📖 Old Testament Survey — Unit 9: The Major Prophets – Part 1 (Isaiah)

The Bible in Miniature

Isaiah is the Bible in miniature. Look at the math: the Bible has 66 books; Isaiah has 66 chapters. The Old Testament has 39 books; Isaiah's first 39 chapters are the warning section, full of judgment. The New Testament has 27 books; Isaiah's last 27 chapters are the comfort section — opening with a voice crying in the wilderness and closing with new heavens and a new earth. The whole Bible is folded inside one prophet, and that is why Isaiah is sometimes called the gospel according to Isaiah. The New Testament writers quote him more than any other prophet. Augustine said he could find more of Christ in Isaiah than in some of the Gospels.

His Hebrew name is Yesha'yahu, and it means The Lord saves. The same Hebrew root gives us Yeshua — Jesus. The author and the Subject have one name. Isaiah saw both Christ's near first coming and his faraway Second Coming. In all, he saw Christ.

Isaiah preached for about fifty years, from around 740 to 687 BC, through the reigns of four kings of Judah — Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah — and was a contemporary of Amos, Hosea, and Micah. Jewish tradition says he was martyred under Manasseh: hiding in a hollow tree, he was sawn in two when soldiers cut the tree down. The author of Hebrews probably has him in mind when he writes of the heroes of faith who were "sawn in two" (Hebrews 11:37). Some prophets pay in tears. Some pay in blood. Isaiah paid in both.

Isaiah's preaching folds into three points — the same three points your professor has used to preach this book for forty years: the Prophet's Call (Isaiah 6), the Prophet's Warning (Isaiah 7 and the first half), and the Prophet's Vision (Isaiah 40 and following, with chapter 53 at the heart). Three sermons. Three doors into one house. Walk through them with me.

I. The Prophet's Call (Isaiah 6)

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple" (Isaiah 6:1). Memorize that opening clause. Uzziah had reigned fifty-two years. A whole generation knew no other king. He died in disgrace, a leper, struck down for trying to play priest at the altar. The earthly throne was empty. Isaiah walked into the temple expecting funeral darkness — and found it crowded with God.

The seraphim cry over the throne the only line in Scripture that ever raises an attribute of God to the third power: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!" (Isaiah 6:3). Hebrew has no superlatives the way English does; you take a word and you say it three times. Not love, love, love. Not merciful, merciful, merciful. Holy. Holy. Holy. Once Isaiah has heard that, his favorite name for God is set for life. Through sixty-six chapters he will call God the Holy One of Israel — twenty-six times in Isaiah, only six times in the whole rest of the Old Testament. Once you have stood in the throne room, you cannot stop using the throne-room name.

Isaiah is the first prophet to apply the language of judgment to himself before applying it to anyone else: "Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). Note the order. Vision of holiness, recognition of sinfulness, then atonement: a seraph flies with a coal from the altar and touches Isaiah's lips — "your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged" (Isaiah 6:7). And only then: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us? Then I said, 'Here am I! Send me'" (Isaiah 6:8). Every great ministry begins in that order. Holiness, brokenness, atonement, calling. If your service feels brittle and your zeal feels manufactured, you may have skipped the throne room. Go back. Look up.

II. The Prophet's Warning (Isaiah 7 and the First Half)

The Two Bookend Invitations

Before Isaiah ever utters a single oracle of judgment, he opens the book with one of the most generous gospel invitations in all of Scripture — and the verse that will, almost forty chapters later, give the Scarlet Thread its very name: "Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord: Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool" (Isaiah 1:18). Notice the colors. The same scarlet thread that has been running through every animal on every altar from Eden to Solomon's temple now becomes the very color of sin itself. Scarlet sins. Crimson stains. Isaiah's whole book is going to be the story of how God turns those reds white. The way He does it is the long argument of the whole prophecy, and the answer is in chapter 53. Read it now and don't forget it; in a moment, when we reach the fourth Servant Song, you will see why Isaiah said scarlet.

