The Face Set Like a Flint

Isaiah 50:4–11 (with Luke 9:51–56; Romans 8:31–34)

Before this session, read Isaiah 50:4–9, the third Servant Song, and on through verse 11. Hear the Servant listen to the Father every morning, attentive as disciples are (50:4–5); watch Him offer His back to His attackers and His face to insults and spitting, willingly and without rebellion (50:6); and notice His unshaken confidence that the Sovereign LORD will help and vindicate Him, His face set like flint (50:7–9).

I offered my back to those who attacked, my jaws to those who tore out my beard; I did not hide my face from insults and spitting.

Isaiah 50:6

A Disciple’s Tongue

We come to the third of the Servant Songs, and we are drawing close now to the cross. In the first Song, God presented His Servant; in the second, the Servant spoke of His calling and His mission. In this third Song the Servant speaks again, and the subject is His obedience, an obedience that will lead Him, before the Song is done, into the hands of men who beat and mock and spit upon Him. Notice how the Song opens, and how it keeps returning, to one particular name for God: the Sovereign LORD, the Master who is also Israel’s covenant LORD. Four times in these few verses the Servant names Him so. The Servant stands before us as one wholly given over to the will of His Master, the Sovereign LORD, and that relationship is the key to everything that follows.

The Sovereign LORD has given me the capacity to be his spokesman, so that I know how to help the weary (50:4). The Hebrew says, more literally, that God has given Him “the tongue of disciples”: the tongue of one who has been taught, instructed, made a disciple. And notice the purpose for which it was given. Not to win debates, not to dazzle the crowds, not to crush His opponents, but to help the weary. The Servant’s tongue is for the weary: the tired, the worn-down, the heavy-laden. This is the very tenderness we met in the first Song, where the Servant would not break the bruised reed; here it is His own speech that is aimed at the exhausted. And when the Lord Jesus came, this was exactly His word to the weary of the world: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28). The Servant learned to speak so that the tired might rest.

It is worth dwelling on whom the Servant’s word is aimed at, because it tells us a great deal about the gospel. Not a word to help the strong, the accomplished, the self-sufficient, but a word to help the weary. The gospel finds its mark in the worn-down. And we are, all of us, weary in ways the world’s remedies cannot touch: weary of trying to be good enough and never quite managing it, weary of carrying a guilt we cannot put down, weary of a law that always demands more than we have to give, weary at the last of ourselves. To every such weariness the Servant speaks His word, and it is not the world’s word (try harder, do more, pull yourself together) but the very opposite: come to me, and rest. The Servant was not given a disciple’s tongue in order to lay heavier burdens on already tired backs. He was given it in order to lift them off.

But before the Servant speaks, He listens. He wakes me up every morning; he makes me alert so I can listen attentively as disciples do (50:4). Every morning, the Servant says, God wakes Him and opens His ear to listen, like a pupil waking for the day’s lesson. The teacher of the weary is first a listener; the One with the disciple’s tongue is first the One with the disciple’s ear. The same Hebrew word, disciples, stands behind both halves of the verse. There is something profound in that order. The Servant does not speak His own word; He speaks the word He has first received, morning by morning, from the Father. We see this all through the Gospels: the Lord Jesus rising long before dawn to pray, withdrawing to listen, saying that He spoke nothing of Himself but only what the Father gave Him to say. The word that comforts the weary is not invented by the Servant; it is received, in the quiet of the morning, from God.

And there is a pattern here worth our attention. We are quick to want the disciple’s tongue: to have a good word to speak, to be of some use, to help the weary people around us. But we are often slow to want the wakened ear that has to come first. We would speak before we have listened; we would give out before we have taken in. The Servant shows us the better way: the morning ear before the daytime tongue, the listening before the speaking, the receiving before the giving. Whatever good word we may have for the weary, we will have it only as the Servant had it, by first having our own ear wakened, morning by morning, to hear what God says in His word. The one who would comfort others must first himself be comforted; the one who would speak must first have listened.

