We need both of these texts if we're gonna understand Matthew's purpose in his gospel in Matthew 12. Two important reminders will be helpful before we get started. First off, remember that Matthew in his gospel is targeting a Jewish audience with the account of the life and ministry of Jesus. That's obvious from chapter one, verse one where he says, this is the genealogy of Jesus, the son of David, the son of Abraham. He is presenting Jesus as the fulfillment of God's promise of a Messiah King who would come to save his people. Because Matthew knows his Jewish audience, he makes assumptions about what his readers know and what his readers will find interesting and helpful. Second, Matthew 11 ended with Jesus inviting the weary and the heavy laden to come to him for rest. Then Matthew 12 opens with that controversy about the Sabbath keeping and what counts as work, what counts as rest. Are the disciples breaking the Jewish Sabbath law when they pluck a handful of grain as they walk along with Jesus. Is Jesus breaking the law when he heals the man with a withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath day? He's doing this under the disapproving glare of the Pharisees. They sure think Jesus has broken the law, Moses. And we ended at verse 14 in Matthew 12 with the Pharisees sneaking out of the synagogue and plotting to murder Jesus. Now, as Matthew has presented Jesus to his Jewish audience, they can't be indifferent about him anymore. He evokes some kind of reaction. You've either got to be all in or all out. These quarrels with the religious leaders, naturally they draw a lot of attention, but now Matthew inserts verses 15 through 21 because he assumes His Jewish audience knows their Old Testament. Perhaps it's to say it's not just the verbal confrontations that show who Jesus is. You can even see him as the Messiah King in those moments when he withdraws from confrontation, okay? Verse 15 is where he picks this up. But when Jesus knew it, that is, knew that the Pharisees had begun plotting his murder, When Jesus knew it, He withdrew from there, and great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them all. Yet He warned them not to make Him known that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, Behold my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my spirit upon him and he will declare justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel nor cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, a smoking flax he will not quench, till he sends forth justice to victory, and in his name Gentiles will trust. All right, so Matthew knows his audience and I have to sort of try to do the same. I'm gonna make some assumptions about you this morning that most of you aren't Jewish. When Matthew offers in this gospel this extensive quote from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, it is actually the longest quote of the Old Testament in all of Matthew's gospel. He assumes his readers will know that passage and understand a little about it. So our goal this morning is really gonna be to go to Isaiah 42, and to understand that so that we can understand this. With Matthew's gospel, we're already about 2,000 years in our past, so if you would jump in the Wayback Machine again with me and go back, set it for another 700 years into the past, the prophet Isaiah called to bring God's word to a rebellious people. He began with a scathing critique and condemnation of their sin, but soon God promised a plan of salvation would come. Specifically, the book of Isaiah contains four of what we call today servant songs. They are poetic passages where God promises a servant who would come and bring salvation. Some of them you probably already know. Isaiah 53 is about God's suffering servant who will bear our griefs and carry our sorrows and be bruised for our iniquities and wounded for our transgressions and with his stripes we're healed. That's one of Isaiah's servant songs. But that's just one of the four of them in Isaiah's book. Matthew here is quoting a different one. He's quoting it as proof that Jesus is the Messiah King. So look at Isaiah 42 and you'll be able to identify this right away. It starts, my servant. So God is calling on his people to behold, to look at his servant in order to identify the salvation which the servant brings. The entirety of Isaiah 42 verses 1 through through 9 is a song of God's chosen servant. Now Matthew only quotes verses 1 through 4, but we're going to look at verses 1 through 9 because his readers would have been familiar with the whole thing. And once we understand Isaiah, Matthew's text is going to speak very clearly for itself. So look at the praise of God's servant in verses 1 through 4. Those four verses Yahweh is speaking Israel is being spoken to and I point that out because it's going to change here in a moment when we get to verse 5. Yahweh stops speaking about his servant and in verse 5 he starts speaking to his servant. But here he's calling on the people of Israel to look, to behold my servant. whom I uphold, my elect one in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon him. He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. In verse one, the servant is described as being upheld by God. Now most naturally, this tells us that Jesus, when he is the servant, he is empowered by the Father as the Father upholds or holds him, ensuring that he'll never fail. But there's more to this word than just being strengthened in that way. The Hebrew word for uphold here is literally to grip fast or to hold tightly. As a servant of God, Jesus is a servant of no other. The Father is holding him tightly, maintaining