Innocent as a Lamb: Christ's Atonement in Isaiah 53

Crushed for Our Iniquities

In his outstanding Bible biography, Abraham: Faith’s Eye to the Future, Robert Norman writes that “Isaac eventually realized what would happen and he was willing to go to his death. . .. Isaac could have overpowered his father, but he did not.”

We know that the boy who was substituted for a lamb, was spared. However, the truly innocent Lamb, Jesus Christ, not only submitted to his Father’s will, he was smitten by God, afflicted and crushed. As Christians we call this the substitutionary or vicarious atonement for sin by the shed blood. Without this central and essential truth, the entire edifice of Christianity collapses. There is absolutely nothing left.

That said, with the atonement comes everything. Norman shows how already in Isaiah 53—a detailed prophesy 700 years before the event—that, as B. Wielenga writes, “the death of Christ is not to be explained as a sealing of the truth, nor a triumphant martyrdom, much less an inevitable course of nature.”

Instead, in six moving chapters, we learn how and why the silence and slaughter of the Lamb is not only essential to a believer’s only comfort in life and in death, but that it also triggers hallelujahs forevermore to the glory of God in Christ and His Own.