'It pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: when Thou
shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He
shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in
His hand.'--ISAIAH liii. 10.
We have seen a distinct progress of thought in the preceding verses.
There was first the outline of the sorrows and rejection of the
Servant; second, the profound explanation of these as being for us;
third, the sufferings, death and burial of the Servant.
We have followed Him to the grave. What more can there be to be said?
Whether the Servant of the Lord be an individual or a collective or an
ideal, surely all fitness of metaphor, all reality of fact would
require that His work should be represented as ending with His life,
and that what might follow His burial should be the influence of His
memory, the continued operation of the principles He had set agoing and
so on, but nothing more.
Now observe that, however we may explain the fact, this is the fact to
be explained, that there is a whole section, this closing one, devoted
to the celebration of His work after His death and burial, and, still
more remarkable, that the prophecy says nothing about His activity on
the world till _after_ death. In all the former portion there is not a
syllable about His doing anything, only about His suffering; and then
when He is dead He begins to work. That is the subject of these last
three verses, and it would be proper to take them all for our
consideration now, but fur two reasons, one, because of their great
fulness and importance, and one because, as you will observe, the two
latter verses are a direct address of God's concerning the Servant. The
prophetic words, spoken as in his own person, end with verse 10, and,
catching up their representations, expanding, defining, glorifying
them, comes the solemn thunder of the voice of God. I now deal only
with the prophet's vision of the work of the Servant of the Lord.
One other preliminary remark is that the work of the Servant after
death is described in these verses with constant and very emphatic
reference to His previous sufferings. The closeness of connection
between these two is thus thrown into great prominence.