Isaiah 53, December 22, 2024

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And I know I told everybody that we were gonna take just a real short break from going verse by verse through Matthew for the
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Christmas season. And what is more natural at Christmastime than to dive back into the
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Old Testament and go into a prophet like Isaiah, right? That's the first thing that pops into everybody's head when we think about baby
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Jesus and Christmas and all that kind of stuff. But as I hope that you'll see, this is important.
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And actually, it's unbelievably amazing what we see here. But I wanna start our discussion of Isaiah actually in the
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Gospel of Luke. We're gonna look in Luke chapter 24. So once again,
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I'll invite you to turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 24. And we'll be starting at verse 13.
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It's the heading that you'll see there is the road to Emmaus. So just by way of background, the road to Emmaus at the end of the
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Gospel of Luke is happening after Jesus' crucifixion.
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People are starting to find out about the resurrection, but not everybody has discovered the resurrection. And this scene finds us with two disciples who had come to Jerusalem to see
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Jesus, now finding that he's been crucified, he's been murdered.
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They're just crestfallen, they don't know what to do. So they're heading back home. And here's where we pick up in verse 13.
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And behold, two of them were going that same day to a village named Emmaus, which was 60 stadia from Jerusalem.
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And they were conversing with each other about all these things which had happened. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating,
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Jesus himself approached and was going with them. But their eyes were prevented from recognizing him.
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And he said to them, what are these words that you were discussing with one another as you were walking? And they stood still looking sad.
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And one of them named Cleopas answered and said to him, are you the only one visiting
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Jerusalem and unaware of these things which have happened here in these days? And he said to them, what things?
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And they said to him, the things about Jesus the Nazarene, who was a mighty prophet in deed and word in the sight of God and all the people, and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to the sentence of death and crucified him.
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But we were hoping that it was he who was going to redeem Israel. Indeed, besides all this, it is the third day since these things happened.
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But also some women among us astounded us. When they were at a tomb early in the morning and not finding his body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.
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Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just exactly as the women also said, but him they did not see.
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And he said to them, oh, foolish ones and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken.
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Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into his glory? Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures.
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So we'll stop right there, but I wanna hone in on that last phrase, the last verse that we looked at, which is verse 27.
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It says, then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures.
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So if you've been here with us for any length of time, you already know, you already know that I'm a huge proponent of reading the
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Old Testament. And one reason for this is that this is a biblical approach to understanding the
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Bible. This is a biblical approach to understanding who Jesus is. And let me just soapbox for a moment here and tell you anyone who says that the
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Old Testament is not important or that we should only focus on the New Testament or that we should unhitch ourselves from the
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Old Testament, that the only thing we need to know about is the resurrection of Jesus is giving you what
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I would call profoundly unbiblical instructions. See, we have to understand about the
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Old Testament that the Old Testament is every bit the infallible, inerrant, inspired word of God, just like the
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New Testament is. The Old Testament is part of God's word for us. And because of that, we have to pay attention to it.
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We have to know what's in it. Now, another reason that we have to read and study the
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Old Testament is because the Old Testament provides a foundation for a lot of the teaching that's in the
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New Testament. I mean, if you look, if you were to take your
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Bible and open it up to the Gospel of Matthew, which is the start of the New Testament, let's just visually do this real quick.
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This is the New Testament over here on my right hand, your left, and this is the Old Testament on the other side.
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Look how many pages there are there compared to the two. And the reason for that is because it provides the foundation for the
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New Testament. The New Testament contains 283 direct quotes from the Old Testament, direct quotes, like word for word.
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But that doesn't count allusions to the Old Testament and it doesn't count cross -references of which there are thousands more.
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And in fact, if we consider Jesus, one source
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I read said that it's estimated that one -tenth of all of Jesus's recorded words in the
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New Testament came directly from the Old Testament. One -tenth of the words that Jesus spoke.
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And just beyond the simple references and allusions, we also have to recognize that the
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Old Testament provides us information on certain concepts, principles, and standards, things that aren't explicitly stated in the
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New Testament. And so the reason that this is important is because sometimes people say stuff like this.
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Jesus never spoke about such and such a subject. Or the
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New Testament whispers about this or something along those lines.
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And a lot of times people say this. In specific,
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I just have to go ahead and say it, right? Jesus never spoke about homosexuality.
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That's what people say. And there's not a word in the red letters about homosexuality or issues related to that.
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But what we have to recognize is this. Those principles, those issues are addressed in the
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Old Testament. They're addressed in the moral law, which we don't get our salvation from the moral law, but that doesn't mean that the moral law has no importance for us today.
