Okay, we're going to get into the book
of Isaiah today.
Let me just mention before I get started
that these are going to be expository messages
that I bring through the prophets, or at
least through Isaiah.
I'm hoping to get to the other prophets.
So, in other words, it's a preaching style
where you are going through the Word of
God and, you know, giving messages.
So it's some kind of mixture of teaching
and preaching.
Today is going to be all teaching because
it's introductory.
What I want to do is introduce the
book of Isaiah.
The title of my message is very lofty.
It's the Life and Times and Writings of
Isaiah.
That sounds pretty exciting, but one hour, I'm
not going to get too far into that.
But anyway, we'll give you a good overview,
I'm hoping, of who he was and, you
know, the times he lived in and so
on.
Isaiah was part of the aristocracy ruling in
Jerusalem in his time.
And someone said that he was the nephew
of King Uzziah.
And that very well could be the case.
And if it's the case, then that means
Uzziah's son, Jotham, which would be the second
king that Isaiah operated under, Jotham would have
been his cousin.
And then Jotham's son, Ahaz, would have been
his nephew.
And Hezekiah would have been his great-nephew,
right?
And Manasseh, Hezekiah's son, you know, you can
see now at this point, the familial connection
is being lost.
And we'll get into that a little bit
later.
But anyway, he definitely was part of the,
as I say, the aristocracy, the ruling upper
class, you know, of the time.
He mingled with royalty, that's for certain.
And he wasn't afraid to confront and to
tell it like it was.
And I want to read a little section
out of the pulpit commentary that kind of
gives a good sense about who this man
was and the way that he ministered as
a prophet during the 8th century BC.
Let me just read this.
Isaiah's temper is one of great earnestness and
boldness.
He lives under five kings of whom only
one is of a religious and God-fearing
disposition.
Yet he maintains towards all of them an
uncompromising attitude of firmness with respect to all
that bears upon religion.
He conceals nothing, keeps nothing back out of
a desire for court favor.
But this boldness and severity for God and
uncompromising sternness, where God's honor is concerned, are
counterbalanced by remarkable tenderness and compassion towards the
individuals who fall under notice as having provoked
God's anger.
As a writer, it is generally allowed that
Isaiah transcends all the other Hebrew prophets.
A lofty and majestic calmness, a grandeur and
dignity of expression is perhaps his first most
patent characteristic.
However strong the feelings that move him, he
always succeeds in maintaining a perfect self-control.
All right, so that just gives us a
little bit of a sense about who he
was and how he operated.
Isaiah truly was a great prophet.
You know, we think a lot about Jeremiah
because Jeremiah's story comes out in a richer
way, in more detail through his writings and
so on.
And so, you know, we think of all
that Jeremiah went through, and he truly was
a suffering prophet and, you know, and so
on.
Isaiah's greatness was different.
His greatness was in his ability to communicate
the heart of God in a very eloquent
fashion, you know, in a way that really
moved people and so on.
Well, anyway, I want to just kind of
give a backdrop on the day and age
which he lived.
You all have a timeline there with you,
and for those on the website, you can
just look over to the right side of
the page, and you'll see a link to
a timeline.
You can just click on that, and you'll
have the exact same thing we're looking at.
And let's just go down about, oh, maybe
about a third the way down this list
of Judean kings, just to kind of give
us a background of what was going on.
You see, Joash referred to his life covered
in 2 Chronicles 24, and then his son
Amaziah, and then his son Uzziah.
I did a message one time called the
Three Backslidden Kings, and these are the three
because they all started off well, and they
all ended poorly.
And so there was a kind of a
pattern being established here by these different kings,
the generations.
But Uzziah is the first important one because
now during his reign is when Isaiah is
born, as we'll see here in a minute,
and Uzziah was a great king.
He truly was a great king.
And during his time, Judah prospered and grew
into a very strong nation and so on.
And he reigned for a very long time,
51 years, I believe.
So that is kind of the backdrop of
what was going on at that time.
The northern tribes of Israel had long since
utterly given themselves over to idolatry.
