The Unique Lord

Isaiah 44-45

            There are three things in particular that I will talk about today: 1) the uniqueness of Yahweh, the Lord of Israel; 2) the absolute crushing of the whole ideology of idolatry; and 3) the naming of Cyrus.

            First, repeatedly in this whole section of Isaiah (and at least three times in these two chapters), we read about the absolute uniqueness of Israel’s God, often introduced by the phrase, “This is what the Lord says.” This God declares there is no god apart from Him. In some places in the Old Testament, the phrase might be translated, “You shall have no other god in my presence,” emphasizing that Yahweh will not share His glory by having another in His presence. Here, it’s a bolder assertion. Those other gods simply are not gods at all. He asserts that He is ancient (44:7) and more than that that He is the originator, the Creator (44:6; 45:11; 45:18).

            This assertion of Yahweh’s uniqueness flows right out into a brutal assessment of the stupidity of idolatry (44:9-20). A human artisan fashions a statue, whether of metal or of wood. There’s the first critique: what kind of a god has its origins in the creativity of a human? (Compare 45:9-10: who is the potter and who is the clay?) Then it gets even more surreal: from the same hunk of wood from which he fashioned his god, the same man starts a fire to keep him warm. The god is made of the same material! What do you need the god for if you have to provide both the material for the god and for your own fire?

            The last thing I want to comment on is the appearance of the name Cyrus (44:28, 45:1, 13). I have an approach to prophecy that demands that the message must have made sense to the original audience. Missouri Synod Lutherans insist on the unity of the book of Isaiah, that is, that a single person wrote it, and we name that man Isaiah of the 8^th century BC. So, the prophecy about Cyrus (who didn’t live until 200 years later) must have meant something to the first audience. The word translated Cyrus is koresh. Koresh is, in every place, even in Ezra, translated as Cyrus. So, I guess my question is did koresh ever mean anything other than Cyrus so that the prophecy had meaning to its first audience.

            I don’t have any issue with the idea that the Lord made a prophecy about the future through his prophet, and maybe that’s the simple answer.