Like a vulnerable plant, apparently of no special value, and despised (Isa. 53:2, 3)—that’s the depiction we are given here of the Suffering Servant. Isaiah has quickly brought us through innocent youth to the brink of the abyss. Even with the background provided earlier, we are not prepared in the sense that we are resigned to the Servant’s fate. To the contrary! Isaiah has taught us to cherish the Child born to us, the supreme Prince of Peace. Others despise Him, but we know who He really is.
 As someone has said: “We have met the enemy and they are us.” The servant is not the first to be despised, rejected, or a man of suffering. King David was all of those when he fled from his son Absalom (2 Sam. 15:30). But the suffering borne by this Servant is not His own and does not result from His own sin. Nor does He bear it merely for another individual; “the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6, NRSV).
 The answer to the question “Why?” is Isaiah’s testing truth: Because of God’s love, His Messiah would choose to suffer. But why? Isaiah drives the “golden spike” to complete the unthinkable truth: He would choose to suffer in order to reach the unreachable, and the unreachable is us!
 Those who do not understand regard the Servant as “struck down by God” (Isa. 53:4, NRSV). Just as Job’s friends thought his sin must have caused his suffering, and just as Jesus’ disciples asked Him “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2, NRSV), those who saw Jesus on the cross assumed the worst. Didn’t Moses say that “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deut. 21:23, NRSV; compare Num. 25:4)?
 Yet, all this was God’s will (Isa. 53:10). Why? Because “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13, NRSV). Because God “made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).
 “What a price has been paid for us! Behold the cross, and the Victim uplifted upon it. Look at those hands, pierced with the cruel nails. Look at His feet, fastened with spikes to the tree. Christ bore our sins in His own body. That suffering, that agony, is the price of your redemption.” — Ellen G. White, God’s Amazing Grace, p. 172.