I Have Not Rebelled

The Servant continues: The Sovereign LORD has spoken to me clearly; I have not rebelled, I have not turned back (50:5). The Hebrew idiom behind “spoken to me clearly” is vivid: the LORD “opened my ear.” The opened ear is the obedient ear, an ear unstopped, ready to hear and ready to obey. And then comes the Servant’s great claim, the thing that sets Him utterly apart: I have not rebelled, I have not turned back. Two small phrases, but they carry the weight of the whole gospel. The Servant heard the Father’s will (all of it, including the terrible part of it that lay just ahead), and He did not rebel, and He did not turn back.

We should not pass too quickly over that picture of the opened ear. The ear had to be opened. By nature, the ear of fallen humanity is stopped up: we do not hear God’s word rightly, and even when we do hear it we do not obey it; our ears are dull, just as Isaiah was warned at his own calling that the people’s ears would be. The Servant’s ear, by contrast, was open, perfectly receptive, hearing the Father’s voice clearly and answering it fully. And what He had by nature, He came to give to us: for the same gospel that tells of the Servant’s open ear promises that God will open ours, unstopping the deaf ear, as the Servant’s own ministry would do in the days of His flesh, that we too might hear, and hearing, obey. We do not manufacture a hearing ear by simply trying harder to listen. It is opened, as His was, by God.

To feel the full force of this, set it beside everything we have read in Isaiah so far. The whole story of Israel, and the whole story of the human race, is a story of rebellion and of turning back. God spoke; Israel would not hear. God led; Israel turned aside to its idols. God called; Israel went its own way. Each of us had strayed off on his own path, chapter 53 will soon confess. Rebellion and turning back is the signature of fallen humanity; it is simply what we do. And into that long history of turning away walks One who does not turn away, who hears the whole will of God, the hardest parts included, and says, in effect, yes. The Servant renders the obedience the nation never rendered, the obedience that not one of us has ever rendered either.

And His obedience is not given to us merely as an example to admire and attempt. If the Servant’s perfect obedience were only a model held up for our imitation, it would be the worst news in the whole book, for it would simply show us, in the brightest possible light, how far short of it we fall. But the gospel is better than that. The Servant’s obedience is reckoned to those who trust Him: His unrebellious, never-turning-back faithfulness counted as theirs, credited to their account, laid over their disobedience like a clean white robe over filthy rags. Where He heard and obeyed, we have heard and rebelled; and yet, in Him, His obedience is treated as though it were ours. This is the comfort hidden inside His faithfulness: not that we are now expected to match it, but that His faithfulness already matches the standard in our place, and is given to us as a free gift.

And we must not miss what the Servant was obedient to. The very next verse will tell us: the will He did not rebel against, the path He did not turn back from, led straight to the attackers and the spitting. The Servant’s obedience was not an easy obedience in pleasant things; it was obedience to a Father whose will, in that hour, was the cross. This is the obedience the Lord Jesus rendered in Gethsemane, when the full weight of what obedience would cost Him pressed in upon Him until His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground, and He prayed, not my will but yours be done (Luke 22:42). He could have turned back; the road out of the garden lay open; He did not take it. For I have come down from heaven, He had said, not to do my own will but the will of the one who sent me (John 6:38). The Servant’s unrebellious ear, opened to the Father, heard the call to the cross, and He did not turn back.

I Offered My Back

And now the Song turns dark, and unflinching, and specific. Having said He did not rebel, the Servant tells us exactly what that obedience cost Him. I offered my back to those who attacked, my jaws to those who tore out my beard; I did not hide my face from insults and spitting (50:6). Read it slowly, for every clause of it came true. The back offered to those who attacked: the scourging, the Roman whip that laid open the flesh. The jaws given to those who tore out the beard: a violent and humiliating assault. The face not hidden from insults and spitting: the mockery, the blindfold, the fists, the spittle running down the face of the Holy One. Seven hundred years before it happened, the Servant described His own passion, down to the spitting.

