Amen. If you would please turn with me in your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 50, beginning with the fourth verse.
The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught that I may know how to sustain with the word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens, he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious; I turned not backward. I gave my back to those who strike and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard. I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting. But the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced. Therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame. He who vindicates me is near; who will contend with me? Let us stand up together; who is my adversary? Let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord God helps me; who will declare me guilty? Behold, all of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Lord, you have given us your word—words that are meant to bring us comfort, even when they may seem to be hard words and harsh or unforgiving. They work towards our good to build up within us confidence and hope in all of your promises. We ask that you open our ears and let us hear as those who are taught, and that we will receive what you have to say to us from your prophet Isaiah. It’s in Jesus’ name that we pray. Amen.
So through the prophet Isaiah, we again hear the Lord’s servant speak. We hear him speak words of his divine confidence, words of challenge against the powers arrayed against God, and words of the comforting beautiful hope which he brings for all of God’s chosen people.
Over our past few passages, we have heard about the servant’s predestined, divinely ordained mission to be a covenant for the people, to bring back the preserved of Israel, to be a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison, those who sit in darkness, so that the Lord’s salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.
Today we shall hear more concerning just how God has equipped his servant to accomplish his purpose. The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught that I may know how to sustain with the word him who is weary. Morning by morning, he awakens, he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught.
Now, the expression ‘of those who are taught’ is a Hebrew idiom referring to any kind of devout disciple, but more specifically to a disciple of the Lord. The root word here, ‘lamid,’ is used to mean both learning and teaching; thus, the name of the Jewish Talmud, their book of the collected teachings and wisdom concerning the Torah, is derived from the same root.
However, oddly, but perhaps even more appropriately, “lamid” also forms the root of another core Hebrew word—one of the words that’s used for an ox goad. An ox goad—what would that have to do with anything? What could such a piece of farm equipment possibly have to do with learning God’s law or Christian discipleship? Actually, quite a lot.
First, let’s think: what exactly is an ox goad? An ox goad is a pointed, metal-tipped wooden pole used for driving and directing cattle. The metal tip was often shaped much like a modern fireplace poker, so this is kind of what a farmer would stick the oxen with.
Second, oxen are beasts of burden and the principal powerhouse on any ancient farm. They were often used to drag a plow through the rough ground, forming rows and breaking up the earth so that the farmers could then come along behind them and plant their crops. Oxen are naturally stubborn and intransigent creatures, so in order to keep the rows orderly and neat, two oxen were yoked together and used to pull the plow more evenly. Oftentimes, an older, more experienced ox would be yoked together with a younger ox so that over time, the younger would learn how to work with others and learn the ways in which it should work.
Third, oxen have a very thick skin, a rather tough hide. Thus, it required something sharp and pointed to goad them—by annoying them with a noticeable prick. Using such a quick, sudden, and surprising jolt of pain would force them to react by moving away from the source of pain, yet it also worked without causing them any true injury.
Finally, the heaviness and burden of the yoke, which bound the younger ox with the elder, coupled with the farmer’s use of this goad to prod and prompt the ox in both speed and direction that it should travel, trained the young ox in its regular work duties. The result of this training was the ability of the ox to work with minimal guidance and direction from the farmer. Its path and work had become instinctual, habitual, ingrained, and in one transformational sense, it had become their new natural inclination.
Koheleth, the teacher, Solomon the wise, writes in Ecclesiastes 12:11, “The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings they are given by one shepherd.” Comparing the wisdom that one gains from God in his holy word to an ox goad also reminds us of the words of the Apostle Paul during the third recorded telling of his conversion in Acts 26, telling of where he heard the Lord Jesus say to him: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads,” reminding Paul and us of the natural stubborn inclination of the ox, like most creatures, which is to kick back against whatever seems to hurt us, even when it is for our instruction, our improvement, and ultimately for our lasting benefit.
The word of God, the learning and teaching and understanding that we receive from it, the discipline which comes by our obedience to His law, through the faithfulness of our walk with Jesus Christ, and the conviction and prodding which we feel from the Holy Spirit within us as He progressively sanctifies us—mind, body, and soul—all of these things are like ox goats which teach and transform our stubborn and hardened hearts of stone.
And the Lord’s servant here is one who is completely mastered by this teaching. So the English of the old King James captures this verse a little bit more deeply intended sense by using “of the learned” instead of “as those that are taught,” helping us to understand that the Lord’s servant is not just any student but is one who has fully learned and knows God’s holy law; he has absorbed it to such a degree that it permeates his entire being and guides everything in his life.