this determination that this servant is a servant of His and no one else. In his ministry, the Lord Jesus asserted, I have not come to do my will, but the will of him who sent me. He's the servant of God, carrying out the will of God. Now this might seem like a strange way to think about it, but when the world attempts to make Jesus into something or someone that he's not, they're really attempting to steal the Lord's servant from him. The Father sent Jesus into the world to be a sacrifice for sinners, redeeming the elect for his own glory. And if we try to remove that purpose of Jesus, to say that he came for lesser purposes, right, that he only came to teach us morals, or he only came to encourage social justice, then what we're doing is we're trying to steal God's servant Because God sent him to do a very specific work, a very specific task. And the Father upholds him, holds him tightly, will not allow him to be diverted from this purpose. Not only is he upheld by God, he is also a servant who is chosen by God. The Father in verse 1 calls him, my elect. Part of this text will be to prove that the future is going to fall out exactly as God has determined it would. By calling this servant His elect, God the Father is simply showing that He is determined to do, and what He is determined to do in the past will actually come to fruition in the future, in eternity past. God chose to save sinners, even choosing the members of sinful humanity whom he would save, calling them his elect. And in that same eternity past, prior to creation, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, one God in perfect unity, counseled together on the means by which they would achieve that salvation. And the Son was elected, he was chosen to be this servant. Therefore, the Son is called my elect one here. The New Testament speaks of him in that way as well. Peter says in 1 Peter 2, 4, that Jesus is rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious to him. Chosen by God and precious to Him, Peter says. And that's exactly what the Father is saying here in verse 1 of Isaiah 42. He is my elect one in whom my soul delights. So the servant is upheld by God, he's chosen by God, he is the delight of God's soul. What father could ever fail to delight in such a perfect son? A son who willingly submits to the father's will in order to accomplish the father's purpose and declare this father's glory. I like how one writer describes this as the father sends Jesus to be this servant. He describes and says, look, every employer knows that you can assign a task to someone without necessarily liking that person or anticipating that they're gonna do a good job. It might just prove to be an embarrassment to you as they represent you doing that task. But what delight it must be to assign this difficult work to a servant son who will do it perfectly and completely and glorify the Father at every moment in the process. In fact, Matthew has already quoted this text about Jesus, or maybe more accurately, God Himself has quoted this text about Jesus. One of the things I wish I could personally have witnessed in Scripture would be the baptism of Jesus and that day when he was baptized, when he came up out of the water, there was this audible voice from heaven saying, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. It's an echo of Isaiah 42 verse one. This is my servant in whom my soul delights. You know what else happened after the baptism of Jesus, right? The spirit of God descended on him like a dove. Isaiah's passage here functions almost as a commentary on the ministry of Jesus written 700 years in advance at the baptism of Jesus, the spirit. descends and the Father declares his delight from heaven. And you see in verse one, my elect in whom my soul delights. And God says, I have put my spirit on him. You can read in Matthew how the Spirit soon leads him into the wilderness and enables him to overcome Satan's temptations. And immediately he is teaching and preaching in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus will stand up in the synagogue at Nazareth and open the scroll of Isaiah and turn it and finger it until he gets to Isaiah 61 and read, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me. God the Spirit sent by God the Father is continually guiding God the Son throughout His ministry all the way to the cross. The final phrase of verse one is really the one that Jewish folks would have delighted in for centuries. They understood this passage to be a promise of the coming Messiah, and they would read and reread the end of verse one, he will bring forth justice to the Gentiles. Literally, he will bring justice to the nations. This is part of the confusion for people who witnessed the ministry of Jesus and wondered, well, if he's the Messiah, why isn't he doing everything we thought the Messiah would do? How could Isaiah's audience not get excited at the prospect of justice to the nations? How could a New Testament Jew who was suffering from the oppressive Roman occupation want anything less than someone who would come and bring justice to those Gentiles, right? We want a Messiah who's gonna come and he is gonna boot out the bad guys and he's gonna finally bring us some justice. They think justice will be a curse on the Gentiles while justice will be a blessing on the Jews. The reality is God would be perfectly just in condemning Jew and Gentile alike. He can be perfectly gracious in saving Jew and Gentile alike. It is foolish for anyone to demand justice from God. but justice is what this passage promises. Three times, actually. Verse one, he's gonna bring justice to the Gentiles. At