Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
You are about to walk through the longest of the prophets, a book so vast and so full of God that the early church loved to call it a fifth Gospel. Isaiah the son of Amoz prophesied in Judah in the eighth century before Christ, in the days when the kingdom lay under the lengthening shadow of Assyria and its armies, and when the far horizon still held a second and later danger, the rising power of Babylon. Into that anxious world Isaiah spoke, and his very name carried his message, for it means “The LORD is salvation,” and salvation is the theme he never lets go. The book begins with a searing indictment of Judah’s sin, moves on to God’s judgment upon the nations of the earth, and then opens out, from the fortieth chapter onward, into the great Book of Comfort, with its tender songs of the Suffering Servant, and it ends at last with the promise of a new heavens and a new earth. Above the whole of it rings the title Isaiah loved above all others for his God, “the Holy One of Israel,” and through the whole of it shine the clearest portraits the Old Testament ever gives us of the coming Messiah: Immanuel, the child born to us, the shoot from the stump of Jesse, and the Servant who bears our sorrows and is pierced for our sins.
As you read, hold this: The Holy One of Israel is also the LORD who saves, and Isaiah lifts both together until they meet in the face of the coming Servant.
The name and what it means
The prophet’s name in Hebrew is יְשַׁעְיָהוּ (yesha’yahu), pronounced yesh-ah-YAH-hoo, and it means “The LORD is salvation” (Strong’s H3470). It is no small thing that a man who would preach salvation for sixty-six chapters should carry that word stitched into his own name, so that every time someone called him they were saying, without knowing it, the very truth he had been sent to declare. And joined to that name, all through his book, stands the title he heard the seraphim cry in the year of his calling, “the Holy One of Israel,” from the Hebrew קָדוֹשׁ (qadosh), pronounced kah-DOSH, the word for holy (Strong’s H6918), meaning set apart, pure, and utterly high above every created thing. Hold those two words together, for they are the pillars of the whole book. God is holy, blazingly, unapproachably holy, and God is salvation, stooping to save a people who could never climb up to Him. Isaiah’s whole labor is to keep both true at once, and to show at last how they can be.
The world of the book
Isaiah served the LORD across the reigns of four kings of Judah, from Uzziah through Jotham and Ahaz and on into the long reign of Hezekiah, a span of some forty or fifty years lived out in the city of Jerusalem. It was a dangerous age. To the north the empire of Assyria was swallowing kingdom after kingdom, and in Isaiah’s own lifetime the northern sister-kingdom of Israel fell to her forever. Judah trembled and was tempted, again and again, to trust in armies and alliances and clever bargains rather than in the LORD who had promised to keep her. Isaiah stood in the middle of all that fear and called the nation back to a single thing: to trust the Holy One of Israel and be still.
Yet Isaiah’s gaze reached far past his own century. He was given to see beyond the near threat of Assyria to the later exile in Babylon, and beyond even that to the day of return and comfort, and beyond that again to a salvation for all the nations and a world made new. This is why the second half of his book can speak to exiles who would not be born for a hundred years and more, and why the New Testament writers, when they wanted to explain who Jesus was and what He came to do, reached for Isaiah more often than for almost any other book of the Old Testament. They understood what the apostle John said plainly of the prophet, that when Isaiah beheld the glory of the LORD high and lifted up, he was gazing upon Christ.
The shape of the book
- The great arraignment of Judah and the vision of the Holy One (chapters 1 through 6). God brings a lawsuit against His own rebellious people, and in the midst of it the prophet is granted his overwhelming vision of the LORD enthroned, is cleansed, and is sent.
- The sign of Immanuel and the promised child and King (chapters 7 through 12). In the shadow of invasion God gives the sign of a virgin’s son named Immanuel, “God with us,” and unveils the child born to us who will reign on David’s throne, the shoot that springs from Jesse’s stump.
- Oracles against the nations (chapters 13 through 23). One by one the proud powers of the earth are called to account before the LORD of all, from Babylon to Egypt to Tyre, that every nation might learn there is one God over all.
- The LORD’s worldwide judgment and triumph (chapters 24 through 27). The prophet lifts his eyes to the whole earth and the end of all things, to God’s final reckoning and to the great feast where death itself is swallowed up forever.
- Woes, warnings, and the Assyrian crisis under Hezekiah (chapters 28 through 39). Warnings fall on those who trust in Egypt instead of God, and then the story turns to King Hezekiah, to the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem, and to the LORD’s deliverance and the king’s healing.
- The Book of Comfort, “Comfort, comfort My people” (chapters 40 through 48). The tone changes to tenderness. The everlasting God who does not grow weary promises to gather His scattered people, and shows the idols of the nations to be nothing before Him.
- The Servant of the LORD who suffers for our sins (chapters 49 through 53). The songs of the Servant rise to their height, until the fifty-third chapter lays before us the One despised and rejected, wounded for our transgressions, who bears the sin of many and makes them righteous.
- The call to the redeemed and the promise of a new creation (chapters 54 through 66). The book closes with a wide and open invitation, “Come, all you who are thirsty,” and with the promise of new heavens and a new earth where God’s redeemed will dwell with Him in joy.
The one thread to carry
If you carry one thing through all sixty-six chapters, carry this: the holiness of God and the salvation of God are not two rival truths but one, and they are joined together in the person of Christ. Isaiah first heard the whole of it in the temple, when the angels above the throne were calling holiness back and forth to one another over a world already filled with the glory of the LORD.
Isaiah 6:3 (BSB) — “And they were calling out to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts; all the earth is full of His glory.””
That thrice-holy God is the One whose glory Isaiah saw, and the New Testament tells us whose glory it was that filled the prophet’s eyes. When John looked back on this very vision, he named the One upon the throne.
John 12:41 (BSB) — “Isaiah said these things because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke about Him.”
So read this book knowing where it leads. The Holy One high and lifted up, the LORD whose salvation is stitched into the prophet’s own name, the Servant pierced for our transgressions, and the King who reigns on a throne without end are one and the same, and His name is Jesus. Learn the Word, follow the thread from the throne room to the cross, and give thanks.