Originally Posted by antelope_sniper
Originally Posted by Thunderstick
Quote
But the passage is not about Jesus. The Suffering servant is Israel, not Jesus.


Explain the logic of the Lord laying on Israel the sins of all Israel so that by their stripes Israel might be healed when the context is clearly referencing two separate entities. There is no logic in that in that view.


It is to be remembered that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible are not predicting things that are to happen hundreds of years in advance; they are speaking to their own contexts and delivering a message for their own people to hear, about their own immediate futures;
In this case, the author is not predicting that someone will suffer in the future for other people’s sins at all. Many readers fail to consider the verb tenses in these passages. They do not indicate that someone will come along at a later time and suffer in the future. They are talking about past suffering. The Servant has already suffered – although he “will be” vindicated. And so this not about a future suffering messiah.
In fact, it is not about the messiah at all. This is a point frequently overlooked in discussions of the passage. If you will look, you will notice that the term messiah never occurs in the passage. This is not predicting what the messiah will be.
If the passage is not referring to the messiah, and is not referring to someone in the future who is going to suffer – who is it talking about? Here there really should be very little ambiguity. As I mentioned, this particular passage – Isaiah 53 – is one of four servant songs of Second Isaiah. And so the question is, who does Second Isaiah himself indicate that the servant is? A careful reading of the passages makes the identification quite clear: “But now hear, O Jacob my servant, Israel whom I have chosen” (44:1); “Remember these things, O Jacob, and Israel, for you are my servant” (44:21); “And he said to me, ‘You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified” (49:3).


Some of the prophecies concerning world empires and the Messiah are certainly reaching centuries into the future. With this as your starting premise everything else falls short of making your point.

The Hebrew is using a singular masculine pronoun to speak of one male individual--a man of sorrows--someone whom God assigned to bear all the sins of Israel--the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. Messiah is spoken of many times and in many passages without the usage of the term Messiah because He is described in many ways by many different terms.

Your explanation logically fails.