In my earlier post, I spoke about how the Messiah is a saviour – in the sense of dealing with the evil, suffering, injustice and chaos of this world. The King/Son of Man would defeat the enemies of God, who by association are the enemies of God’s people, and bring peace and justice to the whole creation.
This is however only one side of Messiah’s saving work. It’s the side that the disciples (and the Jews) got: they understood Psalm 2 &110. What they didn’t get was Isaiah 53 – or rather that the suffering servant is the Messiah, and that Jesus embodied both. This is why Jesus commended Peter for his confession of him as Christ/Son of God, but rebuked him when Peter refused to accept that the Messiah must die.
Isaiah 53 speaks of another aspect of salvation – from the righteous wrath of God. When we read the OT we cannot avoid the fact that God’s wrath is expressed against those who He calls his own people. Even as God was rescuing them from Egypt and making a covenant with them, calling them His people and He their God, it was made very clear to them that there was still a barrier between Him and them: no-one was allowed to even touch the mountain or they would die; no-one but Moses could enter the tent of meeting; and the priests were required to offer bloody sacrifices to deal with people’s sin. The Israelites were constantly selling themselves out to idolatry and forsaking God, showing that their hearts were far from Him, to the point where in His anger He sent them into exile.
All of these things were signs to Israel (and to us, as we look back) that the ‘physical’ aspects of God’s salvation – Land, offspring, prosperity, kingdom, etc. were only pointers to the heart of salvation – salvation from sin, and form the wrath that sin deserves. The history of God’s anger tells us, among other things, that in order to be truly God’s people, the fact of sin and wrath need to be dealt with.
There would have been no doubt in the Israelite’s mind as they went to the temple of three things:
- Sin is serious. The sight of an animal being slaughtered, it’s blood drained, its guts ripped open and its carcass being consumed by fire may sound to us to be macabre, bloody, primitive, crass and obscene; this is because sin is macabre, bloody, primitive, crass and obscene and the sacrifice is an image of what sin both does and deserves.
- Sin can only be justly dealt with by death. Because God is Love, He is also just. He demands, in His holy Love, that all offences against Himself and against His creation be punished. The scales of justice must be balanced, or God would not be good.
- Therefore the only way that God’s justice be satisfied, and a guilty, vile, wretched sinner such as I be saved, is if a substitute is provided, who pays my own debt and receives the wages of death that I have earned. This is what the sacrificial system pictured: what we call penal substitutionary atonement.
This is why the Messiah had to die, if he were to be truly the saviour. Setting up an earthly kingdom in the place of the Romans would not change a thing – it would just be a repeat of the Old Testament; another loop in the cycle, since the hearts of people would be still the same.
This is why, when Jesus was about to be arrested and crucified, he said, ‘The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified!’ (John 12:23, 13:31).
New Jerusalem 