The matching invitation at the other end of the warning section is just as wide: "Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price" (Isaiah 55:1). Those are the gospel bookends of Isaiah. Come now, let us reason opens the book; Come, every one who thirsts opens the second half. Between the two invitations sits the whole story of how God makes a scarlet soul white. The price is paid in chapter 53. The invitation is open in chapter 1 and chapter 55. Come is Isaiah's favorite verb.

Ahaz and Immanuel

The warning section confronts a faithless king and offers him a faithful sign. Ahaz of Judah is in trouble. Two enemy kings have formed an alliance against him, and instead of trusting God he is reaching for help to Egypt and to Assyria. Isaiah confronts him with the great Old Testament definition of faith: "If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established" (Isaiah 7:9). The Hebrew underneath is a wordplay you can almost taste — im lo' ta'aminu, lo' te'amenu. Same verb root, twice. If you do not Amen, you will not be Amen-ed. Faith is not one option among many; faith is the only soil any human life can be rooted in.

So Isaiah offers Ahaz any sign — as deep as Sheol or as high as heaven. Ahaz, with feigned piety, refuses: "I will not test the Lord." But Ahaz had already decided not to trust. He didn't want a sign because a sign would force a decision. So God gives one anyway, the most famous sign ever given: "Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel" (Isaiah 7:14). The Hebrew word for "virgin" here, almah, ordinarily denotes a young woman of marriageable age and does not by itself demand virginity the way the more specific Hebrew term bethulah does; but when Jewish scholars translated Isaiah into Greek centuries before Christ, they rendered it parthenos — the Greek word that does mean virgin — and it was that Greek text Matthew had in view. Understood this way, the prophecy worked at two levels — a near-term sign in Ahaz's own day involving a child soon to be born, and the ultimate fulfillment seven hundred years later when Matthew quoted this exact verse over a manger in Bethlehem (Matthew 1:22–23). Immanuel — God with us.

Spurgeon described Immanuel like this: God with us in our nature, in our sorrow, in our lifework, in our punishment, in our grave — and now we with Him in resurrection, ascension, triumph, and Second Advent splendor. Read that sentence twice. Read it tonight before you sleep.

Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravians, was converted in an art gallery in Düsseldorf, standing in front of a painting of Christ on the cross. Beneath the painting was an inscription: I did this for thee. What hast thou done for me? About a hundred years earlier the painter had failed twice. He had shown his first sketch to his landlady's little daughter and asked who she thought it was. "A good man," she said. He destroyed the sketch. He prayed and tried again. "A great sufferer," she said. He destroyed the second. He prayed harder, painted a third time, and called the girl back. She looked at it and said, "It is the Lord!" That alone makes Christmas meaningful — not that a good man came, not that a wise teacher came, not that a great sufferer came, but that God came. Immanuel.

Two missionaries were once captured by bandits and shut up in a filthy hole, freezing cold, ordered not to speak, not even to make signs to one another. Christmas Day came. One of them sat shivering on the floor. Suddenly his face brightened. Idly toying with bits of straw on the hard-packed mud, he began arranging them into letters. He drew his friend's attention with a glance. The straws spelled out one word: EMMANUEL. They wept with joy. Captives. Cold. Forbidden to speak. Yet God was with them in that filthy hole as truly as in the Bethlehem stable.

The Child of Four Names

And then, two chapters later, Isaiah piles four titles on this coming Immanuel that no human child has ever borne and no human child ever could: "For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6). Wonderful — the name God Himself refused to give to the angel in Judges 13. Counselor — the wisdom of the universe in one human voice. Mighty God — the divine title that ends every honest Christology. Everlasting Father — the eternal one wearing the affection of a father. Prince of Peace — the only one who can stop a human war by making peace inside a human heart. Four titles on one Boy. The virgin's Son of chapter 7 has become the Mighty God of chapter 9. Isaiah is staring at the cradle and seeing the throne.

