Sunday, June 2, 2024 PM

Isaiah’s Opening Vision and the Survey of Chapters 1–12

Back into our study of Isaiah. Having finished up our introduction, we're going to start looking at the flow of the text, the actual passage-by-passage through the book of Isaiah. And so, if you'll turn to Isaiah chapter 1, we're going to start with a survey of the first section of Isaiah, which is chapters 1 through 12.

I've been working on the flow of the text, and so we've got a preliminary outline I've handed out. I'm sorry for the size of the text font. We'll try to figure out some way to stick it on a page with larger font at some point.

However, I wanted to start with you seeing kind of the larger picture with also diving into where we are heading early on. We have plenty of outlines up here at the front. Before we turn to Isaiah chapter 1 verses 1 through 9, before we start that, let me begin with a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening. We thank you for your word. We thank you for the time that we have together. I pray that you would bless our study of this most important book inside your holy scriptures.

I pray that it would be glorifying to you and edifying to us. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, Isaiah. I want to read verses 1 through 9, as this is kind of the first real passage of the book.

Verse 1, the vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken.

Hence to me, the ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib. But Israel does not know. My people do not consider. Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who are corruptors.

They have forsaken the Lord. They have provoked to anger the Holy One of Israel. They have turned away backward. Why should you be stricken again? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick.

The whole heart faints. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. They have not been closed or bound up or soothed with ointment.

Your country is desolate. Your cities are burned with fire in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a hut in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.

Unless the Lord of hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we would have become like Sodom. We would have been made like Gomorrah. How's that for an opening? Setting the tone early in the book of Isaiah.

Judgment on Judah in a Difficult Present

Chapters 1 through 35, our first section in the book, details sermons for a difficult present. The difficulty really is about the rebellion of Israel and God's judgment upon Israel for their rebellion.

And how God uses the superpower of that time, Assyria, to threaten and then bring judgment against His people. And the rebellious nature, the apostate nature of the people of Judah, of Jerusalem, and so on, that keeps on being brought back into view.

And what a seemingly unsolvable problem. How do you get all these people so set in their idolatrous ways to make a turnaround, to abandon their idolatry, to give up on their false ways of worship, and truly fear the Lord rather than fearing man and fearing death?

These are sermons given in a difficult present. And chapters 1 through 12 focus the attention of Isaiah's hearers and Redeemer. I mean, what is the solution? Who is going to deliver the people out of the situation?

How is this ever going to get solved? How is this going to get fixed? Well, it's not going to be the princes. It's not going to be the priests. The nation that will deliver them, it's going to be the Lord.

The Lord is the one who is going to save. And then He details, by way of His prophet, and by way of promises, how He's going to redeem them. How it is He's going to save. Now, chapters 1 through 6 are filled with expressions of woe.

How things are going poorly. The children of woe. We start off by hearing about children. Children who are rebelling. Children who should know better, but children nonetheless. And woe is proclaimed time and again.

The pressing question of chapters 1 through 5 is, what hope is there? What hope is there? Now, that gets answered in more than one passage. Hope is declared, but the balance of the passages has to do with the judgment that is to come.

And then in chapter 6, the pressing question is, what word is there? As God shows to Isaiah the message He's going to preach. And as we have already read and looked in Isaiah 6, it was a message that He would preach, but it would make the ears of the people even more deaf, the eyes of the people even more blind, until the judgment was fully accomplished.

Thus, chapter 6 really fits in with the theme of the children of woe. In contrast to the children of woe, there is the child of hope. Chapter 7 begins with the fear of Ahaz about the enemies of Syria and Israel, the northern kingdom, Pecah and Rezin, enemy kings.

He's so fixated on these enemy kings and what they might do, but he promises, hey, they're not the real problem. They're not the real threat. There's going to be deliverance. You don't believe me? Ask me for a sign.

I'll give you a sign. Ahaz refuses to ask a sign from the Lord. And the Lord says, I'll give you one anyway. The virgin will be with child and shall give birth. In Yusha 7, the focus is to chapter 12, which is a hymn of praise, six verses long, and it's just a beautiful conclusion to the section.

In fact, chapters 1 through 12, if that's all we had of Isaiah, he would still be the most splendid of all the minor prophets. It would be even a more impressive work than Hosea. I think it's 14 chapters long, but it's a very nice, neatly packaged section to begin the book of Isaiah.

The interesting thing when you read through the book of Isaiah, as you read through the first five chapters, the first five chapters, there's no dates other than the first verse that introduces the whole book.

You start in chapter 1, verse 2, and you go through the rest of chapter 5, all the way through. There's no dates, there's no kings, there's no signal about what happens when. These are sermons that have been carefully selected out of all of Isaiah's ministry, and they are arranged together in a very special fashion to introduce the entirety of the work.

We're going to look at that in a future session. We're going to look at how chapters 1 through 5 are arranged in a very intricate pattern to say something together as a group of sermons, a group of texts, drawing our attention to the main themes of the entire book.

Of course, chapter 6 seems to stand apart. The call of Isaiah. Suddenly, we have a date. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up. Suddenly, we have a date, and we have the call of Isaiah, and how he is called to minister in a particular way.

Chapter 6 really stands out. Very often, when people think of the book of Isaiah, they think of chapter 6. They think of Isaiah's call, whom shall I send, and who will go for us, and that splendid vision that Isaiah had.

Now, chapter 6 stands right in the middle. It's kind of like the knot of a bow tie. Chapters 1 through 5, here's the centerpiece, chapter 6, and then chapters 7 through 12. The historical context, particularly the kings like Pecah and Resan, and how they were threatening Ahaz, who was king of Judah, and how he was like a flooding river that left nothing in its wake.

