Wounded for Our Transgressions
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Isaiah 52:13–53:6 (with 1 Peter 2:21–25; 2 Corinthians 5:18–21)
Before this 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).
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.
Isaiah 53:5
The Greatest of the Songs
We come now to the summit: not only of the four Servant Songs, but of the whole Old Testament. There is no passage in all the Hebrew Scriptures that sets forth the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ more clearly, more fully, or more movingly than this one, which runs from the thirteenth verse of chapter 52 through the end of chapter 53. It is so explicit, so exact in its detail, that some have refused to believe it could possibly have been written before the events it describes; and yet there it stands, in a book completed centuries before Bethlehem, a portrait of Calvary drawn seven hundred years in advance. We will need two sessions to walk through it, and we will take it slowly, with our shoes off, as upon holy ground.
It is worth pausing to feel the strangeness of what we are about to read. Here is a Jewish prophet, writing in Hebrew some seven centuries before the birth of the Lord Jesus, in a world that knew nothing of Rome or its crosses; and he describes, with a precision that has unsettled honest readers for two thousand years, a sufferer pierced for the sins of others, silent before His accusers, numbered among criminals, buried in a rich man’s grave, and then somehow alive again and satisfied beyond the grave. No amount of lucky guessing accounts for it. Either this is an astonishing coincidence stretched far past the breaking point, or it is what the church has always confessed it to be: the Spirit of God, who knows the end from the beginning, showing His prophet the cross long before the wood for it was ever cut. We read it, then, not as a poem that happened to come true by accident, but as a window God deliberately opened, ahead of time, onto the very heart of His plan.
This is the chapter to which Philip turned when he found the Ethiopian official reading aloud in his chariot, puzzling over a Servant led like a sheep to slaughter, and asking, who is the prophet saying this about? Beginning with that very scripture, Philip proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus (Acts 8:32–35), and the man believed and was baptized before the day was out. Down through the centuries this chapter has done that same work over and over again, opening blind eyes to the meaning of the cross, until more than one believer has dated his conversion to the hour he finally understood Isaiah 53. It is, in a sense, the gospel before the Gospels: the cross preached in advance.
Some have tried to read this chapter as a portrait of the suffering of the nation of Israel rather than of an individual, and it is worth saying plainly why we do not. We read it of the Lord Jesus because the apostles did. Few Old Testament chapters are quoted or echoed more often in the New, and every time, it is applied to Him: Matthew sees His healings in it, John His rejection, Peter His silent suffering, Paul His atoning death, and Philip preaches Him from it to a stranger on a desert road. The Servant of this Song suffers for the sins of the people, which the nation could never do for itself; He is altogether innocent (he had committed no violent deeds), which the nation never was; and He is vindicated out the far side of the grave, which no nation has ever been. The fit is exact, and it fits one Man only. We are not being clever or fanciful in finding the Lord Jesus here. We are reading the chapter the way the Holy Spirit, through the apostles, taught the whole church to read it.
And notice how the Song opens. We might expect it to begin in the gloom of the suffering, but it does not. It begins at the end, with the triumph. Look, my servant will succeed! He will be elevated, lifted high, and greatly exalted (52:13). Before we are shown a single wound, God shows us the outcome: His Servant exalted, lifted up, set on high. Three verbs of rising pile up in a single line. The whole dark valley of chapter 53 is framed, from the very first verse, by the mountain of the Servant’s exaltation. We are told how the story ends before we are ever made to walk through how it gets there, which is itself a mercy, for it means we may read the suffering that follows already knowing the outcome.
There is a deep irony folded into that phrase lifted high, and the Lord Jesus Himself drew it out. For the first lifting up of the Servant was not to a throne, but to a cross. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, He said, so must the Son of Man be lifted up; and again, And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (John 3:14; 12:32). The same word does double duty: He was lifted up on the cross to die, and lifted up out of the grave and to the right hand of God to reign, and the one lifting up led straight on to the other. The exaltation God promises in the very first verse runs directly through the crucifixion the rest of the Song describes. The road to being “greatly exalted” went down, first, into the very depths.
