Isaiah 53: 4 states:
“Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.”
This Messiah of whom Isaiah testifies will bear “grief” and “sorrow,” but these will belong to us. They will be ours. In His suffering will be found our own shortcomings and failures. He will assume them for us.
As He suffers, we will think it is His own deserved punishment. We will think it is God’s doing. God will smite Him. God will afflict Him. After all, He was not truly God’s Son.
We miss the point of Isaiah’s message when we confine it to the Lord alone. His messengers will also come “as a thief in the night” to warn again before His coming. They, too, may fit the same pattern. If so, then we should be careful when we think another person’s grief and sorrows are inflicted upon them by a God who has smitten them. Such an assessment may, like those who lived and rejected the Messiah, put you on the wrong side of the confrontation.
The Lord’s doings are ever the same. The pattern simply does not change.