Lecture 3: The Themes, Purpose, and Shape of Isaiah: From Rebellious City to Faithful Zion

The lecture, section by section

1. The Holy One of Israel

   The first theme announces itself by sheer count: the holiness root appears 68 times in Isaiah's 66 chapters, and the title the Holy One of Israel 25 times, spread through every part of the book, eleven times in chapters 1 to 35, once in 36 to 39, thirteen times in 40 to 66. Either one Isaiah wrote it all, or supposed later hands wrote in conscious imitation of him. The title occurs only six other times in the Old Testament, and its first biblical appearance is 2 Kings 19:22, Isaiah himself speaking, with Jeremiah and three psalms taking it up afterward: quite possibly Isaiah's own coinage, adopted by later writers. With the Holy One of Jacob and the bare the Holy One, thirty of the sixty-eight holiness uses name Judah's God.

2. The year King Uzziah died

   Isaiah 6 gives the event that fixed the prophet's eyes on holiness for life. As the good king dies, Isaiah sees the Lord, Adonai, the sovereign master, on a throne lofty and exalted, the train of his robe filling the temple, and the seraphim crying holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory. Holy means separate, distinct: Yahweh is distinct from and over his creation, and morally distinct from man, for Isaiah's instant response is woe is me, I am ruined, a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips. He has come, as it were, without his sacrifice; and the Lord himself cleanses him, a coal from the altar touching his mouth: your iniquity is taken away, your sin is forgiven.

3. Whom shall I send

   Then the voice: whom shall I send, and who will go for us? The us belongs to the I who speaks, at least an implication of distinction within Yahweh himself, and John 12 settles whose glory Isaiah saw: the glory of Jesus. Isaiah answers, here am I, send me, and receives a commission that Jeremiah and Ezekiel will receive in their turn: go and speak, and know that they will not listen; the message will harden a rebellious people until the judgment is complete. Yet verse 13 leaves the holy seed in the stump, the remnant through whom God will carry his purpose forward.

4. The sin of Judah

   The second theme is Judah's sinfulness, painted with Isaiah's whole vocabulary. Chapter 1 opens as Deuteronomy 32 did, heaven and earth summoned as witnesses while Yahweh brings his charge: sons I have reared and brought up, and they have revolted against me. Even the ox knows its owner; my people do not understand. Then the words pour out: sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, sons who act corruptly, they have abandoned Yahweh, despised the Holy One of Israel, turned away. Chapter 2 adds soothsayers, foreign bargains, silver, and a land full of idols; chapter 5's vineyard states the civic result, he looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed, for righteousness, but a cry. The lack of righteousness and justice is exactly what Yahweh will correct: a righteous one is coming who will bring forth justice.

5. Judgment that purifies

   So judgment must come, but read Isaiah 1:24 to 26 carefully: I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy, and afterward you will be called the city of righteousness, a faithful city. Yahweh's judgment aims not at annihilation but at purification. That is the overarching image of the whole book: the unfaithful city of chapter 1 becomes the faithful, righteous, rejoicing Jerusalem of chapters 65 and 66, and everything between traces the process, physical deliverance from Babylon, a returned remnant that still needs forgiveness, a servant who will bear the sin, and his return as conquering king for those who trust him.

6. The sin of the nations

   Isaiah does not forget the nations. Chapter 9 indicts the northern kingdom before its captivity; chapter 10 turns on Assyria, God's own instrument of judgment that will itself be cut down; chapters 13 to 23 collect the oracles against the nations, with more in 28 and 34. Though the nations never received Sinai's law, they are judged for pride, arrogance, and refusal of the justice they owe one another, the rebellion of Genesis 11 continuing; and the named nations of Isaiah's day become anticipatory pictures of the eschatological judgment of all nations in chapters 24 to 27. Chapter 47 deals with historical Babylon, whose fall, at the hands of the Cyrus already named in chapters 44 and 45, will open the exiles' way home.

7. A second exodus

   The salvation theme opens in chapter 11: in that day the Lord will recover the second time the remnant of his people, from Assyria, Egypt, Cush, Elam, Shinar, and the farthest coastlands, the four corners of the earth. Verse 15 dries up the tongue of the sea of Egypt and waves a hand over the Euphrates; verse 16 makes it explicit, a highway from Assyria just as there was for Israel in the day they came up from Egypt. A second exodus, with greater miracles and from more lands than the first. And chapter 12 gives the song for that day: behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. Trust is the book's demand, for Judah's problem is precisely that it will not trust Yahweh, and chapter 37 shows him engineering the very crisis that forces Hezekiah to trust him alone.

8. Eight images of the deliverer

   Who is the instrument of this salvation? Isaiah's images accumulate: the light that will shine, the child to be born, the shoot and branch from Jesse, a new David, the stone, the servant, the redeemer of Israel, and, since a second exodus assumes one, a second Moses. The Mosaic parallels run six deep: endued with Yahweh's Spirit as Moses was in Numbers 11, establishing justice as Moses gave the commandments, called from birth, bringing a covenant, the new one, as Moses brought the old from Sinai, rejected as Moses was rejected, and marked by humility, the trait Numbers 12:3 names in Moses and Isaiah sets against the pride of Babylon's king in chapter 14. The New Testament shows the marks in Jesus at his first coming, humble even in glory, the bread greater than manna of John 6.