And actually Uzziah, when he came into power,
King Jeroboam II in the northern tribes of
Israel, he was probably halfway through his reign,
and he also had a very strong reign.
King Jeroboam II was probably the strongest, most
prosperous of all the Israelite kings.
And he reigned, I think, for 40 years,
and he also had led the nation, the
northern tribes, into a time of prosperity and
strength.
So at this point, probably not long before
Isaiah was born, both sides, if I could
put it that way, the northern kingdom and
the southern kingdom, both countries were doing well
outwardly.
And we'll get into more of what was
going on in Uzziah's time later.
Anyway, you can see this timeline here that
goes in conjunction with these kings.
And I want to just say, well, first
of all, I got this particular timeline.
I chose this one out of the inductive
study Bible because it seemed as good as
any of the others I've seen.
I've seen a number of them, and they
all vary a little bit here and there,
but they're all fairly close.
I'd say the widest range that I've seen
on any date was maybe 20 years.
So these dates are fairly accurate.
They're close enough.
They're not perfect.
No one has a perfect dating system, and
there's some reasons for that.
Now, for one thing, there were different dating
systems that were incorporated during that time.
You know, the Egyptians had one dating system
and the Assyrians had another.
And depending on who the king was in
Israel or Judah, as to which dating system
they used.
For instance, I think it was the Egyptians
that would always count, if there's any portion
of a year in a king's reign, let's
say he came into power in December and
he left 20 years later in January.
Well, they would count them as full years.
So instead of it saying 20 years, he
reigned for 20 years, it was actually 22
years.
And you can see how over time that
would really throw off the whole system.
And it should be 20 years, but they
say 22 years.
And I think the Assyrians' system was the
opposite.
If there was any part of that year
that, you know, the same sort of thing,
they would throw out the whole year.
So anyway, whatever, just don't put too much
stock in the numbers.
Just let this timeline give you a general
reference as to when these different kings reigned
and what was going on at that time.
That will just save you a lot of
heartache if you don't get too hung up
on that.
I want to just apply to this timeline,
a timeline, you know, for Isaiah's life, sort
of a shorter version.
And let me just spend a few minutes
to go through his life.
He was probably born about 765 BC.
Again, you know, it could be a few
years in either direction.
But, you know, it was about that time.
And again, that was right pretty much in
the middle of King Uzziah's reign.
King Uzziah had a tremendously successful reign.
God really blessed this man.
And kingdom became stronger than it had ever
been since King Solomon's day.
So no king preceding Uzziah had led the
country into the condition that he did before
that.
Anyway, so about 15 years later, I'll say
750, Uzziah was struck down with leprosy.
And that occurred when he rose up in
pride.
He went into the temple and attempted to
perform one of the priestly duties in the
temple, which was to light the incense and
so on.
And the priests came in and tried to
stop him.
And he went into a rage as most
proud men do.
And as soon as he went into a
rage and reacted that way, God smote him,
and it says it that way, smote him
with leprosy.
Now, that was a very significant thing.
For all these years, he has enjoyed the
blessings of God on his reign, on his
kingdom.
But you know what happens?
You know, it happens to all of us.
When things are going our way, we just
tend to slip spiritually.
We tend to start becoming self-sufficient.
We tend to start becoming proud, start looking
at all of our accomplishments.
And before you know it, man, doom is
headed your way.
And he did this to himself.
I mean, he just was probably over a
matter of years, even growing increasingly more proud
and hard-hearted and self-righteous and who
knows what.
Until he finally had this experience.
I would imagine, just knowing how the Lord
is, that he probably sent people to try
to talk to him.
But, you know, all to no avail.
The significant part of this is this.
That Jotham, his son, came in and shared
the reign with his father.
But Uzziah, it seems as though he was
put into a leper house.
That word that says separate house, it could
mean a leper's house.
But one way or the other, we know
he was quarantined away from everyone.
I mean, there was nothing that you could
do to a man, especially in those days,
to more humble him than to smite him
with leprosy.
And he spent the remainder of his years,
by this numbering system, would be 11, and
that's probably about right.
The next dozen years or so, he spent
sequestered away in a house, covered with this
malignant disease.