the end of verse three, you'll see he shall bring justice for truth. His justice will be true, righteous. It'll be faithful. In verse four, he's not gonna be discouraged until he has established justice in the earth. This isn't only justice for some particular subgroup. It's justice for the whole earth. It's justice for everybody alike. Part of me would really like to be able to, you know, go back into the ancient past and tell our Jewish friends, you're going to look closer at this. You better get ready to suffer the same consequences that you're hoping the Gentiles are going to experience, or you'd better start praying that this servant's idea of justice is different than yours. Thankfully, Jesus, the servant of God, came to earth to accomplish justice in the eyes of God by standing in the place of sinners. He absorbed the wrath of God, submitting himself to the justice of God that we deserved. This elect servant of God came to earth and stood in the place of the elect children of God and went to the cross and willingly took every drop of the wrath of God that we deserved. He didn't come to squash sinners, not even the sinners you don't like. He came to save sinners. That's his divine plan for justice. He'll even stoop down and bring that justice to the most vile people that you can think of, which in Isaiah's day, it would have been those nasty Gentiles. It would have been us, and praise God, Jesus came to save even us. Verse six even says this when it says, he will be a light for the Gentiles. That doesn't mean, oh yeah, he's gonna come and light them up. That's what the Jews would have liked for it to mean, but he's going to enlighten them. At the end of verse four, it describes how the coastlands, the islands, the faraway places will wait expectantly for his law. They're going to seek God's word through Jesus. In verse two, God goes on to describe the character of this servant. He praises the servant and demands that we look at him and then explains how the servant will behave. Here's how you can identify who this servant is. Verse two, he will not cry out nor raise his voice nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, a smoking flax he will not quench. He will bring forth justice for truth. Interestingly enough, verses 2 and 3 is all about what Jesus won't do. You can identify him by what he won't do. It says he will not cry out. He's not going to lift up his voice, cause it to be heard. He's not going to break a bruised reed. He's not going to quench a smoking flax. And verse 4 continues that theme. He's not going to fail. He's not going to be discouraged. This is about what Jesus won't do. For Matthew's readers, if you can put your Matthew 12 hat on for a minute and think this way, They would have seen the Pharisees plotting against Jesus, plotting Jesus's murder, and Jesus knows that they're plotting his murder, and they would think, no kind of king that I know is gonna put up with that. A real king is gonna use his royal authority to crush, to just squash the opposition. And so Matthew uses Isaiah's servant song here to remind them, Jesus is no kind of king like you've ever known. He's the servant king. There are things that he won't do. In verse two, he won't cry out or raise his voice in the streets. This doesn't mean that Jesus is never literally going to raise his voice or be perfectly silent. There's a couple of ways of understanding what this promise is describing for Jesus. It's possible it's saying he won't cry out in anger or frustration. He won't lose his cool. He's not gonna, you know, as he's being opposed by enemies, he's not gonna call for God's intervention against them. It's more likely that what this means is it's speaking about he's gonna have this meek and quiet demeanor. He's not self-assertive. He's not a servant who's complaining about his task. He's not a servant who's whining and griping about what he's been sent to do. He's always a perfect servant, and so hearing his words is the same as hearing the words of the Father who sent him. There's more that he won't do in verse three. He won't break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flax. This is obviously a very strange way of speaking for us. We wouldn't say this today. A reed is a hollow stalk of some plant that grows at the edge of the water, and it has many purposes. For example, it could be turned into a musical instrument, but reeds were very brittle. If they got bent or they got crushed, you could repair them, but why bother, because there's a couple hundred more right there. Just wad that thing up, get rid of it, and grab another. A smoking flax is talking about like the wick of an oil lamp. When it's about to go out, it begins smoking. So imagine in our day a candle that is almost burnt out. There's only a little bit of the wick left and it starts to smoke. What do you do with a candle like that? Well, the smoke is a source of frustration, and you're not getting from the candle what you wanted from it to begin with, so you just quench it. You snuff it out. But God isn't talking about candle wicks and plant stalks here. A bruised reed or a smoking flax is talking about people. Jesus, God's servant, walked among the shattered and the fallen and the failing of this world and he never disregarded them. There was no one who was too far gone for him. There was never a single person who was below the compassion and care of Jesus. You can't even begin to make a whole list of examples of this. There's the woman at the well on her fifth husband. There's the leper on his knees, the woman who was taken in adultery, the blind man on the roadside. There's a short little tax collector