You may be seated.
Our first scripture reading this morning comes from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 34, beginning in the first verse:
‘But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb taking the spices that they had prepared, and they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel, and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and on the third day rise.’ And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest.’
From the Gospels, we turn back to the prophet Isaiah, the 52nd chapter, beginning at verse 13. The prophet writes:
‘Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted. As many were astonished at you, his appearance was so marred beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind. So shall he sprinkle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him, for that which has not been told them they see, and that which they have not heard they understand.’
‘Who has believed what he has heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.’
‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’
‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, and yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that has led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away, and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.’
‘Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief. When his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many and makes intercession for the transgressors.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray.
Lord, you have given us your word. You have told us what you were going to do before you did it. You have told us of what you have done. Now, encourage our hearts and help us to live out of these messages, to live out in faith because of what you have done on our behalf through your Son, Jesus, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
He is risen! Today we celebrate a very happy occasion indeed, an occasion that we celebrate every Lord’s Day morning, even though we don’t often think about it as such.
Every Sunday, when we gather together here for worship, we gather to celebrate the empty tomb and our Savior’s resurrection. The death and resurrection of Jesus informs and fills all of our worship with such joy. But today is a much more special and extraordinary Sunday than every other one because it is Resurrection Sunday.
So, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Why are you looking at me so funny?
Today we celebrate and rejoice at the fullness of Jesus’s Christmas gift to us—the redemption from our sins that he purchased for us by his atoning death on the cross. And so this morning, we celebrate the true reason for the season. We celebrate because the baby lying in a manger grew up to be a man: a man who lived the perfect, sinless life, a man who offered himself, who gave himself up to stand and suffer divine justice in our stead, the one man who died for us and the one man who rose again from the dead for us.
Dying, he removed the guilt and stain of our sins; raised again to life, he restored us and brought the Lord’s favor to us, his chosen people. And now he welcomes us into the divine presence as the children of God. Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth, Jesus Christ, the Lord’s servant, has paid the full price that we each owe God because of our moral debt of sin. He has rescued us from this evil age in which we live, giving us hope and the promise of life eternal in his kingdom, which is coming soon.
And this is the Gospel! It is quite the best Christmas present. Thank God, for he has risen!
And now we are gathered here together two thousand years later because of this wondrous salvation that the Lord has done on our behalf. Unlike the Jewish Sabbath service, which is a time of rest at the end of the week from human laborers and all of our endeavors, we celebrate the Lord’s Day every Sunday on the first day of the week because it is like the Passover celebrated during the first month of the Jewish religious year.
Both Sunday and the Passover remind us of new beginnings, for they mark off and separate the old from the new. The Passover marked the birth of Israel, becoming a nation, one people united by faith in the one true God, Yahweh. It was their Fourth of July celebration; it marked the entrance into their life of newfound freedom—freedom from slavery, freedom from bondage and oppression, freedom to go to the promised land which they would call home.
So it is a fitting occasion to mark the beginning of the year, memorializing the start of a new era. Resurrection Sunday today marks the constitution of God’s true and greater Israel, consisting of the elect of God of all time—past, present, and future—those people redeemed according to the Lord’s eternal plan from before the foundation of the world.
Following Jesus’s resurrection on that morning, we are now free—free from slavery to our sinful natures, free from our bondage to and the oppression of Satan against our souls, and we are now free to travel to that great country, to the land beyond the sea, to the city that has foundations built by God himself.
So again, I’ll say Happy New Year! As we celebrate this anniversary of new life with Christ, as the Jewish Sabbath was celebrated on the seventh day, the last day of the week, and was a day for rest and prayer and study, a day for the people to be restored by communion with the Lord, so our Lord’s Day, Sunday, is the first day of the week. Because of what Jesus has done for us, Christians, it has truly become like the eighth day of creation—the day of re-creation and restoration.
It is the day for us to go forth and live for God in joyful celebration because we now live in an age and order of created being different from those who are still held captive by their sin. We are living in the age of the King and no longer have any stock in the age of darkness which came before. We are joyful today because our Savior lives, but we may only celebrate this joy because first, he died.
That first Lord’s Day, the women from Jesus’s party went to the garden tomb intent on preparing his body for a proper burial, but they found no body. Instead, in the midst of this immediate shock, they were told, ‘He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and on the third day rise.’ And then they remembered.
They remembered what Jesus had told them, how Jesus had been preparing them for this moment. Their understanding of his words, deeds, and prophecies from scripture was slowly increasing as they were now illuminated. This moment, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, was the pinnacle of prophetic fulfillment. The intercessory work of the Lord’s suffering servant made on behalf of his elect people was now validated by God and confirmed as complete.
