Ep. 21 - Isaiah

[MUSIC PLAYING] -GCB. [MUSIC PLAYING] -Looking for a quick overview for a book in the Bible, this podcast series gives you that and more. As Bible teacher Mike Beaumont makes sense of this unique collection of books printed by questions from David Tavana. [MUSIC PLAYING] -We're starting a new series of conversations about a different section of the Bible, really, different part of the library of books that make up the Bible, aren't we? The prophets. -Yeah, we've described, haven't we, the Bible is not just one book, but a library of books, 66 of them. And like any library, the books are categorized by the type of literature they are. And so so far in our series, we've seen the first five books of the Bible that are called law. Not just laws, of course. It's the story of the Patriots, Abraham Isaac Jacob, Moses, and the great Exodus stories, and the laws that were given there at Mount Sinai. We moved on to a second shelf, which was the history section, covering the period from the time when Israel went into the promised land, to the time that it was exiled from it. A third shelf was a section called Wisdom and Poetry that was some of the reflective material from that time. And now we're moving on to the next shelf, as you said, which is all about the prophets, and each of these prophets fit somewhere into that historical timeline that we looked at a couple of shelves back. -And how many of these books are there? -Well, there were hundreds of prophets in the history of Israel, and we get to see some of them in the history books, but actually there were only 16 of them that had their writings recorded in Scripture. Four of them are described as major prophets, really because they're quite long books, so they're major in that sense. And 12 is minor prophets, again, not minor in the sense of less important, but quite simply their works are much shorter. So we're looking here at 16 prophetic writings in all. The most important thing when you're reading the prophets is to consider their historical context. Where were they? And when were they living when they gave these words? Because if we don't do that, actually, you'll end up thinking, well, he's just contradicted him. And the answer is, yes, he has, because it was now a totally different situation. So the setting for the prophets is incredibly important. And just some pointers of things like, first of all, were they prophesying to those northern tribes, those rebellious 10 tribes that had broken away after the reign of Solomon, the nation known as Israel, or were they prophesying to Judah to the southern tribes who would continue in existence long after the north had been conquered and then scattered across the Assyrian Empire? So as a north, as a south, as a before the exile happened or during it or after it, so locating where each of these prophets occurs in history is probably the most important thing you can do in getting the best out of these books. Had you know, well, a good Bible will normally have an introduction to each books and will set you off in the right direction. What's the purpose of the prophets? Well, why do we have the prophets in the Bible? It's easy to think, isn't it? When we think of prophecy that prophecies always are bit, like the future, telling what's going to happen. And of course, we'll see that there is quite a bit of that in the prophets. But actually, I think it's a surprise as many people to discover that it's not the main focus of the prophets. The main focus of the prophets' material is to call both King and Country back to obedience to God's law. God had given the law through Moses as a way of saying to his people, "You are mine. Now this is how I want you to live, both in your relationship to me and to one another." But gradually God's people drifted away from that in both dimensions. And so one of the big things we see the prophets doing is calling people back and saying, "Hey, listen, remember what God said in His Word about this? You can't treat the poor like that. You can't have idols in your home and worship your way as well." So much of their material is not about the future, it's actually addressed to their contemporaries, to confront them with God, with their own God and to remind them of God's character and ways and covenant and to call them back to that God. So there is stuff about the future, but it's actually quite small in comparison to the whole. Well, we definitely ought to make a start and look at these major prophets. So the first one is Isaiah. I mean, how major is the book of Isaiah? Oh, it's major. It's one of the biggest books in the Old Testament. We've got 66 chapters, 66 rich chapters of amazing poetry. Actually, Isaiah has probably the best Hebrew in the whole Old Testament. His language is really well crafted. He uses lots of imagery and he's just really, really good. He's a wordsmith. He knows how to put words together. So this is a really major part of this section of the library. So with 66 chapters, that's quite a chunky book. Now, maybe you could just give us a little bit of a bird's eye view, perhaps before we go into a bit more detail. A simple bird's eye view would be to sort of divide the book into three sections. We get chapters one to 35, which are messages delivered against the threat of Assyria. Assyria was the great empire to the east that had been growing and expanding and was looking westward. And it got its eyes on, well, first of all, Israel, the northern kingdom and during this period of Isaiah's life would also have a go at taking Jerusalem and Judah too. And those first 35 chapters are really all about challenging Judah. Who are they going to trust in in the face of threat? When things go wrong in life, when stuff comes against you, whom will you trust in? The one you're to trust in is the Lord. And if you don't, then the consequences of that will inevitably come. And you mentioned earlier that the context is important. So this is Isaiah speaking to the people in Judah in the south. Absolutely. So that's really crucial in understanding his message. So people in the south, in light of that threat, that is coming certainly to the people of the north and touches on them as well. There's a little historical