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The moral law is summed up in those two quotes that Jesus said, to love the
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Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. That encompasses that moral law.
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So it's still important for us. So Jesus isn't erasing that.
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In fact, we already have seen in Matthew where Jesus is correcting misinterpretations of the
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Old Testament. But then we also understand that it would have been so well known and so well accepted in the society of that day that it would have been almost superfluous to state these things all over again because they're already in the scriptures that the people
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Jesus was speaking to knew and understood. So the point here is that the
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Old Testament, it provided the foundational knowledge. It provided the presuppositions under which the writers of the
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New Testament and the hearers of Jesus would already have been operating under. The Old Testament already provided a starting point.
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It provided a starting point for them, and it provides a starting point for us as well. And one last thing, the
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Old Testament explains in prophetic fashion about Jesus himself. I mean, we just have to look back at that passage we just read from Luke, Luke 24, 27.
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Jesus used the Old Testament to explain to these disciples himself.
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So from that, we can glean at least a couple of principles. And forgive me if this is a restatement of some of the things that I just said, but it is important.
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One, the Old Testament is clearly God's word, as Jesus, the
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God -man himself, used it. It's clearly useful in teaching others, and it clearly contains information that we need to know, information that we need to have.
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But even more important, again, think about this. Jesus used Moses and all the prophets to explain why he was crucified, why he came, why he was killed, and why he resurrected.
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He used the Old Testament to tell these two disciples on the road to Emmaus about this.
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So, I mean, this tells us that despite what we may personally think about the
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Old Testament, what we might think about the difficult passages, the weird passages, the violent passages, the gross passages, all of that's there for a reason.
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It is up to us to dig in, to understand it, to understand why we see all these things.
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Because every bit of the Old Testament comes together.
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I won't say that every single verse does this, because that would be ridiculous, but it all comes together like a mosaic, we've said before, to create a picture of Jesus, to foreshadow
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Jesus, to show Jesus is coming. Now, I'm not trying to downplay the
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New Testament, obviously, because in the New Testament, we get a lot of additional information.
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We get words directly from Jesus. We get to see just a small window into his earthly ministry, a small window into how he worked with people, how he interacted with the disciples.
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But even that, even the fact that we get additional information to shed light on the
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Old Testament, to illuminate part of the Old Testament, that leads me to something that I want you to know.
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This is a very important aspect of biblical interpretation. The New Testament can shed light, again, it can illuminate the
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Old Testament. It can take passages in the Old Testament that were less than clear, or passages that we couldn't connect to Jesus, and it shines light on it.
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It shines light on the shadows, it fulfills details, it fills in those typologies that we've talked about before.
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So it can do all that. The New Testament can help us understand the Old Testament better. But there's one thing that we have to be sure that we never do.
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The New Testament does not change the meaning of the Old Testament. The New Testament doesn't change the meaning of what
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God said in his word to the people of Israel, just because we aren't Israel right now, and we're not.
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1 Peter 1 .25, which ironically is quoting Isaiah 48, says this, but the word of the
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Lord endures forever. Psalm 119 .89 says, forever,
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O Yahweh, your word stands firm in heaven. And of course,
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Jesus in Matthew 24 .35 says, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
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All this to establish the fact that what God says in his word doesn't change.
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We have to figure out how to interpret it sometimes, but the New Testament doesn't change the Old Testament.
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And if you don't know why I'm telling you that, I thank God for that. I hope you don't find out, but there are a lot of people that have a different view.
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Now, having established, again, how important the Old Testament is, what
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I intend to do is take our next three services, that would be this week, Christmas Eve, and next
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Sunday, and look at the book of Isaiah.
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And most specifically, we're gonna get into Isaiah 53, because Isaiah is a massive book.
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There's so much, so much information in it. But Isaiah 53 is a perfect section to look at for Christmas, because it gives us what we'll see is one of the clearest pictures in the
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Old Testament of Jesus. It tells us all about his life in a short section, why he came, what the purpose was.
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And more than that, it gives us a really stunning example of what actual prophecy is.
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So here's what I wanna do this morning. I know that the bulletin says Isaiah 53, but what we're gonna do, because we have to look at some of this extra stuff,
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I'll give you a little bit of an overview of the book of Isaiah to include just some interesting information about it, a little bit of the history of what was going on in Israel at the time.
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And we'll also talk about the role of a prophet before we touch briefly on Isaiah 53.
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Because as I was getting into writing this, I realized, you know, I thought it would be fun.
