Inspired by Isaiah 53:1-6, two friends in a coffee shop wrestle with a Servant nobody believed in, a suffering everybody misread, and a line that says all of us wandered off.
Tom and Ray are at their usual cafe, soaking up coffee and trying to make sense of God’s Word.
Tom: You read that part I sent you? The Isaiah one?
Ray: Yeah. Couple times, actually.
Tom: And?
Ray: Man. It’s heavy. The part about nobody believing it right off the bat.
Tom: Right. Like he says it before it even happens. Who’s gonna buy this?
Ray: Yeah. And then the guy he’s talking about, there’s nothing to him. No looks, no, I don’t know, no presence.
Tom: That part kind of threw me. You’d think it’d be the opposite.
Ray: How so?
Tom: Well, like if God’s sending somebody, you figure he shows up big. Lights, the whole deal. Not somebody you’d walk past on the sidewalk.
Ray: Yeah. Yeah, I thought the same.
Tom: But that’s kind of the point, maybe. I don’t know.
Ray: The thing that stuck with me was the bit where everybody thought God was punishing him. For his own stuff.
Tom: Mmm.
Ray: And they had it backwards the whole time.
Tom: That’s the part I keep chewing on. Like everybody’s standing there watching and they all read it wrong.
Ray: Right. They figured he deserved it.
Tom: And he didn’t.
Ray: Nope.
Tom: I mean, do you ever think about how easy that’d be? To look at somebody suffering and just assume they brought it on themselves?
Ray: Oh, all the time. We do it constantly.
Tom: Yeah. We do.
Ray: I caught myself doing it last week. Guy I know lost his job and my first thought was, well, what’d he do?
Tom: See, that’s it though. Same instinct.
Ray: Probably. I don’t love that about myself.
Tom: Well, join the club.
Ray: The line that got me was the one about the sheep. We all went our own way.
Tom: Yeah.
Ray: Cause that’s not just bad people. That’s, like, everybody. Me included.
Tom: That’s what I can’t get around. It says all of us. Not some. Not the bad ones.
Ray: Every one of us turned off and did our own thing.
Tom: And then God just, what, piles it all on the one guy.
Ray: That’s how I read it.
Tom: It’s a lot to think about.
Ray: It is. I don’t think I fully understand it, honestly.
Tom: Same here. I read it, and part of it lands, and part of it I just kind of, I don’t know.
Ray: Yeah. I’m not gonna pretend I’ve got it figured out.
Tom: Nobody does, probably.
Ray: Probably not.
Tom: You want another cup?
Ray: Nah, I’m good. I gotta get going, actually.
Tom: Alright, man. We’ll pick it up.
Ray: Yeah. See ya, Tom.
Created by Steve
God’s Word…
Holman Christian Standard Bible
Isaiah 53:1-6
Who has believed what we have heard?
And who has the arm of the Lord been revealed to?
2 He grew up before Him like a young plant
and like a root out of dry ground.
He didn’t have an impressive form
or majesty that we should look at Him,
no appearance that we should desire Him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of suffering who knew what sickness was.
He was like someone people turned away from;
He was despised, and we didn’t value Him.
4 Yet He Himself bore our sicknesses,
and He carried our pains;
but we in turn regarded Him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was pierced because of our transgressions,
crushed because of our iniquities;
punishment for our peace was on Him,
and we are healed by His wounds.
6 We all went astray like sheep;
we all have turned to our own way;
and the Lord has punished Him
for the iniquity of us all.