"He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him. 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." (Isa. 53:2, 3.)
This description of the Messiah is to Christians one of the most beautiful and affecting ones to be found in all the world, but to the Jews their Messiah, so pictured in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, was "a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence." They rejected it, as they later rejected him who so perfectly fulfilled it. They esteemed him "stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted." They saw to it that he was brought "as a lamb to the slaughter," that he "was taken from prison and from judgment," that "he was cut off out of the land of the living." But in spite of them he did "make his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death." And because he "poured out his soul unto death," and "was numbered with the transgressors," and "bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors," therefore the Lord did divide him "a portion with the
