Objection: There Is No Mention of the Atonement in Matthew 8:17 (Fulfilling Isaiah 53:4)

The same people who like to say, “A text without a context is a con” and “A text without a context is a pretext” make exactly that same error about the context of Isaiah 53:4.  There is no question whatsoever that Isaiah 53 is about Christ’s atonement.  In Isaiah 53:3, Jesus is a man of pains and acquainted with sickness (literal translation), people hid their faces from Him, despised Him and did not esteem Him.  These are clearly events that happened during His atonement, as Jesus was NOT sick and in pain during His ministry time, people did NOT hide their faces from Him during His earthly ministry, they did not as a general rule despise Him (though some did) during His earthly ministry, and those who did not esteem Him were not as numerous as those who did during His earthly ministry.

Then follows the statement (still in Isaiah 53:4!) that He is considered smitten of God and afflicted.  That clearly happened when He atoned for our sins.  He certainly was not wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, etc. (Isaiah 53:5) before He atoned for our sins at the end of His life.  The verses before and after Isaiah 53:4 are clearly atonement verses.

So any objector along these lines must insist that one snippet within Isaiah 53:4 refers only to His earthly ministry while the ENTIRE context around it surely refers to His atonement.  That is the very kind of Bible interpretation a healing minister would be “roasted” for if he tried to cut out a phrase from its obvious context like that.

But I do understand why this objection is made, because I used to wonder about it myself when reading Matthew 8:17.  In particular, (1) it seems to be citing a “fulfillment” of something that seemed to refer to what happened much later in Isaiah’s account and (2) Isaiah also said in the same verse that Jesus bore our sicknesses (that’s the literal word translated “griefs” in the King James Version) and carried our pains (that’s the literal word translated “sorrows” – many study Bibles have margin notes affirming this, and you can study it out for yourself online), but Jesus was NOT sick and in pain Himself when He healed the sick that evening “fulfilling” Isaiah’s prophecy.  And it is true that Matthew does NOT mention the atonement explicitly in this verse, so the objection is true at face value, though not true in its implication that healing isn’t in the atonement because it was fulfilled in Matthew 8:17.

These matters are covered fully in a reply to a related objection, so you can click on that so that I don’t have to repeat everything here.  But briefly, the lack of a specific mention of an atonement in Matthew 8:17 when it quotes what is clearly an atonement Scripture does NOT mean that the atonement isn’t implied in Matthew’s verse.  How could Jesus take all those sicknesses away from people in Capernaum when He hadn’t paid for their healing yet?  This is the same as asking how people could be healed by mere SYMBOLS of Jesus when He hadn’t gone to the cross yet in the Old Testament, and the same as asking how anyone could be FORGIVEN in Jesus’ ministry before He paid for their forgiveness on the cross.  Jesus did what He did on the basis of His coming atonement, and that is the point Matthew made without having to use the word “atonement” or mentioning the cross.  The fact that Jesus was ABLE to heal the sick “on credit” was PROOF of His coming atonement.

Perhaps you think I’m stretching things by saying that, but I think YOU’RE stretching things if you think that one snippet in Isaiah 53 doesn’t refer to the atonement when most of that chapter obviously does.