Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2070
“Therefore wiil I divide Him a portion with the great. And He shall divide the spoil with the strong. Because He has poured out His soul unto death. And He was numbered with the transgressors. And He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” Isaiah 53:12.
WE may regard this verse as a kind of Covenant made between the everlasting God, the infinite Jehovah on the one part, and our great Representative, Mediator and Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, on the other part. The incarnate God is to be bruised and wounded. He is to pour out His soul unto death and by a travail of soul He is to bear the sin of many. And then His ultimate reward is to be that God will divide Him a portion with the great and He Himself shall divide the spoil with the strong.
Note the double recompense and joyfully distinguish between the two divisions—that which Jehovah makes for Him and that which He makes Himself. Our champion, like another David, is to confront and conquer the great enemy of the Lord’s people, and then He is to have His reward. Unlike David, He is to pour out His soul and die in the conflict, and then He is to receive a glorious portion from the Father, and He is also Himself to seize upon the spoil of the vanquished foe.
glory is displayed around Him. To Him the cherubim and seraphim continually cry in their ceaseless worship and undivided adoration. The four-and-twenty elders, representing the ancient and the present Church cast their crowns at His feet. And the myriads of the redeemed whose robes are washed in His blood pour forth their love and life at His feet. He has His portion with the great—none are so great as He.
He is not only King but kingmaker for He has made His most humble followers priests and kings unto God and His royalty is multiplied in each of them. How much His Father honors Him, it is not for my tongue to tell you. And if it were possible for me to tell it in words, yet the inner meaning could never be compassed by such narrow hearts as ours. He has infinite Glory from the great Father God. He lives forever, King of kings and Lord of lords and all hallelujahs come up before Him. Imagination cannot reach the height of His immeasurable majesty and happiness.
And why these honors? What has He done to merit these immeasurable glories? The answer is that He has done these four things—“He has poured out His soul unto death. And He was numbered with the transgressors. And he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” In addition to what His Father gives Him, it is worthy of contemplation that our Lord has taken, in His life-conflict, great spoils with His own hands. “He shall divide the spoil with the strong.” He has spoiled sin, death and Hell—each one the vanquisher of our race, the spoiler of the entire world.
He has overcome these three, and in each case has led captivity captive. What must be the spoils of such victories? All the processions of triumph that ever went up the Sacra Via to the Capitol of Rome we may dismiss as empty pageants. All the glories of Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Greece are blots of the cruel past which sicken us in remembrance. These led liberty captive. But when He ascended on high He led captivity captive. Jesus blesses all by His victories and curses none. He spoiled no man of his goods—He only brought death on death, destruction on the Destroyer and captivity upon captivity.
In all His spoils men are gainers. And therefore, when the incarnate God divides the spoil with the strong, all His people may joyfully shout without the reservation of a sigh for the conquered and the spoiled. That was a rich triumph
and the spoils He won are spoils that enrich myriads of Believers today and shall enrich them throughout all the ages that are to come.
And why these spoils? What has He done? These trophies—where were they won? What was the conflict? Here is the answer—“Because He has poured out His soul unto death. And He was numbered with the transgressors. And He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” It is a strange fact that I am going to declare, but it is no less true than strange—according to our text the extraordinary glories of Christ, as Savior, have all been earned by His connection with human sin. He has gotten His most illustrious splendor, His brightest jewels, His most Divine crowns out of coming into contact with this poor fallen race.
What is man? What are all men? Nothings, nobodies. This great globe itself—what is it in connection with the vast creation of God? One grain of the sweepings of dust behind the door. The small dust of the balance bears a larger proportion to the eternal hills than this little globe to the great worlds which speak to us across the midnight sky. Yet all those glittering worlds that we can see with the telescope bear an extremely minute proportion to the illimitable fields of Divine creation. We know not that anywhere Christ ever came into contact with sin, except upon this little ball. We have no Revelation of any other redemption. This obscure star is faith’s great marvel!