The Impending Crisis

Isaiah 9-10

            Chapters nine and ten go back and forth between threat and promise. The first promise is of restoration, light following darkness. Zebulun and Naphtali are northern tribes; Galilee is a region in the north, so these chapters have the north kingdom mainly in mind. The south kingdom is referenced too. When the Assyrians invaded in 722 BC, they destroyed the north kingdom and hauled off its people, but the north kingdom never experienced a return from exile. They simply disappeared from history. 20 years later, the Assyrians made war against Judah, too, devastating the land but, by the Lord’s deliverance, not conquering Jerusalem (see Isaiah 36-37, 2 Kings 18-19).

            Since the north kingdom never returned, the promise to Zebulun and Naphtali obviously had to wait longer for fulfillment. As the centuries wound on, the people of Israel did eventually re-inhabit the region of Galilee. By Jesus’ day, Galilee has a large Jewish population, and Jesus does most of His miracles in Galilee, so the first part of chapter nine reaches its fulfillment in Jesus’ work.

            In a much grander, subtler way, the whole prophecy looks forward to the day of ultimate restoration, when Christ returns. After all, the promised peace certainly does not exist on earth yet. So, we are still waiting for the fullness of the prophecy’s fulfillment.

            One other interesting feature of the reading is the judgment on Assyria (10:5-19). The Lord claims that Assyria is His chosen instrument to punish His people, the rod of His anger. But He also says that Assyria has its own sinful plans, which are to destroy and to consume. This is typical of the Lord, from all the way back to the judges at least. He uses the wicked to accomplish His purposes, but He also promises that their wickedness will be the last word. His justice will ultimately prevail. (Of course, the key word is ultimately; consider the previous paragraph.) Even when we see evil prevailing in our day, we ought not lose hope. The Lord is accomplishing His purposes—somehow and on a timeline we may or may not ever understand.

The Virgin’s Baby

Isaiah 7-8

            Isaiah 7 is the classic example of how prophecy works. In it’s original context, it’s not messianic at all, but in Christian reflection it is completely messianic.

            Here’s the context: King Ahaz, about who 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles have almost nothing good to say, is under military pressure. Aram, to his northeast, and Samaria, his neighbor immediately north, are trying to convince Ahaz to form an alliance with them against Assyria. Meanwhile, Ahaz is trying to secure an alliance with Assyria. The kings of Aram and Samaria are preparing a way again Ahaz to force his hand. In chapter 7, we find Ahaz checking the fortifications of Jerusalem.

            The sign of the virgin has nothing to do with a miraculous birth. It is a time marker: in the time it takes a virgin to conceive and give birth to a son—that is about 9 months—this apparent threat will pass. Indeed, by the time such a child knows right and wrong (maybe age 7, certainly by the time the child was a teen) the threatening countries will be completely crushed. So, the prophecy makes complete sense in its original context and its first meaning is for that context.

            I don’t know of any Jewish tradition in the 700 years between Ahaz and the birth of Jesus that pondered these verses and thought, “The messiah will be born of a virgin,” and even if they had, they would have taken it exactly the same way.

            But in light of the angels’ messages to Joseph (Matthew 1:18-25) and to Mary (Luke 1:26-38), the prophecy takes on a wholly unexpected meaning. The messiah is literally born of a virgin, one who according to both Matthew and Luke had never known a man. There is a fullness to Isaiah’s words that prophet himself probably never even imagined.

Isaiah’s Commissioning

Isaiah 6

            It seems strange that Isaiah’s commissioning to his prophetic work is placed after he has been prophesying for 5 chapters. I suspect it’s for literary effect. One of my professors wrote his doctoral dissertation on the fact that Isaiah 2-12 is a well-defined subsection of the whole book, written specifically to place the prophecy about Immanuel (7:14) in the middle. I don’t remember the whole argument, but suffice it to say that there is plenty of evidence that Isaiah didn’t do anything by accident.

            Regardless of its position in the book, Isaiah 6 is a powerfully important chapter. First, we have Isaiah seeing a vision of God in his heavenly throne room. There are hints the heavenly reality is reflected in the arrangement of the earthly temple in Jerusalem, especially the presence of seraphim, angelic beings, similar to the cherubim which were carved onto the ark of the covenant. (Don’t ask what difference there is between a cherub and a seraph; the Bible is really scant on details. Some extra-biblical material adds more, but that is outside the Bible.) So, God is his throne room, in His glory.

            Second, Isaiah’s reaction to being in the present of that glory: he is terrified. Human sin cannot exist in the presence of God’s consuming holiness. It’s why the Lord so regularly cloaks His glory in a cloud to hide it’s consuming power. Isaiah does the only thing he can do: he repents, and he received absolution from the angel.

