Perhaps nothing was so unbelievable and unacceptable to the Jewish people who longed for the coming of their promised Messiah as was the necessity of His death. After all, the Messiah, when He would finally come, was destined to rule and subjugate the enemies of Israel. The possibility, or worse still, the necessity, of the death of this One simply did not compute in the mind of any Jew. It still doesn’t, but it should. It should because the very purpose of His coming was to die, to die for the sins of the entire humanity that had been plunged into the death cycle from Genesis 3 onward. Few prophecies in the Old Testament speak so very clearly about the mission of the Messiah as did those that predicted His death. It is part of what the New Testament calls “the mystery” of Christ, that being that out of His death would come life. His death would balance the scales of divine justice, As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Isaiah, in chapter 53, sets forth one of the clearest of all messianic passages. Many Jews, upon hearing the prophecy of Isaiah 53, assume it is from the Christian New Testament, which, of course, they do not accept. But it isn’t; it’s right out of their Hebrew Bible, their prophet Isaiah, speaking of their Messiah Yeshua Ha-Mashiach. Listen to it: verses 3, 4, and 5, “He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely our griefs, He Himself bore, and our sorrows he carried. Yet, we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging, we are healed.”
Of whom is the prophet speaking? He speaks of the Messiah and what He would experience when He would come seven hundred years future from the time Isaiah wrote that. And add to Isaiah 53 Psalm 22, 34, 38, 68, 69, 109, Zechariah 11 and 13, plus others too numerous to mention. All these Old Testament prophesies were fulfilled in the first advent of Jesus Christ with such stunning accuracy so as to defy any other explanation. Any other explanation short of it all being carried out of the greatest single event in all human history, orchestrated by the very God of heaven in concert with His Trinitarian constitution. It was the Father who sent the Son to die, and the Son was offered through the eternal Spirit. It’s the very heartbeat of messianic prophecy.
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