He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, but he opened not his mouth; he was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and was as a sheep dumb before her shearers, and he opened not his mouth.
Isaiah wrote long before Jesus stood on trial. He describes a sufferer who says nothing while men crush Him. Two questions follow: why did He not speak, and what do the lamb and the sheep tell us about His death?
The natural reaction to injustice is to answer back. One writer also separates the two animal pictures in the verse:
Verse 7 stresses His silence before His accusers. When men are oppressed and afflicted unjustly, protest is natural and usual. His silence went against all experience, and the Gospels note it — Matthew 27:11-14; Mark 15:3-4; Luke 23:9; John 19:9. A sheep really is silent before the shearers. Anyone can see that today by watching shearers at work. But He was not like a sheep being sheared. He was like a lamb led to the slaughter. He was indeed "the Lamb of God," as John the Baptist announced, yet no word of protest escaped His lips.
The earlier verses of the chapter are a confession. From verse 7 the speaker changes:
We have listened to the confession of the godly remnant. Now we hear the voice of Jehovah as He confirms their confession and bears witness to the excellencies of Christ. The remnant have already confessed that He was stricken and afflicted. Now Jehovah bears witness to His perfection: when He was afflicted and oppressed "He opened not His mouth", and "like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth". Men may oppress and afflict, but if He was stricken it was not for any wrongdoing on His part. He submitted to every indignity from man to carry out the will of God in bearing the transgression of God's people.
Silence can mean a person has no power to answer. Here it meant the opposite:
Not a word did He utter. Why was this? Answer me that. Those small creatures of His own hand insulted their Creator. He could have thrown them out of existence with a single word. Why then did He keep silence? … The love of His heart for sinners brought Him to this.
Behind the quietness lay a settled purpose, and the offering He brought was Himself:
Christ also drew near to God, but in the perfect offering of Himself, not by the offering of another. Nothing is more moving, or more worthy of deep attention, than the way Jesus freely presents Himself. He does it so that God may be fully glorified in Him. He was silent in His sufferings, and that silence came from a deep and perfect determination to give Himself up, in obedience, to this glory.
Israel knew about sacrificial lambs. Hardly anyone expected the lamb to be a man standing in front of them:
Isaiah (53:7) had written of One who is "like a lamb that is led to the slaughter." John spoke of a man present before him, and called Him the "Lamb of God." All Jews knew about sacrificial lambs. But few, if any, understood then that a man would be the sacrifice, though Psalm 40 and Isaiah 53 had predicted it. And this One, the Lamb of God, would do what no other sacrifice had attempted or could achieve. He would take away the sin of the world.
His silence was not a blanket rule. There was one thing He would always speak for:
In the perfection of His way, He knows when to speak and when to keep silence. He will speak for the truth, but when it is a question of meeting personal malice against Himself, He is silent. It is good for us to profit by His perfect example, and to follow in the steps of the One who did not revile in return when others reviled Him. There is a time when silence has a far greater effect on the conscience than any word anyone can speak. Yet such silence is completely foreign to our fallen nature.
Peter later echoes the prophet's words line by line:
The prophet foretells that under insults "He opened not His mouth." The apostle can say He was One who, "when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten." Jehovah says through the prophet, "For the transgression of my people was He stricken." The apostle says, "He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:21–25).
- Oppressed — men crushed Him unjustly. The Gospels record the trials where this came true.
- Silent — protest would have been natural. His silence went against all human experience.
- Willing — He could have destroyed His accusers with a word. His quietness came from a settled determination to give Himself up in obedience.
- Lamb — Isaiah foretold a sacrifice who was a person. That Lamb would do what no animal offering could: take away sin.
- Followed — Peter echoes these words for believers: when reviled, He did not revile back.
He was taken from oppression and from judgment; and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living; for the transgression of my people was he stricken.
The verse moves from the courtroom that condemned Him to God's own reason for His death. Two questions sit inside it: what does "his generation" mean, and why was a righteous man cut off at all?
