The Suffering Servant of Yahweh

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger. We’re missing Bryan Broome. We don’t know where he is. We hope he’s not with the gnomes.

We have come in our walk through Isaiah to chapter 53. I guess we’ve kind of been doing highlights. It’s not like we’re expositional about this, but we’re going to look at Isaiah 53. I was mentioning to Greg earlier that this is one of those passages that we might hear about a lot on its own, sort of like, “Oh, you know the part where they go through the fire swamp,” and say, “Who is they? And what movie are we talking about? What does the fire swamp have to do with anything?” How does Isaiah 53 connect to everything that we’ve talked about so far?

That’s a good question. When I wrote the original article I someplace in the middle said, “And by the way, Isaiah 53 is kind of toward the middle of the Bible, or middle of the Old Testament at least, so if you really haven’t been paying attention and you drop in on this chapter, it’s probably not going to do what God intends for it to do.”

The chapter, for those of you who don’t know, is about someone the prophet calls the servant of the Lord, the servant of Yahweh or Jehovah. It’s not a pretty picture. This servant is despised, rejected, and outcast. He is bruised and chastised. He suffers, he takes on the suffering of others, and ultimately he dies.

If you don’t read carefully, it seems at first that that’s where it ends, and you wonder, “Of whom does the prophet speak? Of himself or of some other?” which was the very question the Ethiopian eunuch asked the deacon or evangelist Phillip as they ran into each other in the Gaza desert. “Who is this guy? What’s it all about? Why is it so important? Why does it take up so much room?” The why’s are nearly as important as the who.

If you have been a Christian very long, you probably know the passage. Nonetheless, I’m going to read some of it for starters, and then we’ll come back and read more as we go along. It actually begins in the previous chapter, starting in Isaiah 52:13 –

Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high. As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men. So shall he sprinkle many nations. The kings shall shut their mouths at him, for that which had not been told them shall they see, and that which they had not heard shall they consider.

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and we hid as it were our faces from him. He was despised, and we esteemed him not.

I’m going to stop there for a moment. Obviously, we have somebody, unnamed at the moment and, since he wasn’t on the historical scene, Isaiah does not know his name, and probably himself is grasping to comprehend his own message. This servant is wise. He deals prudently. He’s exalted. He’s very high. That’s how we start out, but almost immediately we find out that his visage, his face, has been marred. Some translations render it “hardly recognizable as human.”

His message no one wants to believe. No one seems to be able to understand. He’s without form or beauty. No one looking at him externally is going to be attracted to him. He is despised and rejected of all those about him. He is a man of sorrows, and he knows grief. The response of the people is to turn away, to despise him. And despite his high origins and calling, the people treat him as refuse, as the scum of the earth.

The question is why is this here? Who is this person? As the Ethiopian eunuch asked, is the prophet talking about himself or is he talking about somebody else? And why does it matter? Why does it take up some 15 or so verses, beginning in chapter 52, to tell us about this? This servant gets more press than anybody but perhaps the psalmist when he is on one of his “Boy, life is hard” rants. Particularly Psalm 22 comes to mind, which is very akin to this.

Now, for Bible-believing Christians, for evangelicals, everyone is saying, “We know the answer. This is obvious. Can we move along here?” You know, you would think this was obvious, but there are people for whom it is not obvious.

First of all, the Jewish interpretation, a common one. I don’t know if there’s an official one, but a common one is that the servant is Israel, because sometimes in Isaiah the servant of the Lord is Israel. Sometimes it’s Cyrus, but this is neither of the above. But in said Jewish interpretation, Israel suffers. Israel is despised. Israel is rejected. And yet somehow through this, through her suffering, she brings redemption and salvation to the world.

For instance, this is why a couple decades ago talking about the Holocaust was very, very important in the Jewish mind and in the minds of those who sympathize with the Jewish people or identify with them in some sense. The Holocaust was part of Israel’s sufferings and part of paying off the world redemption, so we must never forget, not simply because these people who died horribly were the image of God and our neighbors and should have been protected by the law of God, but because there’s a particular redemptive value here that the sufferings of no other people is quite like. So that’s one way of looking at this.

