back_to_faith
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I totally agree with both points and then no need to discuss
I don't agree at all with both of them....
Isaiah 53 is not a prophecy at all,and if one is seduced to apply its fulfillment,one could easily apply it to millions...
you ask how?
let's take a look at the passage:
the servant according to Isaiah is said to be:
1-the kings shall shut their mouths because of him (52:15)
If the servant is Jesus then,what kings shut their mouths because of Jesus?
2-He is despised and rejected of men" (53:3).
How many persons else were despised rejected of men?
many,I don't have time to count them as there are millions.
3-a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief..." (53:3)
How many men of sorrow?
4-we hid as it were our faces from him (53:3)
If we means the Jews,they did not hide their faces from him but condemned him many times.....If we means others ,that is not real and never happened.
5-he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth 53:7
According to John 18:21-23 ("Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said unto them: behold, they know what I said. And when he had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest thou the high priest so? Jesus answered him, If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?"), and Matt. 27:46 ("Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying,...my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"), Jesus not only opened his mouth when oppressed but was struck in the process. He even cried for help.
6-for the transgression of my people he was stricken.
we have two choices here,
1-Isaiah means by the servant a collective noun (the righteous remnant of israel) whom according to him ,for the transgression of Israel was stricken.
If the writer of isaiah meant that,then we have no prophecy here,we have a description of things that just has happened then.
we have no objection to his description of How they oppressed, suffered opened not their mouths,smitten etc
but If he claims that by such suffering they paid back the sins of other Israeli, there we should stop him ,and teach him some verses shows that every person should only be punished for those sins which he commits, not those of others.
Ezekiel 18:20
"The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him."
Jer. 31:29-30 "
In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge."
2- or he means a future servant will be punished for sins of others.
if that is true then we have absured Prophetic language ....
How on earth ,one could verify such prediction?
one could apply the description to a huge list of famous religious figures who suffered and been killed,and assert without proofs that they suffered due to the sins of people..
such as imagine a religious French writer ,predicted once,that some day in the future that a religious french figure will suffer and die due to the sins of French people.....
He used absured style in writing,ignoring the fact that there will be an army of future religious,pious french figures will fulfill it ....
Thomas Paine highlighted the problem well,
Isaiah, or at least the writer of the book that bears his name, employs the whole of this chapter, Iiii., in lamenting the sufferings of some deceased persons, of whom he speaks very pathetically. It is a monody on the death of a friend; but he mentions not the name of the person, nor gives any circumstance of him by which he can be personally known; and it is this silence, which is evidence of nothing, that Matthew has laid hold of, to put the name of Christ to it; as if the chiefs of the Jews, whose sorrows were then great, and the times they lived in big with danger, were never thinking about their own affairs, nor the fate of their own friends, but were continually running a Wild-Goose chase into futurity.
To make a monody into a prophecy is an absurdity. The characters and circumstances of men, even in the different ages of the world, are so much alike, that what is said of one may with propriety be said of many; but this fitness does not make the passage into a prophecy; and none but an impostor, or a bigot, would call it so.
Isaiah, in deploring the hard fate and loss of his friend, mentions nothing of him but what the human lot of man is subject to. All the cases he states of him, his persecutions, his imprisonment, his patience in suffering, and his perseverance in principle, are all within the line of nature; they belong exclusively to none, and may with justness be said of many. But if Jesus Christ was the person the church represents him to be, that which would exclusively apply to him must be something that could not apply to any other person; something beyond the line of nature, something beyond the lot of mortal man; and there are no such expressions in this chapter, nor any other chapter in the Old Testament.
It is no exclusive description to say of a person, as is said of the person Isaiah is lamenting in this chapter, He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a Lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. This may be said of thousands of persons, who have suffered oppressions and unjust death with patience, silence, and perfect resignation.
Grotius, whom the Bishop [of Llandaff] esteems a most learned man, and who certainly was so, supposes that the person of whom Isaiah is speaking, is Jeremiah. Grotius is led into this opinion from the agreement there is between the description given by Isaiah and the case of Jeremiah, as stated in the book that bears his name. If Jeremiah was an innocent man, and not a traitor in the interest of Nebuchadnezar when Jerusalem was besieged, his case was hard; he was accused by his countrymen, was persecuted, oppressed, and imprisoned, and he says of himself, (see Jer. xi. 19,) "But as for me, I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter."(Thomas Paine-examination of the prophecies)
"Isaiah is, upon the whole, a wild, disorderly writer, preserving in general no clear chain of perception in the arrangement of his ideas, and consequently producing no defined conclusions from them. It is the wildness of his style, the confusion of his ideas, and the ranting metaphors he employs, that have afforded so many opportunities to priestcraft in some cases, and to superstition in others, to impose those defects upon the world as prophecies of Jesus Christ. Finding no direct meaning in them, and not knowing what to make of them, and supposing at the same time they were intended to have a meaning, they supplied the defect by inventing a meaning of their own, and called it his (Isaiah's--ED.)." The Life and Works of Paine, Vol. 9, p. 229-30
7-he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days 53:10
that fits perfectly with the (the righteous remnant of israel) interpretation...by no means could be applied to Jesus.
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