He Shall Justify Many

Isaiah 53:7–12 (with Acts 8:26–35; Hebrews 7:23–28)

Before this 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).

Having suffered, he will reflect on his work, he will be satisfied when he understands what he has done. My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins.

Isaiah 53:11

Like a Lamb Led to the Slaughtering Block

We return to the great chapter, taking up its second half, and it opens on a scene of terrible quiet. He was treated harshly and afflicted, but he did not even open his mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughtering block, like a sheep silent before her shearers, he did not even open his mouth (53:7). Twice in a single verse the prophet says it (he did not even open his mouth) as if to be sure we do not miss the silence. The Servant is treated harshly and afflicted, dragged toward His death, and He says nothing. He is led like a lamb to the slaughter, like a sheep that stands silent beneath the shears, making no protest, no complaint, no defense at all.

And of all the images Scripture might have chosen for the Servant, here is the one it chooses: a lamb. The lamb was the great sacrificial animal of the old covenant: the Passover lamb whose blood marked the doorposts in Egypt, the lamb offered morning and evening upon the altar, the lamb of countless sin offerings down the centuries. And every one of those lambs had been pointing forward. So when John the Baptist, seeing the Lord Jesus coming toward him, cried out, Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29), he was gathering up all those centuries of lambs and laying them upon one. The Servant of Isaiah 53 is the Lamb of God, the true and final sacrifice, of whom every lamb that had ever died upon a Jewish altar was only a shadow.

And the title would follow Him beyond the cross, beyond even the resurrection, all the way into glory. When the apostle John was given his vision of heaven, the figure at the very center of the throne was not the conquering lion he had been told to expect, but a Lamb that appeared to have been killed (Revelation 5:6), bearing still, in the place of highest honor in the universe, the marks of His sacrifice. Around that Lamb the whole company of heaven falls down to sing that He is worthy, because He was killed, and at the cost of His own blood has purchased for God persons from every tribe and nation. So the lamb led silently to the slaughter in Isaiah is the very same Lamb adored without ceasing in glory. He does not lay the title aside once the dying is done; He wears it forever. The marks of the slaughter are His eternal credentials, and the song of heaven is, and always will be, the song of the Lamb.

The silence, too, came true with startling exactness. When the Lord Jesus stood before His accusers (before the high priest, before Herod, before Pilate), and the false charges came hurling at Him, He answered them nothing. Pilate, well used to prisoners who begged and argued and bargained for their lives, was quite amazed that this one would not so much as defend Himself (Matthew 27:14). He did not even open His mouth. He could have spoken; He could have called witnesses, exposed the lies, laid out His innocence, perhaps even talked His way to freedom. He did not. The Lamb went silent to the slaughter.

And we should ask why. The Servant was silent not because He had no defense, but because He had no defense He wished to make. He had not come to be acquitted; He had come to die. To have defended Himself successfully would have been to fail His whole mission. The silence of the Lamb is the silence of willing sacrifice: the quiet of One who has accepted, in advance, the verdict that will be passed, because that verdict, unjust as it is, is the very thing that will save the world. And Peter held up that silence as something more than a marvel; he held it up as our pattern: When he was maligned, he did not answer back; when he suffered, he threatened no retaliation, but committed himself to God who judges justly (1 Peter 2:23). The Lamb teaches us how to suffer wrong: not with frantic self-defense, but with quiet trust in the God who will, in the end, set every wrong to right.

Cut Off from the Land of the Living

He was led away after an unjust trial—but who even cared? Indeed, he was cut off from the land of the living; because of the rebellion of his own people he was wounded (53:8). The opening phrase points to a miscarriage of justice. The Servant was “led away after an unjust trial”: hurried through a travesty of a trial, denied the justice owed to the lowest criminal, condemned by courts that broke their own laws in their haste to be rid of Him. There was nothing fair about it. The most innocent man who ever lived was railroaded to His death.

