JR 50 CRUSHED: A BLOODY CROSS ISAIAH 53:3-10 4/3/2026 JESSE RANDOLPH Well, what a privilege it has been this evening to sing of our Blessed Redeemer, what a friend indeed we have in Him, and it’s all anchored in that blood stained cross. And what we’ll celebrate in a couple of days with His glorious victorious resurrection. Tonight, on Good Friday, we are going to spend this portion of our Good Friday service considering just a few words from a highly treasured portion of Scripture namely, Isaiah chapter 53. Isaiah 54 was written some 700 years before the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. Isaiah 53 points ahead to the Messiah, the virgin-born Savior who God would one day send to His people. And what Isaiah’s words make clear is that this Savior, when He came, He would suffer. He would be indeed a suffering Servant. He would be, as it says in Isaiah 53, “despised and forsaken of men.” He would be “a man of sorrows” who was “acquainted with grief.” And Isaiah goes even so far to say, and again he’s writing 700 years before Jesus, that this Suffering Servant would be pierced for our transgressions. Then Isaiah says this, “He was crushed for our iniquities.” That’s from Isaiah 53:5. And also in Isaiah 53:10, it says “Yahweh.” That’s the personal name of God. “Yahweh was pleased to crush Him.” Now, that word “crushed” may bring to mind all sorts of different images for any one of us here this evening. It might bring to us the image of a beetle being crushed under a boot or a can being crushed on the forehead of a frat boy, or a vehicle rolling over and landing on top of its passengers. But here in Isaiah, the One who is being described as crushed isn’t a bug, isn’t a lifeless object, like an aluminum can, and He certainly isn’t the victim of some unfortunate highway accident. No, here we’re told in this passage that prophetically by Isaiah, it would be the Lord of glory, the eternal Son of God, Jesus, who would be crushed. And not only that, we’re told that it would be God who would crush Him. And further as we see here, it would be the pleasure of God. That word can actually be translated the delight of God to crush Him. Now how are we to understand that? What does that mean that God was pleased to crush Him, or that it delighted God to crush Jesus? Aren’t we talking about the same God who says, (Ezekiel 33:11) “’As I live!’ declares Lord Yahweh, ‘I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked.’” So how could God, on the one hand, take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and at the same time be pleased in, delighted by, the death of His Son? His beloved Son. What gives? Doesn’t this somehow make God guilty as some have said of committing cosmic child abuse? Doesn’t this fact render God as one who’d be a moral monster as some have accused Him of being? No, it doesn’t. Not when we consider the depths and depravity of our sin. Not when we consider the nature and character of the One we’ve sinned against. Not when we consider the fact that our sin required a payment which only God Himself could pay which is exactly what Jesus, God the Son, came to do. It’s exactly what Jesus did when He willingly went to the Cross and willingly stood as our substitute on our behalf on the cross. That’s what we’re going to look into tonight in this portion of the events, the Good Friday service. We’re going to look at our sin, we’re going to look at our status before God, and we’re going to consider the loving Savior who not only came for us, but who was crushed on our behalf, who was crushed for our iniquities. Let’s start with that topic of sin. Of course this is Good Friday tonight. And Good Friday and on Easter we are pretty accustomed here in church world to have a larger number of visitors on these 2 days, this Friday and Sunday morning. And knowing that, I’m going to grant that some of you here this evening have not heard much teaching or clear teaching or biblical teaching on the topic of sin. And that’s really no surprise considering the hyper-psychologized, over-medicated, thin-skinned, delicately pampered, affection hungry, affirmation-hungry society in which we live today. 100 years ago if you paid your pastor a visit he would have good bedside manner. He would be pleasant toward you, but he wouldn’t coddle you. Instead, he would say things, with a smile on his face, like what you need to do is repent of that sin. He would use words like repentance when he met with you. Nowadays though, you go into many pastors’ offices, and they’ll say something like, well that anxiety you’re experiencing is really outside my field of expertise. You need to go meet with a shrink or a psychologist. If you’re feeling depressed, go meet with a professional. Or they’ll say things like many pastors today, you know what you need is more time to work on you. You deserve better. Have you tried more deep breathing exercises, or have you tried yoga? The point is a lot of so-called shepherds in our day have grown soft. And soft as they sidestep the topic of sin. And that’s really tragic because you can’t understand the message of Good Friday, you