NOTES for Isa 42:1-7
Isaiah of Babylon had to preach to a community of returning exiles who had just come back from Babylon to the land of their fathers. All these people expected the Messiah to come soon. In the Messiah they saw, first and foremost, the righteous King of whom another Isaiah had spoken—Isaiah of Jerusalem, who had lived before the exile.
This King was to rid the land God had given His people of pagans, restore the Jewish state there, and establish laws in that state in accordance with the Torah. He was to be a righteous ruler and a righteous judge for the people, establishing justice in His country and punishing the wicked as they deserved. In short, this was an earthly king of an earthly kingdom. In Isaiah of Jerusalem, however, the image of this King was not entirely earthly.
His accession and rule were expected to be accompanied by a special measure of God’s presence. But such details faded into the background in the popular mind. The Messiah increasingly became an earthly king, mighty and strong, feared by the surrounding pagan nations. This ‘messiah’ establishes his authority by force, the ordinary earthly force used by all earthly rulers.
Of course, God will help him if necessary. But it was assumed that God’s help would be directed toward building an ordinary earthly kingdom, albeit one with the ‘right’ laws. Isaiah of Babylon, meanwhile, sees the Messiah quite differently. He is not a mighty earthly king at all. He possesses no earthly power whatsoever. In the eyes of this world and its rulers, He is nobody. Yet this does not prevent Him from being the Messiah.
The prophet wanted his contemporaries to see the Messiah as One whose authority and ministry in no way depend on His social status or on the power He possesses on earth. He wanted them to understand the Messiah as a Man who brings to earth a Kingdom that does not exist according to the laws of the fallen world, but rests on something entirely different. He wanted them to accept the Messiah as the King of the Kingdom that is ‘not of this world.’
Otherwise, neither the prophet’s contemporaries nor their descendants would ever have recognized the true Messiah. Of course, they still did have difficulties recognizing Him. But that was already a matter of their own choice. None of those who met Jesus during His earthly ministry could have complained that no one had ever told them of such a Messiah. How Jesus’ contemporaries understood what had been said is another matter. But that, too, is a question of the reader’s or listener’s choice—a choice for which only the reader or listener is responsible.