Who has believed what he has heard from us? Isaiah 53:1
The coming of Jesus into the world was announced by angels as “good news of great joy… for all the people” (Luke 2:10). You would think that people would receive this good news gladly. But across the world, in every culture, the dominant response to the gospel is unbelief.
A student goes off to college. She meets thousands of students on campus, and yet all but a handful are not believers. Her closest friends do not believe, and she begins to wonder: “Was I raised in a religious bubble? Who on this campus has believed what I have heard?”
A young pastor plants a church in a large city. He wants to win the people for Christ. He preaches his heart out. He starts evangelistic ministries, but after five years, he still has a congregation of fifty people. Most people don’t want his message, and eventually he begins to doubt himself. “If the gospel is really true, why do so few believe it? What am I doing wrong? Why are people not responding? Who has believed what they have heard from us?”
Unbelief should not surprise us. We live in an unbelieving world. The human heart is wired for unbelief. The first effect of sin in us is unbelief: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).
Optimistic people like to think the only reason people do not believe is they have not heard a sufficiently compelling presentation of the gospel, but no one could hear a more compelling presentation than those who listened to Jesus, but the overwhelming response was one of unbelief (John 12:37-38).
Remember, the first six verses of Isaiah 53 tell us why we need a savior, and the first reason we need a savior is that, by nature, none of us believe.
Would you say that your own experience confirms what Isaiah is saying here?
