like this and you realize God wrote this seven hundred years before, you can have absolute one hundred confident on confidence. This is exactly what he wrote, and it describes perfectly who Jesus was and what he was going to do for you and me. Right, Yeah, I love it. Yeah, it's amazing, and it's a great scripture to live in. And we didn't even scratch the surface and scratch it of the brutality of it, the significance of it. We could spend weeks just on this one pass Oh. My goodness, it's a whole series, isn't it. So Okay, well, that is our time, definitely, So we will see you tomorrow hopefully on the Bible, guys,