How the Lord shows to Judah, he was the one who delivered them, and how they ought to give praise to him. That's how chapters 1 through 12 are situated. I think that as we look at these sermons, there's a lot of variety in them.

There are parables, there are very dense word pictures, there's rebukes, there's prophecies of promises of hope, but they all address the people of Judah in their present difficulty. Again, their difficulty is twofold.

One, of covenant breakers. The whole nation is filled with covenant breakers. They are inviting, every day, the curses of God, the promised judgments of God. They are set in their ways. They're rebellious, they're recalcitrant.

This is just the way they are, and they have no intention of changing. A lot of people were like that in the nation of Judah. And so, the faithful were concerned, the people who loved the Lord would groan about the wickedness of their time, of their era.

And Isaiah claimed and called for repentance, and showcased and exposed the rebellion of the people. That was the difficulty. Judgment and nigh, with the Assyrian threat. So, those two together make up the difficult present.

The Children of Woe and the Need for Knowledge

I want us to look at verses 2 and 3 again, as we think about the children of woe. We're also going to look over in chapter 5, and we'll look at some key texts out of this section of chapters 1 through 12, so we get the sense of what's going on.

This is going to be important for us before we dive in to chapter 1 verses 2 through 9. Before we actually get into that passage, I want us to know where it's situated, the things that are being talked about, so we don't lose our way.

So again, verses 2 through 3, "...hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth. For the Lord has spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and the donkey knows its owner, and the donkey its master's crib.

But Israel does not know, my people do not consider how terrible it is for a child to be orphaned, but how far worse for the child to have their parents, but live as if they are orphaned.". To have a mother and father, to have parents, to have parentage there, loving them, guiding them, leading them, and yet the child completely casts off all parental honor and obligation as if they were orphans.

How far worse is that situation? So God is pointing that out. He says much the same thing in Isaiah chapter 5 verse 13. He says, "...therefore my people have gone into captivity because they have no knowledge.

Their honorable men are famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst.". He comes back to this idea of the people do not know. They do not have this knowledge. And this is exposing the accusation that you would have on the whole nation because they were performing very poor covenant duties.

And then have to say to them, no, the Lord. No longer, Jeremiah would say, and Isaiah would confirm, no longer would the children keep the covenant. Isaiah, we're going to cross time and again this difficult situation wherein there are many who are called the children of God.

This is the Old Covenant, though, so that doesn't mean that they're saved. It means that they're part of the Old Covenant. They're called His children, but that doesn't mean that they're born again. Some of them were.

There was a remnant. We often read about the remnant in the Old Testament who were truly alive by the grace of God, who trusted in the shadow of Christ, and therefore were alive and saved. But many times we're reading about children of God in the Old Testament who were part of the Old Covenant, and they were rebellious, utterly rebellious against God.

So what hope? What hope is there? I'm glad you asked. Let's look at verses 1 and 2, a couple of passages of hope. Chapter 2, verses 1 through 4 here. So the image is, here's Mount Zion with a temple on top of it, and it gets extracted from its roots and it's elevated on top of all the other mountains, which now are a bunch of pillars and pinnacles beneath it.

Interesting metaphor, but we're not talking about a great geological engineering feat. We're actually extracting Mount Zion, literalistically, breaking it loose of its granite foundations and limestone foundations, and then putting jacks underneath it until it gets high enough above Mount Everest and K2 and the other mountains, and so it could sit nicely on top of them.

No, this is a biblical metaphor. What's the idea? The idea is that this mountain, where the Lord reigns from his temple, is going to be over all other mountains where the other reigning kings and authorities are.

There is an exaltation. The mountain of the Lord's house should be established on the top of the mountains, exalted above the hills, and look, all nations will flow to it. Normally, water flows downhill, but the nations are going to be flowing uphill.

What did Jesus say? By his being lifted up and exalted, I will draw all men to myself. Where did he get that idea? Many people shall come and say, come and let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob.

He will teach us his ways, we will walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations and rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks.

Nations shall call them into plowshares and into pruninghooks, and they shall call them unto the Lord. Peace among the nations is in Christ. That is a really hopeful passage. It is matched in chapter 4 verses 1 -6.

After a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, the end of days for the Old Covenant, we come in verse 1 of chapter 4. And in that day, seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own food and wear our own apparel.

Only let us be called by your name to take away our reproach. The scene of judgment before was the destruction of these people. Now, what will these women do? They all take hold of one man. Let us be called by your name.

We have this scene repeated in other poetic metaphor. Ten men grabbing the sleeve of one Jew, saying, Take us up Mount Zion, and so on. This is a similar expression. In verse 2, in that day, the branch of the Lord of Israel who have escaped.

We could look more in Romans 11 for that encouragement. In verse 3, it is called holy. Everyone who is recorded among the living in Jerusalem. There is nothing left in Jerusalem, so how is Jerusalem still here?

There is another type of Jerusalem. It is the one from above. Even Acts chapter 2, New Covenant Jerusalem. There is a New Covenant Zion. Everyone who is recorded among the living in Jerusalem shall be called daughters of Zion, and purge the blood of Jerusalem from her burning.

Then the Lord will bring back the fire by night. For over all the glory there will be a covering, and there will be a tabernacle for shade in the daytime from the heat, for a place of refuge, and for a shelter from the storm.

Bringing back those images from in the wilderness, in the day, in the cloud, the pillar of fire by night, and the Lord provided for his people as he dwelt among them. Of course, we recall that the Word became flesh, tabernacled, and there is still hope.

The Hope of Zion, the Branch, and New Covenant Jerusalem

Next time, our plan will be to go through chapters 1 -5 to read sermons of Isaiah as a whole. We will start time together by singing the doxology.