Objection: Isaiah DID Refer to Actual Physical and Mental Illnesses and Distresses, but Not Necessarily to a Vicarious Bearing of Them, But to Sympathetic Bearing of the Troubles of This Life

This is another feeble attempt to prove that Matthew 8:17 does not refer to the atonement.  The idea is to make Isaiah 53:4, which says that He literally bore our sicknesses and carried our pains, mean only that he put up with life’s annoyances as part of our common human lot.

I don’t doubt that He had plenty of annoyances, from temple merchandizers to religious detractors and sometimes wishy-washy disciples.  The problem is that Isaiah was very specific.  I assume that the objector is using the King James Version’s “hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” and assumed that the “griefs” must be the kind of “grief of mind” that Esau’s wives Judith and Bashemath were to Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 26:34-35).  If you only read the Bible in English, you could actually support this objection.  When you get into the underlying Hebrew, it unravels.  The word used for grief in Genesis 26 is the word morah, which means grief in the sense of bitterness.  The word used for griefs in Isaiah 53:4 the word choliy, which means sickness.  The words griefs and sorrows are literally sicknesses and pains.  (See Isaiah’s Prophecy of Redemption for more about this.)  They are definitely not the same thing despite both being translated as the same English word by the King James translators.  If you were to claim that Jesus bore what was our common human lot based on Isaiah 53, you’d have to prove that He got sick long before the cross – an objection that has actually been made but which is disproved here.

Once you get into the Hebrew, there is another fatal flaw with this objection.  The word borne in Isaiah 53:4 is the word nasa.  This word is used all over the Bible and has the sense of “take” or “carry away” – a usual translation is “lift up.”  Just as NASA rockets lift up payloads that are carried away from the earth, nasa implies a lifting up, a carrying away, not just a co-suffering of something.  (Before someone comes up with a new objection, I am not suggesting that the Jews derived the Hebrew word nasa from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – that’s just a cute way to remember what it means.)  So this does not mean merely that Jesus HAD sicknesses; it means that He TOOK AWAY sicknesses – OUR sicknesses – by BEARING them Himself!

If you doubt that, check out Isaiah 53:12, where Jesus bare (nasa) the sin of many.  Can any rational Christian deny that the word there means that He took our sins to redeem us from them?  He most certainly was not just sympathetically bearing our sins so that He could have sin troubles like the rest of us!  No reasonable logic could assume that the same word in Isaiah 53:4 means something other than what it means in Isaiah 53:12!