That’s odd because there’s a sense in which in the book of Isaiah that’s almost right, because he talks about Israel and there’s this gradual winnowing down of Israel – nope, not that part of Israel, not that part of Israel, not that part of Israel – and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it only is Christ, and he’s the true Israel who does redeem the world. But it has to get winnowed right down to him, to this one person.

It has to get winnowed down to who stands at the heart of Israel, who is the seed of Abraham, and it takes pretty much all of the Bible for someone to finally come out and say, “And that seed is Christ,” all of Galatians chapter 3. So it’s a good point that this is Israel, if you understand it of the true Israel, of whom all believers are a part. But the suffering is something that Christ Jesus did in his own person.

And although that suffering works itself out in our lives, our suffering is not in that sense redemptive. Yes, we help along the gospel, and Paul has things to say about fulfilling what’s left of the sufferings of Christ, but we did not pay for the sins of the world. By our sufferings, by receiving persecution and tribulation, we carry on what Christ has done. We carry out the message to those beyond and to the next generation, but he did this on his own.

As we read this, one thing that we really should pick up on is his loneliness. He has no friends. In the end, everyone turns their back on him. Even God turns his back. As we look at it another way, he’s the servant of the Lord, and the Lord sets him up as a sacrifice? What’s that all about?

There’s another more current interpretation we probably should talk about. “Yes, this is Jesus, but it’s not like he actually suffered for anybody’s sins. He just showed us how great God loves us by submitting to these horrible tortures, and in there is a message of some sort that we should…” – my wife is making faces at us, presumably at what I’m saying, but she knows where I’m picking this up – “that whatever this is, it is not penal substitutionary atonement because that’s irrational, that’s unjust, that’s child sacrifice, that’s murder, that’s cruelty on a cosmic scale, and God would never do that. So whyever he’s suffering – we were mean to him, and he endured it, and in that patient suffering, that divine love of being our example, somehow there’s something,” and sometimes these people are not very clear about what.

You remember the video, presumably, that I’m thinking of, although I can never remember its name.

American Gospel Part 2.

Yeah, where two young – I will call them scallywags, for lack of a polite term –

That seems like a very polite term considering the context.

They’re sitting there and someone asks them, “What’s the gospel?” and they both look at each other with these arrogant smiles and say, “Well, we can’t answer that. I don’t have an answer for that.”

“Wait, you’re talking about theology in front of a camera, and you’re posing as theologians, and you can’t tell us what the gospel is?”

The one thing they were sure about is it has nothing to do with penal substitutionary atonement, because that was irrational and they just couldn’t believe that, so whatever Jesus did it wasn’t that. So if they were to look at this passage I’m not sure what they would say, honestly, except that it’s not that.

So it’s important that we continue to read and understand the ethical universe that this is set in. It doesn’t work in just any universe. It doesn’t work in a magical universe or a materialist universe or a New Age-y universe. It works in the Christian universe, and it does not work anywhere else, so let me read a bit more here.

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray.We have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

That sounds pretty substitutionary to me.

Yeah, it sounds like a case of, “Read the text. What does it say?”

He bore our griefs, carried our sorrows, was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace is on him, and with his stripes we are healed. The Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. I lost count as to how many times that was. I think it was six or so. That’s God’s interpretation.

At that point we need to stop, and again the average evangelical Christian is saying, “Preach it, brother. We know this. In fact, maybe skip along, brother, because we’ve heard this all so many times that we don’t really need to hear it again. I mean yeah, it’s always great to hear the gospel and all that, but we know this. Have you got something new to say?”

No, honestly.

I don’t think in this entire podcast our goal has ever been to have something new to say, to be honest.