The first phrase looks at what men did to Him. One writer follows the clause into the Greek version an Ethiopian traveller was reading in Acts 8, and calls in a legal expert.
Then further, "by oppression and judgment he was taken away," for it is still what men did to Him that is before us in these verses. If we turn to Acts 8:26-40, we find that the Ethiopian had reached this exact point in his reading of Isaiah when Philip stopped him in his chariot. He was no doubt reading from the Greek version, which renders it, "in His humiliation His judgment was taken away." And so it was. The trial of our Lord ended in His condemnation and crucifixion. It was the most shocking miscarriage of justice the world has ever seen. A legal expert has surveyed the evidence of the Gospels. He stated that every step His accusers and judges took, Jews and Gentiles alike, was irregular and unjust.
The phrase "my people" is the clue to who is speaking here. So does the way the verse justifies the One men condemned.
Two clear considerations support reading these verses as the words of Jehovah. First, the words "stricken for the transgression of My people" are literal evidence that they are. Second, this passage justifies the Messiah, and that is moral evidence of the same. Judgment, and the justification that follows it, belongs here to God and not to the saints.
Commentators differ on this question. One reading takes "generation" as the crowd of that day, and hears the prophet gasping at their guilt.
Differing interpretations of this clause are by no means lacking. But the earlier words may point to the wicked mockery of our Lord's trial before the Roman governor: "his judgment was taken away." If so, the prophet is overwhelmed by the nation's wickedness in bringing about the rejection and death of Jehovah's Righteous Servant. He is led to cry out, "Who shall declare such a generation as could be so guilty" — "for he was cut off out of the land of the living"!
The other reading takes "generation" as descendants. Then the question is a lament: the family line ends before it begins.
In the fifty-third of Isaiah, the rich seed-field of New Testament truth, we find first of all the Messiah come and cut off, with no descendants. So blessing seems to fail completely: cut off Himself, He has none who spring from Him — none who carry on His name and character.
The last line of the verse gives the reason behind His death.
When we reach verse 10 of our chapter we find the answer Jehovah gives to this question. It is a very different one. He was cut off and stricken not for Himself, but for the transgression of those whom Jehovah calls "My people."
Some have argued the blows fell on Israel rather than on Him. The wording rules that out, and the chapter piles up phrase after phrase to say so.
What does it mean that He was pierced for our transgressions? Crushed for our iniquities? That the punishment which brought us peace was on Him? What does it mean that Jehovah laid on Him the iniquity of us all? "Stricken for the transgression of My people" — the stroke fell on Him, not on Israel, as the Jews say. Still more decisive: "it was the will of Jehovah to crush Him."
The question does not stay unanswered. His death gave Him the family He seemed to have lost.
Not until resurrection could He see His seed. His own words say why: "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12). It was after death and in resurrection that He said to Mary, "Go to My brothers and say to them … My Father and your Father, My God and your God." These were His seed, His generation. And the multitudes who "believe in Him through their word" (John 17) are the answer to the prophet's lament, "Who shall declare His generation, for He was cut off out of the land of the living?"
This is the exact place in Isaiah where one traveller's search ended.
These verses emphasise the unrighteous and perverted judgment passed on the Lord Jesus, and the way in which He received everything from God — not protesting His innocence or arguing against the sentence, but quietly submitting to the injustice, knowing there was a deeper purpose in view. Beginning at that same scripture Philip preached Jesus to the Ethiopian. It was effective and he received Christ.
- Oppression. His trial was not justice but its opposite — every step against Him irregular and unjust.
- Voice. The words are God's own: He speaks of "My people," and He justifies the Servant men condemned.
- Substitution. The stroke fell on Him, not for Himself, but for the transgression of those God calls "My people."
- Generation. Commentators differ: either the guilty crowd no one could describe, or the descendants a man cut off can never have.