So Disfigured He No Longer Looked Human
Having shown us the end, God now turns to the terrible middle. (just as many were horrified by the sight of you) he was so disfigured he no longer looked like a man; his form was so marred he no longer looked human (52:14–15). The onlookers were horrified, struck dumb at the sight. And what so horrified them was His appearance: His face so marred, so disfigured, that He scarcely looked human any longer. This is the brutal reality of what the Servant endured: the scourging that laid open the flesh, the crown of thorns, the blows, the long slow agony of the cross, until the One who had no stately form or majesty to begin with was beaten beyond all recognition. We tend to sanitize the cross in our hymns and our jewelry; Isaiah does not. He shows us a Servant whose suffering made the very onlookers recoil.
And we should not look away too quickly, comfortable though it would be to do so. The marring of the Servant’s face is, among other things, a measure: a measure of the sheer weight of what He was carrying. If we want to know how serious our sin is in the sight of God, we have only to look at what it took to deal with it: not a word lightly spoken, not a debt casually waved aside, but a Servant beaten past recognition, a face disfigured beyond the human likeness. Sin is not the small and manageable thing we so often make it out to be; the cost of its remedy tells us its true size. And yet the very same marred face that measures the gravity of our sin measures, in the identical stroke, the depth of His love, for no one held Him there to be marred but His own willingness to stand in our place. The disfigurement is the price of our sin and the proof of His love, both at once, written on one ruined face.
And then, in nearly the same breath, comes the astonishing turn. So shall he sprinkle many nations. Kings shall shut their mouths because of him (Isaiah 52:15, ESV). The very Servant whose marred face horrified the onlookers will sprinkle many nations, and that word, “sprinkle,” is priestly language. (The NET reads “startle,” following the ancient Greek translation, but the Hebrew verb is the one Leviticus uses for the priest’s sprinkling of blood; so we quote the ESV here.) In the old covenant, the priest sprinkled blood to cleanse what was unclean, to make atonement for sin. The marred, disfigured Servant is, in fact, the great High Priest, and His own blood is the cleansing, sprinkled not upon one nation only but upon many: upon the Gentiles, upon the whole defiled world. The blood that ran down that ruined face is the blood that washes the nations clean. And kings, who shut their mouths before no one, will shut them before Him, silenced in awe before the One they would never have looked at twice.
The picture of sprinkling reaches back across the whole of the old covenant. For centuries the priests had sprinkled the blood of bulls and goats (on the altar, on the people, on the mercy seat itself, once every year, on the great Day of Atonement), and still the sin remained, and still the next year’s blood had to be sprinkled all over again, for the blood of animals could never truly take sin away. It was all a long rehearsal, a shadow waiting for its substance to arrive. And here at last is the substance: a Servant who sprinkles not the blood of beasts but His own, and not for one nation once a year but for many nations once for all. The letter to the Hebrews would later marvel at the sprinkled blood that speaks of something better than Abel’s does (Hebrews 12:24), blood that cleanses the guilty conscience as no animal’s blood ever could. Every drop of blood ever sprinkled in the old tabernacle had been quietly pointing forward to this marred and bleeding Servant, in whom the sprinkling would finally do what all the rest of it had only promised.
For they will witness something unannounced to them, and they will understand something they had not heard about (52:15). The nations had never been told such a thing; it was beyond anything they could have dreamed up: that the cleansing of the world would come through a disfigured sufferer, that the way to be made clean was the blood of a marred and rejected Servant. It was new, unheard-of, unguessable by any human wisdom. Paul saw the gospel’s reach to the Gentiles foretold in those very words: Those who were not told about him will see, and those who have not heard will understand (Romans 15:21). The message the world had never heard (a crucified Savior who cleanses by His own blood) would be carried to the ends of the earth; and kings and nations who had never once been told would see, and understand, and fall silent before the marred and sprinkling Servant.
Who Would Have Believed?