who was a traitor to God and country. There's a widow woman who had just lost her son, a lame man laying helpless by the pool of Bethesda. Earlier in Matthew chapter 12, just before Matthew uses this text, there is this man in the synagogue with a shriveled hand and nobody but Jesus willing to show compassion to him. And then there's you and there's me. In the compassion of Jesus, there is no point in your life where you could be below his love and mercy. No matter how shattered you seem, no matter how mistreated you've been, no matter how unimportant or expendable you've been told you are, Jesus, the servant of God, treats people with care. He will mend what is broken. If you've reached a point in your life where you think things are empty and hopeless, Jesus is not done with you. He can fan the flame of your life and bring it to purpose again. It can be brought to purpose in Him. And so this is the section that Matthew quotes, verses 1 through 4, the praise of God's servant. But his readers also would have known the rest of this. So I just want to look at it quickly. Verses 5 through 7, the power of God's servant. I noted in the first four verses, God is speaking to Israel, calling them to look at this servant. Now in verses five through seven, God isn't speaking about this servant, he is speaking to the servants as the readers get to listen. Thus says God the Lord. who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it. The Lord have called you in righteousness and will hold your hand. I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the Gentiles, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the prison, those who sit in darkness from the prison house. As God the Father speaks to God the Son, who is filled by God the Spirit, they know they are allowing us to sort of eavesdrop on this inter-Trinitarian discussion. The Father, Son, and Spirit are co-equals as God, and co-equals in creation. And so, in verse 5, the Father takes the lead in speaking, identifying himself as God the Lord, or God Yahweh, and he claims responsibility for all creation. He created the heavens above. He stretched them out. The idea is stretch them like with no more effort than you would move a curtain. He made the earth, he says, and everything that came out of it. In other words, the earth and everything on the earth is God's special creation. He's not a molder of lifeless clay statues. He gives breath and spirit and life to all things on the earth. And this isn't inserted here just as fluff or filler. It's a powerful reminder that Yahweh is the Creator God right before he commissions this servant in that power that he has. In verse 6, I, the Lord, or I, Yahweh, have called you in righteousness. The servant is an expression of God's righteousness to the world. He executes the righteousness of God, whether it is in expressing compassion or displaying mercy or saving sinners or speaking God's word, everything he does is a display of God's righteous purpose. I actually think the next phrase is super cool. God tells the servants, I will hold your hand and keep you. Now back in verse one, if you remember, God told Israel to look at this servant whom he is upholding. And we talked about that word upholding. It means to hold, to grip tightly, to hold fast. But to the servant, this is not a description of God putting the squeeze on him, right? This is the father holding the son's hand, keeping, protecting, leading him. I don't even have the ability to begin to wrap my mind around that. The almighty creator God holding the hand of the almighty creator God, protecting him in his almighty power. It's mind-blowing. Then verse six says the purpose for that is to secure the servant as a covenant for the people. Later servant songs in Isaiah are gonna describe the nature of that covenant in detail, but the point of these verses is to assure us that God's covenant plan will never fail. This servant, he's not gonna fail. He's not gonna be discouraged, verse four says. He'll be kept by God, verse six tells us. When God the Son robed himself in humanity, he is given the protection God the Father to secure His covenant, to fulfill all His purposes. And so when Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and read from the scroll of Isaiah and read, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he's anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, to recover the sight of the blind, and to set free those who are oppressed. the reaction of the wicked men in that synagogue was to try to drag him out and throw him off of a cliff. Now we know from that story how he just simply passed through the crowd unseen and unarrested. Matthew 12 is the religious leader's plot to murder him. Matthew simply says Jesus knew it and he withdrew from there. But we know now from Isaiah It is the very hand of God the Father who is holding and leading him away from that place. His success is assured because the power of God is the insurance of it. The Father speaking to the Son, I'll hold your hand, I'll keep you, I'll give you for a covenant. And He's allowing us to hear this so that we know nobody can successfully interfere with this servant of God. He is not going to be deterred from his work until verse 6, the end of verse 6. He's a light to enlighten the Gentiles. In verse 7, he opens the eyes of the blind, bringing them sight for the glory of God. He throws open the doors of the prison, bringing those who are captive out of the darkness of sin and exposing them to the precious light of God's truth. If you remember in Matthew, In Matthew 12, he simply writes, great multitudes followed him and he healed them