Jesus: The Unesteemed

Larry Kirkpatrick. oab Seventh-day Adventist Church, Utah, USA

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Scripture Reading: Isaiah 53:3

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.

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Despised and Rejected by Men

According to the dictionary, the word "despised" comes from the Latin word "de- (down) spicere (to look)." The word "rejected" also comes from Latin, "reiect," meaning "to throw back." Jesus was despised and rejected by humanity. Remember, as we've studied in Isaiah 53, we've observed that Jesus didn't come as a glowing special-effect; He didn't come with the glory that He had with God before the world was (John 17:5). He didn't come in such outward radiance or even ostentatious display of intellect that humanity would be forced to receive Him. Isaiah asked "who has believed our report"(Isaiah 53:1) precisely because the response of Israel to her Maker was so poor. When we looked at that initial verse showing that Jesus is truly our first Need and last Hope, we saw that they insisted on looking somewhere else. "To whom had the arm of the Lord been revealed" but to Israel? Yet because He refused to parade an outward glory, refused to come in stature and pomp and purple and beauty, He was not received. He came humbled in form and placid of character. He presented a kingdom cutting directly across the twisted self-nature of humankind. And our response was dark, if predictable. When we gathered together and considered Jesus in Isaiah 53:2, The Root, we looked at the nature of His humanity. We saw that He had immeasurably humbled Himself in taking the fallen nature of man. We saw that He faced real temptation, and lived through real struggles, just as we do. He did not come "to our world to give the obedience of a lesser God to a greater, but as a man to obey God's Holy Law, and in this way He is our example" (MS. 1, 1892). How I appreciate these facts. Through the Holy Spirit, Ellen White says:

Christ came to this earth to show the human race how to obey God. He might have remained in heaven, and from there given exact rules for man's guidance. But He did not do this. In order that we might make no mistake, He took our nature, and in it lived a life of perfect obedience. He obeyed in humanity, ennobling and elevating humanity by obedience. He lived in obedience to God, that not only by word of mouth, but by His every action, He might honor the law. By so doing, He not only declared that we ought to obey, but showed us how to obey. Our only safety is in dying to self, and depending wholly on Christ. We need to keep ever before us the reality of Christ's humanity. When He became our Substitute and Surety, it was as a human being. He came as a man, to render obedience to the only true God. He came not to reveal God as wanting in power, but God in all His fulness. He came to show what God is willing to do and what He has done that we might be made partakers of the divine nature. While enduring the contradiction of sinners against Himself, our Saviour lived a perfect human life. This He did that we also might be perfect. He is everything to us, and He bids us look to Him, for "without Me," He says, "ye can do nothing." The obedience that Christ rendered is exactly the obedience that God requires from human beings today. It was the obedience of a son. He served His Father in willingness and freedom, and with love, because it was the right thing for Him to do. "I delight to do Thy will, O My God," He declared; "yea, Thy law is within My heart." Thus we are to serve God. Our obedience must be heart-service. It was always this with Christ. If we love Him, we shall not find it a hard task to obey. We shall obey as members of the royal family. We may not be able to see the path before us, but we shall go forward in obedience, knowing that all issues and results are to be left with God. . . .[I'm leaving out a wonderful paragraph about the law here]. . . .The grace of God is the line of demarcation between God's children and the multitude that believe not. While one is brought into captivity to Christ, another is brought into captivity to the prince of darkness. The heart of the one who responds to the drawing of Christ glows with the Saviour's love. He shows forth the praises of Him who has called him from darkness into marvelous light. He can not help using his talent of speech to tell of the grace which has been so abundantly bestowed on him; for he has enlisted with those who are striving to advance the glory of God, and has thus become a channel of light. Willing and obedient, he is one of the number called by Inspiration "a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people." Ellen G. White, ST January 25, 1899.

