A man of sorrows,
and familiar with suffering.
—Isaiah 53:3
Portrait artist, Robert Henkes, wrote: “A portrait is not a photograph, nor is it a mirror image.” A portrait, he explained, goes beyond the outer appearance “to capture what the person is really about.”
The first portrait I saw of Jesus was on a little card they gave me in Sunday school when I was a child. I saw another one on the living room wall of a family where I first preached.
There is no authentic pictorial portrait of Jesus, for we have no definitive description of his physical appearance.
But we have this word portrait of him in Isaiah 53: “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.”
That’s a depiction of the crucifixion—an authentic portrait of the Savior.
No portrait of Jesus is complete
without the backdrop—the Cross.