Discouragement is inevitable when we serve in the mission of the church. We see worldly systems that, with sophistication and accuracy, promote sin and hinder the gospel. We see people show interest in the good news, but they remain unpersuaded. We see the darkness of satanic addiction and brokenness strangling families and communities, and it is called “progress”. We, the local church, may be just a small candle in hundreds (or thousands) of square kilometres of thick darkness. There are declining numbers of people going into pastoral ministry and cross-cultural gospel work. And if all that wasn’t enough, we have ourselves and our own sin and limitations to deal with. Needless to say, godly confidence in fulfilling the mission of the church can be hard to come by.
But the Apostle Paul’s situation wasn’t much better; it was probably much worse. A sprawling Roman empire that thrives on corruption, systemic idolatry, and immorality. Travel that is dangerous and physically exhausting. The Christian church is fledgling, afflicted by sin within and pagan ideologies without. They have no outside funding or sources of mature leaders. There are no geographic safe havens. Christianity is only legal so long as it is deemed irrelevant or confused by outsiders with Judaism. And, if we roughly equate the population of modern-day Turkey (88 million) to the population of the Roman Empire, Turkey (at 0.1% evangelical) is significantly more evangelized.
And yet, in this setting, Paul is bold and expansionistic in his approach to the mission of the church. This article seeks to explore a key part of the biblical-theological engine which drives this bold mission in a barren context: the Servant of the Lord from Isaiah. We begin with how the Servant functions in early Christian missionary theology, and then reflect on how the Servant’s mission functions within the theological story of Isaiah. Finally, we close with a reflection on the Servant’s mission for our service.
The Servant of the Lord in Paul’s Mission
The book of Acts gives us a narrative that is fundamentally shaped by the Servant’s mission. When Jesus promises his Spirit to empower witnesses “until the end of the earth,” in Acts 1:8, it is likely a fulfillment of the Servant of the Lord who will be salvation “to the end of the earth” (Isa 49:6). And Luke records how Paul later returns to this verse to support his preaching of salvation to the Gentiles when faced with Jewish opposition (Acts 13:47). Indeed, had Acts not elsewhere clarified that Jesus was the Servant (Acts 3:13), we might have been tempted to think that Paul was the Servant of the Lord, because his mission flows so clearly from the pattern of the Servant.
When Luke quotes Paul’s mission is described as “to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18) there are unmistakable echoes of the Servant of the Lord who came to “open blind eyes” (Isa 42:7, 61:1), causing light (Isa 42:16). Luke believed that Paul’s mission (and that of the early church) was the fulfillment of prophecy regarding the Servant’s own work. And that isn’t too surprising, because Jesus himself had spoken about global proclamation in his name as fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy (Luke 24:44-47).
And so when we turn over to Paul’s own explanation of his anticipated mission to Spain, it is no surprise that we find the Servant, the Messiah, there also. In his discussion of why preachers need to be sent, he quotes Isaiah 52:7, “how beautiful are the feet of those proclaiming the good news” (Rom 10:15). This is not random proof-texting. The death and resurrection of the Messiah were the very kingdom of God and peace which Isaiah had spoken of regarding the Servant of the Lord (cf. Isa 53:5). Paul also quotes Isaiah 53:1 (“Who has believed our hearing?”) to show that the Jewish rejection of Jesus, the Servant, was prophesied and therefore not unexpected. For Paul, the Servant of the Lord’s proclamation in Isaiah 52-53 is the lens through which he understands his own proclamation of Jesus.
And, when Paul is rounding off his argument about not wanting to build on another’s foundation and having fulfilled the gospel, he quotes Isaiah 52:15, “to those whom it has not been proclaimed, they will see, and those who have not heard will understand.” To be clear, this Old Testament citation does more than simply say that those who have not heard the gospel will hear it; it actually promises understanding of the gospel (cf. Rom 15:12, Isa 11:10). It promises success in mission proclamation. And that is why it is so relevant for Paul: in a world where the church is a tiny minority, Paul can be expansionistic in his gospel designs because he knows some from among the nations will come to understand the good news of the Servant of the Lord.
However, the hearing and understanding Paul envisions as happening through his mission may be more than we initially think. That is to say, the hearing and understanding that is prophesied regarding the Lord is not just that some will hear and respond. In reality, it is saying that the Servant of the Lord will transform the nations’ spiritual faculties so they will rightly see who the Servant is.
The Servant of the Lord’s Mission in Isaiah
To substantiate this, we need to see how this “hearing-seeing-understanding” theme is developed in Isaiah as a whole. The theme of knowing and understanding God begins in the first chapter of Isaiah with Isaiah’s scathing indictment: “An ox knows its owner and a donkey its master’s manger; Israel does not know, my people do not understand” (Isa 1:3). Of course, the Lord is the “thing” that Israel doesn’t know. What’s more, the prophet Isaiah’s calling is to harden Israel into such ignorance: “You will say to this people, hear well and do not understand; see well but do not know…” (Isa 6:9). Otherwise, Israel would “see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, turn and [Yahweh] would heal them” (6:10). That is to say, hearing and seeing (clearly spiritual metaphors) precede repentance and forgiveness. And so when we read later that Israel is “blind” and “deaf” (Isa 42:19), there is no ambiguity about it. They are far from repentance and forgiveness, far from spiritual understanding.