Chapter 53 opens not with an announcement but with a question, and a sorrowful one. Who would have believed what we just heard? When was the LORD’s power revealed through him? (53:1). “What we just heard” is the message about this Servant; the LORD’s power, in the Hebrew “the arm of the LORD,” is God’s own saving might. And the question is a lament: so few believe it. The arm of the LORD, God’s mighty power to save, is at work, but it is revealed in such an unlikely way, in such an unexpected form, that hardly anyone recognizes it for what it is. John quotes this very verse to explain why so many who saw the Lord Jesus with their own eyes still would not believe in Him: Lord, who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? (John 12:38). The message was true; the arm of the LORD was bared for all to see; and yet, who believed it?
That picture, the arm of the LORD, is worth dwelling on. All through the Old Testament, God’s “arm” is the great image of His power: the mighty arm that brought Israel up out of Egypt, that scattered His enemies, that no force on earth could withstand. So when a prophet announces that the arm of the LORD is about to be revealed, we instinctively brace ourselves for some overwhelming display of strength. And then we look to see the arm of the LORD bared at last, and it is the arm of a Servant, stretched out upon a cross, with a nail driven through the wrist. This is how God chose to reveal His power: not in a thunderbolt, but in a wound. The mightiest thing God ever did, He did through what looked like utter weakness; the arm that reaches down to save the whole world is a pierced one. No wonder the message is so hard to believe. We were all watching for a clenched fist, and God bared a nailed hand.
Why is the message so hard to believe? The next verse tells us. He sprouted up like a twig before God, like a root out of parched soil; he had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention, no special appearance that we should want to follow him (53:2). The Servant comes up like a tender green shoot out of dry, hard ground: unlikely, unpromising, easily overlooked, easily trodden down. He has no stately form or majesty, no glamour, nothing in His appearance to catch our attention or to make us want Him. And this is the great stumbling block. We expect salvation to arrive in glory, in power, in unmistakable splendor; and the Servant comes in ordinariness: a working man from an obscure northern town, with no halo, no throne, nothing whatever to look at. The arm of the LORD is revealed in a form so humble that the world walks straight past it without a second glance.
Paul would later lay his finger on exactly this scandal. The preaching of a crucified Christ, he said, is a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23), for the wise of this age go looking for wisdom, and the powerful go looking for power, and a man dying in weakness and shame upon a Roman cross looks like neither one. It is the very opposite of anything human religion would ever have invented. No one sitting down to design a god would design this one: ordinary, unbeautiful, despised, executed between criminals. And that, Paul says, is precisely the point: that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength (1 Corinthians 1:25), so that the salvation no one would ever have guessed at might be received as a free gift and not as a human achievement. The message is hard to believe in part because it is too good, and far too strange, for us ever to have made it up. It had to be told to us. It could only be revealed.
Here is one of the deepest truths the cross has to teach us, one the reformers prized above almost any other: that God hides His greatest glory beneath its very opposite. We go looking for God in the impressive, the powerful, the beautiful; and God comes to us in a manger, in a carpenter’s shop, on a gallows: in weakness, in ordinariness, in shame. The glory is altogether real, but it is hidden, and only faith can see it there. The same hiddenness that made the world count the Servant as insignificant is the hiddenness God deliberately chose, so that salvation might be received by faith and not by sight, and so that no one can boast in his presence (1 Corinthians 1:29). We do not believe the message because the Servant does not look like what we are so sure salvation must look like. And that is precisely the point: He never did, and He never meant to.
Despised and Rejected
Now the Song gives us the words by which this Servant has been known ever since. He was despised and rejected by people, one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness (53:3). Despised: held in open contempt, looked down upon. Rejected: refused, turned away, simply not wanted. And then the words that have comforted more sufferers than perhaps any others in all of Scripture, which Handel’s Messiah sets as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”: one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness. The Servant is no stranger to pain; He is its intimate. He and suffering are long acquaintances. He did not float serenely above human suffering, untouched and unbothered; He went down into it, knew it from the inside, carried it in His own frame and felt it in His own heart.
