We were talking yesterday on the podcast about the need to think carefully about how the

Old Testament points to the Lord Jesus. I wanted to say that as a kind of preface to

our thinking and the rest of the week, because we're going to think about four Old Testament

passages that the New Testament itself makes clear would have been in Jesus' own mind

during his own lifetime and then in his teaching after the resurrection about the things in

the Bible that concerned himself. I wonder if you guessed that the passages I was thinking

about are all in the second half of Isaiah, in what we often call the servant songs.

You'll find them in chapter 42, 49, chapter 50, and then in chapter 52, verse 13 to 53,

verse 12. Isaiah had foreseen that since the people of God had breached God's covenant,

they were destined for judgment, and as he had promised God would send them into a far country

into exile. But now as he looks into the future, Isaiah sees deliverance and restoration to the

promised land coming on the horizon, and it would come remarkably through Cyrus, the pagan king

of Persia. That's why Isaiah 40 begins with the words that we are familiar with from

Handos Messiah, comfort ye, comfort ye my people, Seth your God. But remember Isaiah's own

experience that he describes in chapter 6, how he became profoundly aware of his own sinfulness,

and he equally becomes profoundly aware of the fact that the people's geographical exile

was simply a reflection of a much more sinister exile. And so he knew that political deliverance

was not an adequate solution to the real problem, which was spiritual, their sin.

What the people really needed was deliverance from their deeper bondage in sin, and their exile

from God. And so God gave Isaiah insight into the way in which God would bring that deliverance.

The Lord would make Cyrus his servant to bring about political restoration,

but it would take a different kind of servant to rescue them from the power and consequences of sin.

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