Lecture

In the seventh century before Christ, the prophet Isaiah predicted a God-man who would eventually rule the world. In the second chapter of his prophecy, he described a day in which all of the earth would be at peace, and when all the nations would go up to Jerusalem to hear the word of the Lord. In the ninth chapter of his prophecy [vv. 6–7 NKJV], Isaiah announced,

For unto us a Child is born,

Unto us a Son is given;

And the government will be upon His shoulder.

And His name will be called

Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of His government and peace

There will be no end.

This prophecy of Isaiah has led many to believe that in this predicted Son of Israel the prophet foresaw the coming of a God-man.

J. P. Moreland: When we say that God became a man and Jesus Christ, we don’t mean that God stopped being God and He became a human being. What we mean is that Jesus Christ had two very different natures. He had a human nature, and what we mean by that is that He had a body, He ate, He had a finite mind, finite consciousness, but He also had a divine nature. He had the attributes of God in that the divine nature and the human nature went alongside one another in His Person. So that’s what that means. It doesn’t mean that God ceased being God and turned into man. It means that in the Person of Jesus, we have a divine nature and a human nature that exist side by side.

In the same messianic prophecy that predicted the coming of a God-man, Isaiah also mysteriously foresaw the coming of a suffering servant who would die for the sins of His people. The prophet wrote:

Surely He has borne our griefs

And carried our sorrows;

Yet we esteemed Him stricken,

Smitten by God, and afflicted.

But He was wounded for our transgressions,

He was bruised for our iniquities;

The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,

And by His stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray;

We have turned, every one, to his own way;

And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.

(Isaiah 53:4–6 NKJV)

Luis Palau: Isaiah obviously had more revelation about the Messiah in detail together with David in two or three of the psalms or several of the psalms in which he saw not only that God was going to become a man and come to rescue us, but also, of course, He being the Servant of the Lord in a particular way in which He became the pure, spotless substitute upon whom the sins of the world was laid—and who purified the sins of the world, dying in our place.

Charlie Dyer: In the Old Testament there were very strict rules on sacrifices. The lambs had to be without blemish, without spot. They had to be perfect examples, the best the world had to offer, if you will, to be sacrifices, and yet the blood of those sacrifices didn’t solve the problem, because every year you had to offer the sacrifice again. That’s why a prophet like Isaiah could look ahead to ultimately the final sacrifice, the One who would be wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, and serve as the Atonement for our sin. Jesus fulfilled that. He was perfect God. As God He had the power to take care of sin; He had the pure justice, the pure righteousness, or holiness. As a man He could stand in our place. He was perfectly human, so that He could take the penalty God had put on Adam’s race, because of sin. Jesus was the only One who had the power to satisfy and yet who could stand in our place.

And so, in retrospect, many believe that when Isaiah foresaw a God-man and suffering Servant, he was seeing different sides of the same Messiah.