That’s when the servant says that the Lord has given him the tongue of those who are taught; he speaks of having been given a prophetic voice. Prophecy does not mean necessarily that he will always speak of things which are yet to come to pass; it is not confined to future telling. Instead, this means that he will proclaim God’s holy word, declaring the divine wisdom and the unchanging truth. He is given the gospel to preach—the good news of God—words which will encourage and sustain the faithful elect who grow weary in this world of sin, wickedness, darkness, and evil, of apostasy and disbelief.
Then when the servant says that the Lord awakens his ear to hear as those that are taught, he does not expressly mean that he hears God’s words as some audible interaction; otherwise, the words might merely be heard and thus pass in one ear and out the other. The servant does not hear as a television husband hears his wife, or as a TV son who hears his mother, listening and then ignoring them—or perhaps, maybe still slowly responding and doing as they were asked, but much later than they were instructed.
No, to the Hebrew ear, the meaning of ‘to hear’ is synonymous with ‘to obey.’ Those people who truly hear God’s word will naturally obey because of Him who commands it. Well, those who obey God naturally have clearly heard Him speak, for they will respond to His word from the heart.
Again, we see that the Lord here is the sole sovereign actor, granting the servant the tongue for divine proclamation. He is Him who awakens and opens the Spirit’s ear for faithful obedience, and we witness the same kind of action on His part throughout the pages of Scripture—in Moses and King David and all the many prophets whom He sent to the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah—and we still continue to see it today in His equipping of pastors.
John Calvin noted here regarding the office of the minister of the word in the Geneva Bible that Isaiah also represents here the person in charge of them that are justly called to the ministry by God’s word, meaning that this is what a pastor is called to do. When he preaches, it truly is because the words of God flow from his lips from a divine, Spirit-led origin and not just coming out from within himself. Not that the pastor is speaking inerrantly or prophetically in the same manner as Scripture, yet it still possesses a kind of theonoestros—God-breathed inspiration.
Preaching is a form of prophecy speaking of God’s eternal truth, yet it never does suggest that we might speak new words of prophetic revelation or that all of the words that we say will always be true or correct or divine, that they will not always be inspired or inherent. This charges us pastors with the responsibility to ensure that what we preach comes from the Lord and not just from within ourselves.
This cautions a pastor to truly and faithfully preach God’s word and not preach the words of men, to not preach my own words or my worldly wisdom, but to only preach and exegete what God has said.
Now, unlike the other ordinary prophets whom the Lord has sent to His people Israel, the servant is very different. As he says of himself, “I was not rebellious; I turned not backward.” Throughout his ministry, the servant remains faithful, standing firm in his divine confidence; he does not turn away or step off of the divinely ordered path, unlike all those others who still suffered from their human sinful and other moral failings.
Moses, the great servant and arbiter of the law, that he was, was denied entry into the promised land because he struck the rock twice in anger at Meribah. King David, the man after God’s own heart, was denied permission to build the Lord’s temple because he was also a man of blood and violence. Elijah, even after witnessing the divine victory over and against the many prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, despaired of his own life and ministry, despairing of any hope that the people of Israel would return to their God and turn away from the idolatrous ways of Jezebel and King Ahab, and he wished for his life to be ended.
Instead, the true servant of the Lord remains steadfast, standing firm in his divine confidence, faithfully speaking thus saith the Lord to the rebellious people. Yet why must it have been such a challenge for the servant, a prophet of God, to remain steadfast and faithful? A prophet of the Lord speaking to the Lord’s people should not have feared anything from them.
Except that the prophets were sent to declare the Lord’s truth, to accuse the people of their faithlessness, their wickedness, their spiritual adultery, their breaking of God’s covenant with them. The duty of the prophet is to call God’s elect to repentance, to correct their ways. They also proclaim the condemnation of the people of the nations—those children of Satan—telling them things that they did not want to hear, while still righteously providing them the Lord’s loving opportunity to repent. An opportunity that sadly, except by the personally applied grace and will of God, they will always ignore.
Steadfastly declaring God’s word is not the way to win a popularity contest in ancient Israel, in Roman-occupied Judea, or in our modern day. Now, concerning this need for the steadfastness of the servant, the Christ, the psalmist King David writes: “Why do the nations rage, and the people’s plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’”
Rebellion is the world’s default response to God and His chosen. The wicked always rage against the righteous; they hate us just as they hate Him. The people of darkness will always hate and fear the light because it reveals their secret shame, so they fight against it, always seeking to snuff out the light.