We should let the precision of this land on us, because it is staggering. When the soldiers scourged the Lord Jesus, when they struck Him and mocked Him and spat into His face, they were not improvising; they were, without the least idea of it, acting out a script written seven centuries before in the book of Isaiah. The Gospel writers, recording the passion, reach for almost these very words: they spat in his face and struck him with their fists. And some slapped him (Matthew 26:67). The match is exact. This is one of those places where the Old Testament’s testimony to Christ is so precise that it can stop the breath: the very details of Good Friday, set down in Hebrew poetry back in the days of the Assyrian empire. The Servant of Isaiah 50 and the prisoner in Pilate’s hall are unmistakably one and the same.

But the most astonishing word in the whole verse is not any of the abuses. It is the very first verb: I offered. The Servant does not say “they took my back,” or “they seized my jaws,” or “I was made to suffer insults and spitting.” He says I offered my back; I did not hide my face. The Servant was no passive victim, swept helplessly along by events too strong for Him. He gave Himself. He offered His back to the whip. He did not hide His face from the spittle; He turned it toward them. Everything that was done to Him, He first handed over to be done. This is the great mystery at the center of the passion: that beneath all the violence men did to Him, there ran a deeper action still, the Servant’s own free self-giving. As the Lord Jesus Himself would say, No one takes it away from me, but I lay it down of my own free will (John 10:18). They thought they were taking His life. He was giving it.

This changes the way we look at the whole of the passion. We are tempted to read the suffering of the Lord Jesus as a tragedy: a good man overpowered by wicked men, a movement crushed by the authorities, a life cut short against its will. But that is not how the Servant tells it, and it is not how the Lord Jesus told it. He was never overpowered. At any moment He could have ended it; in the garden He reminded His disciples that He could even then call on His Father for more than twelve legions of angels (Matthew 26:53). The hands that were nailed to the wood were not pinned there by any superior force; they were held there by love, and by a settled will. And this makes all the difference to our comfort. The cross was not something that merely happened to the Lord Jesus; it was something He did, a gift He made, deliberately, with His eyes wide open, for us. He was not a casualty of the world’s evil. He was a Savior at His work.

And why would He give Himself over to such things? Not because He was helpless to prevent them; He who stilled storms and raised the dead could have called down legions of angels and walked away untouched. Not because the abuse had any rightful claim on Him; He had done no wrong, and deserved not a single blow. He offered His back to those who attacked for one reason only: because it was the Father’s will for the salvation of the world, and because He loved us. Every lash He absorbed without resisting, every insult He received without retaliating, every glob of spittle He did not wipe away in wrath: all of it was the Servant, open-eyed and willing, walking into our place, taking upon Himself what should by every right have fallen upon us. He offered His back to the attackers so that ours would never have to be struck.

A Face Set Like Flint

How does anyone walk willingly into such suffering? The Servant tells us. But the Sovereign LORD helps me, so I am not humiliated. For that reason I am steadfastly resolved; I know I will not be put to shame (50:7). Behind “I am steadfastly resolved” stands a vivid Hebrew picture, the one that gives this session its title: literally, “I have set my face like flint.” He sets His face like the hardest of stones: fixed, immovable, set in one direction and not to be turned. There is nothing soft or wavering here at all. The same Servant who is so gentle with the weary, who will not break the bruised reed nor snuff out the dim wick, sets His face like flint when it comes to obeying the Father, hard as rock in His resolve to go through with it, whatever it should cost Him.

It is worth holding those two pictures of the Servant firmly together, for they are easy to pull apart and so to ruin. There is a gentleness that is merely soft, that has no spine, that bends to every pressure, that would never set its face like flint toward anything hard or costly. And there is a hardness that is merely cold, all resolve and no tenderness, flint where there ought to be flesh. The Servant is neither of these. He is utterly gentle toward the bruised reed and utterly hard toward the cost of saving it, and the two are not in tension at all; the second is what serves the first. It was precisely because His face was set like flint toward the cross that He could be so tender with sinners; His unbending resolve to pay the price in full is the very thing that made His gentleness more than a passing sentiment. He was hard as flint about the one thing that allowed Him to be soft as a shepherd’s arms with us.