There is a hard comfort in that for everyone who has ever suffered an injustice (and who has not?). The single greatest injustice in the history of the world was the condemnation of the only truly innocent man who ever lived; and God did not prevent it. He permitted the wrong, the lie, the rigged trial, the unjust sentence, and then He brought out of that very wrong the salvation of the world. This does not make the injustice one whit less unjust; the verse does not excuse the men who did it. But it does mean that no injustice, however great, can finally thwart the purposes of God, and that He is able to weave even the wrongs done to His people into a good they could never have foreseen. If God brought the redemption of the whole world out of the worst thing that ever happened, He can surely be trusted to bring some good, in His own time, out of the wrongs done to us, even the ones for which no apology will ever come.

“But who even cared?” At its heart this is a word of terrible loneliness. Who, in that hour, stood up to plead His cause? Who weighed what was being done, or protested the injustice of it, or spoke a word for Him? Almost no one. His friends had fled into the night; the crowds that had hailed Him only days before now bayed for His blood; He stood alone, abandoned, with scarcely a soul to take up His cause. The Servant went to His death in the most profound isolation, deserted by very nearly every human being who had known Him.

“Indeed, he was cut off from the land of the living”: there is the death, stated as plainly as it can be said. “Cut off” is a violent phrase, the language of being severed, removed, executed; Daniel, using a verb of the same stark kind, would foretell that an anointed one will be cut off (Daniel 9:26). The Servant did not merely suffer and recover; He died, was cut off from the land of the living. And once more, lest we should somehow miss the reason, the verse names it: “because of the rebellion of his own people he was wounded.” Not for His own sin (He had none), but for the rebellion of the people. And do not pass over that tender, terrible phrase, “his own people”: the people for whose rebellion the Servant is wounded are His own, and God’s own, the very people He came to save. He was cut off for us.

And there is a deeper cutting off folded inside that word, deeper than the mere severing of body from life. For the Servant was cut off not only from the land of the living but, in some way we can scarcely begin to fathom, from the face of His Father, for to bear the iniquity of the people meant to bear the God-forsakenness that iniquity deserves. It was this, far more than the nails, that wrung from Him the cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46). The sinless Son, who had never known a single moment’s distance from His Father, was in that hour cut off, made to stand in the outer darkness where our sin had earned us a place. He was forsaken so that we should never have to be; He was cut off from God so that we, who deserved that cutting off, might be brought near, and kept near, forever. The loneliest moment in the history of the world was the price of our never being alone again.

A Rich Man’s Tomb

The next verse contains a prophecy so specific that it is hard to read it and remain unmoved. They intended to bury him with criminals, but he ended up in a rich man’s tomb (53:9). Here are two things said about the Servant’s burial that seem, at first hearing, to pull in opposite directions. His grave was intended to be “with criminals”: He would die among criminals, numbered with the lawless. And yet He “ended up in a rich man’s tomb”: His burial would be among the wealthy. How could both be true at once? How does a man executed as a common criminal end up buried like a rich man?

We know exactly how, because we have read the end of the story. The Lord Jesus was crucified among criminals: between two outlaws, counted with the transgressors, dying the death the law reserved for criminals. That was the grave men intended for Him. But then a wealthy man, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the very council that had condemned Him (though he had not agreed to its verdict), went to Pilate, asked for the body, and laid it in his own new tomb, a rich man’s tomb cut in the rock, where no one had ever yet been laid. And so the Servant who died with criminals was buried with the rich, exactly as Isaiah had said seven hundred years before. No one stage-managed it to fulfill the prophecy; it simply happened so, because it was so written.

It is worth stopping to weigh what we have just seen, for it is the kind of thing that ought to steady our faith. A detail like this one (that the Servant would die among criminals yet be buried in a rich man’s tomb) is not the sort of thing a man can arrange for himself. A condemned criminal has no say whatever in where his body is laid; that the Lord Jesus ended in a rich man’s tomb was entirely out of His hands and entirely in God’s. And this is only one of many such details in this single chapter, each one written centuries in advance and each one come true to the letter: the silence, the unjust trial, the company of criminals, the pierced and crushed body, the rich man’s tomb, the life beyond death. No man could have engineered them all; no lucky guess could have landed them all. Taken together, they are something very like the signature of God upon the work of the Servant, His own way of saying: this was no accident; this was Mine, and I told you of it beforehand.

