I obviously had a little trouble digging something to share out of Isaiah 49. It’s easy enough to summarize: God will use Israel to bring light and salvation to the whole world, and he hasn’t forgotten his people in their time of suffering and struggle. But you could get that from reading the chapter itself, and if that’s all I’ve got, you might as well read the chapter and skip my blog post. So I considered making a case that it’s a messianic passage. I could argue that the “servant” throughout the passage is an individual fulfilling God’s purposes for Israel, a representative of God’s chosen nation, not the nation itself. But I go looking for commentaries to jump-start my own commentary here, and, prefacing an exegetical outline from David Guzik, I find this quotation from Alan Redpath: “This chapter is full of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the words quoted could not possibly have their complete fulfillment in any other save in our Savior.” Consider your audience, Jackson: how many of ’em do you think are gonna contend that this passage doesn’t refer to Jesus Christ? Besides, we’ve been there already.