Lecture 6: Comfort, the Guilt Offering, and the New Heavens: Isaiah 40 to 66, and Opening Jeremiah

The lecture, section by section

1. Comfort, and the three voices of chapter 40

   Isaiah 40 opens the vision's last division with the word of comfort to the Babylonian exiles: speak kindly to Jerusalem, her warfare is ended, her iniquity removed, she has received from Yahweh's hand double for all her sins; judgment complete, God turns to restoration. Verses 3 to 11 sound three voices: a voice calling for the way of Yahweh to be cleared in the wilderness so that his glory may be revealed and all flesh see it together; a voice answering the question what shall I call out with the contrast between man, impermanent as grass, and the word of our God, which stands forever; and then Zion herself made the voice, the bearer of good news lifting her cry to the cities of Judah: here is your God, coming with might, coming to shepherd his people.

2. My way is hidden from Yahweh

   The exiles' problem surfaces in 40:27: why do you say, O Jacob, my way is hidden from Yahweh, and the justice due me escapes the notice of my God? Their comfort is undercut by their distrust. Between the promise and the complaint, verses 12 to 26 pile up the power of Israel's God, cresting in the satire of verse 18 and following: to whom then will you liken God? The idol must be cast by a craftsman, plated by a goldsmith; the poorer worshiper must select a tree that does not rot and find a skilled workman to make an idol that will not totter. You must labor to get an idol that can even stand up, and this you will trust? The answer to the complaint is verse 31: those who wait for Yahweh, resting in and anticipating the fulfillment of his word, will gain new strength.

3. One from the east, and the idols on trial

   Chapter 41 introduces the deliverer obliquely: Yahweh has aroused one from the east, called in righteousness into his service, and the nations tremble and run to their idol-makers, but Israel is not to fear: I am your God, I will strengthen you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. At the chapter's end the idols are summoned to court: present your case, declare what is coming; and since they cannot speak, Yahweh speaks, announcing the one aroused now from the north, Persia descending on Babylon from the north, the bringer of good news for Zion who will let the people return and rebuild. The theme of chapters 41 to 48 is the end of Israel's misery in Babylon, and the weaning of Israel from idols by the one proof no idol can offer: the future declared in advance.

4. The servant introduced, and the covenant to the people

   From the deliverer of chapter 41, Isaiah leaps to a greater servant in 42:1 to 9: behold my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations, and he will come humbly. Yahweh addresses him: I will appoint you as a covenant to the people and a light to the nations, the covenant fulfillment to Israel, the true seed of Abraham and son of David, anticipating the mediator of the new covenant that Deuteronomy 30 already implied, with the former things passing and new things declared, reaching ahead to the new of chapters 65 and 66. Verses 10 and following sing the joy this deliverer will bring; then at verse 18 Isaiah turns back to the other servant, the blind and deaf nation in captivity, who must respond to Yahweh.

5. Cyrus named, and the fall of Babylon

   Chapter 43 promises Babylon's destruction though Israel has not called on Yahweh, you have grown weary of me, O Israel, and chapter 44 renews the call to return from idols, closing with another satire on their impotence. Then, that Israel might learn the idols' emptiness beyond argument, Yahweh moves from telling what he will do to naming whom he will use: it is I who says of Cyrus, he is my shepherd, and he will perform all my desire, saying of Jerusalem, she shall be built, and of the temple, your foundation shall be laid. Chapter 45 continues: Cyrus his anointed, girded though he has not known Yahweh, raised up for the sake of Jacob my servant, that Israel may know I am Yahweh and there is no other. Chapters 46 and 47 bring the judgment on Babylon, which had read Judah's captivity as Marduk's triumph and hardened in its idolatry; and 48:20 issues the imperative, go forth from Babylon, flee from the Chaldeans. Yet the section ends, there is no peace for the wicked: physical deliverance leaves a hard-hearted people still needing a greater deliverance.

