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If I asked you who Isaiah was, you would probably say he was a prophet. But what is a prophet? Often people think prophecy is about telling the future. But although that comes into it (as I’ll mention later), prophecy is a much more wide ranging activity. A handy definition, which I’ll come back to, is this: a prophet is someone who reveals the mind of God.
That’s one reason why attempts to match chapters of prophecy to specific events that they seem to predict are often fraught and contentious. Prophecy is not a simple long range weather forecast: the same passage of prophecy can be about historical events, about events in the future and about eternal, recurring truths. All this is jumbled together, and reading it literally will miss much of what it has to tell us, for each part bears on all the others. For this reason we can re-read these scriptures so often and always find something new. And it explains why, if two people collect different meanings from the prophets, they may still both be right.
Let me, then, tell you four different ways in which Isaiah in the passage we read is, I believe, revealing the mind of God. First of all, he is saying something about the past – his past and our past and the past of the people of Israel to whom he is speaking. We know pretty well when Isaiah lived. At the beginning of the book we read that Isaiah’s vision came to him “during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah”. These were kings of Judah spanning the period 792 BC to 686 BC. We don’t know exactly when he was born, but can guess at around the middle of the eighth century BC. You notice, then, that Isaiah sits about half way between the Exodus, usually dated 1446 BC, and the first Easter – I’ll come back to this subject. And from this vantage point, God, through Isaiah, reminds the people of Israel what he did for them:
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you… (v 2)
I give Egypt for your ransom (v3)
This is what the Lord says – he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, (v 16)
Who drew out the chariots and horses, the army and reinforcements together (v17)
No pious Israelite could have heard these words without being put in mind of the Exodus. God is reminding his people that he was and always will be, in the words of the hymn, their Strong Deliverer.
So that’s one way that Isaiah reveals the mind of God: as so often elsewhere God is asserting is special concern for the people of Israel.
But as well as recalling how he has cared for them in the past, God also speaks of their future.
Forget the former things; do not dwell in the past.(v 18)
See, I am doing a new thing (v19)
Now, we need to take a little technical excursus here. Our passage today is from what some people call “Second Isaiah” – chapters 40 to 66. We can tell from many specific references to people and places that these chapters are addressed in the first instance to the people of Israel during their exile in Babylon. For example chapter 44 refers to Cyrus who “will say of Jerusalem, ‘Let it be rebuilt’”: and Cyrus, as you will recall, was the king of the Persians who conquered Babylon and encouraged the Israelites to return to Jerusalem. Chapters 40 to 66 are also known as the Book of Comforts – chapter 40 begins “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God”. They are plainly intended, among other purposes, to give encouragement and hope to the people of Israel in Babylon.
This has of course been the subject of controversy. For it will not have escaped your notice that it was only in 586 BC that the army of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and carried the people of Israel off to their exile. In other words, a hundred years after Isaiah’s time of prophecy came to an end. This has lead some scholars to believe the book of Isaiah had two authors who wrote at different times. This is a respectable point of view, but my own opinion, equally defensible by reference to the text, is that it was all written by the same man, and that in the Book of Comforts, that is in the passage we read, God through Isaiah is speaking to a people yet unborn.
For your sake I will send to Babylon and Bring down as fugitives all the Babylonians , in the ships in which they took pride (v 14)
It’s as though Charles Dickens had written words of encouragement to the people of London during the Blitz. And that of course sounds pretty strange. But then prophecy, the speaking in words of God’s mind, is pretty strange, and a little thing like speaking to the needs of a people yet unborn should not surprise us.
So that’s the second way Isaiah is speaking the mind of God: he is speaking God’s words of comfort to the people of Israel, two and a half thousand years in our past and a century in his future.
