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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comJamieson Fausset Brown Commentary - Isaiah 53:4 - 53:4
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Surely ... our griefs - literally, “But yet He hath taken (or borne) our sicknesses,” that is, they who despised Him because of His human infirmities ought rather to have esteemed Him on account of them; for thereby “Himself took our infirmities” (bodily diseases). So Mat 8:17 quotes it. In the Hebrew for “borne,” or took, there is probably the double notion, He took on Himself vicariously (so Isa 53:5, Isa 53:6, Isa 53:8, Isa 53:12), and so He took away; His perfect humanity whereby He was bodily afflicted for us, and in all our afflictions (Isa 63:9; Heb 4:15) was the ground on which He cured the sick; so that Matthew’s quotation is not a mere accommodation. See Note 42 of Archbishop Magee, Atonement. The Hebrew there may mean to overwhelm with darkness; Messiah’s time of darkness was temporary (Mat 27:45), answering to the bruising of His heel; Satan’s is to be eternal, answering to the bruising of his head (compare Isa 50:10).
carried ... sorrows - The notion of substitution strictly. “Carried,” namely, as a burden. “Sorrows,” that is, pains of the mind; as “griefs” refer to pains of the body (Psa 32:10; Psa 38:17). Mat 8:17 might seem to oppose this: “And bare our sicknesses.” But he uses “sicknesses” figuratively for sins, the cause of them. Christ took on Himself all man’s “infirmities;” so as to remove them; the bodily by direct miracle, grounded on His participation in human infirmities; those of the soul by His vicarious suffering, which did away with the source of both. Sin and sickness are ethically connected as cause and effect (Isa 33:24; Psa 103:3; Mat 9:2; Joh 5:14; Jam 5:15).
we did esteem him stricken - judicially [Lowth], namely, for His sins; whereas it was for ours. “We thought Him to be a leper” [Jerome, Vulgate], leprosy being the direct divine judgment for guilt (Lev 13:1-59; Num 12:10, Num 12:15; 2Ch 26:18-21).
smitten - by divine judgments.
afflicted - for His sins; this was the point in which they so erred (Luk 23:34; Act 3:17; 1Co 2:8). He was, it is true, “afflicted,” but not for His sins.