Praise God that the Lord is truly sovereign over all! Even though within this fallen world, Satan is allowed to hold sway for a time, he does not hold all power, as that ancient serpent’s doom is already written and sure. But remember, before the head of the serpent may be crushed, the heel of the woman’s seed needed first to be bruised to complete the Lord’s eternal plan of redemption.
The servant needed to bring God’s light into the darkness; to release the captives, he needed first to enter into the prison before he could draw them out. Thus, the servant came into the world, bringing the righteous judgment which the world of darkness fears and hates.
Steadfastly, the servant declares, “I gave my back to those who strike, and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard; I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting.” The servant humbly submits to the inflicting of the world’s punishment without protestation. He does not present a vigorous defense because standing fast in the bulwark of God’s truth is the only defense against the lies of Satan’s brood.
Confident in the Lord’s eternal vindication, he presents his back to them to receive their unjust blows.
Now, the growing of a beard for Hebrew men was an important thing; it was a natural thing, a good, God-given thing. Much like the long hair of a woman, which Paul praises in 1 Corinthians, the beard was also something physically obvious and distinctive, which set them apart from other neighboring peoples. A visible difference that carried over even into art.
The beard, for the Hebrew, was a symbol of a man’s age and experience, as well as a sign of one’s ritual purity and holiness before God. Shaving was only expressly commanded and mandated after a person was declared free of leprosy as part of their ritual purification and cleanness. Thus, a man having his beard pulled out or forcibly shorn was culturally considered to be an act of great shame. It was the absolute humiliation for a man, demonstrating that he was possessed of such great weakness that he could not prevent another man from inflicting such a personal offense against his body.
Recall that once King David sent emissaries of peace to the new king of the Ammonites, and that young king shaved off half of their beards, which prompted David to command them to remain away from Jerusalem until their beards had regrown and they were no longer so shamed.
Yet here, we know that the servant permits himself to suffer this kind of cultural humiliation. But beyond the submission to physical abuse, the shame of having his beard torn, the servant also withstands another sign of rejection and disgrace when he is spat upon, even in the face. An act which is universally understood negatively by all the peoples in the world.
Despite all this, the servant sets his face like a flint—stoney, hard, and impassive—against the world’s rejection. Unmoved and undeterred, he is able to say, “But the Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame.”
Because in the eyes of Him only whose opinion truly matters, he is not disgraced, and he does not suffer shame, for the disgrace of the world becomes the glory of God.
We see the great prophetic fulfillment of this in the hours before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. His crucifixion, as horrible a means of execution as it was, was made so much more horrible and degrading because of the terrible specific and personal humiliation that he experienced before going to the cross.
Mark the evangelist describes the scene for us: “So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified. And the soldiers led him away inside the palace, that is, the governor’s headquarters, and they called together the whole battalion. And they clothed him in a purple cloak and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on him, and they began to salute him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him, and they led him out to crucify him.”
Jesus was scourged; He received those blows upon His back and His whole body. Jesus was beaten with a reed; Jesus was spat upon. And although Scripture does not expressly state it, having His beard and hair pulled and beard torn was likely a portion of the abuse which Jesus received at the hands of the Jewish council before he was handed over to the Romans.
Even still, He did not turn away from God, for He knew that through all these things He who vindicates Him is near. The Lord’s prophesied servant, Jesus Christ, suffered all of this abuse because of His faithfulness to God’s word, for His steadfastness and obedience to God’s command, like all the prophets who came before Him.
Yet He is different because He alone is truly righteous and undeserving of any condemnation. Like Jesus, like the prophets before Him, abuse and disgrace at the hands of and in the eyes of the world are what all the Lord’s faithful chosen people have to look forward to in this life.
So we too need to remain steadfast while—often not to the same degree—God’s elect will experience the very same rejection by the people of the world. It is no wonder that we often grow weary and that we need His word to sustain us and encourage us through all of our sufferings.
Yet we are encouraged through our union with Christ because of His obedience, His steadfastness, and His vindication, so that we will be truly like Him in the end.
Just a few short hours before His arrest, Jesus told His disciples, “I have said these things to you that in me you may have peace. In the world, you will have tribulation, but take heart; I have overcome the world.” That is such a word of comfort, for yes, we are promised to suffer and experience tribulations, but we are not to be downcast because Jesus wins.