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I thought it was a good idea. Let's just take a couple of weeks off and look at Isaiah 53. And then I started studying it, and I realized
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I bit off way more than I could chew. And we could literally spend years in Isaiah.
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We could probably spend a year in Isaiah 53. And here I have dedicated, you know, two weeks in a shorter sermon at Christmas Eve.
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But all that said, maybe this will be a foundation for something that we do in the future. So there's a lot of themes covered in Isaiah.
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And some of the resources that I got into were actually Messianic Jewish commentary. So Messianic Jews are
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Jewish individuals who believe in Jesus as the Messiah. Now, one of the commentators, his name is
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Arnold Fruchtenbaum. He provides a list of the different themes that are contained in Isaiah.
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But one of the most interesting themes is this. He says it exactly this way. Referring to Isaiah, the book could be called the
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Gospel of Isaiah, in that Isaiah prophesied the coming of the Messiah more than any other prophet.
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And that's why all of our Advent readings so far have been from the book of Isaiah. Now, he also goes into systematic theology.
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And what systematic theology is, is the practice of looking at what Scripture says about a specific doctrine.
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And within the discipline of systematic theology, there's 13 doctrines. And I'm not gonna go over all of them, but I'll give you a couple of examples.
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One of the doctrines is theology proper, which is the doctrine of God, Theo, God, theology, study of God.
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Soteriology is the doctrine of salvation. So where systematic theology is concerned, if we're looking at the topic of soteriology, we're looking at everything that Scripture says about how we're saved.
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Christology, as you can probably guess from the name, is the doctrine of Jesus Christ. Again, so that's all
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I'll go over. 13 different areas in systematic theology. And Isaiah contributes to every single one of them.
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Isaiah has something to tell us about every area of systematic theology.
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Contained within those 66 books is the whole scope of what we study as Christian doctrine.
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Now, Isaiah has also similarly been referred to as the fifth gospel. It's been referred to as a miniature compendium of the
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Bible because it contains that whole range of biblical truth, that whole range of biblical doctrine. And there's another interesting parallel between Isaiah and Scripture as the whole.
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And this is what it is. So the Bible has 66 books, right?
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Isaiah has 66 chapters. Now, I will admit that these chapter divisions that we have, they weren't in the original documents because the original documents were scrolls.
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So there weren't chapter divisions there. But this is still interesting. Now, it could just be a coincidence.
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Like the number 66 in itself is not necessarily remarkable, but there is something remarkable inside of this number 66.
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So if we go back to the Bible, the Bible is divided into 39 books of the
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Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament to make up 66. If we look at the structure, the 39 books of the
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Old Testament, essentially, they contain some history. They contain a lot of warnings about sin, warnings to the people of Israel.
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They contain prophecies about the coming of the Messiah.
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And that's, again, that's like a 100 ,000 foot view of the Old Testament. Similarly, for the
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New Testament, the New Testament contains, and it begins with the coming of the Messiah. It talks about his earthly ministry, his persecution, murder, burial, resurrection.
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And it concludes with a look at the end times and the eternal kingdom, just a glimpse of the eternal kingdom.
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So that's like a thumbnail sketch of the Bible. Isaiah is thematically divided in a very similar manner.
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The first 39 chapters of Isaiah provide a little bit of information about what's going on, but it provides information about the sin committed by the people of Israel.
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It provides prophetic warnings directly from God through the prophet Isaiah. Commentator Timothy Dame says, the first 39 chapters could be called various prophecies of judgment.
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But then when we look at the second division, the second 27 chapters of Isaiah, those he describes as God's future salvation that is coming to earth.
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The second part talks about the Messiah, talks about something else as well.
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A couple of other things. The second division of Isaiah, ironically, opens just like the
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New Testament does. It opens with a prophecy of the ministry of John the Baptist. Just like the
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Gospels. And then not only does it go through and talk about who the
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Messiah is, the suffering servant, and a variety of other things, but it closes with a vision of the new heaven and the new earth paralleling revelation.
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So I'm not saying that there's a one -to -one comparison, but if you held up Isaiah and the
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Bible, there would be a stunning amount of overlap, a stunning amount of commonality in what's talked about, in what's written about.
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But the thing that makes this the most interesting is that Isaiah prophesied about 700 years before Jesus was even born.
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700 years before the ministry, the first coming, the first advent of Jesus. So while eventually we're gonna limit our focus just to one chapter in Isaiah, it's important for us to understand that the whole book is just a treasure trove of doctrine.
