3 Things You Should Know about Isaiah

1. Isaiah was overwhelmingly influenced by a vision of the holiness of God at the outset of his ministry.

On the day King Uzziah died (740/739 BC), Isaiah had a vision of God “sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up,” while seraphim called to one another,

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isa. 6:1, 3)

The threefold repetition of the adjective “holy” is a Hebraic way of expressing unmatched intensity. Only in Isaiah 6:3 is this done three times in the Hebrew Bible. Its effect upon Isaiah can be seen in the fact that the word “holy” (Heb. qadosh) occurs more frequently in Isaiah than in the rest of the Old Testament combined.

The word “holy” is related to the idea of being separate or distinct. Isaiah’s God is not an extension of the created order, someone who can be manipulated. The people of Isaiah’s day, governed by Uzziah, Azariah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, were deaf to the prophet’s warnings. In the eighth century BC, as in our day, man’s mind was forever creating idols shaped after human desires and predilections.

2. Isaiah’s ministry was seemingly ineffective by God’s design.

To show Judah’s faithlessness, God sent the prophet on a fool’s errand. At the close of the temple vision of God’s holiness, where God’s glory was put on display, God gave Isaiah a somewhat strange commission. For more than fifty years, Isaiah was required to proclaim a message simple enough for a child to understand (Isa. 28:9–10) but impossible for hardened political leaders to comprehend (Isa. 6:9–10). In this way, Isaiah’s ministry set a precedent. When the disciples asked Jesus why He spoke in parables, Jesus answered them by citing from Isaiah’s commission (Matt. 13:14–15; Mark 4:10–12). God’s true disciples will make sense of it, but the merely religious will not. In the same way, Isaiah’s message was scoffed at and rejected.

And what was his message? It was a message of political crisis. In 745 BC, Tiglath-Pileser III came to power in Nineveh, the capital city of the empire of Assyria. And the Assyrian king had only one thing on his mind: world domination. Immediately following the vision of God’s holiness, we are told of Assyria’s successful conquest of the Northern Kingdoms of Aram and Israel, and despite a treaty between the two kingdoms to thwart Assyria’s advances, it proved too little, too late (Isa. 7:1–2; see also 17:3). Then Judah became a target, and Assyria’s aim was clear: “Let us go up against Judah and terrify it, and let us conquer it for ourselves, and set up the son of Tabeel as king in the midst of it” (Isa. 7:6). Assyria was attempting to end the entire redemptive purpose of God and bring an end to the line of David. Ahaz, Judah’s king, thought that a way to survive this threat was to make an alliance with Assyria, but Isaiah made it clear: Ahaz was playing with fire (Isa. 7:17). Judah’s kings were no longer sovereign; they were puppets to the Assyrian hegemony. Even the otherwise godly Hezekiah, four decades after Ahaz, played the same deadly game, making a treaty with Pharaoh and thinking an alliance with Egypt would prevent Assyrian aggression. But Isaiah’s response was blunt: Hezekiah had made “a covenant with death, and with Sheol” (Isa. 28:15). Instead of trusting in the promises of God, exercising faith, the kings of Judah showed their soft underbelly, an inclination to trust their own ways rather than the word of the living and true God.

3. Isaiah is known as the evangelical prophet.

Amidst the decaying glory of the Davidic kingship, Isaiah prophesies, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isa. 7:14), and two chapters later:

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. (Isa. 9:6–7)

Seven hundred years before it happened, in the midst of Judah’s winter, Isaiah promises Christmas—the virgin birth of Immanuel, the Savior of sinners!

But that is not all. In addition to a promise of a coming king and ruler (see Isa. 11; 60), Isaiah is most known for his four Servant Songs (Isa. 42:1–9; 49:1–13; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12). The prophet foresees God’s coming and growing up as a man (Isa. 53:2–3) and becoming the Suffering Servant upon whose shoulders the sins of His people are placed. By way of substitution and satisfaction, the guiltless Servant will die and come to life again and divide the spoils of His victory (Isa. 53:7–12). In the closing verse of Isaiah 53, mention is made that the Servant “bore the sin of many” (Isa. 53:12, emphasis added). In a discussion with His disciples about who should be first in the kingdom of God, Jesus seemed to provide a summary of His mission: “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45, emphasis added; see also Matt. 20:28; John 13:1–17). Evidently, Jesus had reflected on these words about the Servant and understood them as speaking about Himself.