the sight of their own eyes, the Lord and His Word were despised and rejected. But what they once heard not, they

are yet to `consider'. Of this people Isaiah had said, `My people doth not consider' (Isa. 1:3), or, as the word is

translated in Isaiah 6:10, they did not `understand with their heart' and so were not healed.

Not only did Israel not believe that which they heard, but the prophecy continues:

`And to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?' (Isa. 53:1).

Evidently the message which these people had heard, and which they did not believe, was concerning `the arm of the

Lord'. No Israelite could forget the words of Exodus 6:6, `I will redeem you with a stretched out arm', nor would

the hearers of this prophecy forget that in the tenth verse of Isaiah 52, the prophet had said:

`The LORD hath made bare His holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the

salvation of our God' (Isa. 52:10).

Yet `the nations had been startled' when, at long last, they had realised the import of the words.

The word `revealed' is usually associated with a doctrine or a truth, and not so frequently with a person. Of

course, `to reveal' the `arm' of the Lord, might mean to reveal the truth, the promise of the deliverance

accomplished by `the arm of the Lord', but as the word translated `reveal' primarily means `to be naked' and `to

make naked', the meaning of the phrase `The arm of the Lord revealed' may mean `The arm of the Lord uncovered',

as the word is translated in Isaiah 47:2,3. This would bring the passage into line with the one already quoted, which

speaks of `making bare' the arm, and so ready for battle, service or redemption. The fact that the Greek translators

use the verb apokalupto might lead one who was acquainted with the New Testament only, to reject this suggestion,

but the very first occurrence of apokalupto in the LXX is in Genesis 8:13, where it would be impossible to translate

`And Noah revealed the covering of the Ark', the obvious meaning being that Noah `removed the covering' or

`uncovered' the ark. So it is with the second reference, Exodus 20:26, but perhaps the most decisive passage of all

is Isaiah 52:10 where it is used to translate the words `The LORD hath made bare His holy arm'.

The meaning of Isaiah 53:1 therefore, is:

`Who hath credited the words we heard as truth? and to which of the nations, before whose eyes the LORD had

made bare His holy arm, has that arm really been uncovered?'

In other words, when the Saviour entered into His great ministry, how many recognised that in Him the word of the

Lord was being fulfilled, or that the great work of redemption was being accomplished?

`For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: He hath no form nor

comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him' (Isa. 53:2).

We shall preserve the unity of the prophecy if we follow the Revised Version and use the past tense from verse 2

to verse 10, where the change is made to the future, when it says, `He shall see His seed', etc. `The tender plant'

means a `suckling' and the word is used of infants in Psalm 8:2 and in Isaiah 11:8, `The sucking child shall play on

the hole of the asp', even as the verb means to suckle a babe. There is something very tender and appealing in the

thought of a suckling, and this is how the Saviour `grew up before the face' of the Father, for the words `before

Him' are literally `before His face'. The Father knew those early years at Nazareth, and all the sinless purity of that

obscure life, so that heaven itself opened at His baptism and the good pleasure which the Father had in Him was

made known - but in the eyes of others, instead of a `tender plant', He was but `a root out of a dry ground'.

To be set in a dry land, and slain with thirst, is to suffer judgment (Hos. 2:3), but to be visited with dew from

heaven is to be restored and to have beauty as the olive tree (Hos. 14:5,6). When the Psalmist was cut off from the

worship of God he said that he longed for God `as the hart panteth after the water brooks' (Psa. 42:1), and that he

thirsted for God `in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is' (Psa. 63:1).

For a nation to be compared to `a wilderness', `a dry land', and `a desert' (Jer. 50:12) was to declare that nation

cast off from God and devoted to judgment. For the people of Israel to have compared the Servant of Jehovah to a

`root out of a dry ground' reveals the extent of their blindness and the completeness of their rejection of Him.