And then comes a clause that turns the whole thing back upon us. People hid their faces from him; he was despised, and we considered him insignificant (53:3). Notice the we. Isaiah does not leave it at people, some other wicked crowd, long ago and far away. He says we. Faces were hidden from Him, the way one turns away from something shameful or repulsive, something one would rather not have to look at; and we considered him insignificant: counted Him as nothing, of no account, not worth our notice. The rejection of the Servant is not a crime committed only by Roman soldiers and Jerusalem priests in one terrible week; it is the universal human verdict upon the Lord Jesus, and it is ours as much as theirs. We turn our faces away from the crucified Savior, because the cross indicts us, and we would honestly rather not look at it too closely.
There is a terrible irony buried in that rejection, and we ought to feel its full weight. The One we hid our faces from is the very One who had come to save us. The Servant we counted as nothing was the only hope we had in all the world. We treated the arm of the LORD, stretched out to rescue us, as something to be turned away from in distaste, and in doing so we showed exactly how deep our straying really went. It was not merely that we had wandered off like foolish sheep; it is that when the Shepherd Himself came out after us, we wanted nothing whatever to do with Him. This is the true measure of sin’s blindness: that fallen men, offered their own salvation in person, looked straight at it and considered it insignificant. And it is the still greater measure of His grace that He went on and saved us anyway, that He kept bearing the sin of the very people who were, at that moment, hiding their faces from Him.
But within the rejection there is, for the suffering believer, a deep and particular comfort, and we must not miss it. The Servant experienced pain. Whatever sorrow you carry tonight, He is not a stranger to it. He has been despised; He knows from the inside what it is to be rejected, unwanted, turned away from. He has been acquainted with pain; He knows grief not as a distant theory but as an old companion. When you come to Him in your pain, you do not come to a God who watches your suffering from a safe and comfortable distance. You come to One who has been where you are (further down than you have ever been) and who meets your grief not with cool advice from the outside, but with the fellow-feeling of One who has wept your tears before you ever wept them. The Savior knows pain. He is acquainted with your grief.
Wounded Because of Our Rebellious Deeds
And now we come to the very heart of the chapter, and of the gospel, and we should slow down almost to a stop, for everything turns on a small word at the start of verse four: But. But he lifted up our illnesses, he carried our pain; even though we thought he was being punished, attacked by God, and afflicted for something he had done (53:4). “But” is the sound of a dawning realization, of scales falling from the eyes. We had it all wrong, the prophet says. When we saw the Servant suffer, we assumed (we thought) that He was being punished by God for His own sins, attacked by God, and afflicted for something he had done, simply getting what He had coming to Him. But it was not so at all. The illnesses He lifted up were our illnesses. The pain He carried was our pain. He was suffering not for anything He had ever done, but for everything we had done.
And then verse five, which may well be the most precious single verse in all the Old Testament, and which deserves to be read one clause at a time, because every clause is an exchange. He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds: pierced through for our rebellions, ours and not His. Crushed because of our sins: crushed for our sins, ours and not His. He endured punishment that made us well: the punishment that purchased our peace fell upon Him, and not upon us. Because of his wounds we have been healed: by the wounds laid open on His back, the healing comes at last to ours. Read it slowly and watch the pronouns trade places: our rebellious deeds, His wounds; our sins, His crushing; our well-being, His punishment; our healing, His wounds. At every single point, what was ours is laid upon Him, and what is His is given over to us. This is the great exchange, and it is the very engine of the gospel.
Let us be plain about what this verse teaches, for it is the dead center of the Christian faith. The Servant did not merely suffer alongside us, in solidarity; nor merely suffer to set us a brave example; nor merely suffer to show us how much God loves us, though it does indeed show us that. The Servant suffered in our place, bearing the punishment that our sins deserved. He endured punishment that made us well: the chastening, the penalty, the judgment that was required to make peace between a holy God and guilty sinners, was laid upon the Servant instead of upon the sinners. Behind “made us well” stands the Hebrew shalom: peace, wholeness, peace with God Himself. He stood where we should have stood; He took the blow that should by every right have fallen upon us; He bore, in His own body, the just punishment of our sin. This is exactly what Peter meant when he wrote, He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree … By his wounds you were healed (1 Peter 2:24). The wounds were all His. The healing is all ours.