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It's a treasure trove of information for Christians today. And that should be kind of interesting to us as well because Isaiah is a
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Jewish prophet. These are Hebrew scriptures. These are for the people of Israel.
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So we have to understand that while the coming of Jesus absolutely changed a lot of things, our religion is built on a foundation of the
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Jewish people. And Isaiah saw this 700 years before it happened.
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Now, getting back to just the general topic of the book of Isaiah, there have been critics, because it covers so much, who have suggested that Isaiah was not actually written by a single individual.
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They say that it was more likely written by two, maybe three different people named
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Isaiah over a period of hundreds of years. And part of the reason they say this is because a lot of critics of scripture, they don't believe in the miraculous.
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They say there's no way that Isaiah could have written this because people don't see the future.
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There's no way that he could have known that. So it had to be somebody writing later, looking back.
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But at the same time, while those skeptics are out there, again, trying to kind of pick away at the
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Bible, there's a lot of compelling evidence that this is not the case. There's a lot of compelling evidence that Isaiah was indeed written by one individual.
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And one of the most compelling is the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, another argument that these critics make is that the sections are so different.
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That division that I talked about, the first 39 chapters and then the second 27, they say that because that's so different and the themes are so different, we move from warnings and prophecies to actually looking at the crucifixion.
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They say there's no way that the same person wrote that. But when we look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, which a lot of you are probably familiar, they were found in 1947 and it's some very, very old manuscripts.
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The oldest manuscripts of Isaiah are dated to about 150
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BC. So not only did we still have the entire scroll of Isaiah dated to 150
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BC, and guess what? I'm not gonna say BCE. I'll say BC, right?
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A lot of scholars have moved to saying BCE before Common Era. But what created the
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Common Era? It was Christ, okay? So we'll say before Christ and Anno Domini, the year of our
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Lord. So anyway, 150 years before him. So there's no evidence of a gap in there.
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There's no evidence of a time gap in between the sections. And even if there was, it certainly didn't go beyond the time of Christ.
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And in addition to this, there's a lot of other pieces of evidence that suggest a single author. There's a similarity in some of the phrases that are unique to Isaiah, just the way he words some of the things that he says.
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We have the testimony of some non -canonical books, which aren't, they are religious writings of the time, but they're not part of the 66 books that make up our accepted canon of scripture.
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So they're not considered expired, expired. They're not considered inspired, like Ecclesiasticus, which is one.
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We have 2 ,500 years of Jewish and Christian tradition that say that Isaiah was written by one person, whereas we have about 150 years of people saying that it was multiple authors.
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But one of the most compelling things is the fact that in the
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New Testament, Isaiah in its totality is treated as inspired scripture.
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It's treated as God's word. It's treated by Jesus and the apostles as God's inspired word.
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So I think that we can be confident, again, this is like a very brief thumbnail, and this would be a much longer morning if we went into all the information, but a brief thumbnail sketch of why we can be confident that Isaiah was written by the one prophet
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Isaiah. Now, I wanna talk very briefly about the history of what was going on in Israel, or actually in Judah, rather, at the time of Isaiah.
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Another commentator I read, Gary Smith said, reading Isaiah's messages in isolation from its historical context is comparable to overhearing a person talk on the phone without knowing who is on the other end of the line and what their situation is.
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So we can see the words of Isaiah, but if we don't have any concept at all of what was going on in the world, things don't mean quite as much to us.
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So to that end, we have to understand at least a little bit about the time in which Isaiah was prophesying.
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Now, I know that some of you, every time I bring up the word history, you say, oh, I don't like history.
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I hate history. I'll tell all of you to get over it. Get over it.
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We have to learn our history so that we don't continue to make the same mistakes, and we have to learn the history of Scripture because the history of Scripture is the history of the church, and we are in the church.
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There's literally nothing new in the church today. No heretical teachings, like we don't need the Old Testament, or that Jesus wasn't the son of God.
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All that stuff has come up hundreds of years before. But to people that don't look at what's gone on in the church, they think it's new and novel, and we gotta check this out and learn about it.
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So anyway, history. Back to Arnold Fruchtenbaum, the Messianic Jew. So he tells us that the
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Assyrian Empire was the dominant political backdrop to Isaiah's prophetic activities.
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So we have the kingdom of Assyria, and again, those kings, one in particular, plays a pretty large role here in a little bit.
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And as we get to the end of Isaiah, the kingdom of Babylon is rising.
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And again, that has a tremendous impact on the people of Israel as well. So the things that Isaiah is warning people about, these are influenced by the kingdoms that are pushing into Israel, to the northern kingdom of Judah, and they affect what's happening in their lives.
