“Who has believed our report?”

Isaiah asks at the top of Chapter 53. His prophecy of the Suffering Servant seemed outrageous, just as Jesus’ claims to actually be that servant may have seemed preposterous, especially in his home town. Familiarity, the saying goes, breeds contempt. This is never truer than among Church Folk, most whom show enormous respect to visiting pastors or evangelists—complete strangers—while routinely overlooking and dismissing God’s man, God’s servant, standing right in their midst.

We typically consider the story of Calvary from the Gospels. But we can learn a great deal more from the disorganized jumble of rambling texts from the bible’s greatest prophetic voice.

The bible is a living document that speaks to different people in dif-ferent ways. No matter how simple or how contemporary the language we put it into, the bible still requires a certain level of investigative study on our part to truly understand how all the parts fit. No other place in the bible is this concept more true than in the book of Isaiah. Considered the greatest prophet of the bible, the Book of Isaiah is considered a predictive prophetic text in that many of the prophet’s predictions have actually been fulfilled. Isaiah’s description of Christ’s birth, suffering, death and resurrection read like an eyewitness account, but they were written nearly eight centuries before those events occurred.

Read Essay     Next