No, it’s not really to say anything new, but it is sometimes to point out the old, because the old gets neglected and is abandoned to rust quietly sometimes while we do pursue new faddish kinds of things.

The assumption here – well, there’s a couple. First of all, there is an absolute right and wrong in the universe, which implies an absolute God, an absolute Creator, who ordains such things, so this is not a world of polytheism. This is not a world where all is one. This is not a world of materialism. This is a world of a personal God who personally hates sin, who hates lawlessness, who hates that which is contrary to his eternal love and his eternal holiness, and this God punishes not simply sin, but he punishes sinners. Sometimes the evangelical world has trouble with that.

“Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

Yeah. If you define your terms carefully that’s a biblical concept, but if you’re sloppy it’s something else again. To realize that you just have to ask this question – Who does God punish in hell? Sins or sinners?

The existence of hell becomes now a real issue. Do we believe that God punishes sinners for their sins, for their law-breaking, for their transgressions, forever in hell? Or is one of the reasons we don’t want substitutionary atonement is because we’re afraid of hell? We’re afraid of going there, but we’re afraid too that other people are going there. We don’t want to look in the eyes of our mother or father or our child or our Great Aunt Tessie or our best friend and say, “You’re going to hell and you’re going to suffer there forever, and I can’t stop it, but I love you and…”

“Surely God would not do that to me. I believe in a God of love. There must be something wrong here. Hell? Somebody must have made that up, because I believe in a God of love,” borrowing a line from C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce.

Hell means an absolute Creator, an absolute judge, and absolute ethical standards. It also means that God in his love cannot simply look at sinners and say, “You know, that really was horrible but, hey, I love ya. Just come on in. Everything will be all right. We’ll just ignore that and move on from here, you serial killer, you multi-rapist, you instigator of World War 3. It doesn’t matter, because I’m just overflowing with love and I can just pass on all of that.”

We generally call people who are capable of doing such things psychopaths – the mom who can overlook the crime a man committed against her three daughters when he raped them and killed them, and we say, “You’re okay with that?”

“Oh yeah, you know, people do things. Who am I to judge? We just love everybody.”

The irony is that the disposition of “hate the sin, love the sinner,” tends to fuse the sin and the sinner together inseparably, when in reality it’s God saying, “No, here. I have a way to separate the sin from the sinner and make the sinner no longer a sinner in a legal sense and in a real sense.”

Absolutely, but it takes something that no human ever dreamed up, a solution that no one ever imagined. When Isaiah, and Paul quoting him, says, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Paul goes on to say, “But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit.”

He’s not talking about how wonderful heaven is, at least not primarily. It’s maybe an offshoot. He’s talking about the gospel. Nobody ever came up with the gospel, but the eternal Creator would find a way to love the sinner and yet, without impinging upon his own holiness and justice, deal effectively with the sin and welcome the sinner into his presence, and that would involve God dying. I mean, we wouldn’t.

As Paul says, “Maybe for a good man some might even dare to die,” but for our enemies? For those who hate and kill, say, our only begotten son, are we inclined to do that? No, we’re not. But in this Isaiah 53 chapter with the suffering servant, God is looking sin straight in the face, particularly the sins of his people, and saying, “Yes, I am finding a way to love you and show you grace, but it’s not by simply ignoring all of this. I’m not just waving a hand and magically it goes away. I’m not so great that I can overlook your rebellion, because your rebellion is against me, and therefore it is infinite because I am infinite. There’s another way, and it is in some respects a very sad way.”

This is in many respects a sad chapter, and when we read it for the first time it’s hard to see anything but the sadness, the pathos, the loneliness, the suffering. It’s not until we’ve read it a few times and really zero in on the ending verses that we begin to see, “Wait, there’s something else going on here,” because right now it just sounds like this one person, this one servant, is being bloodied, bruised, and tortured for us, and we get some kind of benefit out of it, but what happens to him? At first it’s not at all clear. It just sounds like he gets the short end of the stick on a cosmic level. But let’s read a little further and see what it says.