And, you know, no one can come around
him.
If he did venture out into public, he
would have to cover his face and announce
to everyone that a leper was there.
I mean, it was just horrible, horrible disease.
So Jotham's reign really started well into, you
know, before Uzziah ever died.
So if this numbering system's right, Isaiah would
have been about 15 years old at this
point when this happened.
During those first years, it was Jotham now
who was the king.
All right, in 745, now this is a
date that is certain.
In 747, the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser came
into power.
And he was a very ambitious king, and
he was bent on conquest, and that spread
alarm everywhere, because Assyria was growing.
It was a growing power to the east,
you know, and everyone was taking notice of
it when Tiglath-Pileser came into power.
In fact, it says in 2 Kings 15,
19, that about that time, not long after
that, Assyria invaded Israel, and that was the
first out of four invasions down into Palestine.
But anyway, something was happening.
There was a lot of fear in the
air.
If we went back to the Cold War
years when, well, none of you hardly were
alive when I'm talking about, but in the
early 60s, like the Cuban Missile Crisis and
things like that.
John remembers it.
But anyway, it would have been like that,
you know, how we used to live with
a certain sense of dread in the United
States, because Russia was bent on conquest.
They were powerful.
You know, it would have been that way,
except that we were equals with Russia, and
it wasn't that way for Judah.
Judah was just a tiny, nothing scrap of
a nation, and Assyria is a world power,
you know, so that would have been the
difference there.
But anyway, when Tiglath-Pileser came into power,
it definitely affected things, and it must have
been right about that time that Isaiah was
called into the office of prophet.
So it would have been very close to
the same time.
And I just find that it's interesting that,
you know, these two events are coinciding.
And to me, it seems like the Lord,
that at the same time, he's creating a
little bit of fear in his people.
He's also raising up a prophet to announce
God's will and to warn them of judgment
and so on.
Well, next week, I'll get into the opening
chapters of Isaiah, and we'll talk more about
the word of the Lord that came through
Isaiah during this reign of Jotham and Uzziah.
All right, so 739, Uzziah finally succumbs to
the agonies of leprosy.
So he dies in 739, thereabouts.
And it is that year that Isaiah has
this tremendous vision recorded in Isaiah 6.
And I'll get into that, hopefully.
My plan is to in a couple of
weeks.
But that vision was almost unparalleled in Scripture,
especially during the Old Testament times.
Now, later, Daniel would have some pretty powerful
revelations of God and his throne and so
on.
And of course, in the book of Revelation,
John had some tremendous sights into what actually
goes on there.
But this was very powerful.
And it was a significant milestone in Isaiah's
life and ministry.
Okay, so a few years later, you know,
735, thereabouts, Jotham dies.
He was young, you know.
I don't know why.
Jotham seemed like he was a decent man,
not a great king like his father, but
a decent man and was trying to do
the right thing.
There's nothing said about him backsliding or anything
like that.
But on the other hand, he also wasn't
rooting out the idolatry that was going on
in the land at the time, you know.
So he wasn't strong in that sense.
But again, he was trying to do the
right thing.
And when he dies, his son Ahaz comes
into power.
And if you want to open up to
2 Chronicles 28, I want to just look
at a few verses here that kind of
sum up what Ahaz was like.
We're painting a picture of what it was
like for Isaiah to minister during this time
because he had just started getting his feet
under him as a prophet.
And Jotham dies and Ahaz takes power in
Judah.
So let's see what it was like for
this young prophet who was probably maybe 30
years old at this point.
Let's read these verses, 2 Chronicles 28, 1.
Ahaz was 20 years old when he became
king and he reigned 16 years.
I'll say 16 long, horrible years in Jerusalem.
And he did not do right in the
sight of the Lord as David, his father
had done, but he walked in the ways
of the kings of Israel.
So we see that he is following down
the same path, leading the nation into idolatry
and apostasy that the northern kingdom had already
long since given over to.
All right, but continuing here tells now what
some of the things he did.
He made molten images for the bales.
Moreover, he burned incense in the valley of
Ben-Hinnom and burned his sons in fire
according to the abominations of the nations whom
the Lord had driven out before the sons
of Israel.