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Now, we also see that Isaiah writes about four different kings of Judah. And he writes prophetically about them.
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So these are his experiences, but we can see historically what was going on there with all of these kings by name in 2
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Kings and 2 Chronicles. They're both listed there. So the first king is King Uzziah. Now, he reigned from roughly 790 to 739.
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And now we're talking about BC, right? So the numbers are gonna go down instead of up. So this gets kind of confusing.
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Then we have Jotham, who was king from 750 to 732. Now, probably need a visual aid for this.
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But if I said that Uzziah reigned until 739 and Jotham was there in 750, that means there was a little bit of overlap, called a co -regency.
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Jotham was Uzziah's son. So they served together for a little while, 750 to 732. And then
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Ahaz, with a small co -regency from 735 to 715. There won't be a quiz on this.
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Just bear with me while I go through all these names in these years. And then Hezekiah was king from 715 to 786.
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So these are the four kings. Again, you can read about them in Isaiah. You can read about them in 2 Kings and 2
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Chronicles as well. But what we have to know about the leadership of the kingdom of Judah, like we have
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Uzziah. He was a very successful king. He did some good stuff economically, some good stuff militarily, which led to pride.
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Ultimately, this pride led Uzziah to sort of usurp some of the priestly roles and God cursed him with leprosy.
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That's why he had that co -regency with Jotham, because God cursed him with a disease and his son had to take over.
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Now Hezekiah, that's probably a name that you're familiar with. And he was generally considered to be one of Judah's best kings, despite his own shortcomings.
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But let's just sum all of this up with a quote. Timothy Dame, excuse me.
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He says, although several of these kings demonstrated a certain amount of faith, their lack of complete trust would prove to be problematic for the nation.
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What the nation really needed was a wise king who would rule by fear of the Lord. But because these kings were not ruling by fear of the
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Lord, we have idolatry in the people of Israel. We have oppression and injustice between different classes of people in Israel.
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Now the reason this is important is because all of these things run contrary to the will of God.
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So God spoke to these kings and God spoke to these nations through prophets like Isaiah.
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It was the way the kings ruled, the way that society was going that created the need for prophets to speak on behalf of God, to tell them what they were doing wrong, to warn them of their sins and to tell them how to fix it.
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So one more thing about history. One of the most significant occurrences in the book of Isaiah is the siege of Jerusalem.
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So Sennacherib was the king of Assyria in 701. That's one of the kings of the
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Assyrian kingdom. And he took over Judah.
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Now this could have been a tremendously devastating situation, but to make a very long story short,
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Isaiah and Hezekiah, because of their trust in the Lord, because of the way they operated during the siege, were delivered.
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So this was, this is just an example of how faith and trust in the Lord is exactly what we need when those kind of difficult situations were happening.
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So God delivered them from Sennacherib. In fact, that king was killed by his own son, which is how their deliverance came about.
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So anyway, that's a little scattered overview of some of the history of what was going on.
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Now I mentioned that the way the kings ran their kingdom necessitated a prophet of God.
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So I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of a prophet. Because some of you know that I am,
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I'm just highly skeptical of anybody in our present day who gives themselves the title of prophet.
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If somebody calls themself a prophet and all you have to do is go to YouTube and you can find somebody who calls themself a prophet,
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I sort of check out right there. But that's not something that I have time to rant about today. I will rant about that another time.
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But what we can do is take a look at Isaiah and we can see what the characteristics of a true biblical prophet are because Isaiah was very clearly a true biblical prophet.
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Now, back to another Messianic Jewish author, Victor Buchsbassen. He gave a really helpful overview in his
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Isaiah commentary about prophecy and the role of a true prophet. Now, again, this is a
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Jewish person who believes in Jesus. So for the Jewish people, Moses himself is held up as the model of a prophet.
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Moses is the prophet par excellence, is what he says. Buchsbassen says this, just as the genuineness of apostolic doctrine was measured by its harmony and conformity to the gospel of Christ, meaning anything that the apostles said, we know it was faithful if it conforms to what
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Jesus said, the teaching of the prophets could only be judged by its conformity to the law of Moses.
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So then he lists a few characteristics of Moses as they relate to prophets. So this is what we should see from a true prophet appointed of and by God.
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The first one is reluctance. So if a prophet is a man called by God, he's immediately going to know that he's not worthy of that role.
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No one called by God to speak directly from God to his people is gonna be sinless or perfect enough to do that kind of thing.
