I have been meditating on the marring or the misshaping of His face in the last week or so. I read this scripture…
Just as many were astonished at you, My people, So His appearance was marred more than any man And His form more than the sons of men.

What is the connection, I thought? People astonished at me? At you? The preceding verse speaks of not being in a rush. Of God going before you and being behind you.

But His face? When I felt touched to think about it, I thought it had to be “marred” not just fulfill a prophecy but to do something else.

It’s funny. The Lord had been stirring in me Psalm 27 and the phrase about “the land of the living.” And for nearly a week this statement has been typed on my computer with nothing added. “Was His Face Marred for a reason?” I would look at it multiple times a day. Today I began to clear the deck so to speak. And here just a few scriptures later in Isaiah 53, “For He was cut off from the land of the living;”

What is the land of the living? I felt this. A stream in a wilderness. A family of descendants. Where life is.

The other day, I felt that His face must be marred to “balance” it for us. He had no beauty it says, nothing to draw us. If the holes were still visible in His hands, what about other wounding?

I came to this conclusion about His face. I realized it while watching the Goonies with my grandkids. When Jacob saw Sloth he could only ask “why is his face like that?” I think we ask the same thing about the face of Jesus. Why is it like that? Why will it not draw you? “He has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty that we should desire Him.” Isaiah 53:2

With this, “He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.”

Not only to accept him, but to serve Him, we must accept the difficult parts. I think we have looked at things through the human lens and made Him “palatable” to our way of thinking. Hence, we “mar” His beauty. We in our unredeemed state could not accept His goodness.

We often see people dealing with shame not able to look others in the eyes. Perhaps that is what happened. Or even in the “I am better than you” mode, underrating the spiritual value of goodness. Pushing it away.

Whatever the reason, my final thoughts are that we tried to make Him like us, when His goal was to make us like Him.