He sacrificed and burned incense on the high
places, on the hills and under every green
tree.
And there was more to it than that.
He also, later we read that he closed
up the temple, locked the doors on the
temple and basically banned the worship of Jehovah
and so on.
So we see that Ahaz must have just
been a very wicked son.
You know, it kind of gives credence to
my thought of Jotham as being sort of
a benign ruler, you know, probably not a
strong ruler.
He was a decent man, but he probably
didn't discipline his son and so on, you
know, and probably let him just kind of
go his own way.
And this is where your own way often
takes you.
Anyway, I don't know, that's conjecture, but Ahaz
was a very wicked young man.
And so when Ahaz comes into power, God
starts raising up trouble for the nation of
Judah.
And of course, the people apparently are just
always right there ready to follow any wicked
king.
So this is what Isaiah came into in
a large portion of the first part of
the book.
Occurs during his reign.
Okay, so now a couple of years after
Ahaz takes power, Tiglath-Pileser invades Judah.
And we see that in verse 20, it's
mentioned.
I'm not getting into the story now, but
I'm just kind of touching on all of
this.
And then a few years later, Hezekiah comes
into power.
And things begin to change because Hezekiah apparently
saw the excesses of his father.
And, you know, just as he's biding his
time, waiting for his opportunity to rule in
the nation.
He's watching the mistakes his father is making.
He's seeing the judgment of God upon the
land.
And he's waiting for his opportunity.
And Ahaz is cut down also at a
young age.
I mean, he died at 36.
So I don't know how he dies.
It doesn't say.
But God struck him down and allowed Hezekiah
to come in and take power.
Well, Isaiah cut his teeth as a prophet
during Ahaz's reign.
But now he gets to enjoy 29 years
of respite, if I could put it that
way.
29 years instead of being treated with scorn
by his nephew or by this young king
anyway.
Now he begins to be brought into the
inner circle of advisors to the king.
And he started to be treated with respect.
So when Hezekiah comes to power, Isaiah was
about 37 years old.
And Hezekiah, it says here, was 25.
So we know there was a 12-year
difference or right around there, give or take.
Isaiah being a little bit older than Hezekiah.
And so anyway, Hezekiah is king for a
while.
And then Sargon, another king of Assyria who
had overthrown the previous king, captures Samaria, the
northern tribes of Israel, and takes them into
exile.
That is the end of the northern tribes,
722 BC.
That is also a date that you can
circle as certain.
God finally, after years of warnings and so
on, God finally put an end to the
nation of Israel, the northern tribes.
And it was probably about the next year
that Hezekiah instituted the Passover.
If you remember the story, that was one
part of the reforms that he brought in.
And I'll get into that later in the
book of Isaiah.
But one of those reforms was to get
the Passover established again.
And during that time, he sent out messengers
across the northern kingdom of Israel.
And there were still some Jews up there.
And so he tried to encourage them to
come down and get right with Jehovah.
All right, so that was 722.
701 is the next significant date.
And that is another date that is certain.
That's when Sennacherib invades Judah.
And we'll see that story in detail later.
I'll just mention here that 2 Kings 18
.13 says that it was the 14th year
of Hezekiah.
And according to this dating system, that wouldn't
be true.
It would be the 27th year.
But probably it was the 14th year of
his sole leadership.
And again, the dating system, I didn't think
to mention this also, is that a lot
of these kings would bring their son along
as co-regency.
So you have, let's say, Uzziah.
That was enforced.
But a lot of times it wasn't.
They just did it to try to teach
their son how to be a king.
And so there would actually be two kings.
The man and his son would reign at
the same time.
And so it just throws more confusion into
all the dating systems.
But anyway, 701, Sennacherib invades Judah.
And by this point, Isaiah is 64 years
old.
Right around there.
So when you're reading the story of all
that occurred during that time, well, Hezekiah is
about 50, 52.
And Isaiah is in his mid-60s.
Something like that.
And it was about that same time that
Hezekiah got sick and was healed.
And if that's the case, then we know
that Hezekiah died in 686 BC.