Luke, who knew his Isaiah well, reaches for almost this very picture at the great turning point of his Gospel. Now when the days drew near for him to be taken up, Jesus set out resolutely to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). Luke’s Greek says, literally, that He “set His face” to go: set it, like flint, toward the one city where He knew the cross was waiting for Him. From that moment the Gospel becomes a long journey toward Calvary, and the Lord Jesus walks it with His face set, refusing every detour, every temptation to turn aside, every chance to save Himself. He was not dragged to the cross; He marched to it. The flint-set face is the face of a love so resolved to save that nothing on earth (not the attackers, not the spitting, not death itself) could turn it back.

All along that road there were off-ramps, and the Servant refused every one of them. At the very start, in the wilderness, the tempter offered Him all the kingdoms of the world without a cross, and He would not take the shortcut. In the garden, the way of escape lay open before Him, and He prayed His way through it rather than out of it. Even on the cross itself the voices called up to Him to come down and save Himself; and He could have (that was the bitter sting of the mockery, that He really could have), and yet He stayed. Every temptation He ever faced was, in one form or another, the very same temptation: to unset His face, to turn aside, to choose Himself over us. And every single time, the flint held. He would not be saved if it meant that we could not be. That is what a face set like flint looks like, when the flint is made of love.

And notice where the Servant’s flint-like resolve actually comes from. It is not raw willpower, not merely gritted teeth; it is confidence in God. But the Sovereign LORD helps me … For that reason I am steadfastly resolved. He can set His face toward the suffering because He is certain the Father will help Him, certain that He will not be put to shame, certain that the road of obedience, however dark it runs, ends not in disgrace but in vindication. The resolve rests upon trust. And there is a lesson in that for everyone who must walk a hard road of obedience: the strength to set our face toward what God asks does not come from working up our own determination, but from the confidence that the Sovereign LORD will help us, and that the obedience He calls for will not, in the end, be put to shame. We set our faces like flint not by being strong in ourselves, but by trusting the One who helps.

Who Dares to Condemn Me?

The Song ends in a courtroom. Confident that God will vindicate Him, the Servant issues a challenge, like a defendant who already knows the verdict will go in His favor. The one who vindicates me is close by. Who dares to argue with me? Let us confront each other! Who is my accuser? Let him challenge me! (50:8). And again: Look, the Sovereign LORD helps me. Who dares to condemn me? Look, all of them will wear out like clothes; a moth will eat away at them (50:9). The Servant, on His way to be condemned by the highest court in the land and executed as a common criminal, declares that no one can really condemn Him, because the One who vindicates Him is close by. The Hebrew word is the courtroom verb for “justify,” to declare a man in the right, the very verb that will crown the fourth Song (53:11). Let the accusers come; they will wear out like old moth-eaten clothes, while His vindication stands forever.

There is a quiet comfort in that one phrase, the one who vindicates me is close by. The Justifier is not far off, not absent, not slow to arrive when His Servant is on trial. He is close by: at hand, present in the very courtroom where the world is busy passing its false verdict. The Servant could face the condemnation of men with such composure precisely because the One whose verdict actually counted was standing right there beside Him. And the same is true for everyone hidden in Him. When we are accused (by others, by our own conscience, by the enemy of our souls), the Justifier is not somewhere far away, leaving us to face the charges alone in an empty room. He is close by. The verdict that finally matters is rendered close at hand, by a God who does not stand off at a distance from His people in the hour of their accusing.

And He was vindicated. The world’s court condemned the Servant: found Him guilty, sentenced Him, executed Him between two criminals. But the world’s court was not the highest court. Three days later, God Himself overturned the verdict. The resurrection was the Father’s own declaration that His Servant had been right all along: that the One the world condemned, God justified; that the obedience the world repaid with a cross, God repaid with a crown and an empty tomb. The Servant was, as Paul puts it, raised for the sake of our justification (Romans 4:25), appointed the Son-of-God-in-power … by the resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4). The one who vindicates me is close by, and the empty tomb was the proof of it. The Servant set His face like flint toward the condemnation, certain of the vindication; and the certainty was not misplaced.

