I Am the LORD, the Holy One of Israel - Isaiah 42:1-43:15

I’ve decided we need to host a Prophecy Conference.  We need to invite some big-name TV preachers and prophecy teachers who specialize in the study of the timing of the the Rapture.  They could tell us who Gog and Magog are, they could explain all about the battle of Armageddon, and they could warn us about the terrors of not being ready and being left behind to experience the wrath of God during the Great Tribulation.  After all, that’s what prophecy is all about.

In recent decades, nearly all talk among Evangelicals regarding the topic of prophecy has been assumed to be a discussion about the End Times (or Eschatology).  But if you were to hold a Prophecy Conference and the main topic was The Prophecies of Isaiah, no one would show up.  There’s just not that much entertainment value in Isaiah or his prophecies.  And that’s really a shame.  Because in the words of Isaiah we find some of the most God-exalting passages in all the Bible. 

But I believe that is exactly why most people aren’t interested.  Popular prophecy conferences, as they have been presented over the years, are remarkably man-centered affairs.  More specifically, they are Israel-centered.  It has been commonly taught by many that we must watch the nation of Israel if we really want to know what God is doing in the world.  As we read the news and listen to reporters talk about Israel and the Middle East, we’re seeing Bible prophecy unfold before our eyes.  And the primary  purpose is in order to know who the AntiChrist is so we can be prepared to be taken up to glory before the bad stuff, the 7-year Great Tribulation, begins.

I liken this teaching to a kind of sanctified Escapism.  End Times prophecy teaching is more about avoiding the Great Tribulation than it is about the gospel and avoiding the final judgment.  One gets the distinct impression that the Great Tribulation may be worse than Hell itself.  Many prophecy teachers confuse and meld together the doctrine of the rapture of the church with the doctrine of salvation so that it’s hard to know which one they believe is more important.

And it is easy to see how compelling such Prophecy teaching is if the Rapture can happen at any moment, as some believe.  That would tend to bring urgency to the matter!  “You had better get right with God because Jesus could show up before I finish this sentence!“  This is the Doctrine of Imminence which teaches that the Rapture of the Church could happen at any time with no (or almost no) prophetic signs attending to it.  Without any prior warning, Christ will come and take His church away “in the twinkling of an eye”. 

And of course, the popular notion is that planes piloted by Christians will fall from the sky, and Christians driving cars will disappear, and there will be pandemonium.  Those left behind will either be converted because they suddenly understand all that talk about the Rapture was true, or they will claim that aliens have conducted a mass abduction of religious fanatics and the world is better off because of it.

The downside to these doctrines (aside from just being wrong), is they unwittingly cause many Christians to become lackadaisical and unconcerned and apathetic about Bible study that does not somehow relate to endtime events.  What’s the point of delving into the deeper things of the Bible and spending years in Bible college and seminary learning the original languages so you can study the Old Testament?  What’s the point of investing your money and your life in a church family if we’re all gonna be gone to glory any second now?  And more to the point of our study today, what’s the use reading and studying Isaiah?

The book of Isaiah is not greatly concerned with the Last Days.  But it is greatly concerned with prophecy.  And it is remarkably God-centered.  In reading Isaiah, we see how God preserves the people of Israel, and how God will accomplish His plan to bring redemption to the entire world through Israel.  In those two things we should find ourselves in awe of the magnificence of God Himself.

God, through the prophet, is having an extended conversation with the people of Judah.  It is a prolonged discussion which spans many chapters, regarding their future and the future of the rest of the world.  He is talking about how He will redeem them and send Christ into the world.  Here are some themes we see throughout Isaiah and in these two chapters :

•    Jehovah is the God and Savior and the Holy One . . . of Israel.
•    God, who controls all of history, is THE one and only true God and there is no other.
•    God is the sovereign ruler over all the nations, not just Israel, and they are all at His disposal.
•    God has a peculiar love for His peculiar people: OT Israel and all the redeemed.
•    Because Jehovah is God, He cannot fail in the accomplishment of all of His purposes, namely the glorification of His own name through the redemption of His own people everywhere.

Paul commanded Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture.  I want to read to you and with you, beginning in Isaiah 42, verse 1, and read down through chapter 43, verse 15.  I think it will be clear to us that the focus of this text is not Israel, or the nations, or us.  This text draws our attention to God Himself.