Because 701 is certain.
And we also know certain for certain that
Hezekiah died 15 years later.
So we know that Hezekiah died in 686.
Or, you know, within a year of that.
So that was when Manasseh takes over.
And it seems that during this period, during
the late years of Isaiah's life, he seems
to have retired from public life.
And it was probably during the first years
of Manasseh taking power that Isaiah kind of
backed off of, you know, being prominently involved
with things and so on.
And that seems to be when he wrote
the second part of the book of Isaiah,
which I'll talk about here in a minute.
Chapters 40 through 66.
The whole atmosphere of the book of Isaiah
completely changes with chapter 40.
It all shifts.
And so something is different.
There's definitely a time gap between the first
part of the book of Isaiah and that
last part.
It's like the whole style completely changed.
Anyway, let's look at 2 Kings 21 real
quick.
I want to just read the first few
verses again to kind of give a sense
about what it was like in Manasseh's time.
Manasseh was 12 years old when he became
king and he reigned 55 years in Jerusalem.
And his mother's name was Hephzibah, something like
that.
Now, again, it very well could be that
when it says he was 12 years old,
that he was brought into the throne room
of his father Hezekiah and was starting to
be trained in that.
I don't know.
But anyway, he didn't follow after his father's
footsteps, that's for sure.
Verse 2, he did evil in the sight
of the Lord, according to the abominations of
the nations whom the Lord dispossessed before the
sons of Israel.
For he rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah,
his father, had destroyed, I could say had
painstakingly destroyed.
And he erected altars for Baal and Madanasherah,
as Ahab, king of Israel, had done, and
worshipped all the hosts of heaven and served
them.
I mean, he completely gave over to idolatry.
He built altars in the house of the
Lord, of which the Lord had said in
Jerusalem, I will put my name.
For he built altars for all the hosts
of heaven in the two courts of the
house of the Lord.
He made his son pass through the fire,
practice witchcraft and use divination and dealt with
mediums and spiritists.
He did much evil in the sight of
the Lord, provoking him to anger.
It's incredible.
You know, so he's following in the footsteps
of his grandfather.
And look at verse 11.
Because Manasseh, this is what the Lord spoke
through the prophets.
I don't know if it may have been
Isaiah.
Because Manasseh, king of Judah, has done these
abominations, having done wickedly more than all the
Amorites did who were before him, and has
also made Judah sin with his idols.
Therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of
Israel, Behold, I am bringing such calamity on
Jerusalem and Judah that whoever hears of it,
both his ears will tingle.
I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of
Samaria and the plummet of the house of
Ahab, and I will wipe Jerusalem as one
wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it
upside down.
I will abandon the remnant of my inheritance
and deliver them into the hand of their
enemies, and they will become as plunder and
spoil to all their enemies, because they have
done evil in my sight and have been
provoking me to anger since the day their
fathers came from Egypt, even to this day.
Those two verses, verses 14 and 15, are
key, key verses in the Old Testament, because
that sums up really the Jewish nation.
But look at verse 16.
Moreover, Manasseh shed very much innocent blood until
he had filled Jerusalem from one end to
another, besides his sin with which he made
Judah sin in doing evil in the sight
of the Lord.
Okay, so that is King Manasseh where Isaiah
was forced to spend the rest of his
life.
We don't know how long he lived, but
there is a question about whether he was
martyred by Manasseh or not.
I don't know if you've ever run into
the question, but I want to tell you
why I believe that he was martyred.
And also, I should mention that all of
these notes, and especially things like this, are
on the notes section in the website.
You'll see right next to the timeline there
a link for notes, and that's where all
this stuff can be found.
Why do I believe that Manasseh martyred Isaiah?
Okay, well, let me give you five reasons.
Number one, Isaiah lived to complete the record
of the reign of Hezekiah, and of course,
survived him.
Number two, the testimony of the Jewish writers,
including Josephus.
In other words, this is a tradition that
goes back all the way to the early
Jewish writers.
And number three, that also was attested to
by the early Christian writers, Justin Martyr, Augustine,
Jerome, they all said that Isaiah was martyred
by Manasseh.