section then in sections 36 to 39 where Assyria tries to actually conquer Jerusalem and can't. It's like a historical interlude in the midst of all the beautiful poetry. And chapter 39 ends up with Babylon suddenly appearing. What, why do they come and visit? Well, Babylon is the next great empire that will eventually overtake Assyria. And Isaiah gives us a sort of little glimpse here of the future that's to come. And then the second main part of his book is really from chapter 40 onwards, where he's looking into the future. And he sees that actually now Babylon is overtaken Assyria. And Babylon has actually conquered Judah, the southern part of God's people, and take them into exile. And chapters 40 onwards look at that exile right at the end of it when God's people will be allowed to come back home again. So this is a real leap into the future in that second part. So really the first 39 chapters are all about what's happening in his lifetime, chapter 40 onwards, looking ahead to an exile that hasn't yet happened yet, that it isn't even on the horizon, but he sees it as though it had happened is over and then watch what God will do when he brings us back from that. And that glimpses into the future. I mean, how accurate is it? Oh, I mean, they really are quite amazing. I often call these sort of glimpses into the future, his flash forwards. You know, we're very familiar these days with the technique of a flashback in a movie, you know, the scenario will be going on and suddenly they've gone back to a scene where you see something happening that helps explain what's happening now. Well, Isaiah rather than having flashbacks has flash forwards. He's suddenly in the midst of prophesying something when he suddenly gets a flash forward to see something that will happen. And some of those are in the pretty immediate future. Some go way way ahead to that return from exile. Some will see in a few moments, I'm sure, look way ahead even to the coming of Jesus and will be incredibly precise in terms of what he reveals about Messiah. - How many years are we talking about? - Oh, we're talking here over 700 years to the coming of Jesus. So here's a guy who will be prophesying both the pretty immediate future, like in chapter seven where he has a prophecy to King A has of what is going to happen and how the Assyrian threat that will come against the nation will be over before this child that he prophesies is going to be born is 12 to 13 years old. And it was exactly so that was exactly how it worked out in history. So anything from almost a decade to 700 plus years that this guy is like up there in the premier league of prophets without a doubt. So how did it begin? I mean, how did he come to be a prophet? How did he get this glimpse of both the present and the future? - Well, it came about as we'll see for quite a number of the prophets by being called to that by God. You didn't volunteer to be a prophet. He didn't sort of go to prophet training school although there were some of those it seems in Old Testament periods. He was called by God to this office. And we read about that in Isaiah chapter six and here's an interesting thing. Although we get his call described in chapter six, that means there are five chapters before that and they're all full of prophecies too. In fact, those first five chapters pretty much sum up what his message will be. Now, some scholars think that's because simply the first five chapters are a sort of introduction to his work of what will be coming and then we get his call. But as I was reflecting on that recently, I thought, "Do you know, but he doesn't have to be like that?" Because I think, you know, any of us that develop a gift from God find that it grows. So I've been a pastor and a preacher and a Bible teacher for decades now. But it didn't suddenly drop out of heaven one day when God called me to be a pastor. In fact, I started doing little messages, little bits of preaching. Pretty soon after I became a Christian, some of the youth club that I was part of, we used to go to an old folks home and do a little service there on a Sunday afternoon and they said, "Well, you could do a little five minute talk here, "couldn't you?" And so I actually started the preaching and grew in the gift before God called me to be a pastor. And I've often wondered whether those first five chapters are words that Isaiah is getting from God before his formal call to be a prophet to the nation. And when that call came, it was incredible. So everybody should read, absolutely, Isaiah chapter six. It starts out, "In the year that King Isaiah died, "I saw the Lord." Is that just a time reference? It's absolutely not just a time reference. There's something really powerful in that because King Isaiah had been a great and godly King in Judah. He'd reigned for 52 years. Now, in those days, 52 years was an incredibly long time. When King sometimes literally only lasted a number of weeks or months, certainly up in the northern kingdom in Israel, that was true. So it had been 52 years of godliness, of stability, of prosperity, it had been a good life under a good and godly King. And suddenly the King is dead. And so everyone now is obviously thinking, "Oh my goodness, what's going to happen now?" The King's dead, what's going to happen? And it's in that year when the good and godly King Isaiah dies, that he has this vision in chapter six. And in chapter six, he has a vision of God, the holy God, seated upon his throne. And it's as if what Isaiah needed to know was, "Listen, Isaiah, the King might be dead, but I tell you what, the King isn't dead. He's still on his throne. He's still in control. And what's more, Isaiah, I'm going to call you to be a prophet." And he does that in chapter six, in a particular way, having seen this incredible vision of what God is like and all his holiness. The first thing Isaiah says is, "Woe to me, I'm ruined. I'm a man of unclean lips." Isn't interesting, God was going to use his lips and his speech and he's really aware suddenly that his lips feel very unclean, very unfit for this in the presence of the holy God. And so God sends one of the serifs, one of the angelic beings with a, it says a live call from a sort of altering