And do not pass over that last clause too lightly: because of his wounds we have been healed. What healing? Not first the healing of our bodies, though that too will come, in the resurrection of the dead; the deepest healing here is the healing of the breach between us and God, the mortal wound of sin that no earthly physician could ever reach. By His wounds, the deadly disease of our guilt is cured; the sin-sick soul is made well; the relationship our rebellion had shattered is mended and restored. The marks of the whip upon His back are the very medicine for the sickness in our souls. We were mortally ill and did not always know it, and the cure cost Him His wounds. He was wounded that we might be healed.
The Sin of All of Us
The chapter now states the whole matter as plainly as it can be stated, in a verse that begins and ends with the same words (all of us) and lays the diagnosis and the cure side by side. All of us had wandered off like sheep; each of us had strayed off on his own path, but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (53:6). Begin with the diagnosis: all of us had wandered off like sheep. Sheep are famous for it: wandering off one by one, each following its own nose, not one of them meaning to be lost, all of them ending up lost just the same. That is us, exactly. And the prophet lays his finger on the very nature of the straying: each of us had strayed off on his own path. There is the essence of sin, in one plain line. Not necessarily grand and dramatic wickedness, but simply each of us going off on his own path, doing what seems right in his own eyes, living as though he were his own god and his own end. We have all done it; there are no exceptions hidden anywhere in that all of us.
And now the cure, in the very same breath: but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him. Look closely at what this says, and at who it is that does it. It is the LORD, God Himself, who causes the sin to fall upon the Servant. This was no accident, no tragedy that merely befell an innocent man while God looked the other way. God Himself took the sin of all of us (every wandering, every straying off on our own path, the whole accumulated weight of all our sin) and made it fall, deliberately, with all its force, upon the Servant. The same all of us that strayed at the start of the verse has its sin laid on Him at the end of it. Every one of us who strayed off on his own path is included in the straying; and every one of us is included in the sin laid upon Him. The Servant’s shoulders bore the sin of the whole world, of every sheep that ever went astray.
The reformers had a name for what happens in this verse. Luther called it the joyous exchange, the blessed swap: Christ takes our sin, the whole of it, and gives us in return His own righteousness, the whole of that. He becomes, before God, what we are: laden down with iniquity; and we become, before God, what He is: righteous. As Paul would put it, God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). The sin of all of us was laid upon Him; the righteousness of God is, in Him, laid upon us. It is the most lopsided trade in the history of the world (He gets our sin, and we get His righteousness), and it is all of grace from beginning to end, for we brought nothing whatever to the exchange but the very iniquity He took away.
And this verse will not let us keep it general and safe. It says the sin of all of us, and the only way to believe it rightly is to make it personal, to put your own name into it. Not merely “the LORD laid on Him the sin of the human race,” true as that surely is; but “the LORD laid on Him my sin”: the sins I am most ashamed of, the wanderings I have never confessed to another living soul, the particular and private ways I have strayed off on my own path. All of it was on the list God laid upon the Servant. He bore your sin by name. The healing is for you; the exchange is held out to you; the sin laid on Him was, among all the rest of it, yours. The one question the chapter finally leaves open is whether you will believe the message, and let your sin be the sin He carried, and His righteousness be the robe you wear before God.
Gathering the Threads
We have come to the heart of this study, and indeed to the heart of the Christian faith itself. The greatest of the Servant Songs has shown us the Servant exalted, yet first disfigured beyond all recognition; the arm of the LORD revealed in a form so humble that hardly anyone believed the message; a Servant acquainted with pain, despised and rejected, from whom people hid their faces. And then it has shown us why He suffered: not for His own sins, for He had none, but for ours. He lifted up our illnesses and carried our pain; He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds and crushed because of our sins; the punishment that made us well fell upon Him, and because of His wounds we have been healed. And the LORD Himself (not the soldiers, not the howling mob, but God) caused the sin of all of us to fall upon Him.