Number four is the verse we just read
here, verse 16, that says that Manasseh shed
innocent blood, basically killed many people, martyred many
people.
And lastly, Hebrews 1137, it states that some
of the ancient saints were sawn asunder.
This tradition actually came in two forms.
One was that Isaiah was fastened between two
planks and sawn in half that way, and
others said that he was put into an
empty log, and that was sawn in half.
But either way, it seems certain that that's
what happened to him.
Apparently, Manasseh's excuse to martyr Isaiah was that
Isaiah had claimed to see the Lord in
the sixth chapter, and Manasseh cited Exodus 33,
20, no man shall see me and live.
And so he used that as an excuse
to martyr this dear prophet.
Okay.
All right.
So that's a backdrop on his life.
At least it kind of gives you an
overview.
Are you guys keeping up with me?
Okay.
I know I've been kind of flying through
this.
Now, let me just talk about the book
of Isaiah for a minute.
It's very interesting.
There's 66 chapters in the book of Isaiah,
and there are 66 books in the Bible.
And also interesting is that the first section,
which is definitely different than the second section,
the first section has 39 chapters, and that's
how many books there are in the Old
Testament.
And not only that, but the flavor or
the atmosphere of those 39 chapters is primarily
denunciatory.
In other words, there's a lot of reproof,
there's a lot of warning of judgment coming,
and so on for their wickedness and sin,
which very much relates to the Old Testament,
the basic message of the Old Testament.
And the second section of the books, starting
with chapter 40, there's 27 chapters in that
section, and there's 27 books in the New
Testament.
And the primary message of it is a
gospel of salvation.
So it just is one of those fascinating
little tidbits that you run across sometimes in
the Bible.
You just get the sense that the Lord's
in it, that the Lord is just kind
of letting you know that it isn't the
way it is by accident, that He is
behind all of it.
And I'm going to break down the book
of Isaiah.
I mean, you can take it into those
two sections, but just to break it down
a little more detail, you're not going to
keep up with this.
Again, this will be in my notes, but
I'm doing this just to kind of give
you an idea of the flow of the
book.
The first section, which would cover the first
12 chapters, is a denunciation of Judah primarily.
And the second section, which would cover chapters
13 to 23, is a denunciation of other
nations.
The third section is known as Isaiah's Apocalypse.
That's chapters 24 through 27.
It's a fascinating section of scripture.
We'll get to that before long.
And the fourth section is, again, he returns
back to confronting Judah, but also Israel.
And that goes from 28 to 35 or
through 35.
The fifth section is a historical section of
the book, which is basically the story of
Hezekiah and Sennacherib and all of that, what
happened in Hezekiah's sickness and all of that
stuff.
So there's a little kind of in between
the first part of the book and the
second part of the book is this four
chapters dealing with history.
And then starting that second section, which would
be, you know, we'll say this the sixth
portion of the book, chapters 40 through 48,
what he does is he is addressing the
captives in Babylon as if he was there
right at the end of their captivity.
Now he's giving this 150 years before all
this happens, but he's prophesying as if he's
right there with them in Babylon, you know,
150 years later when they're about to be
released.
And those nine chapters 40 through 48, it's
a word of hope for the Jewish people
that God is gonna set them free.
And he says that in a number of
different ways and so on.
It's very interesting.
The next section is about the coming Messiah.
That's chapters 49 through 57.
And of course, within that is Isaiah 53,
the suffering servant, which is contrasted with the
triumphant coming Messiah, you know, and the Jews
had a hard time reconciling those two and
figuring it out and so on.
But anyway, that's that section.
And then the final section, chapters 58 through
66, deals with the Messiah's reign.
And a lot of that will be when
the new Jerusalem comes down to earth and
what life will be like under the government
of King Jesus.
All right.
And let me just mention a couple other
things about the flow of the book.
First of all, say it's chronological.
Almost every commentary agrees with this, that in
other words, it starts with chapter one and
moves all the way through chronologically.
You could almost, you know, attach sections to
the different kings.
And again, this last section from 40 to
66 apparently was written during Manasseh's wicked reign.
