Isaiah

So for the past few days, my advent readings have been taken out of the book of Isaiah. These passages have encouraged me to praise God for providing so many prophecies about the coming Messiah that Jesus would fulfill while He walked on the earth. (Though I will definitely admit that sometimes Isaiah is hard for me to understand.) Here is one of the passages that really caught my attention.. check it out:

⁴ Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
⁵ But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed.
⁶ All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:4-6)

As I read this passage carefully, I noticed that all we bring into the picture is nothing but bad and yet Jesus takes our bad on Himself and brings us good... Let me show you what I mean:

Here's what we brought:

• griefs
• sorrows
• transgressions
• iniquities

Here's what we did:

• esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, afflicted
• went astray
• turned to our own ways

Here's what Jesus did:

• borne our griefs
• carried our sorrows
• was stricken, smitten by God, afflicted
• was wounded
• was crushed
• took on chastisement
• marked with stripes
• took our iniquity

Here's what Jesus brings to us (after all of the bad we brought):

• peace
• healing

How amazing is that? Such a clear picture of Ephesians 2:4-9 --

⁴But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,⁵even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ- by grace you have been saved- ⁶and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. ⁸For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, ⁹ not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

As a last side note, this is a word cloud of the Isaiah passages that I read through this week. I think these are very neat visualizations because they are created so that words appear larger the more often they are repeated.

So you can see that in these passages, the word Lord appeared far more than any other word. Which words stand out to you the most? Which ones surprise you by how large or small they are?