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So they're gonna naturally have a little bit of reluctance. We see this with Moses. Remember Moses said,
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I'm not a man of words. Can't my brother Aaron do it? He's a better speaker than I am. But we also see it in Isaiah.
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When Isaiah has this vision of the heavenly angels, what does he say?
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This is right before he's called to be a prophet. He sees this vision. He's in heaven, he sees angels. He says,
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I'm a man of unclean lips. He falls on his knees and he knows he's not worthy of doing this kind of work.
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He's not worthy of even being in the presence of God, much less to speak for God. So we see reluctance as a characteristic.
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Another characteristic we see is anguish. Obviously, this is related to reluctance.
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Fuchs -Basen says this. The prophet is a man caught in the middle between a holy God and a rebellious people.
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So the prophet loves God, but he also loves the people he's speaking to. These are his people.
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He's part of this society. He probably knows a lot of them. And usually messages from God aren't happy.
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They aren't good news. They're a declaration of sin and a declaration of possible consequence of that sin.
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So the message from a prophet is often seen as harsh. People speaking the true word of God are often seen as mean and unloving.
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Fuchs -Basen said, it is his destiny to be hated and condemned by his people. We see this in other prophets.
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Amos 5 .10 says, they hate him who reproves in the gate and they abhor him who speaks with integrity.
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And then of course, Jesus talks about Jerusalem as a city that kills prophets and stones those that God sends.
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So anguish is a characteristic. A third characteristic is suffering. So now we have reluctance, anguish, and suffering.
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These are all kind of related, obviously, and none of them are pleasant. None of them are things that we aspire to in our career.
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The life of a prophet is not about selling books. It's not about speaking at conferences.
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It's not about building up a big social media following and putting out videos of the first of the year to tell what the year is gonna be like.
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The role and the life of a prophet is telling people things that they don't wanna hear and suffering for it, often facing persecution for it.
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Isaiah was forced to walk around for three years wearing nothing but a loincloth while he prophesied because God told him that was what he had to do.
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He didn't have nice things. He was walking around basically naked. Now we also see two elements of the prophetic message that need to be present, and those are the exhortative or ethical and the predictive.
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And I know this is getting kind of heady today, so hopefully you guys are sticking with me, but two aspects of prophecy.
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One is telling people what's going on, what's going wrong, what they need to correct.
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And the other is prophetic. Again, obviously that's kind of defining itself. Predictive is the word that I used a second ago, to know what's going on.
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And the author highlights that it's essential for both of those to be present, not just emphasizing one to the neglect of the other.
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And we have to be clear that predictive prophecy is not just that kind of carnival sideshow sort of predicting the future that people say.
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It's much greater than that. It serves a spiritual purpose and a moral purpose. Like the predictive prophecy serves to warn people of divine wrath and judgment, to come upon all unrighteousness and sin.
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It's to call people to repentance and to the ways of righteousness. It's not just to say, you're gonna meet an important person this year, or you're gonna get that job, or your future spouse will come into your life.
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Those are, again, those are carnival sideshow kind of tricks that people do.
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And there's plenty more that we could say about this topic, but I do wanna at least briefly touch on Isaiah 53.
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So let's get into that for just a little bit. So I wanna make sure that you're aware. Anytime we say Isaiah 53, that's gonna be shorthand for something.
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Isaiah 53 actually starts in Isaiah 52 .13. For some reason, when the chapters were divided up, this part, which very clearly belongs with Isaiah chapter 53 was put in the end of 52.
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So again, Isaiah 53 equals 52 .13 through 53 .13,
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I believe. So let's read that briefly. If you wanna turn in your Bibles to Isaiah 52 .13,
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we'll start there. The heading says, the exalted servant. And this is the passage that all of this is leading up to that we're talking about today.
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It says this, behold, my servant will prosper. He will be high and lifted up and greatly exalted, just as many were appalled at you, my people.
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So his appearance was marred more than any man and his form more than the sons of men.
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Thus, he will sprinkle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths on account of him. For what had not been told them, they will see.
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And what they had not heard, they will understand. In Isaiah 53 .1, who has believed our report?
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And to whom is the arm of Yahweh been revealed? For he grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of a parched ground.
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He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should desire him.
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He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised and we did not esteem him.
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Surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted, but he was pierced through for our transgressions.
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He was crushed for our iniquities. The chastening for our peace fell upon him and by his wounds we are healed.
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All of us like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, but Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.
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He was oppressed and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth like a lamb that is led to slaughter and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so he did not open his mouth.