This is the gospel, and there is no other beside it. We are the sheep who wandered off, every one of us strayed off on his own path; and the only hope there ever was for a strayed sheep is that its sin be laid upon Another. It has been. God laid it upon His Servant, who bore it willingly, who was wounded that we might be healed, and who rose elevated, lifted high, and greatly exalted, exactly as the first verse had promised before ever the suffering began. The message is true, however unlikely it looks to the watching world: that the marred and rejected Servant is the very arm of the LORD bared for our salvation, and that the whole of His suffering was for us. The chapter asks only one thing of us: that we believe the message, and receive the exchange: our iniquity for His righteousness, our sickness for His healing, our death for His life. Believe it, and the sin laid upon Him is no longer laid upon you.
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 Song opens not with the suffering but with the triumph (He will be elevated, lifted high, and greatly exalted, 52:13), and the same language of being “lifted up” describes both the cross and the throne (John 3:14; 12:32). Why might God frame the whole tragedy with the triumph from the very start? How does the way up run through the way down?
2. The Servant had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention (53:2), and so few believe the message (53:1). Why do we expect salvation to come in glory and power rather than in ordinariness and weakness? How does God hide His greatest glory beneath its very opposite?
3. The Servant is one who experienced pain and was acquainted with illness (53:3), and yet we considered him insignificant. What does it mean for the suffering believer that the Savior is acquainted with pain? Why is it significant that Isaiah says we counted Him as nothing?
4. Read 53:5 one clause at a time. How is every clause an exchange: our rebellious deeds for His wounds, our well-being for His punishment, our healing for His wounds? What does it mean that he endured punishment that made us well, that He was punished in our place?
5. Sin is defined here very simply: each of us had strayed off on his own path (53:6). Why is this the essence of sin, even apart from grand and dramatic wickedness? Why does it matter that the diagnosis includes all of us, with no exceptions allowed?
6. It is the LORD who caused the sin of all of us to fall on the Servant (53:6): not an accident, but God’s own deliberate act. Why does it matter who laid the sin upon Him? What does it look like to make this personal, to believe that your own sin, by name, was laid upon Him?
Looking Ahead
We have walked through the first half of the great chapter; in the next session we take the second, and it carries us through the Servant’s death and out the far side into His vindication. There the Servant goes to His death like a lamb led to the slaughtering block, and he did not even open his mouth (53:7): silent before His accusers, the silent Lamb whose silence Peter would one day hold up as our own example. We will see Him cut off from the land of the living because of the rebellion of His own people (53:8), and laid, against every expectation, in a rich man’s tomb (53:9). And then the Song turns, astonishingly, toward triumph: the LORD desired to crush Him, and His life was made the restitution for sin; yet out the far side of death, he will see descendants and enjoy long life (53:10); having suffered, he will reflect on his work, he will be satisfied (53:11). Here, in terms as clear as any the Old Testament uses, is the resurrection of the Servant, and the great word that crowns the entire chapter: My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins (53:11). He shall justify many. We will end the chapter exactly where it has been heading all along: at our justification, bought by the Servant who carried our sins.
Before the next session, read Isaiah 53:7–12, the second half of the fourth Servant Song. See the Servant led like a silent Lamb to the slaughter, not even opening His mouth (53:7); cut off from the land of the living, laid in a rich man’s tomb (53:8–9); and then the great turn: His life made the restitution for sin, yet He will see descendants and enjoy long life, and as God’s Servant He will acquit many, for He carried their sins (53:10–12).
Closing Prayer
O God our Father, we hardly know how to thank You for what we have read. We had wandered off like sheep, every one of us strayed off on his own path; and You did not leave us lost in it. You laid upon Your Servant the sin of all of us (our rebellions, our iniquities, the whole weight of everything we had done), and He bore it willingly: wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins, that because of His wounds we might be healed.
Forgive us that we so often hid our faces from Him, counting Him insignificant, walking past the very arm of Your salvation because it did not look the way we were sure glory ought to look. Open our eyes to believe the message: that the marred and rejected Servant is our Savior, and that the whole of His suffering was for us. Let the great exchange be truly ours (our iniquity laid upon Him, His righteousness laid upon us), and let us never once get over the wonder of it; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who was acquainted with our pain and wounded because of our rebellious deeds, and is now lifted high and greatly exalted, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.