The Message Remix (199 page)

INTRODUCTIONISAIAH

 

For Isaiah, words are watercolors and melodies and chisels to make truth and beauty and goodness. Or, as the case may be, hammers and swords and scalpels to
unmake
sin and guilt and rebellion. Isaiah does not merely convey information. He creates visions, delivers revelation, arouses belief.
He is a poet in the most funda
mental sense—a
maker
, making God present and that presence
urgent. Isaiah is the supreme poet-prophet to come out of the Hebrew people.

Isaiah is a large presence in the lives of people who live by faith in God, who submit themselves to being shaped by the Word of God and are on the lookout for the holy.
The Holy.
The characteristic name for God in Isaiah is “The Holy.” As we read this large and comprehensive gathering of messages that were preached to the ancient people of Israel, we find ourselves immersed in both the presence and the action of The Holy.

The more hours we spend pondering the words of Isaiah, the more the word “holy” changes in our understanding. If “holy” was ever a pious, pastel-tinted word in our vocabularies, the Isaiah-preaching quickly turns it into something blazing. Holiness is the most attractive quality, the most intense experience we ever get of sheer
life
—authentic, firsthand living, not life looked at and enjoyed from a distance. We find ourselves in on the operations of God himself, not talking about them or reading about them. Holiness is a furnace that transforms the men and women who enter it. “Holy, Holy, Holy” is not needlepoint. It is the banner of a revolution,
the
revolution.

The book of Isaiah is expansive, dealing with virtually everything that is involved in being a people of God on this planet earth. The impressive art of Isaiah involves taking the stuff of our ordinary and often disappointing human experience and showing us how it is the very stuff that God uses to create and save and give hope. As this vast panorama opens up before us, it turns out that nothing is unusable by God. He uses everything and everybody as material for his work, which is the remaking of the mess we have made of our lives.

“Symphony” is the term many find useful to capture the fusion of simplicity and complexity presented in the book of Isaiah. The major thrust is clearly God’s work of salvation: “The Salvation Symphony” (the name Isaiah means “God Saves”). The prominent themes repeated and developed throughout this vast symphonic work are judgment, comfort, and hope. All three elements are present on nearly every page, but each also gives distinction to the three “movements” of the book that so powerfully enact salvation: Messages of Judgment (chapters 1-39), Messages of Comfort (chapters 40-55), and Messages of Hope (chapters 56-66).

 

 

From:
Smart, wellborn, and well connected, Isaiah had every reason to look forward to a promising career as a landowner or politician. But an experience at around age eighteen of the blazing Holy changed his course. For more than forty years he was God’s ambassador to the royal court, enraging craven kings and guiding a halfway decent one.

 

To:
The good citizens of Judah enjoyed their thriving economy and their all-you-can-worship god buffet. Rich businessmen used ruthless legal tactics on the vulnerable, their wives strutted around in expensive clothes, and King Ahaz had an impressive Assyrian altar copied and installed in Jerusalem. “Holy, Holy, Holy” wasn’t in these people’s vocabulary. They worried about national security threats, but they thought the solution was clever politics rather than doing what God said. The more dangerous things got, the more they fled to sex and alcohol.

 

Re:
About 740-690 B.C. Ironically, Judah’s politicians thought their most dangerous enemy was their northern cousin, Israel. They were actually glad as Israel’s government and economy gradually collapsed during Isaiah’s lifetime. They cheered to see Assyria obliterate Israel and sobered up only when the Assyrian army kept coming and nearly swallowed Jerusalem too. They couldn’t see Israel’s destruction as a warning to them.

In distant Greece, people had been scraping along for generations in villages, but now they invented what they called a
polis
or city-state. (Our word
politics
comes from
polis
. The Greeks enjoyed politics.) Compared to vast bureaucratic Assyria or Egypt, the Greek states were tiny—small enough to allow for experiments in government. It was possible to give every nonslave male a voice in major decisions, although in practice small groups of wealthy men controlled many of the city-states most of the time.