The Work of the Messiah

“Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law. Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it: ‘I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I will take you by the hand and keep you; I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols. Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.’”

Isaiah 42:1-9

Jesus the Messiah is bringing full, faithful, final justice. And only He can.

If you want justice without consulting Yahweh, you want an impossibility. You might as well want a tree with no soil, sun, or water, a story with no words, characters, or emotions, a song with no notes or rhythm. Justice exists because God exists, and it is no vague “God” without will or commands. Justice exists because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is. Honesty is good because Yahweh exists and tells the truth. Generosity is good because the Lord exists and is gracious and giving. Murder is evil because this God, El Shaddai, Adonai, God of Israel gives breath to every lung that has it, because He made the air in the lungs and the alveoli that make the lungs work and the soul the lungs sustain. A nation, a family, a man can only expect to be just as it consults the word of this God. If any country, any husband and wife, any individual sets out to decide what is justice for themselves, it will end badly. It will end in mere human opinion, in increasingly arbitrary definitions of what is acceptable and what is not, in a land in which it is called “good” for two men to pretend they are a marriage or for doctors to mutilate a teenage girl’s body because she tells them she currently feels she is a boy. It will end in a marriage in which fleeting feelings are prized more than faithfulness. It will end in a personal life where the individual pretends he sits upon a throne getting to decide what is best for himself, when in reality an iron chain of sin and lusts is fastened tight around his neck, dragging him further and further down after petty lusts and away from His Maker. No man, no family, no nation ever found more justice while walking away from Yahweh.

If you thirst for righteousness, for goodness, for what is true and beautiful and unshakably righteous, if you search for justice, come to this well, the God of Jesus Christ and His Word. You and your family and your nation could drink for a hundred thousand years and it will never run dry.

Justice comes with His law. He will establish justice in all the earth as He brings His law to the coastlands.

Our nations, our families, our cities, our churches have laws. There is a “should” in all our human interactions. And each and every “should” is just when it conforms to His. The coastlands are waiting for His law because the laws of their tyrants, their bureaucrats, their kings and queens and state legislatures, the laws of so many of our men have been unjust. 

You cannot have justice without God’s Law. Heaven is just because God’s Law is never broken. No one ever loves Yahweh with less than his whole heart, no one forges any idols, no one uses God’s Name in vain, no one ever profanes His sabbath rest, no one dishonors his father or mother, there is no murder, no adultery, no theft, no lying, no jealousy. God’s Law is loved and upheld at every moment in every heart in Heaven, and that is why it is just. It is worshipful, restful, honorable, merciful, pure, generous, honest, and humble always and at all times because God’s Law is the delight of every citizen without fail. And someday, when Messiah comes again, it will be like that among the sons of Adam for the same reason. 

This Servant, this Christ, this Messiah, He is no Alexander the Great. This is no pompous conqueror who lifts himself up higher than he deserves. He is above every name, it was through Him the stars in our sky and the ground under our feet were made, and yet He doesn’t cry out, doesn’t cause His voice to be heard in the street, doesn’t break a single blade of grass in sinful anger.

And yet He wins. Someday every knee will be bowed before Him, and sin’s empire will be so much dust under His feet. He will rule every speck of creation, and every saint who reigns with Him, by His blood, will fly the flag of the Lion of Judah in their hearts. And He will have done this without any bluster, without any of the pride and false bravado of the Nebuchadnezzars and the Caesar Agustuses and the Napoleon Bonapartes and the Josef Stalins who grasped for kingdoms and greatness they didn’t deserve.

When this Spirit-empowered Servant of Yahweh returns with the sound of a trumpet and puts an end to this history, the last rape will have already occurred. The last baby to ever be murdered in abortion will see his or her early, violent death answered for. Lying and adultery and stealing and gossip and idolatry will be done, put away, answered for. There will be no more victims when Messiah returns. Each and every evildoer who refused to turn from his ways will have his hands and his mouth and his mind stopped, mid-sin, and he will face the great white throne of the One who knows what justice truly is.  

Until then, we must delight in God’s Law ourselves, reading it and believing it and trusting the character of the God who authored it. We must love what He loves, hate what He hates, and lead our families, our own lives, and our church as though what our King commands is good because He is good. Because it is, and He is.

What He Does Flows from Who He Is

This is done by the Creator, the Maker, the Giver of all life and breath and thought. That breath you just took was from His hand. Your heart just beat because He ordained it. The One who ordained that Messiah would come and bring the justice we crave, the fairness and goodness and rightness we are desperate for when the evil things happen, He is the One who has chosen that I be alive to speak these words and that you be alive to hear them. God would have us know that it is He, Author of this creation we live in and Author of the souls she houses, it is He who has given Messiah and appointed Him to do what is right.

We have lost, in our day and place, the sense that we owe the Creator obedience because He made our fingers and our eyes and our tongues, and He can demand an account for everything we have used them for fifteen minutes from now if He so chooses. If I were to walk up to this Isaiah right after his vision of God on His throne had ended and said, “My body, my choice,” I think he would be appalled at my ignorance. It may be my choice, but it is most certainly not my body. Did I give myself that first breath? Did I give myself that one I just took? 

