Wednesday, Sept. 9

Wednesday

If you read the book of Isaiah thoughtfully and carefully, you sense immediately the grandeur and the power of God. You hear the powerful, rolling cadences of this book's language. You sense the insignificance of man when compared with the might and the wisdom and majesty of God. And if you ask yourself, "How could Isaiah, just a human being like myself, write a book like this?" to answer seems impossible.

We know very little about Isaiah himself. He lived during the reigns of four kings of Judah - Ussiah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. His ministry began some 740 years before Christ when the ten tribes that formed the northern kingdom of Israel were being carried away into captivity by Sennacherib, the Assyrian invader. And Judah, the southern kingdom, was plunged into idolatry toward the end of Isaiah's ministry in 687 B.C. and was carried captive into Babylon. So the ministry of this prophet spans the time between the captivity of the northern kingdom and the captivity of the southern kingdom - about 50 years. Isaiah was a contemporary of the prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah. And tradition tells us that Isaiah the prophet was martyred under the reign of Manasseh, one of the most wicked kings recorded by the Old Testament. The story is that he hid in a hollow tree to escape the reign of Manasseh, and the king's soldiers, knowing he was in that tree, sawed the tree down. Thus, he was sawn in half. Some scholars feel that when the epistle to the Hebrews in its great chapter about the heroes of faith, lists being sawn in two as one of the ways the prophets were martyred, that it refers to the prophet Isaiah. (Hebrews 11:37)

Isaiah lived in a time of national stress, when man's true nature was visible and was exposing itself for what it was just as in our day. He was deeply troubled over the innate rebelliousness of people, as he cries out in the opening chapter. The nation has deliberately forsaken the ways of God and their stupid obstinacy is simply beyond his understanding. "Why," he says, "even the ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's manger..." (Isaiah. 1:3)  Even an animal knows where its bread is buttered, where it gets blessing and help. But he says, "Not Israel. They don't know where to go." They are wandering off stupidly, ignorantly, and this amazes him. He simply cannot understand their stubborn refusal to turn back - and the other nations around are just as bad.

In his second letter, Peter says of the Old Testament prophets, "First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one's own interpretation because," he says, "no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (2 Peter 1:20-21) and this explains how Isaiah could speak and write as he did.  The amazing thing is that prophets who spoke like this were very much aware that God’s Spirit was speaking through them and that what they spoke and wrote was greater than their own words or insight. They actually searched through their own writings and through prayer, for details about the salvation that was to come. Peter says the same in his first letter:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow.  It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things. (1 Peter 1:10-12)

Now if there is any key to this book, this is it! Isaiah was a man who was searching for something. Peter says he was searching after the salvation that was to come from God. And the interesting thing is that the name "Isaiah" means "The salvation of the Lord."

 What are you troubled by?  What are you searching for?  You will find the answer to both questions in the salvation of of the Lord which is in Jesus Christ!

Jeff Frazier