Introduction
Every thing in this wonderful Messianic outlook is now ready. The Gospel is a gift to the entire world. The promises in the preceding chapters are infallible. God so declares by asseverations plain and strong enough, and he commands the acceptance of them in a way quite new to the experience of the old-time Israelites, namely, by a self-appropriation of them through faith. Through faith in whom? The fifty-third chapter, containing the central doctrine of the system, especially gives the answer. Israel’s sin calls for atonement through a self-offered sacrifice of infinitely greater value than “the blood of bulls and goats.” What Can criticism that favours post-exilian authorship do with these chapters? If prophecy, as such criticism holds, is not supernatural, and is not valid except it speaks fittingly to the thoughts of its own times, then this exilian notion of authorship is utterly at discount, for these chapters speak neither to the epoch of Isaiah nor to that of the exile, but to the successively rising planes of Peter, and John, and Paul, and to the far ages of the Church still future.
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