There is something in the prophecy of Isaiah which makes it stand out from all other books of the Old Testament. In it we are awe-stricken at the power and majesty of God, yet our hearts find rest at the Almightiness of the Great Creator of all things, who in the same breath says He will gather his lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom, and yet hath measured the oceans in the hollow of his hand.
Nowhere do the judgments of the most high peal out with a louder thunder, nowhere does his love breathe more tenderly than when he bends down to say, As one whom his mother comforteth so will I comfort you”. Ponder these words for a little for—God is the speaker and he is addressing all his children. Can’t we feel a glow in our hearts as we listen to these words of love?
Nowhere is God’s glorious salvation more fully set forth than here. In Isaiah’s vision he says, “I saw the Lord”, and it was this that changed everything for the prophet. You will recall another great apostle who said similar words and the sight of God’s Son made him a minister and a witness both to Jew and Gentile of what he had seen and heard.
Isaiah saw the Lord as King of Glory, and heard the Seraphim calling, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts . . . the whole earth is full of His glory”. We can trace the full effect of what he then saw and heard throughout his entire prophecy: first, in an overwhelming sense of sin and God’s judgment; second, an all prevailing sense of God’s power and holiness; and, third, a clear vision of God’s Son and his salvation and of his ultimate universal dominion.
The sight of God’s glory brought to Isaiah the conviction of his own sinfulness and need, and made him cry, “Woe is me, for I am undone”. It brought from him a confession, I am a man of uncertain lips”. This brokenness of heart was very precious to God, as Isaiah understood when he said that the High and Holy One would dwell with the humble and contrite heart. His confession was immediately followed by cleansing: the flying Seraph caused a live coal to touch his lips and his sin was purged. That live coal was taken from the altar of burnt sacrifice. To the question, “Whom shall I send and who will go for us” this cleansed soul was immediately ready to answer, “Here am I . . . send me”. Here indeed was consecration.
This act of Isaiah’s should be to each of us a very real lesson. We have had a personal sight of our Saviour in the word of God. We have had a personal interview regarding our belief in our Heavenly Father and his Son. We have had sorrow and brokenness of heart from the very first moment we realized our sinfulness. We have lad cleansed lips and a very definite commission.
The lips that are filled with God’s messages should be jealously guarded from evil speaking. They should be burnt lips, not filled with great words with the idea of pleasing man, but declaring the testimony of God.
The scorners of Isaiah’s day complained of the simplicity of his oft repeated message . . . precept upon precept, line upon me, as if they were little children . . . and so the Lord’s message came to them as through stammering lips.
The date of Isaiah’s vision was the year that king Uzziah died. Uzziah had been one of the best kings Jerusalem had seen. For forty years he reigned with justice and judgment, but his heart seems to have been lifted up with pride and, for trying to take over the priestly office, he was smitten with leprosy and dwelt an outcast in a separate louse until the day of his death. The sense of this sin and of the defilement of leprosy seems to have been weighing heavily on Isaiah’s heart from the way he connects his vision with the year of Uzziah’s death: “I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips”. It is not only his own sin of which he gets a view as he sees the Lord’s glory, but the sin of his king, the sin of his people.
His message is a message of judgment to his own people that the Lord gives him in his first commission: “The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem”. And he proceeds to lay bare the corruption of their hearts in their rebellion and revolt against God.
The whole head is sick, that is, the centre of all the power of thought; the whole heart is faint, the centre of all power of will and affection: no soundness from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head—corruption showing in the outward life.
He dwells on the sin of hypocrisy (on drawing near to God with the lips while the heart is far from him) and the life full of cruelty to others. Then he makes his earnest appeal, “Wash you, make you clean, cease to do evil, learn to do good . . . seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow”. He who learned to cry, “Woe is me”, is now sent to proclaim woe to others.