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By oppression and judgment he was taken away and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, that for the transgression of my people, striking was due to him, so his grave was assigned with wicked men, yet he was with a rich man in his death because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth.
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But Yahweh was pleased to crush him, putting him to grief. If you would place his soul as a guilt offering, he will see his seed, he will prolong his days, and the good pleasure of Yahweh will succeed in his hand.
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As a result of the anguish of his soul, he will see it and be satisfied. By his knowledge, the righteous one, my servant, will justify the many as he will bear their iniquities.
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Therefore, I will divide for him a portion with the many, and he will divide the spoil with the strong because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he himself bore the sin of many and interceded for the transgressors."
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So why would we look at this passage, this particular passage from the Old Testament at Christmas of all times?
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Like I said, shouldn't we be focusing on sweet baby
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Jesus asleep on the hay or angels, choirs of angels singing?
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I think that it's important that we stop to consider at Christmas not only the birth of Jesus, but why the birth of Jesus is so significant, why the birth of Jesus is actually so impactful or important to us.
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And that's what this passage does. And I don't wanna go too far in the weeds on this today because I wanna talk specifically on Christmas Eve about the concept of atonement.
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But I wanna draw your attention to this passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, from a Jewish prophet,
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Isaiah, who predicted not only the birth, but also the suffering, the death, the resurrection, and the atonement that was brought out by that act of the
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Messiah, the Messiah that we now know in light of history, in light of what we have in God's Word in the
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New Testament that could only be referring to Jesus. Isaiah knew it was the
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Messiah. Isaiah didn't know that it was Jesus. 700 years before he was born, there was no way for him to know that, which makes it all the more interesting that what he prophesied came to pass exactly as he prophesied it for the exact reason.
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Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser says, undoubtedly, this is the servant of Old Testament prophetic literature.
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Few passages can rival the clarity on the suffering, death, burial, and resurrection of the
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Messiah. So again, where we sit today, it's very obvious that he could only be talking about Jesus.
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But to others, and particularly Jewish people today, this may not be quite so obvious.
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And I wanna talk about this next Sunday, but I'll talk about it briefly just a little bit. There's a lot of reasons for this, a lot of reasons that Jews don't know this passage or don't know that it refers to Jesus.
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And there's a couple of reasons. One is that this is actually not frequently read in public in synagogues.
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So even though it's part of the Old Testament, it's part of the prophetic literature. One of the things that happens in their services, which is probably the wrong word for it, but we call them services.
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But every Sabbath, two pieces of scripture are read. One piece is from the
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Pentateuch or the books of Moses, the first five books, the Torah. And the other is a selection from the prophets.
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The entire Torah is read sequentially throughout the course of the year and then started over.
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But when they read the prophets, they go from Isaiah 51 .12
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to 52 .12, and then they pick up in 54, one through 10, which means they entirely skip 52 .13
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to 53 .12, which is what we just read. So that's not read at all in synagogues to practicing
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Jews. Now, that's not to say that Jewish scholars have ignored this because that's not possible.
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It's clearly one of the prophetic writings. But what some rabbinic scholars will say is that there are other interpretations of who this
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Messiah is. They suggest a number of individuals. They even suggest it could be the collective
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Israel as a whole. And I mean, this is a natural response for a group of people that don't accept the
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New Testament or a group of people that don't believe that Jesus was the fulfillment of scriptures. And that's not new.
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That started when Jesus was alive. Those Jewish rabbis didn't believe that Jesus himself was the fulfillment of scriptures.
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That was what Jesus condemned him for. But we have to realize something. We have to realize that modern
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Judaism is not worshiping the same God we are.
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Ethnic Jews, that's not even a religion anyway. But even practicing religious
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Jews are not worshiping the same
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God because they're ignoring his entire revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes that an apostate religion.
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Now, that does not mean that Jewish people are somehow worthy of scorn or hate or anything like that.
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That is not what we're saying at all. Jewish believers who believe in Yahweh but not
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Jesus, we can look at the same as anyone else who doesn't believe in Jesus, as people who need the gospel in their own lives.
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And Isaiah 53 is a perfect place to begin with that because you're beginning in their very own text.
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You can find it in the Hebrew Bible. So we see in Matthew 9, 36, speaking of this,
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Jesus' compassion for the lost. It says, and seeing the crowds, he felt compassion for them because they were distressed and downcast like a sheep without a shepherd.
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Anyone who doesn't believe in Jesus, Jews included, are like a sheep without a shepherd. But we can't ignore
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John 14, 6 either. I am the way, the truth, and the light. No one comes to the Father except through me.