In verse 9, God said that the former things which He declared have come to pass, and now He is going to declare new things that will come to pass in the future. Verses 10 - 13  are those "new things", namely His salvation which will extend to the Gentiles and their rejoicing in it.  That is a new thing as far as Israel is concerned.  No one is quite sure where Kedar and Sela (v 11) are, but they are not Jewish cities.  "The end of the earth" is not Jerusalem.  The seacoasts and the coastlands are references to the Gentile nations, most likely those which surround the Mediterranean Sea.  And the inhabitants of all these places will sing, lift up their voices, shout, give glory to God, and declare His praise because of the salvation in the Lord Jesus that will come to them.  The Lord Jesus will not be a Savior for the Jews alone, but also for the nations.

Then, in verse 13 we see the Lord warring zealously against His foes.  The redeemed have cause to rejoice when God "shows Himself mighty against His foes".  Why?  Because God’s foes are our foes.  Whoever God considers to be an enemy had better be my enemy also.  But this will take place in a new realm, amongst the Gentiles.  Rejoicing among the Gentiles for God’s defeat of His Gentile enemies.  These are the "new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them." 

And even though Isaiah speaks so clearly of this future inclusion of the Gentiles in redemption, the Jews still missed it.  They did not anticipate God ever being the Savior of non-Jews in the same way as He is the Savior of the Jews.  Even today the Jews consider Christianity to be a cult that grew out of first century Judaism.  But what makes things even worse is that so many within the church today STILL want to keep the believers of Israel and the Christians of the nations separated as two different entities.  Paul tells us the New Testament church consists of both believing Jews and believing Gentiles that have been grafted together as one church.  Here in these pages we see that Isaiah prophesied concerning this very thing.

Verses 14 - 17  Lack of obvious action on God's part should never be interpreted as a sign that all is well.  Apparently, the Jews felt that since God wasn’t raining fire and brimstone on them, everything must be OK.  “We must be doing something right!“  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  While God held His peace and restrained Himself, the fire of His anger slowly burned.  Eventually, His anger will spill over and He will bring Babylon to come and destroy Jerusalem. 

Then, after the remaining remnant of the Jews spends 70 years in exile, God will once again act by means of Cyrus, the king of the Persians, and destroy Babylon.  Like a pregnant woman who is anxious and in agony to see the inevitable birth finally take place, so God will be anxious and in agony to finally deliver His justice to the nations.

Destruction of the land will be extensive, and the captivity of the spiritually blind Jews will be accomplished by carrying them to a place they have never seen: Babylon.  But even in all of this, God's sovereign hand is at work.  In spite of their rejection of Him and their love affair with the idols of the Gentiles, God preserves a remnant of His people for His own glory, while punishing Judah for her spiritual adultery.

Verses 18-25 explain the spiritual deadness of the Jews.  It would seem that these words of Isaiah would forever cure the people of Israel from trusting in their religious heritage to commend them to God.  In spite of God's dwelling with them, performing remarkable miracles on their behalf, granting them numerous victories over all their enemies, providing them with the temple worship and the sacrifices, they STILL go the way of the Gentiles by rejecting Jehovah and embracing polytheistic idolatry.  They have become worse than the Gentiles because they exchanged the truth of God for lies and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator.

Consequently, God characterizes them as spiritually deaf and blind.  Judah is remarkably blind!  None are as depraved as she is (vs18-20).  In spite of the fact that God gave them His glorious Law, they jettisoned it all and were plundered and looted by all their enemies (vs22&24).  And it is a sovereign God who sends them.

God says, in essence, "I take responsibility for your destruction because I sent it." (v24)  But the people are so dull they do not even understand their destruction comes from the God who finally became weary of holding His peace and so punished His wayward people.  He finally gave vent to His anger which He had held for so long.

Two things we see here that are unmistakable: God is a holy and sovereign God, and men are held responsible by God for their sin.  God, in His absolute rule over men and nations, will raise up the enemies of Israel to punish them.  But even though Israel will be punished by God, they not be forsaken.  God loves His people.

Chapter 43, verse 1  Israel's existence as a nation is because of God's creation of them as such.  They were created by His sovereign hand in calling Abraham from Ur, by miraculously giving Abraham children, by multiplying his physical descendants, and by increasing them to become a nation of 2 to 3 million people during their 400 years of bondage in Egypt.  He is personally responsible for their existence.  Consequently, they belong to Him.  "You are mine."