So it's laid out chronologically.
And, you know, I'll just mention that Isaiah
and probably the case with most of the
prophets, these were prophecies that were delivered verbally
and then written down later.
That seems to be the case.
And it very much seems to be a
compilation of just a lot of different prophecies
that Isaiah gave during his long years as
a prophet there in Judah.
All right.
We got a few minutes left and I
want to just touch on one final thing.
And that is that there's been a lot
of debate over whether or not there were
two different people who wrote the book of
Isaiah.
If you've ever heard the term Deutero-Isaiah,
that is a term that was created by
the higher criticism people who mostly existed 100
years ago and before.
They did not believe that the Isaiah of
the first 39 chapters was the same person
who wrote the last 27 chapters.
They believed it was written by two different
people.
And primarily the reason they believe that is
because they could not imagine a prophet writing
with the exact detail that he wrote with.
For instance, mentioning King Cyrus by name, which
he does on a couple of occasions.
And so they're like in their fleshly mindset,
probably unsaved theologians.
This all started in Germany back in the
mid 1800s.
They can't imagine that God could actually tell
one of his prophets a name, and such
detail about so many of the things that
would happen in Babylon and so on.
But I want to just give you some
arguments in favor of the unity of this
book.
In other words, that it was written by
one man and that man was Isaiah.
First of all, even though the flavor changed
and in some ways the style changed from
chapter 40 on, the basic writing style remained
the same throughout the whole book.
Ways of saying things and ways that he
would just communicate different things, terms that he
would use, all those remain the same.
Even though the message became much softer and
it did seem to be like at a
different time period.
Well, that would make sense that there was
a period of time that Isaiah was hiding
out or whatever.
And then he came forth with these final
prophecies.
Also as early as 250 BC, the entire
contents of the book were being ascribed to
Isaiah by various Jewish writers.
In 132 BC, the Septuagint Greek Old Testament
accepted it as one book.
You would think that if it was two
books, they would have had the book of
Isaiah and then the book of whoever the
other guy was or whatever.
But no, and this is just a few
hundred years later, they're accepting it as one
book.
Josephus ascribes the prophecies found in the second
part of the book to Isaiah.
That's another argument.
But the crowning argument, the coup d'etat
as John would say of this is that
a number of New Testament writers in referencing
statements made by Isaiah during the second half
of the book said the prophet Isaiah said,
and I have a list of them here.
I don't know if you would want them.
Should I read them out?
Okay.
Matthew 3, 3 is referencing Isaiah 40, verse
3.
Matthew 8, 17 is referencing Isaiah 53, verse
4.
Matthew 12, verses 17 to 21 is referencing
Isaiah 42, one through four.
Mark 1, verses 2 and 3 references Isaiah
41, 3.
Luke 3, verse 4 references Isaiah 40, verse
3.
Luke 4, 17 to 19 references Isaiah 61,
verses 1 and 2.
John 1, 23 references Isaiah 40, verse 3.
John 12, 38 references Isaiah 53, 1.
Acts 8, 28 to 33 references Isaiah 53,
verses 7 and 8.
And then in Romans 10, there's three different
verses Paul references here.
Romans 10, 15, he references Isaiah 52, 7.
And then in verse 16, he references Isaiah
53, 1.
And then in verse 20, he references Isaiah
65, verses 1 and 2.
So to me, that is the clincher.
You know, there is no argument after that.
If Jesus Christ and other New Testament writers
say that the prophet Isaiah said such and
such, that's it.
There is nothing else to argue about.
You know, I mean, there is no point
in even debating it after that.
And I don't know why they were so
certain.
They were just so full of unbelief.
And I could just kind of end it
with this, that in our day and age,
the attack on the word of God has
taken a different form.
In that time, from about 1850 to maybe
the early 1900s, the form that the attack
came was this school of higher criticism, where,
you know, all of a sudden, they're coming
into their own intellectually, and they're gonna start
examining everything the Bible says and all of
that.
And of course, these things come and go.
Satan is always trying to attack the word
of God, but it will stand forever.
Amen?
Okay.
God bless you.
Amen.