OUR FATHER WHO SURPRISED HIS SON WITH A VASTE EXPANSION OF THE SCOPE OF HIS REWARD

The book of Isaiah chapter 49 verse 4 says this;

But I said, “I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing at all. Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand, and my reward is with my God.”

This text is excerpted from a first person narration of the experience that the Lord Jesus had leading up to His death on the cross. 

Here, the Lord is recalling the conversation that He, Jesus the Son of God, had with His heavenly Father shortly before His death on the cross.

The Lord Jesus tells us that He, having lived a perfect life of following the law and doing everything that He saw His Father do, looked around Him and saw that He has been abandoned by His followers and that the mission that He been sent on to save the nation of Israel, had seemingly failed.

Israel, instead of embracing Him as their promised Messiah, had rejected Him and His message of the coming kingdom of God. They accused Him of blaspheme and sentenced Him to death to save their nation from political jeopardy.

Continuing with the telling of the experience from His point of view, the Lord Jesus said to His Father that all that He had worked so diligently for had not materialized and it was all for nothing but He recognized that it was His Father who would be the ultimate judge of the outcome of His mission and ascribe the fitting reward for His effort.

The Lord Jesus then records His Father's reply to His concerns in verses 5 - 6;

And now the Lord says— he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself, for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord and my God has been my strength—he says: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. 

I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

Wow!

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