“How Beautiful upon the Mountains”

Isaiah 50–53

LDS manual: here

Reading

I didn’t make a post for this lesson at first. Now I feel like I have to explain why. The reason is that this lesson wasn’t very good. It covers four tiny chapters, and it’s all supposed to be about Jesus, and I didn’t really have anything to say besides, “Oh, this is so not about Jesus.”

And it’s boring. I was bored. So instead of posting a boring lesson, I watched a movie with my sweetheart, and this was my way of putting my priorities in place. I highly recommend it once in a while.

Anyway, it’s now the next week, and I still don’t really have anything to say about this lesson. But I will say one thing:

Who is the ‘suffering servant’ in Isaiah?

The view of Christianity is that Isaiah foretold Jesus. I’m sure that would have been a surprise to Isaiah. They’ve arrived at this view by cherry-picking scriptures that were about something else, and retroactively weaving it into a narrative about Jesus.

Most of the messianic scriptures concern a ‘servant’, which Christians think is Jesus.

52:13 Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high.

That’s one way to look at it, but another is that this servant is Israel itself. Here’s a page that treats that angle.

All I can say is that I’m glad I no longer have to live in a religious system where multiple conflicting answers are drawn from vague metaphorical scriptures, with absolutely no way to evaluate between the answers. This is my big beef with religion.

Got any other insights? Help me out and put them in comments.