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 her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison 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.

There it is again, substitution.

And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth.

So in case we weren’t sure, yes, he dies and he’s buried. He leaves behind no children. He’s cut off from the land of the living, and we’re reminded one more time this is for our sins, for our transgressions. He himself was not a violent person. He was truthful with no deceit in his mouth. He is the perfect innocent victim, like a lamb going to the slaughter.

In the back of the Jewish mind that should be a little tickle – “Like a lamb to the slaughter.” They knew about lambs that went to the sacrificial altar. Could that have something to do with it? They regularly sacrificed lambs that were pure and innocent and unspotted, and they knew that had some connection with atonement for sin, but it’s not explicit here. It’s at most a subtle allusion.

At this point we’re left with, “Okay, the servant suffers horribly and miserably. We are ungrateful because we reject him. We’ll have nothing to do with him. We don’t even want to look him in the face, and yet we’re going to reap benefit and he’s just going to suffer and die, apparently. And it’s our fault because we treated him badly.” That would be bad enough, but it’s the next line.

Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him. He hath put him to grief

You mean this was a God thing? God planned this? God executed it? He carried it out to its end? He raised up this servant? The servant was indeed a servant. He came to do what God wanted done, and although we had a hand in it – we shunned him, rejected him, turned against him – yet ultimately it was God who killed him.

The word ‘bruised’ again should set off a little tickle in the back of our minds. Haven’t we heard something about something being bruised and crushed? Maybe our minds go back to Genesis 3:15 where the seed of the woman will bruise/crush the head of the serpent, but will himself be bruised in the process, bruised in the heel.

This man’s dying. This man’s dead at this point, and it’s God’s fault. I mean it’s our fault because it’s for us, but God sacrifices himself for us. This is where people jump in today and say, “See? Child sacrifice.” They point fingers at us and say, “You’re reading it wrong.”

“Well, do you want to come up with another way to read this?”

That’s when you say, “I didn’t interpret it. I just read it.”

I just read it. It says what it says. I always love when people say, “Well, that doesn’t mean what you think it does.”

“How do you know what I think it does? Are you saying that you think you know what I’m thinking and you don’t like it? Is that what you mean?”

God is the one who sacrifices his own servant for the sake of his people, and now the image of a sacrifice becomes very clear, because the next line is –

…when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin…

A sin offering, so yes, in case we missed it, we’re talking the language of blood atonement. We’re talking sacrifice. We’re talking reconciliation upon the altar. This servant is the lamb. He’s what all of those lambs and goats and bulls pointed to. He is the blood offering whereby God will reconcile himself to his people.

How can God deal with sin? How can he receive the sinner and punish the sin? By punishing it in someone else. Someone has to take the punishment, someone who is legally entitled to take the punishment. It can’t just be some random person off the street.

That’s what was wrong with child sacrifice in the pagan culture. They thought that if they could just pick someone, someone near at hand, someone they loved dearly perhaps, like their firstborn child, that that would do it. The problem is, you need someone who actually is a legal stand-in, and your child isn’t. Your priest isn’t. Your mother isn’t.

I’ve pointed out this story before, I guess, because I really love this chapter, Revelation 5, where God extends his covenant blessings as a scroll to his people, and search is made of heaven, earth, and hell for someone who is worthy – legally entitled to take the document and execute its terms; that is, to give an inheritance to God’s people, to forgive their sins, and to give them all the blessings of the new creation.

For 4,000 years, no one can find it. Devils? They’re right out. They can’t do that. Angels? Mmm. Other humans? No. No mere human can do this, and yet it needs to be a human because humans are the ones who sinned. Animals? We tried that. That doesn’t work. God? Well, sure, God’s life is valuable enough, but God can’t die, and for 4,000 years that was absolutely true.

So as Isaiah is penning this, he himself has to be thinking, “God, you’re walking yourself into a corner. There’s this servant and you’re going to sacrifice him – a human sacrifice, which we know we despise – and yet somehow this human sacrifice is going to be effective. You’re going to put your wrath against sin on him, and we’re going to go free,” and then this –

…when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.