And the verse gives the reason for this strange honor in death: because he had committed no violent deeds, nor had he spoken deceitfully (53:9). Here is the sinlessness of the Servant, stated plainly. He had committed no violent deeds: no wrong in His deeds; nor had He spoken deceitfully: no wrong in His words. He was, in deed and in word alike, entirely without sin. And this matters far more than we might at first think, for it is the very thing that qualifies Him to be our substitute. A sacrifice for sin had to be without blemish; the lamb laid upon the altar had to be spotless. Only One who had no sin of His own could possibly bear the sin of others. Had the Servant been a sinner like the rest of us, His death could have paid for nothing beyond His own guilt. Because He was sinless, His death was free to count for ours. The spotless Lamb was laid, innocent, in a borrowed grave, and His innocence is the very reason His death can save the guilty.

The LORD Desired to Crush Him

We come now to one of the most startling sentences in all of Scripture, and we must handle it with great care, for it is easily and badly misunderstood. Though the LORD desired to crush him and make him ill (53:10). The LORD desired, God Himself willed, to crush His Servant. The Father is here said to have desired the crushing of the Son. What can this possibly mean? Surely God is no monster, delighting in the agony of the innocent.

No, He is not, and the verse does not mean that. God took no pleasure in the pain itself; the Father is not a sadist who enjoyed the torment of His Son. What the LORD desired was not the crushing as crushing, but the crushing as redemption: what that suffering would accomplish, the salvation of a lost world, the rescue of His people, the great exchange by which guilty sinners would go free. The same verse makes the point itself, for it closes by saying that the LORD’s purpose will be accomplished through him; and “purpose” there comes from the same Hebrew root as “desired.” What the LORD desired was the purpose the crushing would accomplish. A surgeon takes no pleasure in cutting a patient, considered simply as cutting; he takes great pleasure in the cutting that heals. So the Father, who loved the Son with an infinite and eternal love, willed the Son’s suffering: not for its own sake, never once for its own sake, but for the sake of the great multitude that suffering would save.

We must guard our picture of the Father here, for there is a caricature that creeps in all too easily, as though the cross were the loving Son talking a reluctant, angry Father into sparing us, the Son all mercy and the Father all wrath. Isaiah will not let us think any such thing. The LORD desired: it was the Father’s own will, the Father’s own initiative, the Father’s own love. It was the Father who loved the world in this way, that He gave His one and only Son (John 3:16); the giving began in the Father’s heart before ever it reached the cross. The cross is not the Son rescuing us from the Father; it is the Father and the Son together rescuing us from our sin, at a cost the two of them had together resolved to pay. When we look upon the crushed Servant, we are not watching the Father’s reluctance at last overcome; we are watching the Father’s love laid bare. He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all (Romans 8:32): that not sparing is the very measure of how far the Father’s love was prepared to go for us.

And this tells us something about the cross that we must never let go of: that it was no accident. It was not a tragedy that befell the Servant while God looked on, helpless; it was not a good plan that went wrong at the last. The cross was the plan. The LORD desired it; it was God’s own deliberate and gracious purpose from before the foundation of the world. When Peter preached the cross at Pentecost, he said the Lord Jesus had been handed over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God (Acts 2:23); even as wicked hands carried it out, it was God’s settled plan being accomplished through them. The Father and the Son were never working at cross-purposes upon Calvary; they were of one single will, the will to save us, and that one saving will is what “the LORD desired.”

And the verse names what the crushing was: once restitution is made. The word the NET renders “restitution” is the word for the guilt offering, the trespass offering of the old covenant: the sacrifice that made amends, that paid back what was owed. The Servant’s very soul, His own life, was made the guilt offering. He did not merely suffer; He was offered, a sacrifice for sin, to settle a debt His people could never have begun to pay. The altar of the old covenant, with its endless stream of offerings that could never finally take sin away, finds here its fulfillment at last: one offering, the Servant Himself, for the sin of the whole world.

He Will See Descendants

And now, in the very same verse, the chapter does something astonishing. It has just spoken of the Servant’s death: He was cut off, He was laid in the tomb, His life was made the guilt offering for sin. And then, without so much as a pause, it says: he will see descendants and enjoy long life, and the LORD’s purpose will be accomplished through him (53:10). Read that again, and feel the sheer impossibility of it. A man who has just been described as cut off from the land of the living, dead and buried in another man’s tomb, and now He “will see descendants,” will “enjoy long life.” How does a dead man see his offspring? How does One who was cut off enjoy long life? There is only one way in all the world. He must live again.