6. The servant's mission and soliloquy

   Chapters 49 through 52:12, the servant's mission in MacArthur's outline, renew the presentation of the personal servant, distinct from the nation because sent for the nation's salvation, and a salvation too great to stop there: it is too small a thing to raise up the tribes of Jacob; I will make you a light of the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. Chapter 50 opens with the assurance that no permanent certificate of divorce stands between Yahweh and Israel, then gives the servant's soliloquy in verses 4 to 9: sustained by the Lord through intense suffering, I gave my back to those who strike me and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard; I did not cover my face from humiliation and spitting; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know I shall not be ashamed. When that humiliation falls, chapter 53 will tell.

7. The heart of the heart: 52:13 to 53:12

   Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12 is a recognized model of poetic structure, five stanzas of equal length, standing at the center of the middle section of the vision's last division: the heart of the heart. The first stanza opens with exaltation after humiliation: behold, my servant will prosper, high and lifted up, though his appearance was marred more than any man; he will sprinkle many nations, the verb of the sacrificial blood-sprinkling of Leviticus, and kings will shut their mouths, dumbfounded at what the Lord's servant passed through before his exaltation, seeing what they had never been told.

8. Despised, and esteemed stricken

   The second stanza asks, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of Yahweh been revealed? The servant grew up like a tender shoot, a root out of dry ground, the son of David of chapter 11, but with no stately form or majesty to attract a nation fixated on the outward rather than the inward, a fixation that prepares the reader for the Gospels, where the Messiah arrives looking like a nobody and preaching not victory but repentance. So he was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, and we did not esteem him. The third stanza turns the knife: surely our griefs he himself bore, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God, judging his death the just desert of a blasphemer, when in fact he was pierced through, fatally wounded, for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our peace fell on him, and by his scourging we are healed, a spiritual healing, for all of us like sheep have gone astray, and Yahweh has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on him.

9. The lamb, the rich man's tomb, and the many

   The fourth stanza gives his manner in death: oppressed and afflicted, he did not open his mouth, like a lamb led to slaughter; and though cut off, he was with a rich man in his death, God not permitting his burial to share his humiliation, because he had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in his mouth. The fifth returns to exaltation: rendering himself as a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days; by his knowledge the righteous one, my servant, will justify the many; because he poured out himself to death and was numbered with the transgressors, he himself bore the sin of many and interceded for the transgressors. Note the word: many, not all; many will receive the benefit, and the servant, raised, will see and enjoy the fruit of his anguish. This is why the New Testament quotes and alludes to this passage more than any other in the Old Testament.

10. Salvation offered, and still no peace

    The results follow in chapters 54 to 57: salvation freely offered, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, with foreigners who join themselves to Yahweh gathered in alongside Israel in chapter 56. Yet chapter 57 shows the righteous man perishing unregarded and the leaders set against the offer, so the section closes as the last one did: there is no peace, says my God, for the wicked. Deliverance from Babylon through Cyrus did not purge the nation; the redemption provided through the servant, rejected by the nation, has not yet purged it either. Both anticipate a future work; and from chapter 54 onward the word servant turns plural, the servants now naming those who align themselves with the servant, the righteous remnant.

11. Repentance written in advance, and the redeemer from Zion

    Chapter 58 exposes what MacArthur calls the two kinds of religion, sabbath-keeping lip service against heartfelt obedience, for only a changed heart leads to restoration. Then chapter 59 does something remarkable: under the Spirit's direction Isaiah writes out Israel's future repentance in advance, the first prophet in Scripture to do so though not the last, confessing that truth is lacking and justice absent, until Yahweh, seeing there was no man, brings salvation by his own arm: a redeemer will come to Zion, 59:20. On the basis of that repentance the conquering warrior comes forth, and chapters 60 through 63:6 unfurl the great oracles of Zion's future blessedness and the nearing deliverer, followed in 63:7 through 64 by a second prayer for national deliverance, which chapters 65 and 66 answer: Jerusalem restored, and the new heavens and the new earth.

12. New heavens and new earth: the vexed phrase

    Isaiah 65:17 to 25 creates new heavens and a new earth and a Jerusalem for rejoicing, where no infant lives but a few days and the youth dies at a hundred, the one falling short counted accursed; where labor is not in vain, and the wolf and the lamb graze together, the lion eating straw like the ox, the world of chapter 11 under the son of David's righteous reign. Birth continues, and death, for the accursed, continues: this is the kingdom, what premillennialists on the basis of Revelation 20 call the millennium. But 66:22 to 24 uses the same phrase where the redeemed go out to look on the corpses of the transgressors, whose worm does not die and whose fire is not quenched, the New Testament's image of hell, which on anyone's reading is forever: the eternal state.