heaven and touches his lips and so see I've touched your lips, your guilt is taken away and your sin are toned for. And all that he can hear then is this voice saying, "Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?" And little Isaiah says, "Well, I'm here. You could send me and God says, 'Go then' and start speaking to my people. But by the way, they're going to hear but not here, Isaiah. So there's a warning already that it's not always going to be an easy ministry." So that's how he launched on this great ministry had an encounter with God and God called him to it. - A completely humbling experience by the sound of it. - Oh, incredible. And you know, this sense of, well, I think as you reach chapter six, you just get this sense that he was utterly overwhelmed by this holiness of God. He is the angel's crying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord. That's a Hebrew way of saying, the most holy of all. And I think he was so overwhelmed and the fact that it was so overwhelming comes out because one of Isaiah's favorite expressions for God, throughout this whole book, look for it when you're reading it, is the holy one of Israel. And it's like it to God him, it to grabbed him. But of course, what he'd seen in that vision is not just that God is holy and up there. And what are we gonna do about it? God is holy and up there, but he comes down to us. He sent that angel with the glowing cold to touch his lips. So the holiness of God doesn't stand there and accuse and rebuke us. Yes, it does accuse us of our sin, but then the holiness of God acts to deal with that sin. And that's one of the things you'll see in one of his later visions too. How do that amazing sense of God's holiness contrast with the lives of the people around him? Yeah, incredibly so because what people were doing was really drifting away from God. Do you know, one of the things I think all of us can see is when life gets comfortable, it's really easy to settle. I think around the world, certainly in the West, life was pretty comfortable for all of us. And coronavirus came along and shook everything we had ever trusted him, whether it was bank balances or our job, our ability to meet our family, suddenly our comfort was shaken. And we saw perhaps how lucky and how comfortable we were. And what had happened by Isaiah's days was that people had become incredibly comfortable in their lifestyle and in their comfort had become sort of lax and slack in two ways. And actually both of these came out in that introductory chapter, one. And one was they'd become very lax in the way that they'd related to God. And they had thought that simply going to the temple with their sacrifices, as long as they went there and did it, that was fine. You know, they'd done their bit. I suppose the equivalent would be, I've been to church this week, that's it. Me and God are good now. But in chapter one, there's this powerful challenge where God says the multitude of your sacrifices, what are they to me? I've had more than enough of them. I've got no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats. What is this? Champling of my court. Stop bringing me meaningless offerings. Where? That's challenging. The second area where they'd got really lax was in the horizontal dimension. And that is in their relationship with one another. And it was the whole thing, even though the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and the rich. And so, certainly the increasing middle class, not caring about those who were under them. And so there are challenges in this book about the way that they deal with one another. And God is saying, you cannot pretend to be my people unless you are caring for one another in a godly way. And so again, just one verse picked out from this introductory chapter one. God says, "Throughwise I have stopped doing wrong, learned to do right, seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the cause of the widow." So there's these two dimensions that are going wrong, the vertical and the horizontal. And it had all come out of materialistic comfort that it increased, that had taken off that spiritual sharp edge from them. And it caused them just to become lazy and laks and ultimately therefore disregarding of their real heart responsibilities to God and to one another. And all of those things will get challenged. Actually not just in Isaiah, but in many of the prophets from this period. And in a sense then, because they needed to be shown or told the truth, if they didn't change what were the repercussions. Well, this is the hard part of Isaiah's message where he tells them that if they don't change, then judgment is coming. You know, we don't like to think about that aspect of God, but it's a very clear part of Scripture that God does judge sin. And so from chapter 13 onwards, we get God's judgment. And first of all, that judgment is seen as coming upon the nations. But as Isaiah goes on through these chapters, it's very clear too. Certainly by chapter 28 onwards that this judgment is also going to come on God's people themselves. And it will come on them in what the prophets called the day of the Lord. Now, this seemed to be in a very common expression at this period. The day of the Lord was seen, well, initially as any day of God's intervention when he would come and deal with his enemies, but increasingly, it came to be seen as that day at the end of human history when God would come and judge his enemies. And of course, God's people thought, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the enemies are all you, right there aren't there? It's not us. We're God's people. And Isaiah along with the number of the other prophets will say, no, hang on. This day of judgment will also include you. And you cannot just turn around and say, but we're God's people. If you're God's people start living like God's people, or this judgment will most certainly come to you. And yet, even as Isaiah brings those words of judgment, which are real, he also offers promises of hope and salvation. And that's one of the richest parts of his book. In fact, you said towards the end of the book of Isaiah, there's a glimpse into the distant future, which by the sound of it