            Finally, he receives his commission. When we read this passage, we usually stop there: “then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” We only rarely read the second half of the chapter publicly, but it is the part that Jesus quotes about Himself, namely, that Isaiah is to preach to a people the limitations of their faith: they are ever seeing, but never perceiving, ever hearing but never understanding. It is a message of judgment, which Isaiah gets immediately. “How long?” he wonders. How long will he have to pronounce this judgment. And the answer is stern: until the hammer falls and “though only a tenth remain, yet the land will be laid waste again.” The glimmer of hope is that a stump might resprout. Isaiah has some of the most beautiful passages of the gospel you can imagine, but the book is not just sweetness and light; as we’ve already seen, God’s judgment, His la 

The Song of the Vineyard

Isaiah 5

            The Song of the Vineyard (5:1-7) is a straightforward allegory: Israel is the Lord’s vineyard and, despite all the Lord’s care, she has not yielded the harvest of faithfulness He looked for. The second half of the chapter spells out the injustices Israel perpetuates. The rich accumulate more and more wealth at the expense of the poor. People engage in all kinds of drunken revelry. There is a general confusion of what is good and what is bad.

            It goes on, and in some ways it’s uncomfortably modern. One of the issues in our day is the ever-increasing gap between the rich and everyone else. We seem to be a people who self-medicate—whether it’s alcohol or pot or other drugs—anything to feel something in a soul-deadening world. Certainly there’s a confusion of right and wrong: we live in an age in which if something is natural it must be good. “Be yourself,” is our mantra. Never mind that Christ died to redeem us from our natural state and to make us something new.

            Now we have to remember that Israel is not just any nation. She is a combination of what we would call church and state, and she is absolutely unique among the nations for that reason. If the judgment over Israel sounds like it might be a modern condemnation of the US, it is much more a word of warning for the church, complicit and compromised in the world.

            Anyway, God’s judgment in the 7^th century BC is coming on Israel: famine, invasion, exile.

            The Song of the Vineyard takes on a new life in the hands of Jesus. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the same stories of Holy Week. After His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus takes up residence in the temple. There He teaches and, in turn, His opponents come and challenge Him. In the middle of all of this, Jesus tells the so-called Parable of the Vineyard, in which He co-opts Isaiah’s prophecy and applies it against the religious leaders of His day. Everyone knew exactly what Jesus was saying, and the chief priests began to look for a way to arrest Him. In this way, Jesus applies the words of the prophet to Himself and announces that the true judgment, of which Israel’s exile was just a foretaste, is at hand. More on that when we actually get to the Gospels…

A Failure of Leadership

Isaiah 3-4

            In the era when the church was persecuted by the Roman empire, one of the Roman strategies was to target the leaders of the church—bishops and pastors. Their reasoning went, “Cut off the head, and the body will die.” The church proved more resilient than that and, despite a number of defections, the church endured. Still, it remains an effective strategy. Nations like the US and Israel regularly target the leaders of terrorist organizations in order to destabilize those organizations. Leadership is important.

            In Isaiah 3, the Lord threatens the leadership of Israel: from the hero and the warrior on down. And in that leadership vacuum, He threatens to turn their social order upside down. When He says that He will make mere youths their officials, that’s not a promise but a curse. “I will place the least qualified over you.” In his book, The Death of Expertise, Thomas Nichols says that expertise in a field involves a number of things, and experience is one of them. When I was a young pastor, I wouldn’t have much appreciated that sentiment: I thought education was enough to make me an expert. A quarter century later, I realize that experience leavens knowledge; experience gives birth (hopefully) to wisdom.

            Anyway, part of the Lord’s judgment on idolatrous Israel is on her leaders who have either led her into idolatry or not done enough to summon her out of it. Indeed, Israel’s leadership has encouraged her in values that are the opposite of what the Lord desires, especially evidenced in injustice against the poor.

            Finally, as so often in the prophets, sermons filled with terrible condemnation erupt into proclamation of God’s restorative grace. So here. In chapter 4, we read about a Branch that will bring healing to Israel. The Branch and a new shoot from it will be explained more in chapter 11, where it is clearing looking forward not just to a new day for Israel but for the coming age of the Messiah.

Introducing Isaiah

Isaiah 1-2

            We’ve come through two of the three major sections of the Old Testament: we have read the History and the Wisdom literature and today we begin the Prophets. The prophets will occupy us for a good five months!