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That is the only way to salvation. There is no second way. There is no second path. There is no second option.
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Therefore, we can't ignore that. So this is where it gets complicated. And this is where we all get confused too, right?
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Because I told you that the New Testament doesn't reinterpret the Old Testament. So God made a lot of promises to Israel in the
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Old Testament. We can't ignore those promises either. But we can accept that those redeemed
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Israelites that will rule in Jerusalem from David's throne, a physical David's throne on earth, will come to the saving faith in Jesus Christ, the knowledge of Jesus Christ.
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They will become Messianic Jews. And Messianic Jews were able to retain their heritage and their culture while also sharing in that redemption.
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So again, that's also a whole additional topic for an additional day.
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So let's just go ahead and wrap up. Just a few takeaways based on what we talked about today. And I hope that these are all painfully obvious and don't need a ton of discussion.
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The Old Testament is indispensable when it comes to understanding God's plan. The New Testament we like to read, it's more familiar to us, it's shorter.
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The concepts are closer to what we have in our culture than the concepts in the Old Testament.
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So it's just, it's easier. But that doesn't mean we can downplay or ignore or abandon the
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Old Testament altogether. It just takes more work. But when you put the work in, I think you're gonna be really pleasantly surprised at what you find.
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And we also see that the Old Testament was foundational for Jesus and the apostles. And therefore it should be foundational for us as well.
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That's number one, Old Testament is indispensable. Number two, we don't reinterpret the Old Testament with the
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New Testament. These two pieces of literature, and again, we think of the
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Bible as one book. The Bible is not one book. The Bible is 66 books, 66 individual books. These all work together.
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The New Testament gives us a clearer picture of what's going on in the Old Testament, but it doesn't change it.
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Because if it changed it, it would be changing God's word to a certain group of people.
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And we are not that group of people. So it helps us with the meaning of prophecies. It helps us understand what was happening.
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That's number two. Number three, Jesus shows up in huge ways in the
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Old Testament, particularly in prophets like Isaiah. And if you go back to what
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I said about, if you listen to what I just read from Isaiah, and you think about what you know about the
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New Testament and Jesus's ministry, and you realize that Isaiah predicted the whole thing 700 years before it happened, give or take, that should give you a clear picture as a believer, confidence in the inspired nature of God's word.
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How could that happen any other way? You can't do it. I can't do it. Only God can do that.
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And we have it in his word. We have faith in things that are far less obvious than that.
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So that's just something to think about. And while we do see
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Jesus in this way, we don't see Jesus in every single verse of the
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Old Testament, but we see it in a larger narrative picture that points to him. And Isaiah, and number four, or 3 .5,
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Isaiah 53 in particular, in the Old Testament, gives us the very heart of the gospel message.
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So the message of the purpose and work of Jesus is unmistakable to anyone who will honestly come to this text.
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Jew, Gentile, it doesn't matter, because as Paul said in Romans 1 .16, that he's not ashamed of the gospel, because the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the
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Jew first and also to the Greek. And just to hammer this home and reinforce some of this stuff,
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I wanna close with this quote from Charles Spurgeon talking about Isaiah 53. He says, this is one of the chapters that lie at the very heart of the scriptures.
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It is the very holy of holies of divine writ. Let us therefore put off our shoes from our feet, for the place whereon we stand is specially holy ground.
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This 53rd of Isaiah is the Bible in miniature. It is the condensed essence of the gospel.
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So again, I hope you'll join us on Christmas Eve, Tuesday night at seven, where we'll talk about the very specific implications of these verses and why they're important to us at Christmas.
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And then on the 29th, I will show you how Jesus fulfilled these prophecies specifically in Isaiah 53.
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So again, I hope you'll join us for all those things. But now let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we thank you for who you are.
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We come before you and we gather completely undeserving of the grace, the mercy, and the love that you've shown us.
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Sending your son to die for us was not something that had to happen.
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But again, it shows that grace and that mercy. And we thank you that you've given us your word to reveal all of these things to us.
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Before it ever happened, you showed through your own chosen prophets what was to come.
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And then you did it. And despite all that, despite our sin, despite the ways that we have offended you, the ways that we have turned our back on you, just like the
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Israelites, you ask nothing more than that we repent and have faith in the work that Jesus has done on the cross.
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And that's the essence, the very meaning of Christmas, that through the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we're justified before you for those sins with our faith, with our faith alone.
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Lord, we thank you for your son. I pray that these truths would pierce every single one of our hearts and that we would believe in that.
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God, we thank you for this opportunity to gather. And we love you and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.