So today we return to the prophet Isaiah and turn to one of the more familiar passages from his prophecy, the song of the suffering servant. Previously, we’ve considered the identity of the servant as being both a human and divine Messiah. Consider what the purpose of his mission would be: the release of the captives held in bondage by sin and death, gifting eyesight to the blind, and that he would serve as the mediator of a new or different covenant with the Lord.
Then we considered the character and manner for how he would achieve his purpose: steadfastly, resolutely, and silently in the face of all worldly opposition. So now we consider the terrible means by which our freedom, our new life lived in a relationship with God, and our great eternal joy and hope were accomplished and how they’ve been given to us.
Finally, in this passage, Isaiah tells us exactly what our problem is and informs us of the Lord’s solution for it all: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way.’ Then Isaiah tells us of the divine fix, ‘and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.’
Remember, sheep are simple-minded creatures focused only upon their immediate passions or needs. Their basic biological makeup often leaves them oblivious to the dangers around them as they fully follow whatever has their attention at any given moment. They are easily led astray, turning aside from the way in just a moment, getting easily distracted and stepping off of the straight and safe paths upon which their shepherd leads them.
But the Lord God, from the very beginning, had set out a very narrow path before Adam, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.’ But soon Adam and Eve were deceived and encouraged to go about their own way, to choose their own path when that ancient serpent asked them, ‘Did God actually say?’ So, rather than staying on the path that was clear and true and set before them by the Lord, they stepped off and dove into the depths of the jungle, quickly becoming lost in the woods, much like Bilbo and the dwarves in Mirkwood, with no choice but to forge their own way ahead and unable to find a way back to their original narrow way.
Adam and Eve sinned first, and so now we sin. Now the narrow path of holiness is closed to us as punishment for our sinfulness and our inherent corruption. Now we each wander about, lost and alone in the wilderness, denied a relationship with the Lord, exiled from his presence. Adam and Eve, stepping off of God’s path by eating the forbidden fruit, sinned first; they turned mankind away from his presence.
So now we are born off of that true path, without any good sense of direction telling us where to go. And then the law of God was given to his people at Mount Sinai to be a guide to lead them back—back towards the true path, a path to come near to his presence. However, we sinful people still continue to wander away from even that wider road.
We are lost in the wilderness, without God; our shoes are worn, our clothing is torn, and we are covered from head to toe in muck and grime. We carry the scars upon our very flesh, earned from these lost wanderings in the darkness. But sometimes, in the Lord’s providence, we may stumble back onto the road of law and light for a time before once more slipping off back into the jungle.
We know how much better it is to be on God’s path than it is to go our own way, yet somehow we cannot seem to stay on it. Hopelessly lost and in need of rescue, we need someone to intercede on our behalf, to come find us, clean us up, and bring us back where we belong. We need someone to set us on the path and give us the courage and perseverance, the steadfastness to remain in the way—someone to lead us through to the journey’s end.
Thus the voluntary sacrificial suffering of the Lord’s servant, who alone has walked the narrow path to its conclusion—from the beginning until its very end—happened to establish us in this way. At the Lord’s command, he walked into this treacherous jungle where death reigns and carried his people out. The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all to get us out of the deadly trouble which our sin keeps us in.
Jesus suffered for those sins in our place; he met us where we were, lifted us up and out of the quagmire, and then set us down in his place to be justified before God. The righteous one suffered for our unrighteousness so that by his grace we would be made righteous. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.
Jesus is our perfect substitute; he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world—the perfect man, the final Adam, and the one able to obey the Lord where Adam rebelled. Jesus suffered all of this so that we would not have to; he suffered all of this instead so that we would be healed and made whole. Isaiah warns us of the sad news: ‘Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief.’
All that the servant would suffer, everything that the four Gospels record Jesus experiencing—his betrayal and abandonment by his friends, his rejection by his people, the trial with all manner of false witness being spoken against him, and his unjust conviction and execution—were all part of the express will of God.
How can that be? How could a loving God ever allow, much less require, demand, or ordain all of the particular horrors experienced in Jesus Christ’s sufferings? The physical, mental, and spiritual? God could not; he would not. If Jesus, his servant, was a mere human creature, it would not be righteous. It would in fact be unjust—him knowingly, intentionally, and forcibly punishing one innocent person in place of the guilty many. If it were, then this would be a truly cruel act, and the Lord’s glory would be diminished by it.
But praise God that Jesus went to the cross as a willing volunteer! Yet if Jesus was more than a mere created man—and most certainly he is—if Jesus is God himself, God the Son, who he is, then by their unity of will, God the Father must have willed that God the Son would suffer as an atonement for the elect, and that the God the Son must have been willing to suffer all of these things to redeem the elect—the righteous given for the unrighteous, an atonement sacrifice of substitution which the entire religious system of ancient Israel prefigured and foreshadowed.