We should feel how remarkable it is that the Old Testament speaks here at all. For long stretches the Hebrew Scriptures are reticent about what lies beyond death; the grave is often pictured as a land of silence and shadow, and the hope of resurrection, though it flickers in places like Job and the Psalms and Daniel, is mostly held in reserve. And then, here, at the very climax of the greatest of the Servant Songs, the curtain lifts: a man cut off from the land of the living will yet see descendants and enjoy long life. The hope that elsewhere only flickers blazes up, for once, into open daylight, and it does so precisely because the resurrection of this particular Servant is the ground of every other resurrection hope there is. He is the firstfruits; and because He lives, His offspring shall live also. One of the Old Testament’s brightest words about life beyond the grave is spoken, fittingly, about the very One whose rising would one day unlock the grave for everyone else.

Here, in terms as clear as any the Old Testament uses, is the resurrection of the Servant. The chapter does not leave Him in the rich man’s tomb. It carries Him straight through death and out the far side, alive: seeing descendants, enjoying long life, the LORD’s purpose accomplished through Him. The same Servant who willingly submitted to death is alive to enjoy the fruit of it. The cross is not the end of the Song; the empty tomb is. And this is precisely why we are able to read the whole dark chapter without despair: because we were told, away back in the thirteenth verse of chapter 52, that the Servant would be elevated, lifted high, and greatly exalted, and here we are shown how it comes to pass, through death, and up out of it, alive forevermore.

This changes how we are able to read the whole of the chapter, and, indeed, how we are able to read our own darkest chapters. We come to Isaiah 53 from the far side of Easter morning; we already know that the tomb is empty. And so we are able to walk through the harsh treatment and the affliction, the cutting off and the grave, without being swallowed up by them, because we know they are not the end of the story but the road to its glory. The suffering was real, every wound of it; but it was never the last word. And the believer, joined to this Servant, slowly learns to read his own suffering in the very same way: not pretending it does not hurt, but refusing to believe it is final; knowing that the One who went down into death and came up alive has made even our graves a doorway, so that for us, too, the suffering will prove in the end to be the road, and not the destination.

And what does the risen Servant see? He will see descendants. He has offspring: a vast family, children beyond all counting. By the world’s reckoning the Lord Jesus died young and childless, leaving no descendants behind Him. But the Servant’s descendants are not of the flesh; they are all those whom His death brings home to God, the whole family of the redeemed, the countless multitude born again through His dying and His rising. The letter to the Hebrews pictures Him saying, Here I am, with the children God has given me (Hebrews 2:13). Every soul ever saved by His cross is His offspring, His descendant, His own child. He did not die childless after all. He died to become the father of an innumerable family, and you, if you are His, are numbered among His descendants.

Having suffered, he will reflect on his work, he will be satisfied when he understands what he has done (53:11). The Hebrew word behind “having suffered” is the word for hard, wearing toil, the labor and trouble of the soul; and it was through that labor that the Servant brought forth His many children. And when at last it is over, He looks upon the result (the redeemed multitude, the family bought with His own blood), and He is satisfied. The agony was worth it. The letter to the Hebrews says that for the joy set out for him he endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2), and this is that joy: the sight of His people, saved, gathered home, His own forever. When the Servant looks upon the harvest of His suffering, He does not count the price too high. He is satisfied. And among the things that satisfy Him, if you belong to Him, is the sight of you.

My Servant Will Acquit Many

And now we come to the crown of the whole chapter, indeed to one of the great summits of the entire Bible. My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins (53:11). Here, seven full centuries before Paul wrote a single word of Romans, is the doctrine of justification, set down in one line of Hebrew poetry. “My servant,” God calls Him, and we have just met Him two verses ago as the sinless One, who committed no violent deeds and never spoke deceitfully; the Hebrew line even names Him “the righteous one,” so that the Righteous One makes the many righteous. And what does this Servant do? He “will acquit many”: He declares them righteous, sets them right with God, accounts them just in His own sight. “Acquit” is the very verb elsewhere translated “justify,” and the Greek Old Testament the apostles read uses Paul’s own word for it. The great word that the whole Reformation would one day labor to recover, the word on which Luther said the church itself stands or falls, is right here, in Isaiah, on the far side of the cross, waiting for us all along.