Jesus "took our nature, and in it lived a life of perfect obedience." I guess we were looking for something altogether different. We so preferred the alien, fictionalized, "almighty" God—a God who was so far above and so far away that we could be excused from our responsibility to obey! We didn't want to have to choose. We didn't want to have to stand on one side or the other of the grace-line—"the line of demarcation between God's children and the multitude that believe not." It is unquestionably because of this—because God came too close for our comfort—because He truly became one with us and one of us—that "He is despised and rejected of men." We looked down upon Him, because in Him we saw a dusty man. We wanted to see a God obeying God but we were given God willingly humbled to the level of fallen man and then we saw this Being obey God. No wonder we were offended. We couldn't bear that. We didn't want that. We wanted sin. We wanted release from responsibility. We wanted "our rights" as fallen men! We sought for a gospel with a free-ride. As if heaven owed us one. We are a race of sinners. We are wicked. We are evil. We are darkness. So what does the Holy God care about us for? Why does He plan to win the race with us? Is heaven hung up on making it into Ripley's "Believe it or Not?" Is our Father in heaven doing this just because even He needs a cheap thrill some of the time? God forbid. Heaven is not just showing-off to be showing-off. Heaven has an agenda and it must be our agenda. Heaven is embarked upon ending sin for eternity. It won't happen again. That's why Jesus, although despised and rejected of men, came to this world, His world. He's not just climbing a mountain because its there; He's ending sin because its there. And it doesn't belong there. It doesn't belong anywhere.

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A Man of Sorrows, and Acquainted with Grief

The easy way out is not Jesus' way out. He humbled Himself to death, "even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:8). If Jesus took the nice nature of pre-fall Adam, then why did He walk into the garden of Gethsemene and pray to His Father to take the cup of suffering from Him? Why did He say not His will, but His Father's be done? Because in the humanity that He set up His tent in—that He lived in—there was a strange, alien pull. Although His character was unselfish to its core, the nature He bore as a human was awry; it had as much built-in distortion and brokenness as ours does, because it was our nature. Deep down inside there arose from the mysterious place of His humanness a pull toward self. He never indulged this pull, but fought it every step of the way. It was always there, lurking, just revving. It was like a cold winter's morning when you go out early, before leaving for work, to start the car and get it warmed up and its heater running before leaving. There it is running, ready to roll, ready to put into gear, ready to back out of the drive-way and onto the street. But Jesus never let His nature take Him for that ride. Instead, He "condemned sin in the flesh" (Romans 8:3). Oh yes; make no mistake, Jesus was a man of sorrows. He fought back daily, even hourly, against a poisonous nature when His saying just one tiny "yes" to it would have given Him such great relief. But it would have killed His conscience and ended the government of God. He was acquainted with grief. Yes, He knew what it was to loose loved ones, to experience poverty and hardship, to be called a worker of miracles by the power of demons. He knew what it was to be taunted as a child and to be an outcast in those years when humanity most longs for companionship and the acceptance of other youth. As a virile young man He denied the carnal and abstained from all impurity, no matter how inviting to the unfulfilled inward-pulling nature He wore more closely than skin-tight. His character was preserved untainted. He was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15). He was acquainted with the grief of resisting a downward-spiraling nature that was ever at war with the unselfish kingdom He had come to reveal. From within a broken nature, Jesus unfurled the flag of the kingdom of God. He climbed the mountain of sin with His Father and the Holy Spirit, and put up heaven's stars and stripes. He restored our freedom. Because of who He was and what He lived, we can become sons and daughters of the King. John 1:12-13. Thank God.

