Behold, My Servant will prosper;
He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.
Just as many were appalled at you, My people,
So His appearance was marred more than any man
And His form more than the sons of men.
Thus He will sprinkle many nations,
Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him;
For what had not been told them they will see,
And what they had not heard they will understand. (Isaiah 52:13-15)

The Messiah is introduced for the fourth time in this prophecy of Isaiah as the Servant of Jehovah. That is a messianic title; He is the one who comes to do the will of Jehovah. He is the one Israelite whose work will prosper on such a level that He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted. And in the end He will render the globe speechless.

“My Servant,” He says, “will prosper.” This is the revelation: “He will prosper.”

Jesus didn’t die as some kind of a martyr to a noble cause that He failed to pull off. The Hebrew means literally “to act intelligently or wisely.” And when you say someone acts wisely in Hebrew, what you mean is that they’re successful. This success is the result of hard work and wise strategy.

He will act wisely. He will be successful. He will prosper. In other words, He will not fail to accomplish the will of God.

The evidence of His success is in the same verse: “He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.”

God is going to make Him high, then higher, and then highest. High, I believe, looks at His resurrection. Higher looks at His ascension. And highest looks at His coronation. He is going to be so successful that God is going to raise Him from the dead, take Him into glory, and sit Him at His right hand.

The astonishing revelation of the Servant of Jehovah is this: He will come, He will succeed, He will accomplish the purpose of God by His great effort, and God will validate that by raising Him from the dead, taking Him into glory and seating Him on His throne. That is astonishing.

And this revelation is followed by an astonishing humiliation:

Just as many were appalled at you, My people,
So His appearance was marred more than any man
And His form more than the sons of men.

This seems bizarre, because the next verse talks about how the nations and kings are silenced by His glory. What is going on here? His career will be successful. He will be lifted up, ascended and crowned in glory. But the promised success of the Servant of Jehovah in delivering His people includes an astonishing humiliation.

The word “astonished” has the idea of being so shocked that you lose control. That this is going to happen to the Messiah is so shocking, it’s almost paralyzing. And what is the shock?

That his face and body will be so disfigured and distorted that He will be (to translate the Hebrew literally), “away from men,” out of the category of being human. This is a distortion and a disfigurement that destroys all resemblance to being human.

This looks at His crucifixion and what led up to it — where He was so disfigured, so mutilated, so distorted as to be beyond looking human. Psalm 22 gives some details about what was going to happen to Him on the cross:

I am poured out like water,
And all my bones are out of joint;
My heart is like wax;
It is melted within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd,
And my tongue cleaves to my jaws;
And You lay me in the dust of death.
For dogs have surrounded me;
A band of evildoers has encompassed me;
They pierced my hands and my feet.
I count all my bones.
They look, they stare at me;
They divide my garments among them,
And for my clothing they cast lots. (Psalm 22:14-18)

We all know what happened to Jesus. We understand that He was scourged, that He was beaten raw, so that His body was a mass of open wounds pouring blood out. We understand that a crown of thorns was crushed down on His head, with thorns as long as two or three inches. Blood ran down His face. We understand the sleeplessness of the nights leading up to His crucifixion, the weariness. And we also have to understand the contorted expressions that He must have had on His face — the disfiguring, tortured face of the Holy One suffering.

You barely recognize a human being under the blood and the wounds and the crushing burden of His body hanging on a cross and being dislocated. And so it says “many were appalled at you.”

It was the astonishment of contempt. This couldn’t be their Messiah. This pictures the shock of the common people who looked at His humiliation. He was a repulsive object to them, nowhere near what they wanted in their Messiah king.

His degradation is the deepest possible — the most profound, the most horrible. But so will His exaltation be. We go from an astonishing revelation to an astonishing humiliation or mutilation, and then, finally, an astonishing exaltation:

Thus He will sprinkle many nations,
Kings will shut their mouths on account of Him;
For what had not been told them they will see,
And what they had not heard they will understand.

The scene changes with another jolting shock. It was local Jews living in Israel who were astonished at His disfigurement in death. Now, all of a sudden, the astonishment belongs to nations and kings who are speechless when they see Him.

The Bible says that the sun, moon, and stars will go out when He comes. He will appear in blazing glory. The book of Revelation says that people will cry for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them, to hide them from the face of His coming. Every eye shall see Him. And when He comes to establish His Kingdom, He will literally take over the world. He will replace rulers.

The whole world will be stunned when He returns. The drama that will occur as Christ appears in glory will not be lost on anyone. Kings will therefore shut their mouths on account of Him. Those who always have a right to speak will be speechless. The involuntary effect of shock and amazement will render them silent. The world will be mute as He comes. Why?

For what had not been told them they will see,
And what they had not heard they will understand.

The world hasn’t been told about the glorious return of Christ. But when He comes, they will all see it, they will all understand it, and they will be in stunned silence. They will have their complete theological education about the second coming in a moment.

So, our Lord’s inhuman disfigurement astonished the first-century Jews who saw Him. His exaltation will astonish the globe; the whole world will see Him. Between His humiliation (which included His death) and His exaltation, something had to happen: resurrection. And that’s exactly what is not only implied, but stated, in verse 13: “He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted.”

You can find more insights into Isaiah 53 in Dr. MacArthur’s book “The Gospel According to God: Rediscovering the Most Remarkable Chapter in the Old Testament.” For a limited time, the book is available for 25% off from The Master’s University’s bookstore, here.

This post is based on a sermon Dr. MacArthur preached in 2012, titled “The Startling Servant of Jehovah.” In addition to serving as the pastor of Grace Community Church and the voice of Grace to You, Dr. MacArthur is the chancellor of The Master’s University in Santa Clarita, Calif. You can learn more about TMU at masters.edu.