Wait a second, he’s dead. How’s that happening? You can say, “Well, see his seed – that was on the cross,” and we have Hebrews. For the joy that was set before him he endured the cross, despising the shame. Okay, but prolong his days? He’s dead. How does a dead man prolong his days? And the pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand. He’s not just sitting there being alive, like someone on life support. He actually is actively executing the will of God (think again of Revelation 5, executing the terms of the covenant document). But he was dead.

He [God] shall see of the travail of his [the servant’s] soul, and shall be satisfied.

The suffering extends not merely to the body, but to the soul, and God is the one who executes the judgement upon the servant. And God, seeing this, his justice, his righteousness, his holiness are satisfied.

…by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.

Justify – here we are again in legal terms. God will declare those who know this servant, who know what he has done, who know him by faith – he will declare them to be just and righteous, despite their sins, because the servant has borne God’s wrath against those sins. The penalty is paid and, by implication, although it’s not said here, his righteousness, his law-keeping, is being transferred to them so that when God looks at them they see the righteousness of the servant. It goes on –

Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he hath poured out his soul unto death and he was numbered with the transgressors, and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Notice how quick that went by. He shall divide the spoil with the strong because he hath already poured out his soul unto death. Wait, how can he divide a portion with the strong if he’s dead? There’s one obvious answer. He’s not dead anymore. He got better. He got over it. He came back to life.

All of the suffering, as huge and awful as it was, ends with the servant somehow having died, and the servant is alive executing the will of God and justifying many and interceding for them, dividing the spoil – that is the treasures of this world – with other strong forces (we can think Satan here).

We’re not told at this point what the proportions are. When we move into the next chapter, we get an idea that God is not satisfied with a small number of gems, diamonds, and gold coins, that he wants most of it, and he’s not giving up very much.

There you have it. So again the Ethiopian eunuch says, “Who’s he talking about?” and Dr. Luke writing in Acts says, “Beginning here, Philip opened his mouth and preached Jesus.”

For those of us who are evangelical Christians, this is not a problem. We know who this is. We know who the one person whose life is of infinite value, who can bear the wrath of God and come out alive on the other side, the one who is himself life and omnipotence and power and truth, who can bear all of these things even to death and come back alive and continue what he had begun. This is the gospel, because the one who does these things is God.

As we read through this and through the rest of Isaiah, it becomes increasingly clear that the servant of Yahweh, the servant of the Lord is himself Yahweh. Yahweh is the servant. The Son is the servant who comes to do the Father’s will, and it’s because he is the Son of God that he can do these things.

The Heidelberg Catechism has these questions:

Q: What sort of a mediator and deliverer must then we seek for?

A: For one who is very man and perfectly righteous, and yet more powerful than all creatures; that is, the one who is also very God.

Q: Why must he be truly man and also perfectly righteous?

A: Because the justice of God requires that the same human nature which has sinned should likewise make satisfaction for sin, but one who is himself a sinner cannot satisfy for others.

We need a human stand-in, a human representative to represent our race. We fell in Adam. A second Adam could step in and take that place, but he’s got to be human – 1) to identify with us, but 2) he’s got to be able to suffer.

God could blast a rock for eternity, but the rock doesn’t feel anything. That doesn’t accomplish anything. It has to be someone who in his human soul feels/experiences/knows the wrath of God and alienation from God, and knows what hell is like. And then he has to be able to die, because that’s the penalty for sin. The soul that sinneth shall die. So he’s got to be human. The problem is that he has to be a perfectly holy human and not be caught up in the condemnation that Adam merited for us. And so the next question –

Q: Why must he also be truly God?

A: That he might, by the power of his Godhead, sustain in his human nature the burden of God’s wrath, and might obtain for and restore to us righteousness and life.

