Isaiah 53:10
Isaiah 53:1010Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush Him and to cause Him to suffer; and when His soul is made a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, and the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.
"It pleased Jehovah to crush him" (NWT). The Watchtower acknowledges the verse as Messianic and as a reference to Jesus's death, but reads it within the corresponding-ransom framework: Jehovah was pleased that Jesus's perfect human life served as the equivalent payment for Adam's forfeited perfect human life. The crushing language is treated as descriptive of the suffering, not as theologically loaded substitutionary penalty.
's "it pleased Jehovah to crush him" is the Old Testament's clearest statement of penal substitution. The Father willingly delivered the Son to suffer for sins not his own — and the chapter has already specified those sins as "ours" (53:5). Pair with : "God displayed him publicly as a propitiation through faith in his blood... so that God might be both just and the justifier of the one having faith in Jesus." The cross is the point where Jehovah's justice and mercy meet: the penalty is fully paid, and the guilty go free — because Jehovah was pleased to crush a substitute. The doorstep form: "Why was Jehovah pleased to crush him? The only answer that holds Isaiah 53 together is that the crushing satisfied a justice the world could not satisfy any other way."