Isaiah shows God’s people how their sins have hidden his face from them, how they have rebelled and vexed him greatly. He tells them their righteousness is as filthy rags; with scathing words he rebukes the vain and careless women for their haughtiness. He speaks in clear words about the sin of spiritualism and the blessing upon those who keep the Sabbath from polluting it—not doing their own way, not finding their own pleasure, nor speaking their own words on the Lord’s Holy Day. God’s warning in these words through Isaiah apply in our day just the same as it did then.
The crowning sin which Isaiah denounces, is the sin of idolatry. In the 2nd chapter the land is pictured as full of idols, rich and poor uniting together in their worship. But God’s promise follows that he will utterly abolish the idols, and that men shall cast them to the moles and the bats. Chapters 40 to 46 contain the most vivid descriptions of the making of idols. The rich man is described as lavishing gold out of the bag, and weighing silver in the balance, and hiring a goldsmith to make him a god. The goldsmith is shown at work melting the gold in the fire, holding it with his tones, shaping it with his hammer on the anvil, graving it with a tool, casting silver chains for it and fixing it in its place so that it cannot be moved. Then the poor man’s action is described. He cannot afford to pay a goldsmith, so he chooses a good sound tree and sets a carpenter to work to carve him an image of wood.
In the promise which we have already mentioned that God will utterly abolish all idols, we have the corresponding promise that the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. Again comes the contrast that, instead of a man looking to the images which his fingers have made, he shall look to the one who has made him.
The wonderful accuracy of chapter 40 is a delight to read over and over: “Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand”. The figure here is that God held the water in the hollow of his hand and saw to it that the exact quantity was there and then placed it in its earth bed. Here we have the exact quantity we require to produce the right amount of rain to make the earth fruitful. “And meted out heaven with a span”: the extent of the atmosphere was fixed by the great creator and is exactly proportioned for us to breathe without difficulty. And weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance”: the height of the mountains on every coast is in direct proportion to the depth of the sea which beats upon its shore.
But the keynote of this wonderful prophecy is salvation. Isaiah’s own name means “salvation is of God” and it forms the subject of the book from the very first chapter, where we read these glorious words, “Come now and let us reason together saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow . . . I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins . . . return unto me for I have redeemed thee”.
Peace—the effect of righteousness, the result of salvation—runs as a silver thread throughout the chapters, from the Prince of Peace in chapter 9 to the proclamation of peace in chapter 57 and “Peace as a river” in chapter 66.
The universal spread of God’s kingdom was foreshadowed in the vision in the words of the Seraphim: “The whole earth is full of the glory of the Lord”. This wonderful truth is expressed all through the book . . . all nations shall flow to the mountain of the House of the Lord which is to be established in the top of the mountains. . . . The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
The glorious salvation centres on the coming one, the promised Messiah. All the predictions about him having been fulfilled only in one event: the birth of Jesus our Saviour, of whom the angel said to Mary, “That holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God”; “Unto us a child is born”, are the words of Isaiah. -To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour”, were the words of the angels to the shepherds; “His name shall be called the mighty God, the Prince of Peace”, says Isaiah. And the multitude of the heavenly host sang glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men”; “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. . . . They that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death upon them hath the light shined”, says the prophecy. “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation”, said the aged Simeon; A light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel”.
Once more abruptly comes the prophecy, “There shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse and a branch shall grow out of his root. . . . The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord”. This description of the Messiah in the 11th chapter corresponds perfectly with the description in the 61st which Jesus applied to himself in his first sermon in the Synagogue at Nazareth, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me . .In both descriptions the result of that anointing is the same, making him the friend of the poor, the meek, and the depressed.
Jesus stopped in his reading at the proclamation of mercy. He did not go on to read of judgment, for in his first coming he came not to judge but to save, but he is coming again to judge the world, for his father has given him authority to execute judgment also: “Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of condemnation.”
And that judgment shall begin at the house of God!
Paul tells us Jesus will return as a thief in the night—but surely not to us? We know he is about to return and should be watching for him, expecting him! Now is the time for us to make ready to meet him, because if we are in this state of mind then we shall welcome him with joy and not with fear.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One