all. Well, it sort of makes you wonder, well, healed them of what? And if you followed along in Matthew's gospel, he has not been shy about listing all the different ways that Jesus heals people, and yet on this, it's the rare occasion where Matthew is intentionally vague. No doubt there were people who were sick, who were lame, who were blind, but the description, because he's this chosen servant of God, is there is a world full of darkness, a world full of sin and wickedness. Sinners who are imprisoned by sins of their own creation and blinded to the light of God, and Jesus heals them of those sins. So here in Isaiah, The Lord's saying, behold my servant. Look at him, look at what he will do. He's going to rescue helpless sinners and give them sight and light and freedom. Verses eight and nine, we've seen the praise of God's servant and the power of God's servant. Look at the promise of God's servant. In this final couple of verses, the speaker is still God the Father, but he's speaking to Israel again through the prophet Isaiah. I am the Lord. That is my name. And my glory I will not give to another, nor my praise to carved images. Behold the former things that have come to pass and new things I declare to you. Before they spring forth, I tell you of them. The first words of verse 8 will forever remain a puzzle to those who do not understand the nature of God. He says, The Lord, I am Yahweh. That is my name. I'm not going to give my glory to another. He is the everlasting I am, and He will not share His glory. And yet, wasn't He just calling people to look at this servant and praise Him and glorify this servant in verse 1? If God's not going to share His glory with anyone else, doesn't that mean this servant is God as well? Because God is Father, Son, and Spirit, three in one. In fact, in John 17, Jesus will pray and say, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may also glorify you. And later he says, And now, O Father, glorify me together with yourself, with the glory which I had with you before the world was. This servant is glorified by God, who says, I will not glorify anyone but myself. The Father's glorified in declaring his purpose here to save sinners. The Son is glorified in securing that salvation through his compassion and mercy and the sacrifice of his own life's blood. The Spirit's glorified in securing sinners and bringing them to salvation and faith in Jesus. That doesn't leave glory for anybody else. not for us, or especially in Isaiah's day, not for those false gods, those idols of our own making. This servant song proclaimed from the voice of God himself demands that we look away from every idol, from every self-made, self-exalting purpose, and find our means of glorifying God through his servant, Jesus Christ. Listen, nobody can do what God can do. Earlier in Isaiah, I can't preach the whole book of Isaiah, but God issued a challenge to those people who worshiped false idols. He actually said, look, bring those idols on. Let's see what they can do. Let's see them tell us what they've done. Let's see them tell us what they plan to do in the future. And if they can't do that, if they can't say, here's what we've done, or say, here's what we will do, how can you trust in them instead of me? God's not gonna share his glory with any carved images, but God will receive glory through Jesus Christ, the visible image of the invisible creator. And every idol that competes with God, calling our hearts to love and fixate on lesser things, it is worthless vanity. And to prove it in this final verse, God answers that challenge that he had brought up earlier to Isaiah. Can those carved idols tell you what they've done? Can they tell you what they're going to do? In verse nine, look, the former things have come to pass, and new things I declare before they spring forth, I tell you of them. Very simply, that's saying, look, the warnings that I gave you in the past have been fulfilled, and right now I'm telling you all the things that I have planned for the future. And I'm telling you before it happens. And so Matthew picks this up to say, well, God told us what he was gonna do. He told us to look at his servants, so now look at Jesus and see he is the fulfillment of all the things God said he was going to do. It's important for Matthew's audience as he appeals to this servant song is you think about the story that's unfolding at that moment in Matthew 12, right? The religious leaders are plotting to murder Jesus, and in response, Jesus leaves that place. Look, he's not running away. Jesus is nothing less than the servant king of almighty God who declares all things that will come to pass before they will happen. This tension that's going on, is temporarily put on hold as Jesus withdraws from that place, but it's going to take him to the cross in God's timing. And when Jesus dies on the cross and rises from the dead, it's going to fulfill all the promises of God made of his servant through his prophet Isaiah. It's gonna bring salvation to Jew and Gentile alike because Jesus is the perfect servant who God upholds, will not allow him to be deterred from his work. Matthew takes this servant song from Isaiah 42 and shows how it is fulfilled in Jesus alone because Jesus is the delight of the Father. Jesus is filled by the Spirit. Jesus is that Meek and lowly, remember Matthew 11? I am meek and lowly at heart, right? Jesus is that meek and lowly servant who won't break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flax. He is hope for all who are hurting and you can put your trust in him because he is the servant king that God promised and he's come just like God said he would.