When Justice Heals: Rethinking Isaiah 53 Beyond Penal Substitution

A Different Way to Read Isaiah 53

The core belief of Christianity is that we are made at-one with God through Jesus. However, throughout church history, many different metaphors and theories have been used to explain how that happens.

One of the most prominent of these is PSA. The basic idea is that all humans are guilty of sin, and God’s justice demands a penalty for that sin—death. To save us from being wiped out, Jesus steps in and takes the penalty for us, satisfying God's justice and allowing us to experience God's love.

Is This Really Justice?

A big problem with this framework is that there's arguably no justice involved in it at all.

First, the concept of "justice" in PSA is entirely punitive in nature. It has no redemptive or restorative power; it's simply "you did a bad thing, so a bad thing has to happen to you". This is not what justice entails throughout the rest of Scripture.

Second, this scenario wouldn't be considered just in any modern court. If a murderer’s brother offered to take his place in prison for life, we would say "absolutely not". It doesn't address the crime, protect the community, or restore what was broken. The only effect might be a grim satisfaction in seeing someone punished, which feels gross and inappropriate to attribute to God.

Thankfully, atonement has been described in many other ways throughout Christian history.

In fact, it's essential to remember that these explanations, including PSA, have always remained doctrines or theories, rather than dogma. You can be a Christian and hold different views on how Jesus saves us; the core of the faith is that Jesus saves us.

The Suffering Servant in Isaiah

Despite the problems with PSA, it remains a topic of debate, particularly concerning one major passage used by its proponents: the Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53. This is a passage that trips many people up when they begin to expand their thinking beyond a narrow PSA model.

To understand it, we need context. In the broader context of Isaiah, the "servant" initially represents corporate Israel, God's chosen people, intended to be a light to the nations. But, as is a common theme in the Hebrew scriptures, Israel fails at this mission. So, beginning in Isaiah 49, the scope of the servant narrows and becomes an individual who will succeed where the nation failed.

Within the context of Isaiah, this can be read in multiple ways. Some Jewish readers see a messianic figure, while others view it as a sharpening of the metaphor, where the servant is still Israel, but the image is more focused and intense. It isn't necessary to read this as pointing directly to Jesus.

As Christians, however, we do read this passage as being about Jesus, an interpretation affirmed in Acts 8, where Philip explains to an Ethiopian official that the suffering servant is Jesus. But even "about" can have a range of meanings. As Andrew Rillera says, "Isaiah 53 is read as the 'script' for what it looks like for the righteous/just to live in an unjust/unrighteous world". Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of that script. Acts 8 affirms that Jesus fulfills this passage, but it doesn't tell us how.

So, as Christians, we see Jesus as the fulfillment of this story and read him back into the words of Isaiah.

Re-Reading the Text

Now, if you approach Isaiah 53 already assuming PSA is the correct model, you will certainly find language that reinforces that starting point. But for the first 1,500 years of Christianity, that wasn't the starting point people brought to the text. If we step outside of that assumption, we can find alternative ways to understand the language.

So, let's look at three key points.

1. "The Punishment for Our Peace" (Verse 5)

The verse reads, "...the punishment for our peace was upon him, and by his wounds, we are healed". The key Hebrew word here for "punishment" is musar. This word does not mean retributive punishment or a legal penalty. Instead, musar is restorative; it refers to discipline, correction, or instruction that always has a purposeful and positive outcome. For example, the same word is used in Proverbs 3 to describe a father's loving discipline and in Isaiah 26 for corrective suffering that leads people back to God.

The servant suffers for others, but that suffering is not a payment to anyone. It's the price the servant paid for living righteously in an unjust world, and through it, he renewed the world's relationship with God. God didn't inflict bad things on Jesus; Jesus experienced the consequences of living justly, and through his righteousness, he healed the world.

2. "It Was the LORD's Will to Crush Him" (Verse 10)

What about the line that says, "Yet it was the LORD’S will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin..."? Two key phrases here are "it was the LORD's will" and "an offering for sin".

The point is not that God enjoyed causing Jesus to suffer. The point is that this was God's plan. Since Jesus is God enacting the plan to save the world, of course, everything Jesus experienced was part of that plan. It was the means by which God would turn the story around.

The phrase "offering for sin" uses the Hebrew word asham, which specifically means a "guilt offering". In Leviticus 6, an asham was offered when you had wronged your neighbour. The priest would "bear your sin" by taking it into God's presence for removal, and then you were required to make restitution to your neighbour. The priest never paid your penalty; you still did, but the penalty was restorative (making right what was broken), not retributive.

When Isaiah says Jesus' life was made an atonement, he's saying that Christ’s righteous suffering brings our sin before God for removal and obligates us to make restitution to restore our relationships with one another. There is no penal transference here.

3. "We Considered Him Punished by God" (Verse 4)

Finally, let's go back to verse 4: "Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted".

This points directly to what René Girard called the scapegoat mechanism. Human societies often achieve social cohesion by collectively blaming their problems on a scapegoat, someone they can believe is being justifiably punished by God. It allows us to shift our own failings onto someone else.

Isaiah shows us that when we see the servant suffer—the necessary suffering that comes from living righteously in an unjust world—our first instinct is to misinterpret it. We will consider him punished by God. In other words, we wrongly attribute the source of the suffering to God, rather than to a world that rejects God's way.

It's only after Jesus moves through all of that suffering with perfect love and grace—"Forgive them, Father, they don't know what they're doing"—and is resurrected, that we can see the truth. His resurrection proves the suffering was not an act of rejection by God. Only then can we look back and understand what Isaiah was trying to tell us. We thought he was punished by God, but he was actually punished because it was God's will for him to move through the world in innocence and love, freeing us to pursue the restoration God always wanted.

A More Beautiful Invitation

If you come from a background where PSA is the only way you've heard the atonement discussed, I understand how hard it can be to shake that framework when reading Isaiah. I'm not even arguing that you can't get to PSA from this text.

What I am suggesting is that it is not the clear, obvious, or necessary reading. It's a function of bringing our preconceptions with us to the text. If we can step back from those, we can see something far more beautiful than a legal transference of penalty: an invitation into the kind of life of righteousness and restoration God has always wanted for all of us.