It is worth seeing the resurrection clearly here for what it was: not merely a happy ending tacked onto a sad story, but a verdict. When God raised the Servant from the dead, He was handing down a judgment, reversing the judgment of every earthly court that had condemned Him. The world had declared Him a blasphemer and a criminal; God declared Him righteous, and His own beloved Son. And because the Servant did not die for His own sins (He had none) but for ours, His acquittal is not His alone to keep. Paul makes the connection in a single dense phrase: He was raised for the sake of our justification. The resurrection is God’s public announcement that the price the Servant paid was accepted in full, that the debt is settled and the books are clear, and that all who are in Him stand acquitted with Him. Easter morning is, among all the other things it is, a courtroom; and the verdict read out there over the Servant is read out, in Him, over us.

Now here is where this Song reaches out and lays hold of us, and it is one of the most thrilling moves in all of Scripture. The apostle Paul, writing to the Romans about the security of the believer, reaches for this very courtroom and these very words, and puts them in our own mouths. Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is the one who will condemn? Christ is the one who died (and more than that, he was raised) (Romans 8:33–34). Do you hear it? The Servant’s confident challenge, who dares to condemn me?, becomes, through Him, the believer’s confident challenge: who is the one who will condemn us? The vindication the Servant won is shared out to everyone who is joined to Him by faith. Because He was justified, we who are in Him cannot be condemned. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1).

And notice that this is not the comfort of a clean record. Some assurances are hollow, because they depend upon our being innocent, and we know perfectly well that we are not. The accuser does not generally need to lie about us; his charges are mostly true, which is exactly what gives them their sting. The believer’s confidence here is of an altogether sturdier kind. It does not rest on denying the charges (I never did those things), for we did. It rests on a verdict already rendered over Another: the charges were real, and they were laid upon the Servant, and He bore them, and He was vindicated, and we are in Him. So the answer to the accuser is never “I am innocent.” It is, rather, “I am guilty, and my Servant has already been condemned in my place and then vindicated, and there is therefore now no condemnation left over for me.” That is an assurance that holds even when (especially when) the accusations are perfectly true.

Think for a moment of what this means. The Servant stood in the dock in our place, took the condemnation that belonged by rights to us, bore the blows and the spitting and the cross, and was vindicated. And His vindication is now reckoned to us. So when the accuser rises in the court of our own conscience (and he will, with charges that are very often true) to read out the long list of our sins and demand our condemnation, we have an answer that is not in ourselves at all. We point away to the Servant. He bore my charge; He took my condemnation; He was vindicated, and I am hidden in Him. Who is the one who will condemn? The Servant asked that question on His way to the cross, sure of the answer; and now, because of the cross, the least and weakest believer may ask it too. No one can condemn those whom God has justified in His Servant. The case is closed.

Gathering the Threads

The third Servant Song has brought us to the very edge of the cross. We have seen the Servant taught by the Father morning by morning, His ear wakened to listen as disciples do and His tongue trained to help the weary. We have seen His obedience: not rebelling, not turning back, even when the road ran straight toward those who would attack Him. We have seen Him offer His back to those who beat Him and His face to those who spat upon Him, not as a helpless victim but as a willing sufferer who handed Himself over for our sake. We have seen Him set His face like flint, resolved by love and grounded in the confidence of God’s help, and march toward the condemnation certain of the vindication the empty tomb would one day bring. And the Song ends with a question put to us: Who among you fears the LORD? Who obeys his servant? Whoever walks in deep darkness, without light, should trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God (50:10). The Servant walked the darkest road there ever was, trusting the Father; and His followers, when they too must walk in darkness, are called to do the very same: not to kindle their own little fires, but to trust the name of the LORD and to lean their whole weight upon God in the dark.