carries a sense of hope. But how was that relevant to the people that he lived amongst when he was alive? Well, I mean, first of all, you can't get away from the fact that judgment was coming. And that indeed did come. It would ultimately come in 5, 8, 6, b c when Babylon would attack Judah and destroy Jerusalem and take its people into exile. But I think what he's doing is he is giving them a sense of hope that judgment actually never needs to be the last word with God. You know, sometimes we have to go through judgment. And he's very clear that this judgment, it's a refining, it's a purposeful judgment. It's to wake God's people up. It's to get their attention and get their hearts back to him again. And so the relevance for them in their time is that we may have to walk through judgment. But I do want you to know there's hope. There is always hope. And that will come at sort of two levels. The first level of flash forward from chapter 40 onwards will be the hope that they will return from this exile that they will have to go into. And beautiful passages from chapter 40 onwards where he'll talk about God sending a messenger to prepare a highway for his people coming back out of Babylon to the promised land. And a second level of hope will be even further ahead that 700 years that we referred to that will then be a hope not just for God's own people, but for those who are not yet his people as he gets flash forwards about the coming of the Messiah, the Christ, the one we now know to be Jesus. So this sense of hope is looking that far ahead to Jesus himself. Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, scattered through this book, we find all sorts of prophecies about Jesus. We find, well, actually from the beginning to the end of his life, it starts in chapter 7 where there is this prophecy about the virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son. And he's going to be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. Now, at a primary level, he was pointing to a young maiden in the court and saying, she will have a child. And before that child is old enough to discern between right and wrong, 12 and 13, this threat from the North will have passed. And historically, that's exactly what would happen. But the new testament picks that up and says, wow, but yet he was seeing something beyond that as well. And we'll apply it to a prophecy of how Mary the Virgin can see it and bore Jesus in chapter 9. We get that great passage about for to us a child is born to us a son is given and the government will be upon his shoulders. His name will be wonderful, Councillor mighty God everlasting father, Prince of peace and of the increase of his government and rule. There will be no end. And he's looking forward to Jesus there. But later in his prophecy there's a couple of other prophetic words that come out chapter 61 for sees the spirit anointed nature of the Messiah's work. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he's anointed me to preach good news, something that's picked up in Luke chapter 4. And perhaps the crowning glory is in chapter 53 where he sees someone he's called the servant, the offering servant who in the earlier chapters looks as though it could be the whole nation of Israel. But as these four servants progress, it's pretty clear that it's an individual, the individual we come to know as Jesus. And he sees how an earth can God bring us back. How an earth can God rescue us when we are so sinful? And the answer is God is going to have to deal with our sin. And he's going to deal with that sin through a suffering servant. And so in chapter 53 we see Messiah's death, the death that would not only be a sacrifice but a substitution. It will be our griefs and sorrows that he'll carry. He says it will be our rebellion and sins he will pay for. Through this death people will be healed and brought into God's wholeness. And that chapter, you've never read it, just want to encourage listeners to read it because it includes many precise details about Christ's final hours, about how he was oppressed, treated, harshly, remained silent, was buried in a rich man's grave, how he saw that that would not be the end but he would be raised and exalted, which would make it possible he says for many to becainted righteous. So there are some incredible flash forwards here, such as the prophetic anointing on this guy. It certainly sounds like a remarkable climax to the book. And if you've read through the 66 chapters, as you say it's quite a book, but worth reading, but for what reason in particular would you say? There are lots of like people's favorite verses hidden away in this book, scattered through out here. And if you work your way through, you'll come across them again and again, there are some rich promises of God. But I would say as a whole, what is the message that Isaiah brings in troubled times? Remember he was speaking in troubled times when it looked like the nation might be overwhelmed. He too, are living in troubled times for different reasons when it would be easy for us to feel overwhelmed. And for me, the message that Isaiah shouts out loud with is that with God, There is always hope. No matter how black things might look, there is hope. No matter what exile you might end up feeling you are taken into, there is always hope of restoration. But we have to play our part in that. By getting our hearts right with God and ensuring that our relationship with Him is worked out in how we care for others. And so it is a book of incredible hope. So if you are feeling hopeless at the moment, this is an incredible book to work your way through. Yes, you will come to some passages that seem hard and difficult but press on through because hope is coming and that for me sums up Isaiah. Hope is coming and it is coming from our holy God who always reigns in heaven. Bible books in 30 minutes covers every book of the Bible. And you can hear Bible teacher Mike Beaumont in conversation with David Taviner in more 30 minute podcasts. Bible biogs, Bible surprises, Bible songs. As well as their journeys on location in the holy land and beyond. Jesus then and now and unstoppable church then and now. Making sense of the Bible for life every day.