Do you remember Socrates from school? He probably came up in a philosophy class, or maybe also a world history class, something like that. Maybe you've just heard about him along the way. He's a pretty famous philosopher. He used to live in Athens a long time ago, and then he died. He was also featured heavily in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but they didn't call him Socrates, they called him Socrates the whole time. So it could be confusing. He died a bummer of a death, but I think the people of Athens at the time that he died considered it an honorable death because he got convicted by the elders of Athens of corrupting the youth of Athens with pernicious ideas that got inside their heads. And probably honestly, it was very destabilizing. I don't know. I've never tried to govern an ancient Greek city-state. I don't know what I would have done if I'd been there. But Socrates seems real smart in the rearview mirror. I mean, his student was Plato, and Plato's prize student was Aristotle, and Aristotle's prize student was Alexander the Great. And heck, I mean, in a way, several generations later, the prize student of Alexander the Great was Octavian, who went on to be known as Caesar Augustus. They didn't know each other, but Octavian read the heck out of everything that had to do with Alexander the Great. So you know, Socrates is brilliant, long, long legacy. I guess he did succeed in corrupting the youth of Athens, if indeed that was corrupting. But there's a cave. You can still go to it in Athens, I think. I don't know if it's real or not, but it's very old, and they say this is the cell of Socrates. This is where he died. Because they gave him the option for this honorable death. I don't remember what poison Oh I do remember. It was hemlock. He drank hemlock. He chose suicide for his means of death, because I guess it was a more honorable, a more dignified death that surely had to go into his calculation. That death scene has been romantically portrayed in a bunch of classical art and things like that. It's very tragic, but I guess honorable. And you contrast that with the death of Jesus of Nazareth some four hundred-ish years later. And there is no way to put lipstick on that death, as we were talking about yesterday. It's an ugly death, a brutal death, a shameful death, a humiliating death. That was the point of what the Romans were trying to accomplish. I mean, there's no way they were going to give someone who was receiving an execution for undermining the stability of an occupied territory. There's no way they were going to give a destabilizer some sort of honorable death. I mean, you make a point. If you've seen Spartacus, you know, it portrays how they were like, hey, then you know, this guy was, yeah, a brave warrior, this freed slave who led an insurrection, but he still led an insurrection. He tried to destabilize things. So we crucified him and all of his buddies, and we put them right along this road right here for everybody to see. That's the kind of death that Jesus got. It was a make a point death that Rome was trying to inflict on him. And so they wanted to make it as ugly and shameful as possible. And the religious leaders in the Gospels, by the way, they knew exactly what they were doing when they were gunning for that kind of death, and particularly when they had their late night kangaroo court under the cover of darkness, nonsense trial and conviction of Jesus, they drummed up false witnesses to try to get him on a very specific set of charges that would result in him being not just dead, but humiliated in front of everybody. I mean, really, bloodied, beaten, broken, lifted up on a tree for everybody to see, and he's portrayed historically as having a little loincloth on or something, but I don't think that's how the Romans crucified people. I think they wanted all of the shame to be on display. It was a horrible death, and the Bible mixes no words about that. This isn't some kind of honorable you choose your way out, old man Socrates kind of a deal. This was wretched. And the Old Testament even predicts it as we discussed last time around. We were reading this thing that Jesus said as he's on his way, he knows he's going out the door from the Last Supper to go and be arrested and go and suffer this horrible death. And he says to his disciples, as it is written, quote, and he was numbered with the transgressors, and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment. Unquote. What's that a quote of? Isaiah 53. Now yesterday, for some reason, I started in Isaiah 53 6. Why did I do that? I should have just started Isaiah 53 1. So now I'm going to do that. I'm just going to read you all of this stuff. Listen to this. Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? This is written hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years before Jesus, by the way. He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, like one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Now you might say, okay, well, surely Isaiah's talking about somebody else back here. I mean, this whole passage is called the suffering servant passage. And admittedly, there's a lot of other context going on around Isaiah here. But the New Testament makes it abundantly clear that these are not coincidences between what's being said in Isaiah, and there's a bunch of stuff in this huge book of Isaiah that all point to very Jesus-y things. The New Testament makes it really clear. That's not an accident. This is on purpose. We're talking about Jesus here. Maybe there's a double application here where Isaiah is using some character the original audience might have known or anticipated to point to its true fulfillment, that being Jesus. Not going to unpack that entirely, but it goes on. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. See what we're driving at here? God wouldn't let his servant, God wouldn't let someone noble or the kind of person that we would look to to be the Messiah, take on all of this humiliation and shame and pain, right? Would he? But it goes on. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. Well, dang, that sounds an awful lot like the stuff we've been looking at as we've been hung up here in Galatians chapter three, that Paul is saying about the crucifixion of Christ and what it does. Paul writes in Galatians three, ten, all who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it's written, cursed is everyone who doesn't continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Clearly, no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous will live by faith. The law is not based on faith. On the contrary, the man who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree. Look at the way all of this stuff just intersects so beautifully. Paul isn't out on some island here, is making up stuff out of thin air, like I wish the religion worked this way. I wish this is what Jesus' death meant. Peter, who we looked at yesterday when we went and checked in with 1 Peter chapter two, he's not just making stuff up out of thin air and being like, I wish this is how we remembered Jesus. This would feel good to me. They're drawing on something that is deeply established, centuries old, as old as like the crusades are to you and me as we're having this conversation right now. Well established stuff that points an arrow from deep in history using the hand of God right at the cross, right at Jesus of Nazareth. The passage goes on, Isaiah 53 6. We all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us is turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. That's the first Peter two passage. It goes on, Isaiah 53 7. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he didn't open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. I don't know how well you remember the whole crucifixion account from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four books in the New Testament that tell the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But this is the story of the crucifixion account. They all tell the same thing. This is the scene. This is the picture. It goes on, Isaiah 53, eight, by oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of my people. He was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth, yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer. And though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul he will see the light of life and be satisfied by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors, for he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors. There's so much going on here in Isaiah 53, and I wanted to just rush right through it and get right back to Galatians, but this kind of is Galatians. This is one of the most important passages in the whole Old Testament that undergirds what Paul is trying to remind the Galatians of. And you know what? This format allows us to take a little extra time when we find nuggets like this in other parts of the Bible and just linger there. So linger we will. We'll pause here and pick up where we left off in Isaiah 53, talking about this suffering servant next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.