            A reasonable question to start with is, “What exactly is a prophet?” That’s a harder question than one might think. I’d start by comparing an Old Testament prophet to a New Testament pastor, at least insofar as a pastor is a preacher. The fundamental task of the prophet was to answer the question, “What is the Lord up to?” For this reason, it is better to think of the prophets as forthtellers, men who interpret the world and the Lord’s actions in it. To be sure, there is a foretelling aspect to their work; they are interested in what the Lord will do, too.

            This means that to interpret the prophets correctly we need to start by asking, “What did these sermons mean to those who first heard them?” Only after we have struggled with that issue will we be in the right place to see their fuller meaning, a meaning that very often takes us to the Lord’s work in the Jesus and sometimes looks into our own lives, as well. Our progression, then, is 1) the prophet’s own day and context, 2) the messianic fullness of the message (see 2 Corinthians 1:20), and 3) the appropriate application to our day. Many times, we’ll find that the application to our day isn’t as specific as we would like.

            Now, Isaiah in particular is a great place to start reading the prophets. We know quite a lot about Isaiah’s times, so we can often have a sense of what his words meant to his first hearers. Isaiah was commissioned in the year that king Uzziah died—740 BC (Isaiah 6:1) and he was in ministry until the reign of Hezekiah, who was on the throne from about 715 to 687 BC. Isaiah’s ministry extended at least 40 years, perhaps up to 50 years. (Jewish tradition says that Isaiah was sawn in two by King Manasseh, Hezekiah’s son.) This was a period of several threats to Judah, recorded both in the Bible and in other ancient sources.

            Further, Isaiah is explicitly quoted in the New Testament more than any other book except Psalms. As we read through Isaiah 1-11, a churchgoer will find a number of the passages familiar. Isaiah 7, 9, and 11 are all read near Christmas as prophecies of the coming Messiah. Other familiar passages include chapters 40, quoted by the Baptizer, Isaiah 35, alluding to the Messiah’s ministry, and Isaiah 61, quoted by Jesus Himself about Himself. More than any other prophet, Isaiah’s words point to Jesus.

            Finally, some of Isaiah’s words are simply beautiful and comforting in their own right. Personal favorites are Isaiah 35, 40, and 55. These passages talk about the Lord’s care and His promise to restore all things to their perfect, Edenic state.

            To today’s reading, Isaiah 1 sounds several themes that will occupy the prophet. First and foremost, he condemns idolatry, likening it to adultery and beastliness. Second, there is a condemnation of faithless religion and social injustice, which Isaiah portrays as evidence of an idolatrous heart. Finally, there is a call for repentance and an invitation to restoration.

            Isaiah 2 also sounds a common Isaianic theme: the Lord’s coming restoration. Here it is a vision of the establishment of the mountain of the Lord, with the nations coming to Him and an age of peace being established. Before that day, idolatry must be rooted out.

            So, for Israel, her current troubles are explained as the judgment of the Lord on her faithlessness. Christians can see how the confrontation between the Lord and faithless humanity led to Jesus’ crucifixion, an event which fulfilled the Lord’s purposes in paying the debt of sin and opening the way to His everlasting kingdom. That kingdom exists now in the church, called to holiness of living, and will be fully revealed when Christ returns in glory.

Introducing the Song of Songs

Song of Songs 1-8

            The key to understanding the Song of Songs is right in its title: The Song of Songs of Solomon. The book is literally a song of songs, a collection of love songs, written by Solomon. (Interpreters argue about all of that, but that’s what I think.) Commentator Tremper Longman counts 23 discrete poems in the book.

            And they are unabashedly love songs. They extol passion; they talk without shame about sexual attraction. Author Rodney Clapp puts it this way:

The Song of Songs even more unabashedly exults in sexual beauty and desire. It is a straightforward celebration of a woman and man reveling in one another’s attractiveness, rhapsodically cataloging the other’s most favored physical features. Lips, skin, hair, eyes, breasts, legs—all are delighted in and enthusiastically celebrated… At times, of course, the later Christian tradition would attempt to ‘spiritualize’ the Song of Songs, but the text is so resolutely physical that the earthly body can never be entirely routed form it (Clapp, Tortured Wonders, p. 199).

As Clapp notes, many Christian interpreters have been embarrassed by the overtly sexual notes in the book and have tried to make it an allegory about Christ and his love for the church, but I just don’t think it works that way. To be sure, St. Paul says that human marriage is a picture of the love of Christ for His bride, the church (Ephesians 5:32), but to make the Song exclusively about that misses the point. It’s a book of wisdom, and as such it talks about human experience, and part of human experience is physical love.

            This exultation in physical love, in the Greek’s eros, stands in sharp contrast to the book of Proverbs, where eros is connected with adultery. To be sure, passion is dangerous, especially outside the bonds of marriage. But the Song of Songs reminds us that, within the Lord’s chosen design, it is a beautiful thing.