Now, leaving scholarly considerations on one side, my belief that there was no second Isaiah, that the Book of Comforts was indeed written, by divine inspiration, a hundred or more years before it was needed, is strengthened by the following observation: that the Israelites in Babylon are not the only people yet unborn to whom God speaks through Isaiah. For this passage of prophecy is not just a book of Comforts for the exiles in Babylon. It’s a book of comforts for us. As we’ve been reminding ourselves this week, the book of Isaiah, particularly the later chapters, are peppered with prophecies fulfilled in the life of Jesus. So when God says through Isaiah
Fear not, for I have redeemed you ; I have summoned you by name; you are mine (v 1)
He is not speaking just to the people of Israel in their exile in Babylon. He is speaking to all his people, you, me, everyone in Fulbourn, every subject of the Queen, every person who lives or has lived or will live in the whole globe from the Inuit in Greenland to the Bushmen in the Kalahari.
I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west
I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back’
Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth (vv 5-6)
…
All the nations gather together and the peoples assemble (v 9)
This is not just about the people of Israel in exile in Babylon, is it? No. For we are all in exile. We all like sheep have gone astray. Through wrong use of the freedom that God gave us, we have cut ourselves off from him. Through Isaiah God says to all of us that he will not leave us in the exile into which we have sent ourselves.
Isaiah is of course writing in high poetry. For the bald and prosaic restatement of these eternal truths we can turn to that master of the unadorned technical exposition, St Paul. He’s like [the man] in Dragnet - Just the facts please.
For what I receive I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.
It can be no co-incidence that, as I said, Isaiah sits in history exactly half way between the parting of the Red Sea and the discovery of the empty tomb. God’s first rescuing of his people from Egypt foreshadows his great rescue of all of us through the Cross in many ways. Isaiah stands in between these two events, and draws our attention to their similarity. In both, God’s people are in exile; and in both, God redeems them at a great cost.
Why God chose the Cross as his method for wiping out our sins and opening the way to a true relationship with himself is a big subject – bigger than this sermon. But one thing we can learn from Isaiah is that however it was to be done, it was not going to be easy. It’s going to cost a lot.
I give Egypt for your ransom, Cush and Seba in your stead… (v 3)
I will give men in exchange for you and people in exchange for your life (v 4)
Now, when we read prophesy we have to distinguish between the figurative and the literal. And I think these are figurative sayings. They are hints of the stupendous price God will pay to redeem his people – the Israelites from Babylon and us from sin. To redeem us he gave in the last resort not Egypt, Cush or Seba, but his only son.
So that’s the third way that Isaiah is making God’s mind known: he is describing the first Easter.
Finally, though, as well as telling us about that great event in history that we have been remembering and celebrating this weekend, he is also telling us about what it means to us today. For as you will know, crucifixion and resurrection are not just a story that sets a moral example; they are events which have changed the world in its most profound aspects. Isaiah’s prophesy tells us about this change. When God says through Isaiah
Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? (vv 18-19)
we are warranted in taking him to be speaking not just about the Israelites in Egypt, not just about the exiles in Babylon, not just about the world at the time of the first Easter, but about us, here, now.
I am sure many of us feel exiled from time to time – this is certainly true of me. Well, saying “exiled” is a bit general, a bit too figurative. Let me give you some examples of what I mean. One might, for example, have behaved badly to a friend or a relation – either by doing something cruel, or by failing to forgive and see the other person’s point of view. And one might then feel “there’s no getting over that, there’s no point hoping we can really be friends again”. One might have some kind of failure at work and think “nobody values what I do and I’ll never believe in myself”. Maybe you have had the experience of being with a group of friends and thinking “nobody really understands what I’m talking about or how I feel”. Or perhaps, no matter how full of good things your life is, you wake up one morning and just want to pull the covers over your head and blot it all out.
Well if any of that is familiar to you as it is to me, then Isaiah has something about the mind of God to reveal in his prophesy. Not that these feelings are mistaken. No. We are exiles in this vale of tears we call the fallen world, cut off from God by our own sin and the malice of others. The message of Isaiah is that our exile is not permanent. Remember, the people of Israel were in Babylon for fifty years. They would have thought “things are not going to get any better – we’re never going home”. But God is not about never. This is part of the Gospel that, as Paul reminds us, we have received, and on which we can take our stand. The Book of Comforts is a book of comforts for us, this week in Cambridgeshire. We can bet on it, even if it seems too good to be true. Through Isaiah God says to each of us, no matter how far gone we may think ourselves, “See, I am doing a new thing!”