It is worth being clear about what that word actually means, for a great deal hangs upon it. To justify, to acquit, is a courtroom word; it does not mean to make a person gradually better, or to improve him by slow degrees until he is at last fit for God. It means to declare a person righteous: to hand down, here and now, the verdict of acquittal, to pronounce him just in the sight of the court. When the Servant acquits the many, He does not merely begin a long process of reforming them; He declares them, on the spot and once for all, righteous before God. This is exactly why justification is such staggeringly good news for people who know perfectly well that they are still very far from good. It is not a reward handed out for improvement we have managed to make; it is a verdict pronounced over us while we are yet ungodly, on the strength of the sins the Servant carried, for God is the One who declares the ungodly righteous (Romans 4:5). The change in us follows after, surely it does; but the verdict comes first (full, and free, and final) the very moment we believe the message.

And the verse tells us the ground upon which the Servant acquits: how the righteous One can declare the unrighteous to be righteous without speaking a falsehood. For he carried their sins. He acquits the many by carrying their sins. The sin that stood against them, that made them guilty, that no court of heaven could simply overlook: He took it upon His own shoulders and carried it clean away. And with the sin carried off and gone, the once-guilty are free to be declared just. This is no legal fiction, no looking politely the other way; it is the most costly transaction in the universe. The Servant can acquit the many because He has, at the price of His own crushing, actually removed the very sins that condemned them. He carries, and therefore they are justified. There is the whole engine of our salvation in a single clause.

And do not miss the sheer wideness of that word: acquit many. Not a few. Not some small and select handful. Many: a great host, a multitude that no one can number, gathered out of every nation and tribe and tongue. The Servant’s saving reach is enormous. When He willingly submitted to death, He did not do it for some chosen elite while leaving all the rest to fend for themselves; He lifted up the sin of many (the same many as the “all of us” whose sin the LORD laid on Him in verse 6), and He acquits many, and the invitation to be among them goes out to all. If you find yourself wondering tonight whether you might be among the “many” the Servant acquits, the answer of the whole chapter is simply this: come, and find out, for the “many” is wide enough to take you in.

The chapter closes with the Servant’s reward, and with a final, tender word. So I will assign him a portion with the multitudes, he will divide the spoils of victory with the powerful, because he willingly submitted to death and was numbered with the rebels, when he lifted up the sin of many and intervened on behalf of the rebels (53:12). The Servant is rewarded, given the victor’s portion, exalted on high, because He willingly submitted to death. And two last things are said of Him, and both are unspeakably precious. He “was numbered with the rebels”: counted in among criminals, crucified between two outlaws; the Lord Jesus Himself quoted this very line on the night He was betrayed, And he was counted with the transgressors (Luke 22:37), knowing it was about to come true before morning. And He “intervened on behalf of the rebels”: the Hebrew word is the one used for stepping in to intercede, and He prayed for them. From the cross itself He prayed, Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34), interceding for the very men who were driving the nails. And He intercedes still: the risen Servant, says the letter to the Hebrews, always lives to intercede for those who come to God through him (Hebrews 7:25). The prayer begun upon the cross has never once stopped. He is interceding for the rebels yet, and that, too, means you.

Gathering the Threads

We have come to the end of the greatest chapter in the Old Testament, and it ends not in the grave but in glory. We have seen the silent Lamb led to the slaughter, not even opening His mouth; the Servant railroaded through an unjust trial and cut off from the land of the living, because of the rebellion of His own people; the sinless One, who had committed no violent deeds and never spoken deceitfully, laid in a rich man’s tomb. We have seen that the whole terrible thing was what the LORD desired (not the pain of it, but the redemption it bought), and that the Servant’s own life was made the guilt offering for sin. And then we have watched the chapter turn from death to triumph: the Servant alive again, seeing descendants and enjoying long life; satisfied at last with the fruit of His suffering; acquitting many by carrying their sins; rewarded, numbered with the rebels, lifting up the sin of many, and interceding for them still.

