The words around which we are going to gather today are at the beginning of the forty-second chapter of the prophecies of Isaiah.
Behold, My servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen, in whom My soul delighteth.
For the moment, the first clause: “Behold, My servant.”
We are going to be occupied with the servant of the Lord; that is, with the nature, the method, and the means of the service of God. What is true service to God? How, and by what means, is God most truly served?
I am sure that we all come down to a matter of this kind: that, being here on this earth and passing this way only once, when it comes near to the end it seems to have been so short. But that it shall have meant that, in some vital ways, the Lord has been served by our being here—I say, surely goes to the heart of every one of us.
And that is why we will respond to any help that may be given in understanding how that can be. That is the thing that the Lord has laid on my heart for this time.
Those who have but a superficial knowledge of the Bible only need to have it mentioned for it to spring into life and recognition: the idea of service. The law of service is a dominant one throughout all the Scriptures.
When we open our Bible and begin, we find that man was not only made himself as something to satisfy a divine idea; not only was he given a great wealth of things to enjoy and by which to profit; but he was given a trust. He was put in trust by God. He was called immediately into a vocation.
From there, right on through the Bible, that law of vocation, that principle of service, is a golden thread running through the whole fabric.
Till we reach the end of the Bible, the last words are these:
And His servants shall serve Him;
and they shall see His face.
Abraham’s election and call was, above everything else, vocation. The same was manifestly true of Moses, who goes down in history with the title, “Moses, My servant.”
Israel’s very constitution and redemption was on the basis of that word:
Let My people go, that they may serve Me.
The law of service governed their very beginnings and remained the law of their life. It determined everything where they were concerned.
It is very clear that this is true of David, and of all the intermediary servants of the Lord—the priests, the kings, the prophets, and the nations. They all represented this divine idea of a purpose to be served, a vocation to be fulfilled, a work to be done.
When we pass into the New Testament, this truth is so self-evident that we should be wasting time to stay to point it out. The great phrase, with which we are very familiar, used by the Apostle Paul, is: “Called according to His purpose.”
That is a very comprehensive phrase. We must interpret it aright. “Called according to His purpose” does not just mean called to be something, although it does mean that; or called to have something, although it means that.
It means, supremely, called to a great vocation. “Called according to His purpose” relates to a work to be done—something in which God is to be served.
The idea of service and servanthood runs through these prophecies from which we have extracted this fragment. In a certain section of this book, this idea comes out as being the very core and the very sum of everything else in the book.
If you will think about it and go back to it with this thought in mind, you will find that all that is in this book—and there is much in it—circles around this vocation of the servant of the Lord.
Much of the tragedy that is recorded here is simply the tragedy of the Lord’s people: they have failed in this very matter of vocation. All the hope and prospect that is presented is closely bound up with some recovery of this vocation.
There is a great deal here. I would like to spend time with this book, taking you right through with this word, servant. I think I shall not do that, although I have underlined in this book the word servant and am tremendously impressed—and you would be also—with the large number of times that the word occurs in these prophecies.
If you have not noticed it, I suggest that you do what I have done: let the Book of Isaiah stand out, and then read it in the light of this one word, the word servant. You will come to the same conclusion that I have come to: that the core of everything here, the sum of everything here, is servanthood, or the service of the Lord.
Now, when we do consider the book in the light of this dominant factor, we find that it resolves itself into three aspects.
First of all, this servant vocation was fundamental to the choice of the whole nation; that is, the people of God as a people.
We will repeat that. Make it perfectly clear: this conception of servanthood was fundamental to their election, to their choice and separation, their calling, and their constitution.
In a very real sense, this book reveals that their existence was hanging upon this one thing: a divine vocation, their service to God. Should they fail there, there was no longer any justification for their being that nation.
But then, that is exactly what did happen. There is this fundamental calling, the law of their calling—service, or servanthood—but, as a whole, as a nation in entirety, they failed in this very thing.
Because of that, they are put aside. This book sees the nation, at least as the time begins, set on one side, put out of its place, and totally inoperative in relation to God—set aside from usefulness and right out of the way—all because of this one thing: failure in the very constituent of their existence, the service of the Lord.
You will be recalling some of these passages, which I have not time to quote, which relate this very phrase, “My servant,” to Israel:
Thus saith the Lord,
Israel, thou art My servant;
Jacob, whom I have chosen.
That is a collective term. So it was. That is the first thing: the idea of the people of God as a corporate whole is that of servanthood. Let us hold that, because we have got to come back and say much more about it.
The second thing: because of the failure of the nation as a whole, we find the transition from the nation to a single person—Person with a capital P.
Whereas, in the first instance, the nation was God’s servant, that was taken away from the nation and transferred to this individual, this Person.
We could take up a second series of passages from the book which bring that truth into view:
My servant, My chosen,
in whom My soul delighteth.
That is a contrasting picture: that which is to satisfy the soul of God.
There begins, then, this presentation and unfolding of the servant of the Lord as related to the Messiah, the Christ—all these Messianic prophecies about the Lord Jesus as the servant of the Lord.
In that Person, all the original, full, perfect thought of God as to servanthood—the essential meaning of it—was taken up, exemplified, and fulfilled in this individual, in this One: “My servant.”
That is the second thing that this book brings so clearly into view.
The third thing is the reappearance and perpetuation of the idea: lost in the whole nation, saved in the individual, and deposited in a remnant.
A remnant is constituted on the basis of the individual, taking its character from the servant of the Lord as that one Person.