First of all, he has to be God so that he can uphold the humanity that suffers, because no human can take on the infinite wrath of God, particularly when it’s dumped upon a human soul over the course of a few hours, but also the life he gives has to be of infinite value. One human, if he were innocent and if God would permit such a transaction, could atone for one other human being – life for life – but we want one sacrifice who can atone for the sins of the world. We want a life of infinite value, and that’s God.

By the way, if it was one man for one man, that’s one man suffering in hell for eternity to rescue one man.

I got this question in Bible class actually yesterday or the day before. One of my brighter younger students said, “How does this work? Jesus was on the cross for what – a few hours? And we would have to go to hell forever?”

I got the privilege of explaining to 53 students what we’re talking about here. “Yes, for a mere man that would make sense. This is why he has to be God. His life has to be that valuable that even all of our infinite sins against him don’t add up to the infinite value of his life and of his glory.”

The third thing is that he must be absolutely holy. If he’s going to come into this world, he has to come in with a holiness that pushes all of Adam’s sin and all of Adam’s guilt aside, and he comes as the Holy One of God.

This is Jesus. This is the gospel. And if anybody out there has never heard this before or it’s never clicked, now would be a good time to talk to Jesus, because he is alive.

There was a young lady traveling with our tour group in Rome, sharing a room actually with two of our students. They came knocking on the door late at night saying, “Can you come talk to our friend? She’s really confused. She’s been watching…” – I don’t remember if it was Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell, one of them – that’s a great source of theology for you – “and she has questions we can’t answer.”

I think they could. I think they just got a little spooked, but I sat down with her and she told me what she was thinking. “With Jesus it’s almost like the night before he died he knew what was going to happen, and almost like he was telling Judas to go do something about it. I don’t understand what’s going on here.”

“Can you tell me who Jesus is?”

“Well, he was this really great man and he did wonderful things. I mean he was so great, it was almost like he was God or something, and they killed him!”

“Okay. Is Jesus alive today?”

“Oh, no.”

“Let me tell you a story.”

When I was done, she actually said, “That’s the greatest story ever told.” Yeah, it is. Sometimes our preconceptions and our over-familiarity get in the way of understanding why it is what it is, what it had to be what it is.

I had this with kids out of good evangelical churches. I’d ask, “Why did Jesus have to die?”

“Because he loved us.”

“Yeah, but why did he have to die?”

“To save us.”

“How?”

“To save us from our sins.”

“Why?”

“Because he loved us,” and they’d keep going around in circles.

“What I am asking you is why did his love lead to his death?”

“To show us that he loved us.”

“Okay, that’s the wrong answer.”

I mean there’s some truth in it, but that’s not primarily it. He did not come as an example of love. That’s secondary or tertiary. He came to bear the penalty that our sins deserved, and until we’re willing to talk about the penalty for sin, until we’re willing to define guilt not as some icky feeling, but as a true legal matter that requires either eternal punishment or substitutionary atonement, we’re not ready to understand the gospel. We’re forever trapped with, “Well, Jesus was a nice guy who suffered a lot, and boy, didn’t he love us because somehow that helped us. We’re not sure how.”

As we read Isaiah 53, we see that even here in the darkness of the Old Testament where we stand in so much shadow, there is clarity so that when we get to the New Testament the various writers quote it with wild abandon and sometimes at length. This is the gospel. The is the servant of the Lord. This is Jesus. This is our salvation.

That’s awesome. We could have a whole podcast about that.

I think we just did.

It’s a good time to wrap up. Do you have a recommendation?

Yes. What I quoted from is called the Heidelberg Catechism. Catechism is a strange word to many. I had a number of aunts on my father’s side who were all sweet Christian ladies but quite a bit older than me, and they went to various churches that were decidedly non-creedal, or at least they thought they were, non-confessional and certainly non-catechetical, so when they heard the word ‘catechism’ they thought instantly of the only catechism they’d ever heard of, the Roman Catholics.

