Adult Class
December 2006-May 2007
Isaiah
Lesson 3: Future Glory, Present Judgment
After God’s declaration of judgment on Judah and Jerusalem, He held out hope of a future restoration of His people. Just as a tree can be cut down, yet shoots come up out of the stump, so His destruction of Judah will result in One who will rise from the desolation to provide glory for the people.
4:2-6—The Branch
Isaiah, more than any other prophet, is concerned with the coming Messiah. He has a wealth of prophetic declarations pointing toward the redemption of all of God’s people. Here, the first clearly identifiable discussion of the Messiah in this book identifies Him as the “Branch of the Lord.” This shows that the Branch comes from the Lord. This same imagery is adopted by Jeremiah much later (Jeremiah 33:15).
The remnant of the people will be called holy and God will, Himself, cleanse them with a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire. This process is probably the very thing that John the Baptist referred to in his remarks to the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 3:11. He understood the impact of the coming of the promised Messiah!
In addition, the appearing of the Messiah calls forth the imagery of the Exodus—the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, the visible presence of God. This will be obvious to the “assembly” and will provide protection from all harm and danger. The point to this brief chapter is merely that the coming of the Messiah will be a time of great glory and blessing for all God’s people.
It is worth contemplating that God’s declarations of judgment are liberally sprinkled with offers of grace and promises of glorious restoration for the penitent. God had a plan in motion from before the beginning to provide redemption for humanity (1 Peter 1:20). Even though Israel proved faithless, God showed His faithfulness and completed His task of mercy and grace.
5:1-7—The Song of the Vineyard
Isaiah begins by announcing that he will sing a song for his “friend.” His song will be a song about the friend’s vineyard. The friend is identified as God; the vineyard is identified as Israel. God did everything He could, far beyond reason, to ensure a healthy environment for His cultivation. He chose the vine (nation) by His sovereign grace and installed it in the choicest location. He expected that it would bear proper fruit (Galatians 5:22-23) but instead it produced a worthless, useless crop.
God appealed to the nation to serve as judge, to decide whether He had somehow been negligent in His care so as to deserve the crop. He knew that He done far beyond anything necessary. In response to the nation’s rejection, He will remove its protection and quit wasting His effort on it. This forms the basis for Jesus’ parable in Matthew 21:33-41, which convicted the chief priests and scribes of malfeasance in their leadership of the people of Judah in that day.
Since God removed the protection of the nation, it will swiftly be overrun by predators. It will be like the Garden after Adam and Eve sinned—it will bear thorns and thistles. God wanted justice from His people—the obedience to His law—but instead found only lawlessness, corruption and violence.
Those who are greatly blessed by God have a great obligation to Him as well. It is our responsibility to live in harmony with His will and to demonstrate the kind of lives that reflect well on Him. It is the worst sort of ingratitude to receive from God’s hand the blessings of mercy, grace, peace, redemption, and hope and then despise Him and His will for our lives. We must live lives worthy of the great grace we have received (Ephesians 4:1).
5:8-30—Hard times ahead, especially for some
The greedy swallowed up all the property they could, never satisfied with their holdings and unwilling to abide by the law of Jubilee. In response to these characters, God promises their efforts will be worthless. Their great land will yield a fraction of a harvest, so the great estates will be abandoned.
The debased spend all their time indulging only their own pleasures. They can’t be bothered to know and do the will of the Lord. In response, God will send them into exile, where there are no pleasures. The dead will be without number and there will be no future for the survivors.
The mockers carry with them their sin, yet they despise the word of the Lord and mock anybody who seeks to please Him. They deride His plan, but they will experience it in its fullness when God’s destruction is visited upon them.
The wicked deliberately turn righteousness upon its head. They redefine matters so that what is good is called “bad” and what is truly bad is extolled as “good.” It is impossible to miss the application to our world, as sin is casually redefined as a “lifestyle choice,” and the oppression of whole classes of people is called “commitment to diversity.” Entertainment media glorify violence and mayhem of every kind, and greed is celebrated at nearly every level.
The arrogant already know everything they need to know and cannot be corrected by anything God might say or do.
The corrupt use their positions of power only to enrich themselves and further entrench their power.
In response to all this, God is bringing destruction on the nation. He will extend His hand against the people of Israel—but that is not all. He will also bring against the nation an army of invaders who will overwhelm the land. This alone should strike terror into the hearts of the people, since it was a long-established understanding that while God may be swayed to mercy, human beings cannot be touched (2 Samuel 24:14).
The prophet’s role was to speak the word of God. He had no discretion to choose a message; he could only say what God gave him (Isaiah 5:9). It gave Isaiah no pleasure to announce the doom of Israel and to endure the rejection of the masses. However, he had to say what God gave him to say. And God gave him a hard message to deliver.