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Isaiah
A C A R F I L L E D W I T H F E S T I V E , laughing people grinds to a halt
as the old man flags them down. “Don’t go on!” the man shouts. “The
bridge is washed away.”
“Silly old man,” the people laugh. “Don’t listen to him.” The car
roars off into the darkness and plunges into a raging river. There are no
survivors.
What you will be
Nobody is that foolish, you might think. But the
reading about
people in the nation of Judah were. The prophet
Isaiah warned them, again and again, of the disas1:1– 5:30
Judah’s sins
ter that would happen if they did not get right with
God. “Silly old man,” they must have laughed.
6:1-13
God calls Isaiah to be a
Then they plunged headlong into disaster.
prophet
In the first thirty-nine chapters of the book,
Isaiah urged the people of Judah to repent of
7:1–12:6
Prophecies of the Messiah
their sins and get right with God. He pleaded for
spiritual and moral renewal. He told of the cap13:1– 35:10
Messages of judgment
tivity that would come if the people continued
against the surrounding
to ignore God. Living under the threat of invanations
sion and deportation, the Judeans should have
36:1– 39:8
listened to Isaiah. But they were too busy doing
God delivers Jerusalem from
their own thing. They didn’t have time for God.
Sennacherib
And so Isaiah’s words fell on deaf ears.
40:1– 41:29
Chapters 40–66 then take an abrupt turn. Even
God will comfort his people
though the people of Isaiah’s day would not lis42:1– 52:12
ten, the time was coming when people would
God’s Chosen One,
turn back to God. So for those who would listen,
the Servant-Messiah
Isaiah’s words here are filled with promise and
52:13 – 53:12
hope. They also include some of the most amazA prophecy of Jesus’
suffering and death on
ing prophecies in all of Scripture about the birth
the cross
and death of Jesus, the Messiah, 700 years before
54:1– 66:24
these events occurred! If you have listened to
Restoration for God’s people
Handel’s Messiah, you will recognize that much
of it comes from these later chapters of Isaiah.
Isaiah’s message could easily be interpreted as a message for his times, and
it was. But it is also a message for us today, nationally and personally. The erosion of the moral and spiritual fabric of a nation is the foreshadowing of the
disintegration of that nation. The nation that forgets God will wither and die,
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