We would do well to help our unbelieving neighbors and friends and relatives see that their breaths are not their own, the soil they stand on is not their own, the sky above them is not their own. This earth stretched out underneath us has a King, and He is our Maker and our Judge, and He will someday see that every careless word and every blood-soaked murder and every act of selfish injustice is answered for. Today our offer to every man and woman who hears this Bible read and proclaimed is this: Yahweh, our Maker and King, can answer for the worst of sinners in the Cross of Messiah, His Servant. Kiss the Son while you may, and become God’s son or daughter. Do not despise Him while there is still time. 

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who made each of us and our parents and our grandparents, He has terrifying wrath, as He showed when he put all this ground we stand on under thousands of feet of water in Noah’s day because of the violence and wickedness of our fathers. Do you ever breathe a sigh of relief when you see a rainbow? You should, and so should I. The blood of no less than sixty million aborted infants cries out from our American ground, but praise God’s mercy He promised to never bring a second global flood. Because at the same time, flowing from His same, unimaginably good heart as His wrath, He has shocking, unsearchable mercies. And it is this mercy that Messiah gives to some who are blind, some who are prisoners, some who sit in darkness.

It is this mercy that has commissioned Jesus, Messiah, Cristos, Servant, Anointed One to be a covenant for the people and a light for the nations. The blood that flowed through Jesus’ perfectly holy veins is as sure a pledge of His faithfulness to the elect, His church, as any ring from any husband the world over. This husband died in advance for His bride, submitted Himself in advance to torture and murder to spare her, and this despite the fact that she was a lying, faithless, harlot. There is no measurement to the love God has for His church, His people. Start diving today and an eternity from now you will have barely left the surface. His grace is deeper than the flood of His wrath. xJesus is a covenant and a light because of who this God is, not because of who we are. He is faithfulness, He is grace, He is mercy that calls a man before the first cell of his body was formed, before the name on the birth certificate was even a thought in his mother’s heart.

This Messiah is a covenant for men who have made a smoldering, wrecked ruin of their lives, whose children won’t speak to them and whose minds torture them with memories of all their past sins. This Messiah is a covenant for women who have submitted themselves to impurity and sexual sin, whose shame runs so deep they can’t remember what it feels like to not be bound to it. This Jesus is a light for nations far off, hearts far off, families far off. When He feeds the guests at His wedding feast from the gifts of His own heart, when the book of this history is closed and the day dawns on the new heavens and new earth and His people join Him in paradise, there will be men and women washed from all manner of sins. His light is that bright and reaches that far into the shadow. His covenant is that strong and the blood of it that powerful. There will be former heroin addicts and prostitutes and gossipers and fornicators and liars and racists and thieves and they will all be able to say, “Such was I, but I was washed. He made me something new. And that cleansing is now complete.” There will be Chinese Christians who were brought to faith despite Mao Zedong’s murderous opposition to God, Melanesian Christians from Pacific islands brought to faith in the 1800s through the missionary work of men like John Paton, Christians from a world away and a millennia away like the North African pastors Augustine of Hippo and Athanasius of Alexandria. It will be a big feast for a big God.

And all of us will be able to go to Abraham and say, “It was true! All of us were blessed through your seed. The light of God was brought to us. It spread over Europe and sparked a Reformation and the invention of the printed word. It spread in East Asia where the power of tyrants and emperors who pretended to be gods couldn’t stamp it out. It spread in Africa despite the darkness of Islam. It was translated into English and Spanish and Portugese and Tagalog and Arabic and Armenian. Messiah was a light to all our nations!”

He is Yahweh, that is His name; He will give His glory to no idol, and no idol will ever be who He is. 

What He Does is Something New

Some time around this Bethlehem birth we celebrate, another boy was born to two different parents. The mother wouldn’t have had quite the same glory to treasure in her heart, because she and her husband were undoubtedly surprised and saddened when they realized that their new little baby boy couldn’t see their faces. He grew up never knowing what his parents looked like, and then thirty years after the Christmas night this suffering servant was born in Bethlehem, His disciples passed this blind boy, now grown into a man. And they asked the Messiah whether the sins of the parents or the sins of the man himself were the cause of his blindness, his decades of darkness. And this chosen one, this God with a heart that took on flesh because He loves blind boys and captives and women who are working on their sixth husbands, this God who took on flesh to chase down bad men and bad women and make them something different, He told them that the man’s blindness had occurred to give God glory, and then He took some dirt and spit on it and anointed those broken eyes.

And so on the day this man finally saw the faces of his mother and father for the first time, what he saw was shame. “We don’t know how he was healed! He’s a grown man! Ask him!” they exclaimed to the religious authorities about the miracle performed in their boy, embarrassed of their son because they were embarrassed of his Healer. That’s the first day he saw his mother and father.

But the God who loves the blind, the rejected, the orphaned, He was not so quick to disown this boy. This man would see something much better on the face of his new family, his truer family.

This Messiah, our Isaiah 42 Servant, found our bland man a second time. And this time He gave Him something better to see, and better eyes to see it. 

“Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe,’ and he worshiped him. Jesus said, ‘For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, ‘Are we also blind?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, We see, your guilt remains.’” John 9:35-41

Some of the most beautiful words in your Bibles: “Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him…”

There are those who are cast out. This Messiah seeks such men and women out, and He does for them and in them what no one else could or would.