This is the gospel in its fullness, and there is nothing whatever to be added to it. The righteous Servant carried the sins of the unrighteous, died as their offering, rose to see the great family His death had brought forth, and now acquits the many and prays for them at the right hand of God. The only question the chapter finally leaves is the one it has been pressing on us all along: will you believe the message? Do not count yourself outside the “many” He acquits; the chapter puts you among the descendants He sees, the rebels He intercedes for, the ones whose sins He carried. He has done all of it. The offering is made, the grave is empty, the intercession is going up even now. Believe the message, and be justified, for God’s righteous Servant acquits many, and the “many” is wide enough for 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 Servant is led like a lamb led to the slaughtering block, and twice we are told he did not even open his mouth (53:7). Why was He silent before His accusers: not because He had no defense, but because He had not come to be acquitted? How did Peter hold up this silence as our example (1 Peter 2:23)?

2. They intended to bury him with criminals, but he ended up in a rich man’s tomb (53:9), fulfilled when the Lord Jesus was crucified between outlaws yet buried in a rich man’s tomb. Why does His sinlessness (he had committed no violent deeds, nor had he spoken deceitfully) matter so much for our salvation?

3. The LORD desired to crush him (53:10) is a startling statement. What does it mean, and, just as importantly, what does it not mean? Why does it matter that the cross was God’s deliberate plan (Acts 2:23) rather than a tragic accident?

4. How is the resurrection of the Servant taught in the words he will see descendants and enjoy long life (53:10), words quite impossible for a dead man? Who are the “descendants” the risen Servant sees, and how are we numbered among them (Hebrews 2:13)?

5. My servant will acquit many, for he carried their sins (53:11). How is the doctrine of justification taught here, seven centuries before Paul? How can the righteous Servant declare the unrighteous to be righteous? What is the ground on which He does it?

6. The Servant intervened on behalf of the rebels (53:12): from the cross, Father, forgive them, and at God’s right hand still (Hebrews 7:25). What comfort is there in knowing that the risen Servant is praying for you even now?

Looking Ahead

We have stood at the summit; now the ground opens out into the broadest invitation in all the Bible. Having shown us, in chapter 53, what the Servant did, chapter 55 throws the doors wide and calls the whole world to come and receive it. Hey, all who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come! Buy and eat! Come! Buy wine and milk without money and without cost. (55:1). It is the gospel offered for nothing, to everyone who thirsts, with no money required and no price to pay, because the price has already been paid in full by the Servant of the chapter before. In the next session we will hear God ask why we spend money on what will not nourish or satisfy (55:2); we will hear Him promise an unconditional covenant, like the reliable covenantal promises He made to David (55:3), and call us to seek Him while He makes Himself available, for He will freely forgive (55:6–7); and we will hear that His word, the promise He makes, does not return to Him having accomplished nothing (55:11). After the cross, the invitation: come, and drink, without money and without cost.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 55, the great gospel invitation. Hear the free call to all who are thirsty: come, buy without money and without cost (55:1–2); the promise of an unconditional covenant, like the reliable promises made to David (55:3); the call to seek the Lord while He makes Himself available, and His free forgiveness (55:6–7); His plans and deeds higher than ours (55:8–9); and the word that goes out from Him and does not return having accomplished nothing (55:10–11).

Closing Prayer

O God our Father, we thank You for the Servant who was led like a lamb to the slaughter and did not even open His mouth; who was cut off from the land of the living because of the rebellion of Your people; who, though He had committed no violence and spoken no deceit, was laid in a borrowed grave for our sake. We thank You that it was Your desire (not for His pain, but for our redemption) to make His life the offering for our sin.

And we praise You that the grave was not the end: that He saw His descendants and enjoyed long life, that He looked upon the fruit of His suffering and was satisfied, and that Your righteous Servant acquits many, having carried their sins. Number us, we pray, among the many He acquits, the descendants He sees, the rebels for whom He still intercedes; and let us never doubt that He is praying for us even now at Your right hand. We can add nothing at all to what He has done; teach us only to believe the message, and to rest in it; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb who was slain and is alive forevermore, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.