Mended

I was struck by something in Isaiah 53 (the so-called ‘suffering servant’ passage) this week, during an unexpected stay in hospital. Cutting a long story short, I heard a testimony of complete healing from a life-shaping genetic disorder, in which the person healed was standing on 1 Peter 2.24, specifically ‘by His stripes you have been healed’. So the main thing is, wow, anyone can see dramatic healing when they stand on God’s word, and that was and is relevant to me, too.

But I would like to suggest that this little phrase means more than we credit it with.

So the first thing that struck me when I looked at 1 Peter 2, was that the writer quotes from Isaiah 53 three times in one and a half verses (53.4, 53.5 and 53.6 to be specific)*

And when I started working through the Hebrew of Isaiah 53, it seemed to me that, as ever, the desire to write good English results in a significant loss of definition. That isn’t even a criticism, it is just the nature of languages that nothing in one language is likely to have an exact equivalent in the other.

Let me share my lumpy version of Isaiah 53.1-5 and then return to the subject of mending.

Who has believed what we report, and to whom has the strong arm of Yahweh been revealed?

Growing up as a suckling before Him, and as a root out of dry ground, He has no beauty or splendour, and when we see Him there is nothing to see that we should delight in Him.

He is held in contempt and rejected by men, a man of sorrow, knowing sickness / grief, [then complicated pun beyond my ability to explain, based on fact that Hebrew word spelt ‘master’ ( מַסְתֵּר ) and meaning ‘Master or Lord’ but pronounced (according to the entry in Strong’s, about which I am starting to harbour grave doubts) ‘ahDOHN’ can also mean ‘hide’ so something like ‘we adonaied’] our faces from Him; He is held in contempt and we did not take any account of Him.

Surely our diseases / griefs He has carried away, and our suffering He has suffered, and yet we accounted Him struck down, slain by God (Elohim) and defiled.

But He was desecrated for our rebellion [ie rebellion against God], bruised for our punishment, the discipline for our peace was on Him, and by His stripes of wounds, we are mended by stitching together.

If my version has any virtue then it is just to make crystal clear, the blindness upon God’s people as they look at the one He has sent, and in every single dimension think that what they are seeing is God’s judgement on this Man, when in fact it is the price of their freedom from sin and rebellion they are seeing on display.

They rebelled, so ‘Yahweh’s strong arm’ is desecrated; they deserved punishment, so He was bruised; they needed correction if they were ever to achieve shalom, so He was disciplined; and they were like a torn bag or garment, so His stripes – the long lines of bleeding weals and wounds on His body, stitched them back up.

So is it just ‘healed’ as in ‘healing’? It certainly includes that. But it is actually ‘mended’, and to understand what mended would look like, I think you need to look at the Deuteronomy 28 blessings, Isaiah 61, Malachi 3 and every other statement of covenant blessing and restoration.

I have an older friend who was suffering from bad knees; two other friends prayed for him for healing, when he wasn’t expecting it, at a Men’s camp earlier this year, and his knees were instantly healed. But when he went for his annual medical (he drives a bus), the doctor was astonished; she told him he now had the heart of a 20 year old man, his incipient macular degeneration had disappeared and a couple of other things also. He just knew his knees needed a fix, they prayed for healing and he got it all! (Update: he had a nasty fall last week; turns out he was still taking strong meds for the high blood pressure he no longer has, and blacked out…)

And that is how we need to read that verse in Isaiah 53, and also in 1 Peter 2.24 (because it is clear to me that the writer understood it wasn’t just ‘healing’ healing). Whatever the gap between where I am and all the promises of God’s covenant love towards me – whether health, prosperity, influence, being a blessing to all nations, whatever – He has already stitched it up with the most perfect mend ever, through the torn lines on Jesus’ back.

Which makes “by His stripes I have already been healed” a declaration for every day and every circumstance.

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(* this is the biblical equivalent of a paleontologist identifying the last meal consumed by a fossil creature; what was the writer of 1 Peter meditating on that morning…)