Isaiah’s Servant as light to the nations is applied to Jesus and to the apostolic mission — the nations’ inclusion is fulfillment, not a parenthesis.
The Servant is given as a covenant for the people and a light for the nations, to open blind eyes and bring prisoners out of darkness (Isaiah 42:6–7; 49:6). The scope is deliberately wider than a single ethnic enclave: salvation to the end of the earth.
Luke and Acts place this text on the mission’s lips. Simeon sees in the infant Jesus a light for revelation to the Gentiles (Luke 2:32). Paul and Barnabas cite Isaiah 49:6 when turning to the nations in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:46–47).
Gentile inclusion is not Plan B after Israel “failed.” It is what the Servant songs already required. The remnant believes; the word runs to the Aegean and beyond; the Spirit falls without distinction.
Light to the nations — in the Servant, through the apostolic witness.
The ends of the earth are in the original brief.
The fall of the Temple removes the institutional claim that light must be mediated through that house’s courts. The light was already Christ; history clears the rival lampstand of the old center.
The nations still come to the light by the gospel. There is no need to rebuild graded access. The Servant’s commission stands as present mission, not as a postponed ethnic schedule.