This is the divine covenant of redemption, where, within the Godhead, and before the foundation of the world, the three persons of the Trinity agreed to and willed to redeem an elect people for themselves. The cross upon which Jesus died was not an act of utmost horror ordained and commanded by God, as it may first appear; it was the act of God’s purest love. Thus we call a memorial of that occasion, Good Friday.
Jesus interceded for us on that day in this loving manner; he hung in our place as our substitute, took upon himself the curse of God, and suffered for us as the Lord’s servant—to serve his chosen people, his friends and siblings sacrificially. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
But Protestants in our faith ordinarily focus upon the empty cross, the finished work of Christ, and the glory of the resurrection. But all too often we forget about the aspect which the Roman church emphasizes most with their image of the crucifix—the passion of Christ and his sacrificial death. Thus we may forget or ignore something important: without Friday, we do not have Sunday.
Without Jesus’s death, there is no resurrection, and we could not receive the gift of eternal life. We cannot have the empty tomb, which we celebrate today, without first having the cross—the deeper darkness before the brightness of dawn.
So there on that Roman cross, the wrath of God was satisfied; the absolute justice of God was meted out, and in so doing, the love of God was also magnified. That cross, the Lord’s holiness and righteousness, was on full display before the world in this eternally efficacious punishment for sin. Meanwhile, the Lord’s mercy and grace were also in full view through the same vicarious atonement sacrifice.
‘When his soul makes an offering for guilt.’ When? Not if! This event, this pivotal moment of all redemptive history, was ordained by God to happen; it needed to happen according to the eternal plan and is all to God’s glory.
‘When his soul makes an offering for guilt.’ His soul is an unusual turn of phrase; underlying it here is the Hebrew word ‘nephesh,’ a word which encompasses our eternal soul, our life, our minds, our self, and who we are. So we best understand this as that Jesus surrendered and sacrificed the totality of himself on that cross. Yet without this diminishment, he gave up everything for us and then received everything in turn from God.
‘When his soul makes an offering for guilt.’ An offering for guilt has always been a sacrifice of atonement. Under the Mosaic law, both guilt offerings and sin offerings were separate, although connected sacrifices—effectively two sides of the same coin. The sin offering was an expiation, a removal of the sin and a restoration to the righteous state; while the guilt offering was a propitiation, a favorable turning towards the penitent, a restoration of the relationship with God. This intercession of Christ; he turned God’s wrath away from us and took it upon himself.
This is the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds, we are healed. This is the salvation that we received—that we are saved from God’s wrath by God himself. Jesus stepped in front of us and took the blows of judgment that we deserved, thus we have been healed by not being wounded by His every wound.
And thus we live because he died.
Next, here’s the promise of the resurrection. ‘He shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.’ Out of the anguish of his soul, he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
This servant, who was cut off from the land of the living—an expression denoting a fate considered worse than death, dying without any progeny, with no children to remember him or to carry his name forward into the future—shall see his offspring, because his spiritual children will be in view, and he will know them. His efforts and the results of his work will be known, remembered, and will continue on into the future.
The one whom the world considered cursed and wished to forget will be remembered and will be blessed and will be satisfied with the knowledge that his duty has been completed as a job well done.
The servant of the Lord, in bearing the iniquities of the elect, will make many to be accounted righteous. This is how he sets the captives free, releasing those prisoners bound to Satan and death by their sin, drawing out those who were once blind out of the darkness and into God’s light. That first Lord’s Day, raised to life again, transformed and glorified, Jesus, the servant, received his eternal inheritance from God—an inheritance which he then also divides and shares with us, the elect, all the children of God.
‘Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong.’ Since he bore our sins on the cross, because Jesus has interceded for us—transgressors—we have been saved by his grace alone and now live joyfully trusting in his promises.
Through Jesus’ intercession on the cross, the divine transaction, where all of our sins were imputed to him and his righteousness was imputed to us, we have died to sin. Jesus is our perfect substitute, our Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world so that now—under the law, the law’s penalty has been paid—we are freed to live for God.
The Apostle Paul wrote of this day and our lives post-empty tomb, saying in his letter to the Galatians: ‘I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.’
This is the joy which we celebrate today—our resurrection life in Christ Jesus. This is the Gospel of Christ—that in love he gave his life for ours, rescuing us from the evil age in which we live so that now we will live by faith, following his path as the obedient children of God—for his glory alone.
Merry Christmas, for he was pierced for our transgressions and with his wounds we are healed. Happy New Year, for today we celebrate the first day of the Christian life because this is the anniversary of our being raised to life in him!
So make a joyful noise to the Lord! Shout, ‘Hosanna! Our King! Our Messiah King has come and has blessed his people!’
He is risen indeed! Amen.