Seven hundred years before Christ’s incarnation Isaiah wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost concerning things to come and blessings to be fulfilled. He wrote to encourage and comfort the hard pressed people of His own age and did so by telling them beforehand of the Messiah’s success and how this success would be measured. Having spoken of God’s righteous servant being sacrificed for the sins of His people the prophet goes on to describe the fruit of Christ’s suffering and the harvest He achieved. Prepare to go big The Old Testament remnant was by definition small. Even the number of Christ’s followers in His own lifetime was not large. He called them His ‘little flock’ and they seem to have numbered only one…

Our studies in Isaiah now bring us to Chapter 53, surely the Mt Everest of Old Testament Christology. Isaiah has been comforting the Lord’s remnant people with views of deliverance by the Messiah. Here, the representative nature and saving purpose of Jesus’ death to redeem His people from the captivity of sin is plainly laid out. Our Old Testament brothers and sisters are shown the circumstances of Christ’s passion, the meaning of His suffering and the glory that should follow. These verses might have been written by an eyewitness. A restricted revelation The Lord Jesus told His followers ‘strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’. Isaiah was aware of this phenomenon. The…