can’t understand the message of the Cross and you can’t understand the one true message of salvation that God has offered to this world without having a biblically-informed and biblically robust concept of sin. We’re going to correct that tonight. We’re going to work through a word that no one likes to talk about anymore, that word being sin. So what is sin? Sin, in its original context, the meaning of the word means to “miss the mark.” The way that an archer’s arrow might sail wide right or wide left away from the bullseye. Sin is fundamentally missing the mark. Alright, so if sin is just about having bad aim the way that an archer might have bad aim, and if sin is just about being a little off center with my life, then what’s the big deal? Why is sin such a big deal? Why is sin such a problem? Well, the problem is this. When we sin, when we miss the mark, and we all do, those sins that we commit are not some morally neutral act, like an arrow flying errantly into the woods passing by a confused bluejay as it lands lamely on the dirt. No. Our sins aren’t like that. When we sin, we sin against Someone. And that Someone we sin against is God Himself. The God of the Universe. The God of heaven and earth. The God who has revealed Himself through His creation and nature. The God who has revealed Himself through history and providence. The God who has impressed the reality of His existence on the consciences that He’s given us. The God who has revealed Himself through His Son, the Lord Jesus. The God who has revealed Himself through His perfect and written Word, the Scriptures. Sin is an offense against that God, a God who is described in Scriptures as a consuming fire. A God who is a jealous God, a holy God, a God of wrath. A God who in the Psalms, He’s described as One who feels indignation every day. (Psalm 7:11) And One who hates, he says in Psalm 5:5, workers of iniquity. That’s the God who has set the standards for us to live by. That’s the God you could say, who has set up the targets that we are called to hit with the lives that we live. But tragically, we have continually and repeatedly failed to do so. Instead, we sin. Now, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. God didn’t make us, God didn’t create us with the ultimate aim of having us fail Him. Sin certainly can’t be laid at His feet. No. When God made man as the pinnacle of His creation, when He created everything out of nothing, when He declared His creation to be very good in Genesis 1:31, He created man to have eternal fellowship with Him and perfect communion with Him. He made man to live forever and to live forever with Him. But that’s not the way it turned out. What happened? Sin happened. Romans 5:12 says, “Through one man sin entered into the world.” Did you catch that? Sin has historical roots. It has a provable pedigree, a provable lineage which runs all the way back to that one man, that first man Adam, who along with Eve in the Garden of Eden, did the one thing that the Lord had commanded them not to do, which was to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And it was through that one act of disobedience, that initial act of rebellion, that sin entered into the world. We know from that same passage I just quoted, Romans 5:12, that death then spread to all men. Meaning that while sin initially entered the world through Adam as he and his wife procreated, as their descendants started populating the earth that plague of sin started spreading to all men. And the result is that sin has impacted people of every skin color and skin tone and hue going down through the centuries. And sin has impacted the two sexes, male and female that God has ordained. And sin has crossed the border of every country impacting every people group who has ever lived. Sin has spread to all of mankind to everyone, everywhere. It’s a universal plague. It’s a global disease. Romans 3:23 tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Now note that didn’t say a few have sinned, or a couple have sinned or many have sinned or most have sinned. It says all have sinned. So that cute little toddler that’s about to take his first steps, just like the death row inmate that’s about to take his last meal, equally sinners. The strung-out prostitute and the Stepford wife, both sinners. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, all sinners. All have sinned. See, as a consequence of the fall, Adam’s fall, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden, everyone in his line, meaning everyone who has lived here on planet earth, everyone here tonight in this auditorium, is a natural-born sinner. The reason that we can’t get over that feeling that things just aren’t right, and we’re not right, and we don’t feel right, we know we’re not doing right, well that’s because we aren’t right. The reason that we have those feelings of guilt about what we did with so-and-so or what we shouldn’t have done with so-and-so, or how we thought about so-and-so, or how we looked at so-and-so. The reason we have those guilty feelings is that we are guilty. The reason that we can’t find lasting