The word remnant occurs some dozen times in this book, but we know so well that it runs through most of the prophets. It is a governing idea in the prophets:
A remnant shall return.
The Lord will preserve unto Himself a remnant. That remnant becomes the repository of this divine law of servanthood.
One of the last things said about the remnant in the Old Testament is, “My peculiar treasure.” Not because of what they were in themselves, but because of the purpose which they served: recovering the divine thought of servanthood.
So we have here these three things:
The Person is not introduced in Chapter 9. Everybody is familiar with the words descriptive of Him there:
Wonderful Counsellor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.
He is introduced in full form in Chapter 11:
Unto us a child is born,
unto us a son is given.
Here He is described in the following presentation as to His spiritual nature and character. We are not staying with all those details at the moment. Here He is introduced, appointed, tested through suffering.
Remember the heart of Isaiah 53:
My righteous servant shall justify many.
Tested through sufferings and triumphant:
My servant shall be exalted and lifted up,
and shall be very high.
Then, through suffering, power; and finally, attested: “My peculiar treasure.”
So step back a moment. This book has a very great deal in it about the judgment of the nation. That judgment fills many pages, and worldliness was the cause of the judgment. It was vocation that was the crux of the whole matter.
Remember this: the vocation of the people of God rests entirely upon their separateness from this world. Therefore, to destroy, nullify, or paralyse their mighty God-given vocation, the great enemy will always seek to create a link between them and this world.
That was at the bottom of the prophets: the link that had come about between this nation and the other nations and this world, resulting in their being found totally incapable in their vocation in the world and among the nations.
The judgment was not only because of their condition; it was because of failure in the very object of their existence.
If something ceases to fulfil the purpose for which it was created, it may still be that object, that entity; but with God it no longer stands where it did stand in His acceptance when the purpose of its creation is lost.
Well, that, of course, is something quite obvious. But, you know, there is a principle wrapped up in that. We all recognize that what matters to God is not that we are just Christians, called God’s people. It is that we are fulfilling the purpose of our existence as such: the vocation.
Walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called.
As to the Person, it is quite clear, from what I have said and from the reading of this book, that He is central. He is central to everything.
It is impressive that, so early in the book—the point marked by our division of chapters as Chapter 9—so early He is introduced, as though He is placed there to dominate all the prophecy. A great deal is going to follow, but it will all be under the head of this One whom God has Himself appointed. He is central.
As to the remnant, all we at this moment would say—but we have a lot more to say presently—is that the remnant represents the abiding principle of God’s purpose and God’s method.
We are familiar with this fact: when the large, the many, the big, the extensive thing fails God, His reaction is not to abandon His purpose, but to take it up in a representative company, called in the Old Testament a remnant. That is God’s principle and God’s method of continuity. He has followed it all through history.
Now, when we pass to the New Testament, already it is possible that you have been thinking, “Well, that is all Old Testament; that is all Israel. What has that to do with us?” Well, when we pass to the New Testament, what we find in the first place is that that nation, as such, is disinherited. No doubt about it.
Open your Gospels. That nation is no longer in the place of divine favour, no longer standing in the place of divine vocation. It is under judgment, with judgment coming near to fulfilment. It is displaced.
But secondly, we find this Person—not now in prophecy, but actually present in all the terms of the prophecy. Here He is. His presence, and all that the prophet said about Him, is now actually on the spot. He is here, with all the features that have been foreshadowed about Him.
But thirdly, a new nation is being brought in.
To use Peter’s description—and mark you, Peter was not speaking of Israel after the flesh; he was speaking concerning the church:
Ye are an elect race,
a royal priesthood,
a holy nation,
a people for God’s own possession,
that ye may show forth the excellencies of Him
who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light.
There is a summary of our calling, the purpose of calling, and the nature of the call. A new nation is being brought in.
In the first sentence, one judgment phrase of the Lord Jesus to the old nation was:
The kingdom of God shall be taken away from you,
and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.
Vocation. So with the New Testament, the new nation is introduced and the way to its being made up is opened.
But the shadow comes in too soon. The first thing that we find before we are through our New Testament is incipient decline and apostasy: worldliness again, that devastating thing creeping into the church, and judgment of the church now being foreshadowed and begun.
As a whole, this new nation is beginning to fail in the purpose for which it was raised up.
And this, in general, is nigh unto—use a very unpleasant phrase from Scripture—being spewed out of God’s mouth. Terrible thought concerning a holy nation, but there it is.
But that is not the end of the New Testament. There is God acting again, and His own law and principle being followed: the remnant, the overcomers.
I was impressed, in reading through Isaiah again, coming to the later chapters, where the servant idea is in the plural so many times. I think, if I remember rightly, some eleven times in the later chapters after Chapter 54.
Here it is in the singular—that is, “servant,” “servant.” Right after that point, it has been collective. Now it is individual: servant, servant, My servant.
Now let us be careful: that does not mean that the divine idea of collective servanthood has been abandoned, as we shall see in a minute.
But it corresponds to what we have in those early chapters of the Book of Revelation:
He that hath an ear, let him hear.
As in the last chapters of Isaiah, so in those first chapters of Revelation, the corporate thing is made up of individuals who have got the idea.
Now it is not something just general, vague, and indefinite. Now it is people, individuals, if you like, who have seen what God intended; who have grasped the divine meaning in the existence of the church; and who have made a personal response to stand for that.
Then they become the new representation of the divine intention. They are corporate by reason of their one vision, their one apprehension.
But it is like that today, is it not? In general, there is a very unsettled, indefinite apprehension of divine and eternal purpose.