While God is speaking to and dealing with Israel as a nation about their redemption, it must be understood that this redemption (Fear not, for I have redeemed you) is a national redemption, not a personal, individual redemption for the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.  God is going to redeem and restore the nation of Israel from their 70 years of captivity in Babylon because He has set His love upon them, and because He has a great plan, a holy purpose for their continued existence: the coming of the Holy One of Israel, their Messiah, in the flesh, to save them and all who believe in Him from their sins (Mt. 1:21).  He redeems the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon in order to preserve the line of David, send the Lord Jesus, and accomplish the redemption of spiritual Israel, all the elect from every nation, through His sacrifice of Himself for their sakes.

This is more of the future “new thing” that God is proclaiming which idols cannot do.  It is this act of foretelling the history of the world that separates the one true God from the multitude of false ones. 

Verse 2  What does it sound like God is talking about here?  God has already proven His trustworthiness to Israel in the past by going with them through the waters (the Red Sea) and through the rivers (the Jordan).  So His past faithfulness in delivering them from Egypt is sufficient reason to trust Him for their future deliverance from Babylon.  In the not too distant future, three young Jews will literally go through the fiery furnace accompanied by the Son of God. (Daniel 3:25ff)  Surely their experience of deliverance from the flames will bring to mind these verses from Isaiah.

Verses 3-7  speak of the nature of God's care for His people Israel.  He will redeem them because of who He is: "the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior."  The Servant is also the Holy One of Israel, who is also their Savior, who is also Jehovah their God.  In other words, Jesus is God.

One of the measures of God's love for His people is His willingness to give, or in some way sacrifice other nations for their sakes.  The most blatant example of this is Egypt: "I give Egypt as your ransom."  What does He mean by this?

What has already happened in the past is an example of what God will continue to do for Israel's sake.  All the first born of Egypt were killed by the Angel of Death (most likely the pre-incarnate Christ), for the sake of Israel's redemption from slavery.  The entire nation of Egypt was decimated for the sake of Israel and they were redeemed by the deaths of an entire generation of Egyptians.

The army of the Assyrians was sacrificed for the sake of Judah when the Angel of the Lord went through their camp and slew 185,000 men in one night.

Babylon will suffer a similar fate at the hands of Cyrus, king of the Persians. Through the overthrow of the Chaldeans, Cyrus will set God's people free to go once again to the promised land and rebuild Jerusalem so that they might become a nation once again.

Jews will return to Israel from everywhere they have been scattered by their enemies (and ultimately by God).  And all of this will be, not primarily for the sake of the Jews, but primarily (as is the case with absolutely everything) for the sake of the glory of God (v7).

Verse 4-7  These are precious words in the ears of a deaf nation.  God refers to them as precious and honored and loved.  He calls them sons and daughters (v6).  He promises to deliver them from their enemies and bring them from north, south, east and west (vs 5&6), from the ends of the earth.

But these are a particular people, "everyone who is called by My name."  Not everyone, but only those whom He has set His love upon for His own glory.  He loves them above the nations. This is a discriminating love which God reserves for His own people, His nation.

Verses 8-13  God then calls upon the deaf and blind nations to give testimony to the things of the past and explain the events of history.  This is a continuation of God's challenge to idolators and their idols in 41:21-24 to divine the past and the future, which they clearly cannot do.

Continuing the challenge, God now calls upon the people of Judah to be witnesses (vs 10, 12) to what He has done among them in the past when there were no other "gods" in their midst, and to be witnesses regarding what Isaiah is about to prophecy and declare concerning their future.

God's own "proof" of who He is and that He is the only true God is shown by the testimony of His witnesses, the people of Israel.  They can testify that of all the gods, only Jehovah is able to save (v11). Only Jehovah can, and does accomplish all His purposes (v13), and no one can thwart Him.

The purpose of the prophetic scriptures, and the rest of the entire Bible, is not to cause us to focus on ourselves, but on God.

•    Jehovah is the God, the Holy One of Israel in particular whom He created, and His Servant is the Savior through whom He will redeem a people for Himself from every nation on earth.
•    The God of Israel is the God who controls all of history for His own purposes, and His purposes are good.
•    God is the sovereign ruler of all the nations, not just Israel, and they are all at His disposal to carry out His perfect will, according to His own good pleasure.
•    God has a peculiar love for His peculiar people: All the redeemed.
•    God will accomplish all His purposes.  He cannot fail.

We are to be in awe of such a great God who has loved us as He has, and praise Him constantly for who He is.