Isaiah 42:1

1. Behold my servant Who is meant? Not Israel, as in Isaiah 41:8, nor the prophet himself, because what is affirmed of this “servant” transcends what any Old Testament prophet was ever called to, and what any mere man was ever capable of doing. The Targum adds Messiah to the words “my servant,” as explanatory of them. And Abarbanel, the Jewish enemy of Christians, says those who interpret otherwise are “smitten with blindness.” To the conception of a transcendent Personality the word must refer, from attributes following, which are applicable only to such a conception; in other words, to the incarnate Redeemer, looming up to the prophet’s eye from the far future. It may be asked what affinity has this word here with the same word in Isaiah 41:8, and in Isaiah 42:19-20, where it seems God’s true Israel is called his “servant.” The answer is, our prophet was of the broadest cast of mind; of loftiest spiritual conceptions withal; and was ever certain of victory crowning truth and righteousness as against idolatry and sin; and the conqueror was ever to be the Messiah, first of the Davidic type of kingly glory and righteousness, (Isaiah 17:12;) then Jehovah and co-workers, namely, the embodied idea of the true Israel as in these chapters, (41-47;) then the holy seed descended from Abraham, the indestructible germ, in which the continuity of Israel was preserved, culminating in the Christ, as St. Paul interprets in Galatians 3:16. The one true Israel becomes thus individualized in the person of the future great deliverer, the coming Christ. Delitzsch illustrates by a pyramid, of which the base is Israel as a whole; the central section Israel according to the flesh, but purified, and so the remnant Israel; the apex is the personal Messiah springing out of Israel. God has also his “servants” outside of Israel; of whom, in these chapters, is Cyrus, representing employed agencies from the Gentile world over whom he rules, as do typical Messianic agencies from Israel in whom he rules.