Palm Sunday - Isaiah 50:4-9a - by Don Neuendorf
Prophecy is strange to us. In modern movies and books like the Harry Potter series a prophet goes into a trance, gets eerie, maybe starts to speak in a different voice (more like he is possessed than anything else) and then utters some obscure poetic reference. Prophecies are prose enough to clearly apply to a certain person, but poetic enough to be capable of misinterpretation (which, of course, is what makes the story exciting).
The "Servant Songs" in Isaiah....
...don't sound weird to me. They don't have a different "voice" than the rest of the book. But they are difficult to understand because they shift between different contexts - the prophet's present circumstances and the distant future. And they shift between different characters - the prophet himself or someone contemporary with him, and a person in the future who is "prefigured" by these words.
But "prefigured" is not the same is an advance copy of the person's resume'. The prophets tells, in 4 "servant songs," about a person who will come and have a unique relationship to God.
- 42:1-9 (The Servant will be humble, but bring justice.)
- 49:1-13 (The Servant will be called from before birth to restore all the nations to God.)
- 50:4-11 (The Servant will be beaten and mocked, but determined.)
- 52:13-53:12 (The Servant will be despised and rejected, but will bear our sins.)
The prophetic details are usually not very specific. On the other hand, the accumulated prophecies, even just these 4, specify quite a number of things about the expected person's character and career. Can you think of anything like this outside the Bible?
Julius Ceasar achieved some remarkable things. Can you find a prophet who spoke, before Caesar was born, about his crossing of the Rubicon? The French Revolution was a huge shift in our history, as was the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Can you think of any prophet who even hinted at them hundreds of years before they came about? (Fiction writers like Jules Verne don't count. Even he only extrapolated things he already saw in seed form.) The collapse of the Soviet Union was an enormous historical shift. One of the 2 most powerful nations in the world was dissolved. Did anyone seriously predict that event even 10 years before - let alone 400?
This is why it has very special significance when we say, in the Apostles' Creed, "(Jesus died and rose again) according to the Scriptures..." All that Jesus did was JUST AS THE PROPHET SAID IT WOULD BE hundreds of years before.
What does that say to you about how you should value God's Word? What does it suggest to you about God's promises for your own life?