SID: “Who would have believed our report?” In other words, who’s going to believe the report of the prophet? This was Isaiah saying, “Who’s going to believe this? For he, this one, shot upright forth as a sapling and as a root out of dry ground.” In other words, it’d be a miraculous birth. “This one had no form nor comeliness that we should look upon him nor beauty that we should delight in him. He was despised, forsaken of men, a man of pains and acquainted with disease.” Now, it’s in the Hebrew. I realize in the Christian Bibles, it may not say that, but in the Hebrew, it actually says pains and diseases. In other words, not only would the sins come on this one, but all the pains and all the diseases of humanity. “And as one from whom men hide their face, he was despised and we Jewish people esteemed him not. Surely, our diseases …” It wasn’t his. “Our diseases he did bear. Our pains he carried whereas we did esteem him stricken and smitten of God and inflicted.
SID: We thought God was punishing him, but he was wounded because of our transgressions, our sins. He was crushed because of our inequities and the chastisement or the punishment for our welfare went right on him and then the good news. “And with his stripes …” When you have stripes, blood comes on the human body. So with his stipes, with his blood, with that substitute, with that sacrifice, we Jewish people—not, will be healed. We were healed. “All we like sheep do go astray. We turned every …” This was written 800 years before the messiah came to earth in the prophet Isaiah. “All we like sheep did go astray. We turned everyone to his own way and the Lord hath made to light on him the inequity, the sins of us all. He was oppressed though he humbled himself and opened not his mouth.”
SID: Could you imagine being oppressed? It was worse than oppression. The scriptures tell us he was beaten raw. “For this reason for he was cut off out of the land of the living.” That’s another way of saying, died. “He died for the transgressions of my people to whom the stroke was due although he had done no violence. Neither was any deceit in his mouth.” There’s no one in the Bible that God says this about except the perfect substitute. “Yet it pleased … I mean there was no deceit anywhere in his mouth. Yet it pleased God to crush him.” At that point, “Stop,” my father said. “You’re reading from a Christian Bible.” I said to my dad, “This Bible was published by the Jewish Publication Society and take a look. It was inscribed by our orthodox rabbi,” but my father still had a lot of questions. But he wouldn’t even ask me. He just froze and I couldn’t discuss the issue of Jesus anymore.
