“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.” (Isaiah 53:3)
Our text tells us something of the world’s reception of Jesus when He came into the world in the first century. We are told that there would be no beauty that we would desire Him. John the Apostle wrote that “Jesus came unto His own but His own received Him not. (John 1:11) Our text prophesies that men would despise Him. Folks would hide their faces from Him. Men would count Him as nothing, a big zero with the outside line rubbed out. They crucified Him.
Would Jesus be received more readily today, or would we crucify him again if He were bodily in our world? Billy Graham said in a recent devotional that Jesus would be crucified more quickly today than in the first century. I agree. It is what many of us have been saying for many years. Take away the entertainment which churches use to draw a crowd, the acceptance of non-repentant sinners into the membership and take away raffles, cake sales, car washes, yard sales and other non-Biblical means of raising money for doing God’s work and we will see that He is despised and rejected today as much as He was in the first century.
Thankfully, there are those strong believers who adhere to the Christ of the Bible, the One who is the only way of salvation, the living Christ.
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