We had trouble convincing them that we were not Roman Catholics, especially when they saw the Apostles’ Creed and the words “holy catholic church” in it. We tried over and over to explain, and I don’t know that they ever completely got it.

For those of you who may not know, a catechism is a device used to instruct the young in years or the young in faith, those who don’t know much about the faith. It is set forth as a series of questions and answers designed to lead one through the basic doctrines of the Christian faith.

There have been a great many catechisms written over the millennia since Jesus left earth. The one that I was raised on is called the Heidelberg Catechism. I also have tremendous respect and affection for the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and even the Larger Catechism that no one ever seems to read or reference, but this is the one I know and it’s a little more devotional than the Westminster.

The Westminster is precisely theological, and there are times for that. The emphasis of this catechism is, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” and so the whole thing is phrased in terms you could almost call hedonistic. John Piper probably would. “What do I get out of this? What’s the comfort? What three things do you need to know to live and die happily?”

It brings the faith down to a sequenced series of questions about who God is, who man is, why man needs a Savior, who our Savior is, what he’s done for us, and then moves on and talks about the Christian life, about obedience and prayer and worship and things like that.

There are any number of versions. The one I quoted is not the one that I’m familiar with. It’s a modern translation of it, because originally it was written in German, but you can find it online and order copies of it. It’s named Heidelberg because that’s where it was written, in Heidelberg, Germany back in 1563, but it remains imminently useful, profitable, and practical today.

It comes with lots and lots of scripture references so that you can compare the questions and answers to what the Bible actually says. It does not leave you in doubt that maybe somebody made all this up. There’s plenty of room to go searching scripture to see if these things be so.

So that’s my recommendation if you’re new to the faith, and even if you’re pretty old in the faith, it is still a beautiful and useful tool for Christian growth.

It’s kind of ironic that we sometimes find catechesis associated with the Roman Catholic Church, because it’s my understanding that the Roman Catholic Church didn’t have a catechism until after the Reformation, when all the Reformed and Protestant people were all like, “So, uh, how do you teach your kids? Because we’ve got this nifty little question and answer set here. What do you guys teach?” Then the Roman Catholic Church had to sort of scramble and get its stuff together, so it’s like 1,000 questions. Nobody ever expected anyone to memorize that. That’s ridiculous.

More a piece of propaganda. “Yeah, we have one too, and ours is bigger than yours.” What do you have for a recommendation?

This is kind of a sprint into left field from your recommendation, but I recommend having house guests. We had a friend visit us this past weekend, a friend of mine from college, and not only did it force us to get our house in order to make a tidy guest room for her, but we just had a lovely time. It was a very low-key visit. We didn’t do a lot, but our family doesn’t do a lot on a regular basis so it was just kind of “come share life with us for a little bit.” It was really refreshing. It's one of those friendships that you can pick up after years of not seeing each other, and everything is fine.

I thought only guys were allowed to have friendships like that, where you don’t see a friend for years and then it’s like, “Oh yeah, he’s my best friend. I haven’t seen him in three years.” This is a conversation I had with my family or somebody in the last 48 hours.

I feel like I was there for that conversation. I think it was at my house.

Yes, it was at your house.

I think it’s a particular blessing of Christian friendships. My parents have certainly found that over the years. They’ve lived in a lot of different places and had a lot of very good friends in a lot of very disparate places, and they’ve never been afraid to go on to the next place because the Lord has always provided sound fellowship and blessed communion everywhere they’ve gone. And every time they’ve left somewhere they’ve left behind friends that they know they’ll see again, not only in heaven but on earth and with great joy even here. So have a house guest. That’s my recommendation. It helps if they’re a very easy house guest.

Oh, I didn’t know you had to qualify.

Well, if you have a bad house guest then I’ll have to talk about the recommendation of drawing boundaries.

This conversation has been a delight. Thank you so much, Greg. It’s always a pleasure to return to Isaiah 53. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. We appreciate all the work that he puts into this podcast.

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