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We Hid Our Faces From Him

We hid our faces from Him. At the cross, all the disciples, even the beloved John, ran and fled. They couldn't believe that Jesus was Jesus but He was also on the cross. That was a non-sequitor—an illogical assumption—to them. How could this be the fate of their beloved Jesus? Peter grasping what Jesus said was coming, urged, "Be it far from Thee, Lord: this shall not be unto Thee" (Matthew 16:22). Jesus recognized in Peter's well-meaning but hijacked sentiments the subtle suasion' of the devil, and responded firmly, "Get thee behind Me, Satan: for thou art an offence unto Me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men" (Matthew 16:23). Peter didn't realize it, but He was hiding his face from Jesus when he urged Christ to stop short of the sacrifice before Him, "even the death of the cross." We are like Peter. We don't want to contemplate the consequences of the kind of self-sacrifice beheld at the cross. How much more we would prefer that Jesus "do it all" for us, than that we might do anything at all for Him. How we wish that the pathway to heaven was greased with oil and butter and we could just slide in to home-plate in the vaguely self-serving glory that God loved us so much that He somehow just couldn't live without us. His love was so "great" that He "bent the rules for me" is, I guess, what we would like to think. Because we sure don't seem inclined to live as if we thought otherwise. The Jews didn't—and we don't—really want to lay claim to a "God" who hangs naked and defeated on a cold wooden cross and dies just at the grand finale! We don't want to let Him shine His light on our conscience in any intimate way, because there are dark things in there and we'd just prefer that He "leave them alone." The old saying goes "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." We don't want to admit that it's broke, nor do we want to lift a glove to fix it. Maybe God can give us a pill or something and that will fix it; but we sure hope there is nothing that He wants us to do.

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Jesus: The Unesteemed

In His rebuke of the devil, Jesus pointed out that Satan did not value the things of God. The last part of the text we've chosen today reads: "He was despised, and we esteemed Him not" (Isaiah 53:3). That is, we refused to rightly value Him. This all boils down to the utterly different values of selflessness and selfishness. It is only love that can value another above one's self. Satan charged that all beings were selfish, even God. He claimed that His (God's) requirements were self-serving, that no truly selfless service can exist. Do you recall Satan's claim in the dialogue with God over Job? Both of his claims were that Job's motivations were selfish (Job 1:9-11; 2:4-5). Jesus also warned us about our own motivations:

If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? Luke 11:11-13

Jesus pointed out that even evil people value the well-being of their children. And we are evil. Don't we value the well-being of our loved-ones? But when it came to the Lord of glory, we esteemed Him not. We refused to value Jesus and what He stood for. His kingdom is so different from that kingdom so naturally envisioned by we who are evil. And therein lies our joy and hope today. Because Jesus did not consent to leave us in our twisted and self-serving value-system. He came to set us free. Job was born with the same kind of perverse nature as us. He too was inwardly twisted, predisposed to love evil and hate the good. But as he walked through life something happened. He began to live God's way. How interesting it would be to have a record of his childhood and youth; unfortunately, inspiration has not granted that to us. We don't know the details about his youthful years. But something happened back there that changed his life. And Satan's claims were refuted by Job's reaction to the calamities he experienced. We know that in eternity Job will be thankful for what God did when He intervened and helped him to see His kingdom. Jesus was unesteemed. He was unvalued by a world that owed Him everything. The record of John reads, "He came unto His own and His own received Him not" (John 1:11). But it wasn't just His coming to the Jewish nation. The first verses of John chapter one speak in global terminology, not national or local. "All things were made by Him" (John 1:3); "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men" (John 1:4); "But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name" (John 1:12). Jesus was unvalued. His values are contrary to the values of the world. If we do not count Jesus as all-valuable, if we are not willing to set aside everything interfering with our communion with Him, then we are still clinging to our old value-system. We need not keep it. It is outdated for you and for me. We have changed kingdoms. We have been translated to the kingdom of Jesus (Colossians 1:13). Jesus has been unvalued. But that was then. What about now? Cannot we see that only because of His intervention, today we enjoy the hope of eternal life, and can live heaven on earth in the here and now?

Yes, ‘tis sweet to trust in Jesus, Just from sin and self to cease, Just from Jesus simply taking, Life, and rest, and joy, and peace.

Today, as we partake in this communion service, we know that Jesus is coming back for us. In the meantime, let us receive His heartwork within, receiving Him who we had counted Unesteemed, now as Esteemed. Let us receive, in this bitter, sin-poisoned world His sweetness and trust in Him. Let's simply take from Him, what He so simply gives to us: life and rest and joy and peace.

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