Book Write-Up: The Gospel According to God, by John MacArthur

John MacArthur. The Gospel According to God: Rediscovering the Most Remarkable Chapter in the Old Testament. Crossway, 2018. See here to buy the book.

The Gospel According to God is about Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53 describes a suffering servant, and Christians historically have interpreted that servant as Jesus Christ.

Here are some thoughts and observations about this book:

A. MacArthur believes that Isaiah 53 speaks about Jesus Christ’s vicarious, atoning suffering and death, as well as Christ’s resurrection. But is not Isaiah 40-55 about Israel’s restoration from Babylonian exile? How would Jesus Christ fit into that? MacArthur states that Isaiah 40-48 discusses Israel’s restoration from Babylonian exile, Isaiah 49-57 concerns redemption from sin, and Isaiah 58-66 speaks of Christ’s millennial reign and deliverance of creation from the curse of the Fall. Indeed, Isaiah 40-48 does explicitly refer to Babylonian captivity, with its statements about Cyrus and the Babylonian gods Bel and Nebo (see Isaiah 44:28; 45:1, 13; 46:1). But the themes of national exile and restoration are present in Isaiah 49-57 as well (see Isaiah 49:22; 51:2-3, 11), for Isaiah 49-55 talks about Israel coming to Zion from Gentile nations and becoming populous. MacArthur does not explicitly engage this, but what he says pertains to it. MacArthur treats Isaiah 53:1-10 as the words that Israel will speak at the eschaton. All Israel will be saved at Christ’s second coming (Romans 11:26), and Israel will confess that, as a nation, she was wrong to reject Jesus Christ. She thought that Christ was weak, a far cry from the strong Messiah many Jews anticipated, but she comes to realize that Christ was smitten for her transgressions. MacArthur may believe that Isaiah 49-55 is still about national Israel, but that it concerns the restoration of national Israel in the eschaton, not from Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E.

B. Isaiah 53:9 states regarding the servant: “And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth” (KJV). MacArthur interprets that as an allusion to Jesus’s burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man. I checked scholarly and Jewish commentaries to see how that would be interpreted from a non-Christological perspective. Indeed, scholars struggle with this, for why would Isaiah 53:9 say that the servant will be buried with the rich? Is that not a notable contrast with the suffering of the servant in Isaiah 53? I found a variety of explanations. One is that the servant’s enemies intend to bury him with the wicked, but God, in rewarding the servant’s righteousness, ensures that he is buried with the rich instead. Another view is that the wicked and the rich are both participants in the servant’s death. Rashi goes this route, and John Oswalt, in NICOT, appears to go this route when he says that the servant “is not even buried with the poor, who had been his most faithful companions, but is surrounded in death by some of those whose sins he had carried, but who had oppressed and despised him.” A related view is that the rich are oppressors, so they are appropriately coupled with the wicked in v. 9: the servant would be buried in the tomb of a wicked oppressor, or God punishes the servant as if the servant is a wicked oppressor (when he is not). Still others emend the text, saying that “ashir” was originally “osei rasha,” “doers of wickedness.” In that scenario, the servant’s grave is with the wicked and the doers of wickedness.

C. Isaiah 53:11 states: “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities” (KJV). How does the servant justify people by his knowledge? MacArthur interprets this to mean that people have eternal life by knowing God (John 17:3), meaning the knowledge is not the servant’s knowledge but people’s knowledge of God (“his knowledge”=”knowledge of him”). There are commentators who agree with MacArthur, but, doing a search of “daat” with a possessive suffix, I could not find it used in the sense of “knowledge of” someone or something. Rather, it refers to knowledge that is possessed by someone (Job 10:7; Proverbs 3:20; 22:17; Isaiah 47:10; 48:4), in which case interpreting the knowledge as the servant’s own knowledge makes more sense. In what sense does the servant’s knowledge justify people? How does the servant knowing something serve to justify many? A variety of explanations have been proposed. One view is that the servant’s knowledge is his experience of suffering, meaning that his suffering is what justifies many (vicarious penal suffering). Another view is that the knowledge is the servant’s knowledge of God (Hosea 4:1, 6), or God’s will. The servant knows God and God’s plan to save sinners and, by submitting to that, he does what is necessary to justify sinners (suffering and dying); or, according to Keil-Delitzsch, the servant uses his own knowledge of God to make people practically righteous, as the servant reveals his knowledge of God to others (Matthew 11:27). Rashi interprets Isaiah 53:11 to mean that the servant will judge people’s court cases in knowledge and wisdom (cp. Isaiah 11:2-4). Another approach is to correct the MT’s punctuation so that the verse reads: “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied by his knowledge. My righteous servant shall justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.” The knowledge does not justify, in this case, but reinforces the servant seeing the fruit of his toil.

D. The book concludes with a stirring sermon by Charles Spurgeon about Christ being a man of sorrows. Spurgeon observes that the disciples in Mark 4:36 take Jesus as he was into a boat, where he falls asleep. Spurgeon says the disciples had to carry and place a sleepy Jesus into the boat because Jesus was continually weary, with all his labor and his sadness. That is a detail I had never noticed.

While the book’s focus is largely on penal substitution, the book had thought-provoking insights, here and there. MacArthur also brings into the discussion Jewish beliefs about the Messiah, the suffering servant, and Jesus. He may be uncritical in assuming that the Talmudic references to Jesus represent the Jewish establishment’s side of the story from the first century, but the passages inspire questions. Why, for example, do the passages overlap with yet diverge significantly from details in the Gospels? They overlap with the Gospels and even accept some Christian presuppositions (i.e., Davidic descent, in some cases), yet the story that they tell differs in key details, such that some question that it is the same Jesus. MacArthur also attempts to integrate Isaiah 53 into the larger context of Isaiah, demonstrating the importance in the Book of Isaiah of sin and the need for forgiveness, a need that the servant meets. MacArthur did this fairly effectively but perhaps could have acknowledged the significance of Israel’s national restoration throughout Isaiah and shown how the Gospel relates to that.