And yet that is not the last word for Israel. Isaiah 35 looks forward to God’s great restoration. He will renew the land, bringing joy to his people (35:1). They will “see” the glory of the Lord when he comes in salvation and justice (35:2, 5). And this is how it is explained: “then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be opened” (35:5). Within the context of Isaiah, this must refer to spiritual renewal (though it likely alludes to physical restoration as well), so that Israel can know and understand their God. When they hear and see, there will be safety (35:9) and redemption (35:10).
With this background, the Servant of the Lord comes into clarity. When the Lord’s Anointed is commissioned to “open blind eyes” (Isa 42:7), this is surely an explanation of what it means to be a covenant to Israel and a light to the nations (42:6; cf. Isaiah 61:1-3).
Likewise, when we come around to the climactic passage of Isaiah 53, we see this theme again. In Isaiah 53, the Servant of the Lord’s death will accomplish forgiveness for God’s people, and so God will vindicate him (Isa 52:6-10). However, near the beginning of this passage, we read, “that which was not reported to them, they will hear; that which they have not seen, they will understand” (Isa 52:15). In context, it is the remarkable nature of the Servant’s sanctifying mission, in spite of his horrible suffering, that causes the amazement. And the amazement is among the Gentiles. The crushed and crowned Anointed is the key to opening the darkened hearts of humanity.
Furthermore, when taken in its larger Isaianic context, “they will hear” and “they will understand” cannot mean the simple relaying of a message which is cognitively comprehensible. It must mean that they, when they encounter the suffering and vindicated Servant of the Lord, come to true knowledge of the Lord. In other words, it is referring to not simply external proclamation, but the sovereign, effectual, internal call of God. It is a prophetic word: they will hear and understand.
This explains much in the context of Isaiah, for the nations figure prominently in Isaiah 40-66. Thus, when we hear that the Servant of the Lord has a mission “to the ends of the earth,” we should read it against the background of God’s heart for the nations: “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other” (Isa 45:22). Regarding the foreigner who had typically been excluded from worship until that time, we read, “I will bring them to my holy mountain, I will bring them joy in my house of prayer” (Isa 56:7). Both in the external summons (Isa 45:22) and the internal call (Isa 56:6), the Servant is the one who will bring these things to pass.
When taken together, Paul’s frequent usage of the Servant of the Lord in combination with the Servant’s mission of opening spiritual eyes and ears shows the underlying narrative from which Paul conceived of his own mission and that of the church.
Prophesied Transformation and the Mission of the Church
With this background, we return now to our current moment and station in the mission of the church. For, unless we are involved in a Messianic Jewish work, our Christian service (whatever form it might take) surely falls under the “to the ends of the earth” banner in the history of salvation. And there is much this theological story has to say to us, for we also serve in the mission of the Servant.
First of all, when Paul cited texts about the Servant and his global mission, he was not so much saying, “See, there is a verse that supports what we are doing” (which would not be at all wrong!) but rather “Look, we are living out the unfolding fulfillment of God’s prophesied plan of salvation for all the world through God’s sovereign orchestration.” And the book of Acts certainly has this feeling as well (e.g., Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, Peter and Cornelius, etc.). And we still live in that time. God is still fulfilling the Old Testament scriptures regarding the Servant’s mission, opening eyes and hearts, through the mission of the church. Mission is the fruition of “Thus says the Lord.”
Secondly, the Christian church should have an incredible sense of confidence. This confidence is not rooted in the fact that we have technological superiority, the numeric edge or physical strength, as has sometimes been the case in the past. But rather we join with the early church: small in number, limited in resource, socially maligned, but confident in the prophecy of God regarding the Servant of the Lord. To return to an earlier image, imagine the Turkish church boldly sending missionaries to Yemen, one of the most hostile places on earth! And yet so should our confidence be. The prophesied effectiveness of the gospel call produces such confidence.
Thirdly, hard places are a misnomer. There are only hard hearts. Paul closes the book of Acts by quoting Isaiah 6 as the paradigm for gospel resistance among the Jews (Acts 28:26-27). They can’t see, hear or understand God himself, or in context, God’s saving self-revelation in the Son. But this is not a geographic problem (the hardness of Romans in general is not condemned, cf. Rom 1:7!), it is a people problem. In the mystery of God’s sovereignty, the Servant has not (yet) opened their eyes. In the midst of globalized cities, thousands of years of global immigration (think of the hordes of Genghis Khan, the Celts across Europe or the Viking invasions) and the ebb and flow of Christian populations on the various continents of the earth, we should know that the crushed then crowned Messiah is still doing his work, even if we do not comprehend it fully.
Fourthly, it seems to me that the full fruit of the gospel has not yet swept through reformed evangelicalism. Past generations in the West and other nations currently, both of which perhaps had or have less clarity on the beauty of the gospel, have been more involved in the fulfillment of the global mission of the church than we are. Just as a renewal of clarity in the gospel produced a missionary movement in John Calvin’s Geneva, so also it should sweep through our evangelicalism. Likely part of the “fruit” (Rom 1:13) that Paul longed for in his gospel encouragement of the Roman church was the fruit of sending him to Spain. As we grasp the gospel with fresh depth, may God have mercy and produce an abundance of going and sending fruit in the coming years.
