But back when Toronto used to make the playoffs every year (like,
when I was a kid), I remember staying up super late to watch their games. And
it was great! We’d be sitting on the edge of our seats the entire time, waiting
to find out who was going to win. And if the game went into overtime, our
nerves went through the roof. But honestly, there were times where I just
wanted to know what the score was going to be so I didn’t have to deal with all
the pressure!
Now some of you might be saying that knowing the score takes
all the fun out of watching a game. And honestly, you’re right. But imagine for
a minute that something like that happened. Imagine after the Boston Bruins
beat the Ottawa Senators 2-1 last night, the announcers said, “And now, to end
off tonight’s broadcast, let’s fill you in on what tomorrow night’s scores are
going to be!”
I figure there’d be three main reactions to this. Some
people might be angry that the score was spoiled for them and not even bother
tuning in the next night. Others might be thankful that they could watch the
game without any pressure. But I’m sure most people would say, “Yeah right! You
can’t predict the future! There’s no way that score’s going to be right!”
So, you tune in for tonight’s game, laughing at the silly
sport’s announcers who think they can predict the future. But at the end of the
game, you’re not laughing anymore. When the final buzzer sounds, you see that
the announcers got the score right!
Must be a coincidence,
you think. Or a lucky guess. So you
quickly turn to the end of the other game being played at that time and what do
you see? The announcers got that right too! In fact, by the end of the night,
you see that the announcers correctly predicted all four games! Talk about
amazing! After getting four scores right, you’d have a much bigger reason to
believe those guys if they predicted scores again for future games!
But that’s now how sports announcers work… Their job (like
historians or newspaper writers) is to tell you about things that are happening
or have happened. They can make guesses about the future, but their job is to
tell you about the past! There’s nothing mind blowing about that in and of
itself. But if you came across a sports station or a history book or a
newspaper that told you 100% of the time exactly what was going to happen in the future, I bet you’d be pretty
amazed. I certainly would be!
But what if I told you that this kind of thing happens in
the Bible? That there were people who could tell you what was going to happen
in the future like it was yesterday’s news or sports scores?
There was a special name for these kind of people in the
Bible: prophets. Prophets were people who were chosen by God to deliver
messages to others. Many of these messages were warnings to the people of
Israel. God would send a prophet to tell the Israelites that if they continued
to worship other gods and disobey the one true God, then God would punish the
Israelites. But other times, the prophets gave messages about things that were
going to happen in the future!
Now there are lots of famous prophets in the Bible, but I
want to focus on one prophecy from one particular prophet today. This prophet
was named Isaiah, and his prophecies fill one of the longest books in the
Bible. And the prophecy I want to talk about is found in Isaiah 53.
Here, Isaiah tells us that God was going to send a servant
to the Israelites. This servant was going to look like a normal, everyday
person. “There wasn’t anything special about the way he looked that drew us to
him” (Isaiah 53:2, NIrV). In fact, Isaiah said that the Israelites were
actually going to look down on this servant, laugh at him, be mean to him, and
ignore him!
Not only that, but Isaiah said this servant was going to
suffer. He was going to take “on himself the pain that should have been ours”
(Isaiah 53:4). He was going to be pierced (poked with sharp sticks) and crushed
“because we had sinned” (53:5). Did you catch that? God’s servant wasn’t going
to be punished for anything bad he had done; he was going to be punished –
killed – for all of us who have done wrong things (53:8).
Isaiah then says that this was always God’s plan. This means
that from the beginning of time, from long before Adam and Eve sinned (like we
talked about last week) or any of us had sinned, God knew that He was going to
send this servant to suffer and die so that every single one of our sins could
be forgiven.
But thankfully, that’s not the end of the message! Isaiah
finishes this prophecy by saying that that even though God’s servant is going
to die and be punished for our sins, the servant will be brought back to life
(53:10-11)! And when that happens, the punishment and death we deserve for all
those bad things we’ve done will be taken care of. We won’t need to be punished
or die for our sins anymore because God’s suffering servant did that for us!
There’s just one problem though. This was a prophecy,
meaning that Isaiah was talking about something that hadn’t happened yet.
Isaiah wasn’t talking about a servant who had already been born; he was talking
about someone God was going to send in the future! But nobody knew when this servant
was supposed to come or what he would look like! Then what reason do we have to
believe that this servant has come or ever even will come?
Well, just like we would only trust a sports announcer to
tell us about the future if he actually got the scores right, the best way for
us to know if a prophecy is true is if the things in that prophecy actually
happen. And SPOILER ALERT, everything Isaiah said about this suffering servant
has already come true!
Time for a quick history lesson. The 66 books of the Bible
were written over a really long time by a bunch of different people. The books
of the New Testament were written around 1900 years ago, while the books of the
Old Testament are even older than that! In fact, people who have studied the
Bible a lot longer than me mostly agree that the book of Isiah was written
between 2400 and 2500 years ago! That’s 400-500 years before Jesus was ever
born!
Why does that matter? Well, that suffering servant Isaiah
was talking about is Jesus! The Bible
tells us that Jesus was wise and strong (Luke 2:52) and an amazing teacher, but
He is never described as being super handsome or standing out in a crowd for
His looks.
Not only that, but Jesus was constantly being made fun of or
looked down on by people. Lots of people didn’t believe in Him, and the
Pharisees and Sadducees (the religious leaders at the time) did everything in
their power to have Jesus killed! And when He died, Jesus was literally pierced
by nails and spears while He was on the cross.
The Bible tells us time and time again that Jesus died so
that our sins – all those bad things we’ve done – could be wiped away and God
wouldn’t punish us anymore (Romans 3:24-25). Why? Because Jesus took the
punishment that we deserved for sin – death – when He died on the cross (1 John
2:2, 1 Peter 2:24).
But just like in Isaiah, the story doesn’t end there! Jesus
didn’t stay dead. Instead, after three days, He rose again and proved that
death had been defeated! This is why we’ll be celebrating Easter in a few days.
And this is why we don’t just talk about when Jesus died, but we celebrate that
He rose again! Because Jesus died and came back to life, we can trust that all
of our sins are forgiven and that we don’t have to worry about dying anymore
either. Those broken relationships with God we talked about last week can be fixed
because of what Jesus did on the cross! We can have a relationship with God
now, one where we love Him and obey Him and can come to Him when we are scared,
and we can look forward to going to heaven with God when we die.
But what’s amazing is that Isaiah talked about these things
500 years before they ever happened! And this isn’t the only time that Isaiah
talked about Jesus, nor was Isaiah the only prophet to prophecy about Jesus!
Prophets from all kinds of places in the Bible were predicting how Jesus would
live and how He would deal with sin long before Jesus ever walked on the Earth.
That’s huge guys! The fact that these prophets talked about
specific things Jesus would say and do long before He was born helps us to
trust that what the Bible says is true. The
prophecies about Jesus give us reasons to believe in Jesus. And that last
part’s important. Jesus might have died on the cross and rose again to forgive our
sins, but each of us still has to decide if we believe that’s true.
If you haven’t done that yet – if you haven’t decided yet to
follow Jesus – it’s something really simple to do. All you have to do is pray
to God, say that you believe in Jesus, and ask Him to forgive you for your
sins. That might be something you want to do with your parents or a pastor at
your church though. They can help talk you through more of the Easter story and
why it’s so exciting to follow Jesus.
And if you do already believe in Jesus, great! I hope this
stuff about Isaiah has encouraged you. But wherever you’re at, I hope you’ll
come back next week to hear even more about some of the amazing things our God
has done!
~Brentagious
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