The Servant: His Seeming Failure and his Great Destiny

49:1–6. This is the second of the Servant songs (cf. 42:1–4). It is represented as uttered by the servant himself, and it strikes a very definite and personal note. The servant, with his sense of a divine call, equipment, and protection, sees through his temporary defeat to the ultimate glory which his God will enable him to achieve. The servant is Israel, languishing in exile; his destiny is to bless the world, to be “a light to the Gentiles.”

1. Isles: the message (of salvation) concerns the whole world (vs. 6). Israel was divinely called from its birth, like Jeremiah (1:5). My name as the Servant of Jehovah, divinely appointed to do a mighty work for the world.

2. The mouth is specially mentioned, because Israel is the prophet nation. She is Jehovah’s weapon in his contest with the false gods; through her victory is won for the true religion throughout the world (vs. 6): therefore he hid, preserved, protected her carefully, as a warrior his sword or his arrow, till the decisive moment.

3. Will be glorified, will get me glory.

4. Notice the contrast between what He said (vs. 3) and what I said (vs. 4)—between high destiny and deep despondency. Yet Israel triumphs over her despondency, through the faith that her God will defend her cause, her right (rather than judgment).

5 f. Again the high sense of destiny. Not only will Israel’s work not be fruitless (vs. 4), it will be glorious. These verses seem to lend strong support to the view that the Servant in the songs is an individual, whose duty is first to restore his people Israel, and then to carry the light of salvation to the world. But vs. 6, if we omit the words that thou shouldest be my servant (which are very awkward, and probably not original in the Hebrew), implies that the task of restoring Israel is Jehovah’s task—too light for him; and similarly in vs. 5, the bringing back of Jacob and the gathering of Israel can be referred, in point of grammar, as well to Jehovah as to the Servant; and the context, as well as the general tone of the songs, decides in favor of Jehovah. It is he, not the Servant, who brings back Jacob. When Israel, preserved from destruction (or scattered, so Gr.), has been restored by Jehovah, then she, the Servant, will turn to the wider world to be a light to the Gentiles (cf. 42:1, 4), that my salvation may be unto the end of the earth (so margin). Jehovah’s salvation is for all mankind (45:22 f.), not for Israel only; she is the means to the larger end.

McFadyen, J. E. (1910). The Book of the Prophecies of Isaiah (pp. 319–321). MacMillan Co. (Public Domain)