Isaiah 42:1-4

Israel as the Lord's Servant. The features of the portrait are these: (1) It starts from the thought of ch. Isaiah 41:8 ff., the electionby which Israel is constituted the Servant of Jehovah; but this is immediately followed by (2) the equipmentof the Servant with the Divine Spirit, and (3) the missionfor which he is raised up, viz., to be the organ of the true religion to the world (Isaiah 42:1). (4) The mannerand spirit of the Servant's workingare then described; his unobtrusiveness and tenderness (3 f.). (5) His unflinching constancyin the prosecution of his work, and his final and complete success. The whole description is singularly elevated, and impressive; Jehovah speaks of His Servant as He sees him, and as he shall yet be revealed to the world.

If the Servant of the Lord here described is Israel, he is obviously not Israel in its actual condition of bondage and inefficiency. He is Israel according to its idea, the Divine ideal after and towards which Jehovah is fashioning the people. This ideal is personified, and it is the vividness of the personification that leads many readers to think that an individual must be meant. But such impressions are not greatly to be trusted. It is a very hazardous thing to set limits to the possibilities of O.T. personification. The real question is whether the characteristics ascribed to the Servant are capable of being realised by the nation of Israel, or whether they are such as to demand a separate and personal embodiment. Even if it should be found that some details do not readily fall in with the national interpretation it would not at once follow that that interpretation was false; for no one argues that our Lord's parables must be literally true stories, because they contain features to which no spiritual meaning can be attached. But that consideration need not trouble us in this passage, for it will be seen that all that is here said of the Servant is applicable to Israel in the ideal light in which it is here presented. Certainly no historic individual of that agecan possibly be the subject of the picture.