9. The Spirit, and the sovereign King

   Isaiah also dwells on the Spirit of Yahweh: Yahweh sends a redeemer who is himself Yahweh, empowered by the Spirit who comes from Yahweh, an implication, not yet an explicit declaration, of distinction within the godhead that awaits the New Testament's clarity. And flowing from chapter 6 comes the theme of sovereignty: the King on the throne, whose glory fills the earth because nothing happens outside his plan. Chapter 41 stages the courtroom: let the idols declare the future if they can; Yahweh alone knows and determines what is to come, which is why, Essex notes, a couple of passages from Isaiah are enough to deflate any theology in which God does not know the future.

10. The purpose of the book

    The purpose statement gathers the themes: the holy Yahweh will not permit unholiness in his people, so he will deal with them through judgments that chasten and purge, until a faithful, trusting remnant is fit to participate in his program; and in that program the Gentiles too, as chapters 2, 65, and 66 picture, will come to Jerusalem, learn Yahweh's righteous ways, and become his people, Israel extending his rule among them. And all of it is for his own glory, the note Ezekiel will strike even harder: the God who turns rebels into worshipers is the God who gets the glory. It is Deuteronomy 30 again, Moses' skeleton, with Isaiah led by the Spirit to fill in the detail; and on this purpose, Essex observes, the major commentators are in substantial agreement.

11. Reading Isaiah's prophecy rightly

    Pressed on whether Isaiah 26 describes Armageddon, Essex models restraint: the passage promises that Yahweh will shelter his people while his indignation passes over the earth, a truth Revelation will develop, but Isaiah should be allowed to be Isaiah. The book has almost no chronological markers; the prophet can set the near and the far side by side in a single breath, and no tribulation manual can be built from him. For step-by-step order, wait for Ezekiel 33 to 48. Isaiah gives the great points, not the sequence.

12. Assyria in the streets, Babylon on the horizon

    Structurally, note the two empires. Through Isaiah's lifetime Babylon was, apart from a few years around 709 to 703 BC, a vassal of Assyria, whose kings from Tiglath-Pileser III onward styled themselves kings of Assyria and Babylon. Assyria is the crisis of Isaiah's own day: from 745 to Hezekiah's death every king of Judah had to decide how to deal with Assyria, and the oracles of chapters 7 to 10 and 28 to 31, including the pleas not to go down to Egypt, are anchored there. Yet after chapter 39 Assyria is named exactly once, in 52:4, for God has shown Isaiah that the empire of the future, the one that will destroy Jerusalem, is Babylon.

13. Condemnation, interlude, consolation

    The book's agreed threefold shape: chapters 1:2 to 35:10, condemnation, Isaiah's oracles against sin with the Assyrian crisis behind them; chapters 36 to 39, the historical interlude; chapters 40 to 66, consolation, comfort, comfort my people. And the interlude reverses chronology on purpose: the deliverance of 701 BC is narrated first, then the earlier illness and the Babylonian embassy of about 703 to 702, so that the book closes its first half on Hezekiah's folly, showing Babylon his treasures, and Isaiah's word that Babylon will carry everything away, from which the reader falls straight into chapters 40 to 66, where Isaiah speaks to the Babylonian exiles as though present among them. Tellingly, those chapters name no exile events and no Babylonian kings; the single specificity is Cyrus, Yahweh's proof that he alone declares the future. The liberal objection to the book reduces to one thing, the denial of predictive prophecy, which is the hallmark of unbelief, not of scholarship.

14. The book that ends where it began

    Isaiah closes on the words with which it opened. The rebels of 1:2 reappear in 66:24 as corpses of the men who rebelled, their worm undying, their fire unquenched, the very verb of 1:31 where the strong burn with none to quench; the desecrated new moons and sabbaths of chapter 1 become the new moon to new moon and sabbath to sabbath worship of all flesh in 66:23; the city turned harlot becomes the Jerusalem created for rejoicing of 65:18. Adapting Dorsey's literary analysis as a guide rather than a creed: chapters 1 to 12 move from rebellion to the wolf and the lamb, mirrored by 58 to 66; 13 to 27 humble the proud, beginning with Babylon's king, mirrored by 49 to 57 which exalt the humble servant; 28 to 35 forbid trust in earthly powers, mirrored by the call to the exiles to renounce the idols; and at the center stand the narratives of 36 to 39, Yahweh's demonstrated supremacy over every earthly and divine power. Trust in Yahweh, and Yahweh alone.

1. Isaiah's response to seeing the Holy One was woe is me, and the Lord's response was cleansing, then commission. How does that order, sight of God, conviction, cleansing, calling, test the way you approach serving God, and where might you be skipping a step?

2. Judah's root problem was refusal to trust Yahweh, and God engineered a crisis that left Hezekiah no one else to trust. Where has God removed your alternatives, and did you read it at the time as severity or as mercy?

3. Isaiah's judgments smelt away dross rather than annihilate. When you are under God's discipline, what difference does it make to know the fire is a refiner's and not a destroyer's, and how would you help someone else see that?