Assyria and Babylon

The warning section also exposes the two world powers that always come for God's people. Assyria stands for godlessness — there is no God, might makes right, eat and drink and grab what you can. Babylon stands for religious apostasy — yes, there is a god, sort of, and many of them, and the truth is whatever you want it to be. Both powers are alive and hungry today. Both have your church in their crosshairs. The contrast that organizes the first half of Isaiah is right there: Ahaz refused the sign and died with the kingdom shaking; his son Hezekiah, when his own crisis came (Isaiah 36–37), took Sennacherib's threatening letter into the temple and literally spread it out before the Lord — and that night the angel of the Lord struck 185,000 Assyrians dead in their tents. Stand firm in your faith, or you will not stand at all.

III. The Prophet's Vision (Isaiah 40 and the Second Half)

Now turn the page to chapter 40, and the entire tone of the book changes. The warning is over. Judgment has been pronounced; exile is coming or already here. The voice of Isaiah becomes the voice of consolation: "'Comfort, yes, comfort My people!' says your God" (Isaiah 40:1). Then a voice cries: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God" (Isaiah 40:3). Seven hundred years later a man dressed in camel's hair will appear in the desert and read this verse over himself. The voice in the wilderness has a name. His name is John.

Then comes the verse to bury people by: "All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever" (Isaiah 40:6–8). Mark that verse for the day you stand at a graveside. And the famous closing of the chapter: "Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles" (Isaiah 40:31). Mark that one for the day you cannot get out of bed.

Now to the most stunning predictive prophecy in the entire Old Testament. Isaiah 44 and 45. Isaiah is writing around 700 BC. The Babylonian exile hasn't even happened yet. And he names — by name — the Persian king who, a hundred and fifty years later, would crush Babylon and let the Jews go home: "Who says of Cyrus, 'He is My shepherd, and he shall perform all My pleasure'" (Isaiah 44:28); "Thus says the Lord to His anointed, to Cyrus" (Isaiah 45:1). And in 539 BC it happened exactly that way. Since the 1800s, some scholars have proposed that a later prophet, often called "Second Isaiah," wrote chapters 40 through 66 during or after the exile, pointing to differences in vocabulary, style, and historical setting between the two halves of the book — real literary arguments some hold even while accepting predictive prophecy elsewhere. But the case for one Isaiah remains strong: the church has held the book's unity for two thousand years, and the New Testament writers quote both halves as the words of the same "Isaiah the prophet" without distinction (see John 12:38-41). The simpler reading still stands. The God who can name Jesus seven hundred years early can certainly name Cyrus a hundred and fifty.

The Scarlet Thread Reaches Its Tenth Station

And now the heart of the book — the four Servant Songs. Isaiah 42, 49, 50, and 52:13–53:12. Each one introduces a mysterious figure called "the Servant of the Lord," and each one tells you a little more about Him. The Servant will bring justice to the nations. He will be a light to the Gentiles. He will give His back to those who beat Him. And then the fourth song — Isaiah 53. Henrietta Mears called it the Holy of Holies of the Old Testament. Read it slowly. Every line is a line in the gospel.

Now mark where we are in the long story this whole course has been telling. The Scarlet Thread of redemption began in Eden when God killed an animal to clothe Adam and Eve. It ran through Abel's lamb, Noah's altar, the ram on Moriah, the blood on every Egyptian doorpost at Passover, the goats of Yom Kippur, the bronze serpent in the wilderness, the scarlet cord in Rahab's Jericho window, and the rivers of blood that flowed through Solomon's temple for almost four hundred years. Nine stations. Every animal a promissory note. Every altar a postcard from the future. Isaiah 53 is the tenth and central station — the place where the Lamb the thread had always been pointing to finally has a face and a name. Listen to the verses and watch the thread reach all the way back to Genesis 3 and all the way forward to Calvary:

"He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief… He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:3–6).