Jesus has won the victory; therefore we may have peace even in the midst of all the turmoil of our lives. The servant Jesus endured all these things because he knew the Lord God helps him; therefore he has not been disgraced.
Before the world, he is disgraced and humiliated, but we know the truth that before the one who matters—the only one who truly matters, the Lord God—he is not put to shame or disgraced. Therefore we will not fear, we will not worry, we will not falter in the face of all the world’s abuse, because like Jesus Christ, so long as we remain faithful to Him, we will not be shamed before our heavenly Father.
Because He alone is our vindicator, our justifier. Having spoken previously about the different interpretations concerning the identity of the servant—whether a singular individual or of Jewish Israel—this particular text makes that second thesis difficult to affirm.
Where other times we can see the covenant relationship of a representative mediator standing in place of the whole body, here, the affirmations which the servant makes cannot be reasonably applied to either the natural ethnic Israel or even to our understanding of the greater Israel and all the elect of God, chosen before the foundation of the world, composed of both Jews and the Gentile nations.
The servant here affirms of himself, “The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious; I turned not backward. I gave my back to those who strike and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard; I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting.”
Although the Lord revealed His law to His people at Mount Sinai and trusted them with the oracles of God, time and again they were proven to be stiff-necked and rebellious people, constantly turning aside from the path which the Lord had established for them to walk in. No better than any of the rest of us, they grumbled and murmured against Moses, Aaron, and the Lord in the wilderness.
Again and again, they refused to enter the promised land of Canaan, allowing their fear of the peoples in the land to override their faith and trust in the Lord, leading to 40 years in the wilderness; often and repeatedly falling into apostasy and idolatry as a people, which led to their ultimate exile from the land. They ignored and murdered the prophets whom the Lord sent to call them back to repentance, and they ignored the divinely mandated sabbaths for the land, which were enjoyed eventually during the 70 years of the exile.
So throughout recorded history, there is no sense by which the Jewish people could ever truthfully claim to not be rebels against the Lord—just like the rest of humanity.
Now, while the Jews themselves have indeed been feared and hated as a people throughout the centuries—experiencing all manner of persecution, violence, injustice, and abuse—they have not suffered silently or stoically, nor have they sought it out willingly. Yet God is still so gracious to them and to us.
Now, when all the servant passages are considered, Scripture here can only speak of one person—a singular and unique individual, a man who is above all reproach—and it cannot be describing one who is the recipient of the Lord’s salvation but is instead the agent who brings salvation to sinners like us, Jesus Christ.
But now the scene turns, and it’s as if we are gifted a glimpse into the divine courtroom. The Lord God, our heavenly Father, sits in the judgment seat. The Lord God, our heavenly brother, Jesus Christ, God the Son, the servant of the Lord stands there in the place of defense, standing before the eternal Father who justifies and condemns.
To declare his challenge: “Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together; who is my adversary? Let him come near to me.” Who will stand before the divine throne and condemn his servant? Who can produce any evidence of his wrongdoing?
Who may judge him? Who can indict or convict him? Can Satan? Can the world? No, clearly not! Only the one without sin is righteous enough to judge and convict, and he is the very same one who vindicates him—God.
Behold, the Lord God helps me; who will declare me guilty? Behold, all of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.
The world— all creation, the heavens and the earth—even Satan himself cannot stand against the Lord’s Christ. They all will fade and pass away; they are corruptible, finite, and cannot last, but the servant of the Lord, the Lord’s anointed, is incorruptible. He is eternally righteous and just, for He is the Lord.
Also, in the final day of judgment, only Christ shall stand—for only Christ remains. This is why our gracious union with Him by our divinely imparted faith in Him is such a beautiful comfort for us.
Those whom He has chosen, those whom He has called, will also stand before that very same throne in the very same spot, united in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. We will stand there confidently and steadfastly and boldly, also declaring to our adversary, the accuser of our sins, to Satan’s face, “Behold, the Lord God helps me; who will declare me guilty?”
The glorious answer to the question is no one. The only one who could is Christ, and He died for us to forgive us of our sins and rescue us from this evil age. Our rescuer shall not condemn us, for He is our help and our justifier.
So let us be like those that are taught, standing steadfast with Christ in faith, so that when all this world passes away, we too shall remain together in Jesus, the steadfast servant of the Lord. Amen.