It gets said to somebody who has just had a scan come back wrong, and meant as a promise about the body, and the reader goes home and the scan does not change. The verse is about more than sin, which surprises people who have been told otherwise. What it is not is a guarantee about this year.
My wife Sarah was ill for three years. The treatments worked and then they stopped working, and this was one of the verses I had in my hands during that stretch. I know what it does when it does not come true, and I will not pretend the question is academic.
Isaiah wrote a more physical line than the King James lets on
Start with the verse itself, one line above the famous one.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
Isaiah 53:4 (KJV)
Griefs and sorrows sound like feelings. The Hebrew words underneath are choli and makob, and choli is the ordinary word for being ill. The same translators render it disease when Ahaziah falls through a lattice, disease when Ben-hadad sends to ask whether he will recover, sickness in a promise to Israel in Deuteronomy, and sick in Isaiah’s own first chapter.
In twenty of the word’s twenty-four places the King James gives sickness, disease or sick. Grief it uses four times: twice here, at 53:3 and 53:4, and twice in Jeremiah, both times in the same breath as a wound. Those four are the only places where they reach for a word about feeling at all.
The Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh, which has no Matthew to account for, gives the line as it was our sickness that he was bearing.
Matthew read it medically, and said so
He is the one who settles that the physical sense is really there, and he does it without hedging.
When the even was come, they brought unto him many that were possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and healed all that were sick: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.
Matthew 8:16-17 (KJV)
Infirmities and sicknesses. That is a fair rendering of the Hebrew and a long way from griefs and sorrows. Anybody who tells you Isaiah 53:4 has nothing to do with bodies is arguing with Matthew.
Notice where he puts the fulfilment, though. Not at the cross. At an evening in Capernaum, early in the ministry, with a queue of sick people at a door. Matthew sees the prophecy landing in the healings he has just described, years before Calvary.
Peter read the same line about sin, and in the past tense
Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.
1 Peter 2:24 (KJV)
Sins, twice, before the stripes arrive. And then the verb. Ye were healed, finished, done. A thing reported, not a thing still owed. The Greek is a simple past.
Isaiah’s own next verse goes the same direction, and people take the title of this article out of it.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5 (KJV)
Transgressions, iniquities, chastisement, and then the stripes. Two sin words and a word for discipline, stacked in front of the clause everybody quotes alone, and the verse after it has all of us straying like sheep with the iniquity of us all laid on him.
So which is it
Both, and the New Testament does not treat that as a contradiction. Two writers took one line and applied it to two kinds of ruin, because the prophet was describing somebody carrying everything that is wrong with us, and sickness is part of what is wrong with us.
And they were not working from the same Bible. The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament the early church mostly quoted, had already turned 53:4 into sin: he bears our sins, three centuries before Peter wrote. Peter’s reading is the Greek one. Matthew went back behind it to the Hebrew and rendered infirmities and sicknesses, against the version in everybody’s hands.
Neither of them turns the sentence into a schedule. Matthew locates a fulfilment in the past. Peter puts his verb in the past. Neither says that a believer with a diagnosis this month has a claim to file, which is the same shape as the promise nobody made about what you can handle, and Paul, who could heal people, wrote that he had left Trophimus at Miletum sick, and asked the Lord three times about his own thorn and was answered with grace and not removal.
The version that does harm
The reading I want to name is not “healing happens.” It does, and I have seen it. The harm is in the next sentence, the one that says the healing is guaranteed and therefore anybody still sick has failed a test.
That sentence puts a bill on a bed. It takes a promise about what Christ carried and turns it into an examination the patient is failing, and it is set almost entirely by people who are well.
I do not know why some are healed now and some are not, and I have no reason to offer for anybody’s particular year. Sarah was not healed. The verse was still true while she was dying, and it was not true in the way the person who quoted it at me meant.
If you are ill and somebody has told you that your faith is what is missing, and the weight of that has made you think about not being here, please call or text 988. It reaches a crisis line in the United States and, since 2023, in Canada. There is a chat at 988lifeline.org. Outside those two countries, your local emergency number.
The healing that does not wear off
Every resurrection Jesus performed was a temporary arrangement. Lazarus died again. The widow’s son died again. The people healed at that door in Capernaum are all dead now, which does not make Matthew wrong about what he saw.
The healing Isaiah describes is the kind that does not wear off, and it arrives late for most of us; the stripes were real long before any of it was applied.