Isaiah 42:1

FEATURING A PROPHECY OF THE MESSIAH

By far the most interesting part of this chapter is found at the very beginning.

Isaiah 42:1-4

"Behold, my servant whom I will uphold; my chosen in whom my soul delighteth: I will put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. He will not cry, nor lift up his voice, nor cause it to be heard in the street. A bruised reed will he not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench: he will bring forth justice in truth. He will not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set justice in the earth; and the isles shall wait for his law."

The certainty that it is Jesus Christ the Messiah who is actually prophesied here has been known for ages; and only the rebellious perversity of deluded and hardened minds could be responsible for the regrettable fact that today one finds the true meaning denied by a few.

"The ancient Chaldee version translates the first line here: `Behold, my servant, Messiah.' The apostle Matthew applied it directly to Jesus Christ; nor can the passage with any justice or propriety be applied to any other person or character whatsoever."[1]

In the New Testament, Matthew quoted this whole passage verbatim in Matthew 12:18-21, stating that the prophet Isaiah had written this, and applying every word of it to Jesus Christ. It is the unwavering conviction of this writer that the Gospel of Matthew is a true portion of God's Word, every word of which we hold to be absolute and unalterable truth!

I have already written an exegesis of this paragraph in Vol. 1 of my New Testament Series of Commentaries (Matthew), pp. 170,171.

"Reference is here made to other writers regarding their comments on this passage: Only Christ fulfills the assignment here; all others fall short.[2] The Messiah-Servant is presented here as the tender Prophet; and clearly the Servant is here presented as an individual, not as the nation of Israel.[3] This speaks of Christ the antitype of Israel, and also the antitype of Cyrus.[4] Christ, the Servant, here is closely related to Israel. The mention of God's Spirit given to Christ upon the occasion of his baptism (Matthew 3:17) emphasizes that the Servant is an individual, standing out from the mass of Israel, a fact strongly emphasized again in Isaiah 42:18, below.[5] There are few indeed who deny that "the Servant of the Lord" here is the Messiah. The portraiture has so strong an individuality and such marked personal features, that he cannot possibly be merely a personified collective."[6]

No matter how undeniable an interpretation may be, the diehard critics will not have it so. "Isaiah 42:1-4 mean that Yahweh has called Israel, taken him by the hand, made him a covenant and a light to the nations, to bring them forth from the prison-house of glimmering darkness."[7] It is charitable to suppose that Wardle ever read the rest of this chapter, where it is unequivocally stated that the nation of Israel was both blind and deaf! How could such a nation be thought of as light and a covenant to all the nations? Furthermore, this remains the status of secular Israel until this day.

In our Introduction to Isaiah, we pointed out that splitting Isaiah once by no means solves any problem. Kelley tells us that, "Bernard Duhm (we do not know if this last name is pronounced Dumb or Doom!) published a commentary in 1892 and revealed that he had isolated four `Servant Songs' (Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; and 52:13-53:12), alleging that they were so different from the material in which they were embedded that they must have been written, not by their imaginative Deutero-Isaiah, but by someone else!"[8] Such a ridiculous error as this is due to the failure to recognize the close relationship between Christ and the First Israel and also between Christ and Cyrus, our Lord being undoubtedly the antitype of each of these, as noted by Jamieson, above in footnote 4.

The most deplorable error of interpretation with regard to the Old Testament and to Israel particularly is that of the failure to distinguish `which Israel' is meant. All of the glorious promises to Abraham never pertained in any degree to the mere physical descendants of that patriarch, but to his "spiritual seed," the "true Israel," the honorable people of "like character and faith of Abraham." The stupendous error of the critics in supposing that the nation of physical Israel is "the Ideal Servant" of Jehovah is due to their confusing the sinful kingdom of Israel with the "Servant" in whom the Lord was delighted, and who is here promised that Jehovah will uphold him, etc. That Israel is the "True Israel"; and just who is he? The apostle John quoted Jesus himself on this, and he said, "I am the true vine" (John 15:1). The physical, secular Israel was never, for a moment, the "true vine." Christ only is the True Vine, the True Israel; and just who is the Old Israel? Jeremiah tells us what kind of vine Israel became:

"To Israel: Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate branches of a vine foreign unto me?" (Jeremiah 2:21).

Note also that Isaiah had stressed this very same fact in Isaiah 5:3-8, where it is revealed that: although Israel (the physical Israel) had been intended to produce grapes, instead it produced only wild grapes and was fit only to be destroyed. There are literally countless passages of the Old Testament that dwell upon this tragic truth; and yet, throughout the Old Testament, God continually reiterated the truth that all of the sacred promises to the patriarchs were yet to be fulfilled. How? In the spiritual Israel, of course!

In this very chapter, the two Israels are dramatically presented; and without the information conveyed here, no understanding whatever is possible with reference to whole sections of the Old Testament. The two Israels in view here are the blind and deaf and rebellious Israel, and the Holy Christ who is the "True Israel," "the True Israel" of the New Testament. The first Israel is a type of the True Israel which is Christ.

The first Israel came up out of Egypt, being called forth from Egypt by God; Christ the True Israel also was called out of Egypt (See Hosea 11:1 and Matthew 2:15). The birth of the first Israel as a nation was accompanied by a wholesale slaughter of innocent babies by Pharaoh who sought to destroy Israel; and the birth of the True Israel (Christ) was likewise accompanied by the wholesale slaughter of the innocents by Herod the Great. All of the first Israel were descended from Abraham; so was Jesus Christ the True Israel (Matthew 1:1). The first Israel, namely, Jacob, died; and Joseph begged the body of the first Israel from Pharaoh for the purpose of burying it; and when the True Israel (Jesus Christ) died, another Joseph begged the body of Pilate in order to bury it. The old Israel received "bread from heaven" in the form of manna in the wilderness; the New Israel receives Christ as the "bread from heaven," eating of his flesh and of his blood in the symbolical ritual of the Lord's Supper in the "wilderness of the Church's current probation." This is an extensive subject; but these few lines will demonstrate the validity of the type-antitype relationship between the two Israels.

Note what is said here of the character of "The Servant." God's soul delighteth in him (the prophetic present for the future verb). Could this refer to the "nation" of the Old Israel? Certainly not. Ezekiel stated that the secular nation had become worse than Sodom and Gomorrah (Ezekiel 16). He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. The Old Israel absolutely refused to do this; and they are still refusing to do it in the case of the shamefully displaced Palestinians. Only in the Ideal Israel, Jesus Christ our Lord, has justice and salvation ever come to the Gentiles. It was primarily because the physical Israel understood Jesus' intention of saving Gentiles that they rejected him and engineered his crucifixion.

"And the isles wait for his law ..." (Isaiah 42:4). Delitzsch as quoted by Rawlinson stated that, "It is an actual fact that the cry for redemption runs through the whole human race. They are possessed by an earnest longing, the ultimate object of which is, however unconsciously, the Servant of Jehovah and his instruction from Zion."[9]