- Seed. Verse 10 answers verse 8: through death He gains the family He seemed to lose.
And [men] appointed his grave with the wicked, but he was with the rich in his death, because he had done no violence, neither was there guile in his mouth.
Isaiah's prophecy has just described a servant put to death. This verse turns to His body, and it holds two opposite fates together: a criminal's grave and a rich man's tomb. So who decided where He was buried?
Much of the meaning turns on translation. Older English Bibles read as if the servant made His own grave. Writers say this hides the point. Someone else assigned Him that grave.
It is unfortunate that the King James Version gives us such a poor translation of this verse. Translated literally, it reads: "And men appointed His grave with the wicked, but He was with the rich in His death, because He had done no violence, and there was no deceit in His mouth." The King James wording, "He made His grave with the wicked," is wrong. The enemy wanted to throw His body where the bodies of the wicked were thrown. The power of God made that impossible.
One small detail of wording carries weight.
As is well known, "the wicked" is plural, while "rich" is singular. So the simple facts are the best comment on the prediction. Man proposed, but God disposed. He alone could set it out long before, and He did. In their own thinking, men assigned Him a grave with the wicked. In fact, by God's purpose, He was with a rich man in His death.
Hatred does not stop at death.
The Jews had certainly planned to put the blessed holy body of the Son of God into the common pit, along with the bodies of the two criminals who died beside Him. Satan's malice went beyond the betrayal by a close friend. It also wanted His body thrown into that pit after His death. God's answer to this insult to His Son was already on record.
One man fulfilled this line of prophecy. He appears in the story once and then disappears: Joseph of Arimathea.
And so it came to pass. He was crucified between two wicked men, though one of them was wonderfully saved before he died. If men had had their way, they would have flung His sacred body into a common grave with the bodies of the thieves. Joseph of Arimathea stepped in and stopped it, and His body lay in the new tomb that belonged to Joseph. God always has the needed man for His work. Joseph was born into the world to fulfil that one line of Scripture!
Notice when Joseph acted.
The death of Christ produced what His life had never produced. Joseph comes out boldly. He claims the body of Jesus, receives it, and buries it in his own new tomb.
The verse gives a reason for this honoured burial. The reason is His own character.
God made sure that this Perfect One "was with the rich in His death," because He was sinless. "Violence" and "deceit," the two things that mark sin, were both completely absent from Him. Violence marks those who are strong, and deceit those who are weak. But He "had done no violence, and there was no deceit in His mouth." Jehovah points to Him—the Perfect One.
So the burial is God's own verdict on a life that men had dismissed.
Verse 9 shows, by His burial in the rich man's tomb, that God has fixed a limit to the wicked activity of sinful men... God makes sure to show how He values the moral beauty of that life. Men may say, "there is no beauty that we should desire Him." The charm and moral perfection of that blessed Man were unattractive to those who did not believe. Yet there was supreme beauty there. Like the Passover lamb, the Saviour had passed the inspection of God's holy eyes — kept from the tenth day to the fourteenth and proved to be without blemish or spot.
One more detail carries weight. No one had ever lain in that tomb before.
It was new in the sense that the grave had never before received a sinless occupant. The grave and the dead have always belonged together, for God had said, "you are dust, and to dust you shall return." But the body of Jesus did not belong to the grave. For the first time in human history the grave had received a body that could not decay, because it was a sinless one. Yet His burial was as real as His death, and here is the gospel: "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures ... that he was buried."
- Appointed — men planned a grave for Him among criminals. The verse records their plan, not His choice.
- Overruled — God set a limit to their malice, so that the plural "wicked" gave way to a single "rich man."
- Provided — Joseph of Arimathea had stayed silent. God kept him in reserve to fulfil one line of prophecy.
- Because — the honour had a reason. Violence and deceit, the two marks of sin, were absent from Him.
- Undefiled — a tomb that had never held a body received one that could not decay. That burial is part of the gospel itself.