Thoughts on Isaiah 53 & Revelation

Today’s reading: Isaiah 52-53; Revelation 18

Isaiah 53 is a really interesting piece of Scripture because if you gave it to someone, even many non-Christians, without telling them that it was from the Old Testament, and asked them who it was about, they would probably tell you Jesus, and yet, despite being so clear, nobody put it together until after Jesus rose from the dead and pointed them back to it.

If you haven’t read Isaiah 53 closely before, or if you’re reading through the reading plan with us and just skimmed over it without paying too much attention, go back and give it a read; it’s relatively short, so it won’t take you too long, but it’s incredibly worth it.

Isaiah 53 is full of statements like:

But he was pierced for our transgressions;

he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

and with his woulds we are healed.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;

he has put him to grief;

when his soul makes an offering for guilt,

he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;

because he poured out his soul to death

and was numbered with the transgressors;

yet he bore the sin of many,

and makes intercession for the transgressors.

The crazy thing is that while I picked three verses out of the broader chapter, really the whole thing reads like this, declaring very clearly what Jesus was going to do in going to the cross to pay for sins. And yet, like I mentioned at the start, despite being so clear in hindsight, nobody in Jesus’ day, or before His day, put this together and knew what was happening.

In His infinite wisdom, God told us what would happen, but in such a way as even His spiritual enemies couldn’t tell beforehand what He was going to do until it was too late.

As we’ve been reading through Revelation, I’ve mentioned this a couple times, but I think we have to realize the same kinds of things are happening in Revelation as in Isaiah. So many Christians, theologians, commentators, etc. get obsessed with figuring out how everything in Revelation is going to play out. They try to stitch together events, figure out which things are which, who the Antichrist will be, what type of helicopter they think the locusts rising from the pit actually are (because we assume they can’t be spiritual creatures), which nations are Gog and Magog, etc. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t try to understand the book of Revelation by any stretch, but even in the midst of the visions and such that John records, there are things that he is explicitly told not to record, so we know for certain that we on’t have all of the info. God has enemies who are constantly working to thwart His plans and bring their own to fruition, so God is not going to give them enough information to effectively stop His plans. Like in Isaiah, He is giving us probably a lot more than we realize, such that after the fact nobody will be able to say it was not the Lord’s hand at work or His plan in motion to bring about His purposes, but until that day comes, there will be critical pieces of the puzzle missing such that neither we, nor God’s spiritual enemies, can paint an exact picture of His plans.

I point that all out to say that we shouldn’t feel like we have to come up with a full end-times scheme, mapping out how everything will play out leading up to the last days, as we read through Revelation. And, along with that, if someone tells you they have Revelation all figured out, you can probably pretty safely ignore what they have to say about it because that would seem to defeat the point of the intentional ambiguity the Lord baked into it, and they are not wiser than the Lord Himself…