13. How the commentators divide, and Isaiah's horizon

    No commentator in the course takes the new heavens and new earth as the temporal kingdom only. Some take it as the eternal state only, reading chapter 65's images symbolically. Young, in what Essex calls the amillennial way of having your cake and eating it too, reads it as the church age and the eternal state, chapter 65's long life symbolizing present blessing; Oswalt, to his credit in a Reformed NICOT commentary, actually uses the word millennium, seeing a symbolic church-age aspect, a literal temporal kingdom, and the eternal state. Most premillennialists take double fulfillment; Essex, with MacArthur, prefers blended yet distinct. The deeper point is Isaiah's horizon: he sees the whole restoration as one picture, hills without the valleys, no revelation given him that the kingdom would end; only Revelation 20 discloses the thousand years, and John reserves Isaiah's phrase, new heavens and new earth, for the eternal state of Revelation 21 and 22. Reading Isaiah rightly means remembering where he stands in the progress of revelation.

14. The king and the servant, and preaching Isaiah

    Dorsey's chart sets Isaiah 13 and 14 against 52 and 53: the king of Babylon exalts himself and is humiliated; the servant is humiliated and then exalted, the proud king almost a foil for the coming servant, contrasted in life, fortune, death, and the response of kings at their end. On preaching: Isaiah is hard to exegete and therefore hard to exposit; Essex never preached it straight through, and counsels entering by the Christological passages, chapters 7, 9, and 53, in Advent and Easter series, while guarding against atomistic proof-texting by giving each passage its context. For a long pastorate, somewhere between the tenth and twentieth year, take a year and a half to two years, sixty-six to a hundred messages, condensing where wise (Babylon's oracle in 13 and 14 is one message) and never losing the big picture. Expositions of Isaiah are sparse, Wiersbe's brief survey being the best quick one, and the sparseness of the bibliography testifies to a sparseness of exposition in the churches: books are not written where no one is preaching and no one is demanding.

15. Opening Jeremiah

    The course then turns to Jeremiah, named like Isaiah for the prophet God raised up to speak and then write, with more autobiographical material than any other prophet and, by word count, the longest book among them. The book's own testimony: 51:64 declares, thus far are the words of Jeremiah, marking chapter 52 as the one final addition not from the prophet himself, and 51:60 to 61 shows Jeremiah writing Babylon's calamity in a scroll for Seraiah to read aloud to the captives. Chapter 36 gives the working method: Yahweh says take a scroll and write, and Jeremiah calls Baruch, who writes from the mouth of Jeremiah; dictation is authorship. Chapter 45 preserves a personal word of encouragement from Yahweh to Baruch, whose association with Jeremiah made his life no easier than the prophet's. The book is a tale of two cities, Jerusalem named 107 times and Babylon 118, though Babylon is not named explicitly until chapter 20, a third of the way in; the reader of Isaiah 39 already knows who the foe from the north must be. Unlike Isaiah, Jeremiah dates many of his oracles, and where the Spirit led him to date one, the historical circumstances matter to its meaning; the book is far from chronological, and the scroll of chapter 36 is not our canonical book. And Jeremiah was a known work: read in Babylon, known to Daniel, familiar to the Chronicler, a book of continuing influence generation to generation.

1. Isaiah 40 answers the complaint my way is hidden from Yahweh not with explanations but with a vision of who God is. When you feel unseen by God, which do you actually reach for first, and what would waiting for Yahweh look like in your present circumstance?

2. Isaiah 53 says we esteemed him stricken, mistaking the substitute for the sinner. Where do outward appearances still govern your judgments of what God is doing, in others' lives or your own?

3. Essex observes that sparse Isaiah commentaries reveal sparse Isaiah preaching, since supply follows demand. What does your own appetite for the harder parts of Scripture create demand for, in your church and in your home?