Messiah - He Is / Was Despised . . . And We Esteemed Him Not.

One of the songs in Handel's Messiah is based on Isaiah 53:4

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

 I think the verbs are interesting here. These words were written by Isaiah well before Jesus' time, yet he wrote it in the present and past tenses, as though they had already happened and were still happening. I think that shows the faith Isaiah had in the truth of his prophecy, similar to the faith Lehi had when he said "I have obtained a land of promise" long before his family actually reached it (1 Nephi 5:5).

Yet, the present tense could have been true for Isaiah, and it is certainly true for us. Jesus Christ doesn't have to be personally on the earth to be "despised and rejected of men." People despise and reject Him in every age, including both Isaiah's and ours.

But I think the point of Isaiah's passage isn't to point fingers at those who reject Christ and those who have rejected Him, but to make sure that we don't reject Him as well. We should try to make sure that we don't "hid[e] as it were our faces from him." We shouldn't back down and stay quiet when people despise and reject Christ. Too many people have already done that, as the Apostle Peter will attest. And I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the people in the mob calling for Jesus' death were just following the crowd. It's far too easy to simply go with the flow and not make waves and the world drifts further and further into apostasy.

The lament in Isaiah 53:4 isn't just that "He is despised and rejected of men," but also that "he was despised, and we esteemed him not." Let's not make the same mistake. Christ was and is and will be rejected, but not by us. Let us stand by Him and esteem Him, even if the rest of the world despises Him.