Isaiah 53:4 - Exposition

Surely he hath borne our griefs ; or, surely they were our griefs which he bore. The pronouns are emphatic. Having set forth at length the fact of the Servant's humiliation ( Isaiah 53:2 , Isaiah 53:3 ), the prophet hastens to declare the reason of it. Twelve times over within the space of nine verses he asserts. with the most emphatic reiteration, that all the Servant's sufferings were vicarious, borne for him, to save him from the consequences of his sins, to enable him to escape punishment. The doctrine thus taught in the Old Testament is set forth! with equal distinctness in the New ( Matthew 20:28 ; John 11:50-52 ; Romans 3:25 ; Romans 5:6-8 ; Romans 8:3 ; 2 Corinthians 5:18-21 ; 2 Corinthians 8:9 ; Galatians 3:13 ; Ephesians 1:7 ; 1 Peter 2:24 , etc.), and forms the hope, the trust, and the consolation of Christians. and carried our sorrows. The application which St. Matthew makes of this passage to our Lord's miracles of healing ( Matthew 8:17 ) is certainly not the primary sense of the words, but may be regarded as a secondary application of them. Christ's sufferings were the remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God . They who saw Christ suffer, instead of understanding that he was bearing the sins of others in a mediatorial capacity, imagined that he was suffering at God's hands for his own sins. Hence they scoffed at him and reviled him, even in his greatest agonies ( Matthew 27:39-44 ). To one only, and him not one of God's people, was it given to see the contrary, and to declare aloud, at the moment of the death, "Certainly this was a righteous Man" ( Luke 23:47 ).