satisfaction in the bottom of a bottle, or in a sports team, or in a relationship, or status or title or wealth, or hobbies or four-year election cycles, is that while all of those things might grant us temporary momentary fleeting relief, all of it gets ultimately crowded out by the weight of sin which presses down on us heavily, stifling us and suffocating us like an elephant sitting on our chest. But the reality is when we come into this world we aren’t merely spiritually stifled and we’re not merely spiritually suffocating. The Scriptures tell us oh so clearly that when we come into this world we’re actually spiritually dead. Ephesians 2:1 says, “you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” You know people use all kinds of spiritual language like I’m just seeking after God. No, you aren’t. The Bible teaches oh so plainly that we are not spiritually seeking anything. We’re not even spiritually struggling. We come into this world as spiritual stillborn, dead on arrival. Spiritually dead. I’m not using this language folks to be sensational or provocative. I’m using the language to be biblical, to reflect what God’s Word actually says. The Bible teaches very clearly that sin has entered the world, we’re all sinners, and sin comes with a consequence, that consequence being death. Romans 6:23 says, “the wages of sin is death.” The reason we die physically, the reason these bodies eventually give out after 70 or 80 years if we’re fortunate, the reason that the 7-year-old girl with pigtails dies of grueling bone cancer, the reason that a family of four is killed when they’re T-boned crossing an intersection, the reason that an older woman has to say goodbye to her husband of 54 years as his hand grows cold and clammy and then gray and then lifeless, is on account of sin. Sin is what has brought about physical death in this world. The wages of sin though is not only our physical death. It’s also our spiritual death. Meaning, on account of our sin when we come into this world, when we’re born and swaddled and all cute and ga-ga and goo-goo and all that stuff, we are already born spiritually estranged from God. We are at war with God in that moment. We are at enmity with God, enemies of God. Isaiah 59:2 says, “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God.” And further, it’s not just our physical death and our spiritual death, sin brings eternal death. Meaning what awaits the unrepentant sinner, the one who dies in that condition of being spiritually estranged from God, is the just and righteous punishment of a holy God in the eternal flames of hell. A place that’s described as having weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the worm never dies, a place of eternal conscious torment. And what this means is that in our natural condition, in the condition in which we entered this world, even the condition we are sitting in today, if we are not followers of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are in bigtime trouble. Because what we face and what we deserve when those relatives are gathering around our hospital bed as we’re on our death bed about to take our last breath, and as those loved ones as their faces become grainy and eventually grayed out silhouettes, when the hospital monitor stops beeping and our eyes shut for the last time, what we deserve is the righteous outpouring of the wrath of God. That’s what we deserve. Now some of you I’m sure are thinking, man, this message already is kind of a bummer. It’s dark. It’s gloomy. It’s sad. It’s foreboding. Honestly, it’s a little scary. I thought this was Good Friday. Well, amen. It is Good Friday. And the reason it is Good Friday is that God ultimately provided a solution for our sin. The very God that we have sinned against, the God who formed heaven and earth, the God who formed us in our mother’s womb, the God who is giving us life and breath right now, the God who has been offended by our sin, He Himself gave us a solution for our sin problem. He gave us a way to be reconciled to Him. Though He is a holy God, and no He cannot, because of His holiness, excuse or condone sin. And though He is a God of justice who will never fail to dispense His perfect justice, and though He is a God of wrath who I mentioned from Psalm 5:5, is angry with the wicked every day, He is also, and I hope you hear this, a God of mercy, a God of grace, and a God of love. He is a God, as it says in 2 Peter 3:9, “who does not desire that any would perish, but that all would come to repentance.” And so, though we on account of our sin deserve God’s righteous wrath to be poured out on our heads, God offered us a way out. He offered us a way by which we might be spared and rescued and saved. And He did so not because He’s fickle, not because He changed His mind, not because He reversed course and suddenly decided, you know what? I won’t pour out my righteous judgment against sin. No. He did pour out His righteous judgment against our sin, but He didn’t pour His righteous judgment out on our heads. Instead, He poured out His righteous judgment on His Son. Again, here’s our text. (Isaiah 