Isaiah 50:7

The message that is sent is life and death, good and evil, the blessing and the curse, comfort to desponding saints and terror to presuming sinners,

For the Lord God will help me - That is, he will sustain me amidst all these expressions of contempt and scorn. Shall I not be confounded - Hebrew, ‘I shall not be ashamed;’ that is, I will bear all this with the assurance of his favor and protection, and I will not blush to be thus treated in a cause so glorious, and which must finally triumph and prevail.

THESE are, in prophecy, the words of the Messiah. This is the language of Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Deliverer, whom God has sent into the world to be the one and only Savior. We know that this is the case because it is to Him, and to Him alone, that the verse preceding our text must refer—"I gave My back to the smiters, and My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not My face from shame and spitting." This is the declaration of Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews—and it is He who said of old in prophecy, and afterwards carried it out in actual life, "I set My face like a flint." Luke seems to have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the 51st verse of his 9th Chapter, in which he says of our Lord that, "when the time was come that He should be received up, He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem." There is the same meaning in the two passages, and one cannot help feeling that the words recorded by Isaiah were brought by the Holy Spirit to the memory of Luke when he penned that expression. The fact is that our Master, even from eternity, resolved to save His people, and nothing could keep Him from the accomplishment of His purpose. From eternity He foresaw that they would fall from their first estate and He entered into Covenant engagements to redeem them—and from the pledge He gave of old, He never turned back. Time rolled on and men fell, and afterwards multiplied upon the face of the earth, but Christ's delights were still with the sons of men and often did He, in one form or another, visit this earth to converse with Abraham, or to wrestle with Jacob, or to speak with Joshua, or to walk in the burning fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. He was always anticipating the time when He would actually assume human nature and fulfill His Covenant engagements.

THESE are, in prophecy, the words of the Messiah. This is the language of Jesus of Nazareth, the promised Deliverer, whom God has sent into the world to be the one and only Savior. We know that this is the case because it is to Him, and to Him alone, that the verse preceding our text must refer—"I gave My back to the smiters, and My cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not My face from shame and spitting."

Therefore have I set my face like a flint - The Prophet Ezekiel, Eze 2:8, Eze 2:9, has expressed this with great force in his bold and vehement manner: “Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, And thy forehead strong against their foreheads: As an adamant, harder than a rock, have I made thy forehead; Fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks, Though they be a rebellious house.”