Notice how Isaiah 1:18 and Isaiah 53 finally meet. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." How? "By His stripes we are healed." God turns the reds white by laying them on Someone Else and then striping that Someone Else until the color comes through. Scarlet sin. Crimson stripes. Snow-white forgiveness. The Scarlet Thread paid for in scarlet blood. Three more stations of the thread remain in the Old Testament — Zechariah will see Him pierced and a fountain opened for sin (Zechariah 12:10; 13:1), and the very last word of Malachi will leave Israel waiting for the great and dreadful day of the Lord. But the central station, the place all the others were postcards of, is Isaiah 53.

An English Bible teacher was once hurrying down the platform to catch a train when a man chased him. "Sir, I was in your meeting tonight. I want to find God." The teacher said, "I have no time, but take this Bible. Run to the nearest lamppost. Open to Isaiah 53:6. Stoop down low and go in at the first 'all.' Stand up straight and come out at the last 'all.'" And he boarded the train. The man stood beneath the lamppost, baffled, and opened the Bible. "All we like sheep have gone astray." Stoop down low. Yes — that is me. "We have turned every one to his own way." Yes — that is all of us. Now stand up straight. "And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all." All. He bore it. The man wept beneath the lamppost and trusted Christ. Friend, stoop down low at the first 'all.' Stand up straight at the last.

A young Jewish girl in New York was taught Hebrew by her rabbi father. They read the Old Testament together. One day she asked him why he had skipped Isaiah 53. "It is not for us," he said; "it is for Christians." She asked, "Then why is a Christian chapter in our Bible?" He told her to keep quiet. So she copied chapter 53 onto a small piece of paper, folded it tight, and carried it in her stocking for two years. Two years. She read it every chance she got. It led her to Christ. The rabbi's daughter became the rabbi's testimony.

The book ends with new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65–66) — no more weeping, no more crying, no more death. Revelation 21 will not invent that picture. Revelation 21 is quoting it.

IV. Two Foci: Christ on the Cross, Christ on the Throne

Henrietta Mears reached for an unlikely illustration to close her chapter on Isaiah, and it is the right one. When Johannes Kepler tried to explain the motion of the planets by giving each one a circular orbit, his calculations would not work. A circle has only one center. Then Kepler discovered that planetary orbits are not circles but ellipses — and an ellipse has not one center but two foci. Once he placed the sun at one focus, the math finally fit. She applied it to Isaiah: this prophet's vision of Christ has two foci. Christ on the cross — and Christ on the throne. Christ in humiliation — and Christ in power and great glory. The book that begins in Isaiah 6 with a throne high and lifted up and lands in Isaiah 53 on a Lamb led to the slaughter is asking you to hold both points at once. Try to make it a circle around just one and the math will not work. Christ is both.

Open your New Testament and Isaiah's two foci appear again. Revelation 4 — a throne. Revelation 5 — a Lamb, "a Lamb as though it had been slain, standing in the midst of the throne" (Revelation 5:6). The very picture Isaiah saw in two chapters separated by forty-seven, John sees in two chapters back to back. Throne and Lamb. Cross and crown. Two foci, one Christ.

Acts 8 — Philip meets the Ethiopian official on a desert road, reading aloud from Isaiah 53. "How can I, unless someone guides me?" the eunuch says. Philip "opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him" (Acts 8:35). You can preach the whole gospel from any verse in Isaiah; just start at the cross. Luke 4 — Jesus comes home to Nazareth, walks into the synagogue, and is handed the scroll of Isaiah. He unrolls it to chapter 61 and reads about the Spirit anointing Him to preach good news to the poor. Then He rolls up the scroll, hands it back, sits down, and says nine words that change history: "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). He did not say this is about Me. He said this IS Me.

And His name is Immanuel — God with us. In our nature. In our sorrow. In our lifework. In our punishment. In our grave. And now we with Him in resurrection, ascension, triumph, and Second Advent splendor. John Wesley, dying, whispered the last sermon of his life: "The greatest of all, is, God with us." That is Isaiah's gospel. The Lord whom Isaiah saw high and lifted up is the same Lord who said, "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." He is your Immanuel today. Stand firm in your faith. You will stand.

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