For this is the Servant’s road, and it becomes the road of all who are His: obedience that does not turn back, suffering received as from the Father’s hand, a face set toward whatever God asks, and trust in the dark, all of it resting on the certainty that the Sovereign LORD will help, and that those whom He justifies can never be condemned. The Servant offered His back to the attackers so that we might never bear the blows we deserved; He took the condemnation so that we might share His vindication. So when the accuser asks who shall condemn you, you need not search yourself for an answer you will never find there. Point instead to the Servant with His face set like flint, who offered His back for you and was raised for the sake of your justification, and say with Him, and now because of Him: who is the one who will condemn?

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. The Servant is given a disciple’s tongue so that I know how to help the weary (50:4), but first He is wakened every morning to listen attentively as disciples do. Why does the listening come before the speaking? What does this teach us about how we might have a true word for the weary people around us?

2. The Servant says, I have not rebelled, I have not turned back (50:5), even though obedience led straight toward those who would attack Him. How does His obedience contrast with Israel’s, and with ours? How is this the obedience the Lord Jesus rendered in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42)?

3. The most striking word in I offered my back to those who attacked (50:6) is “offered.” Why does it matter that the Servant was a willing sufferer rather than a helpless victim (John 10:18)? How does the precision of this verse (the scourging, the torn beard, the spitting) strengthen our confidence in the Scriptures?

4. The Servant says I am steadfastly resolved (50:7), literally “I have set my face like flint,” and Luke says the Lord Jesus set out resolutely to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). What does it mean that the gentle Servant who will not break a bruised reed is hard as flint in His resolve to obey? Where does that resolve come from?

5. The Servant, on His way to be condemned, declares, Who dares to condemn me? (50:9), sure that God will vindicate Him. How was He vindicated? How does Paul take this very challenge and put it in our own mouths (Romans 8:33–34)?

6. The Song ends by calling whoever walks in deep darkness, without light, to trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God (50:10). How did the Servant Himself walk this way? What does it look like to trust God in the dark rather than to kindle our own light?

Looking Ahead

We come now to the mountain peak: not only of the Servant Songs, but arguably of the whole Old Testament. The fourth and last of the Songs runs from chapter 52, verse 13, through the end of chapter 53, and it is the clearest, fullest, most explicit prophecy of the cross in all the Hebrew Scriptures, written some seven hundred years before Calvary. There is so much in it that we will need two sessions to walk through it slowly. In the next session we take the first half, where the Servant stands before us despised and rejected, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness, one from whom people hid their faces (53:3). And there we will come to the very heart of the gospel, set down in words a Christian can hardly read without tears: But he lifted up our illnesses, he carried our pain … He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins; he endured punishment that made us well; because of his wounds we have been healed. All of us had wandered off like sheep … but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (53:4–6). Here is the great exchange at the center of everything: our sin laid upon Him, and His healing given to us.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 52:13 through 53:6 slowly, and prayerfully; it is the greatest of the Servant Songs and the clearest prophecy of the cross in the Old Testament. See the Servant exalted, yet disfigured beyond recognition (52:13–14); despised and rejected, acquainted with pain, one from whom people hid their faces (53:3); and the very heart of the gospel: wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins, the LORD causing the sin of all of us to fall on Him (53:4–6).

Closing Prayer

O Lord God, our Master and our Maker, we bless You for Your Servant, who listened for Your voice morning by morning and spoke Your word of rest to the weary; who heard Your hardest will and did not rebel, and did not turn back. We thank You that He offered His back to those who attacked Him and did not hide His face from insults and spitting, not as a helpless victim, but as a willing Savior, handing Himself over for our sake.

We thank You that He set His face like flint and marched to the cross for love of us, certain that You would help Him; and that You did help Him, raising Him from the dead and vindicating the very One the world had condemned. Grant that when the accuser rises against us with charges that are often true, we may not search ourselves for an answer, but point away to Your Servant who bore our condemnation and was raised for our justification, and say with Him: who is the one who will condemn? And when we must walk in darkness with no light, teach us not to kindle our own poor fires, but to trust Your name and lean our whole weight upon You; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.