
Come And Reason Ministries
Come And Reason Ministries helping you learn to discern.
Come And Reason Ministries
Come And Reason Ministries – helping you learn to discern.
Isaiah is called the gospel prophet, the prophet who brings the good news. It’s in the book of Isaiah that we find the beautiful description of the coming Messiah, who becomes a real human:
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end (9:6, 7 NIV84).
In Isaiah 53, we find the powerful prophetic description of Jesus’ mission to take upon Himself our sin-sick condition, to suffer and die to procure the remedy to sin. We read that by “his stripes we are healed”—yet that we would miss the truth that Jesus was suffering to cure the sin condition and heal humankind and, instead, draw the false conclusion that it was God who was punishing Him:
Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted (53:4 NIV84).
Oh, how Christians have misunderstood! We have failed to fully realize what it means that God so loved the world that He sent His only Son. It was the Father’s will to send Jesus to fulfill Their joint purpose of destroying the devil and his power (Hebrews 2:14), annihilating death (2 Timothy 1:10), and restoring humankind to sinless perfection (1 John 3:8; Hebrews 5:9, 8:10; Ephesians 2:15). They accomplished this through Jesus becoming a real human, taking the sin condition upon Himself, being tempted in every way like us (Hebrews 4:15), and overcoming. It was the Father’s will and the Son’s will for Jesus to be crushed by our sin-sick condition in order to overcome and cure the condition and thereby provide remedy to all who trust Him. Just as Paul wrote:
God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21, 22 NIV84).
And God, seeing the saving result of the suffering of Jesus, was satisfied with the result (Isaiah 53:11): humankind saved and restored to eternal life!
Yes, Isaiah proclaimed the gospel—the good news about God’s character of love and the promised Messiah to provide remedy to our terminal sin condition, so that by faith in Him we may be healed. Praise God!
But I wonder, if Isaiah came to us, to our Christian churches today, and spoke to us the way he spoke to Israel, what would be our response? Would we rejoice? Would we recognize his words as a message from God, or would we become angry and deny the message was from God?
Imagine sitting in your church pew when a man, claiming to be a messenger from God, speaks the following, adapted from chapter 1 of Isaiah, to your church. How would you react? .
I pray that as we start this new year, we will embrace the words of Isaiah and Come and Reason together with God—that His truth will set us free and that His love will heal our hearts, and though we have histories filled with the dark stains of sin, through Jesus, we are washed clean, reborn with new hearts and right spirits, and made pure.
So, Come and Reason together with us in 2021 as we work together to advance God’s kingdom of love!