53:5) “He was crushed for our iniquities.” And again (Isaiah 53:10) “Yahweh was pleased to crush Him.” On the cross at Calvary’s mount, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, God the Father’s measured fury, His perfect justice, His righteous wrath, was poured out upon Jesus, His eternal Son. God the Father crushed Jesus. Jesus, the Son of God, was crushed by all of the insults and the taunts and the jeers that were being directed to Him while He was on the cross. He was crushed by the whips and the cords which ripped through His flesh as He was violently flogged. He was crushed by those nails that were driven into His hands and His feet pinning Him to this torture device known as the Cross. He was crushed by the mocking robe that was placed upon Him, thrust upon Him. He was crushed by that crudely twisted together crown of thorns that was hammered into His skull. He was crushed as He was battered and bruised and bleeding, hanging upon that Cross for those three agonizing, excruciating hours. In other words, the condemnation and punishment that we deserved was transferred fully and sufficiently to a Substitute, to Jesus. And the weight of God’s justice was bearing down on Him, pressing down on Him, crushing Him. And then eventually, with His body heaving and His energy depleting Him and His life leaving Him, having drunk down the cup of God’s wrath to its very dregs, the crushed One let out this conquering cry when He said “Tetelestai,” it is finished. And in doing so, when He said that, Tetelestai, He was declaring victory over sin and death and Satan, a victory which would be cemented three days later when He arose victorious from the grave. So God the Father did crush God the Son, but not on a whim, not as an act of unbridled rage. But instead, He did so through the eternally planned day, on a specific day on a specific hill on a specific piece of wood, the Cross. And God the Father allowed all of this to happen. Indeed, He caused all of this to happen as a demonstration of His great love toward mankind. He did all of this allowing His only begotten Son to be pierced, to be crushed because of His great love for us. Romans 5:8 says, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” He did that for you. He did that for me. Is there better news than that? Is there more good news than that? I don’t think so. Now I need to ask you all personally. I don’t know everybody here personally so I’m going to ask personal questions addressed to everyone in this auditorium tonight. Do you know these things? Do you believe these things? Do you understand what Jesus Christ did on the Cross on your behalf? Do you understand how pitiful your plight would have been had Jesus not been crushed on the cross on your behalf? Do you understand how immeasurable His love is for you that He would endure that and go through that for you? Do you not only understand these truths intellectually, but do you believe them as a matter of personal faith? If the answer you have to any one of those questions is no, I have to ask what are you waiting for? Why won’t you come to Jesus Christ. Why won’t you come to the One who was crushed for you. Why won’t you come to the One who died for you. Why would you reject a rock-solid offer of having your sins forgiven and the hope of eternal life secure? Why would you say no to that? Romans 10:9. This is a promise from God through His Word. “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” God we praise you this evening for the wonder of the incarnation by which your Son, the eternal Son of God took on a real body of flesh. He wasn’t a ghost. He wasn’t a phantom. He really walked the earth and ministered to His people. And He taught and He performed miracles. He set His face toward Jerusalem. He went to the Holy City and He was ultimately arrested, betrayed, flogged, beaten, bruised and crucified. God we do praise You for Your perfect plan of salvation and redemption, centered on the Cross at Calvary, centered on a Savior who left His blood on that Cross, a Savior whose blood was sufficient to atone to pay for the sins of the world. God what a Savior, what a marvelous plan, what a loving gracious God you are. God, for those of us who have believed upon Jesus Christ for our salvation, I pray that tonight would be a special night and has been a special night of remembrance and reflection upon the death of our Savior, Your Son and the salvation that He brought through it. And God, I do pray if there’s anybody here who has yet to put their faith in Christ, if they’ve yet to bow the knee to Him as Savior and Lord, they have yet to get over whatever intellectual hurdles or ethical hurdles or anything else that they think through as being a stumbling block to putting their faith in Christ, God I pray tonight that you would cause the scales to fall away from their eyes, that you would replace their hearts of stone with a heart of flesh, that you would grant them faith. Eyes to see and ears to hear. Save their souls and grant them eternal life. God You are good and you do good. We trust You and we love You. Thank you for the Cross. Amen.