Reading the book of Isaiah (or any other prophet) can be a little like looking through a kaleidoscope.  Bits and pieces of imagery make sense by themselves, but no matter how long you keep turning, no recognizable picture seems to take shape.

Part of this is just the nature of reading an ancient text.  We’re not familiar with the places or the events that would have been current to Isaiah’s audience.  Someone in Sicily, today, reading the words, “Remember the Alamo!” might not have any sense of how those words would still resonate in San Antonio Texas.  There is a much, much greater time and culture ‘distance’ between us and Isaiah’s 8th Century (BCE) Israelite audience than that.  Some modern translators attempt to close the gap for us using contemporary language, but in a book as old as Isaiah, there are figures of speech whose meanings have been lost forever, and the most translators can do is make their best guess based on their knowledge of Biblical languages and on the basis of the hints provided within the overall context of the passage.

Another part of the challenge of a book like Isaiah is the nature of Biblical prophecy.  The words on the page can be Isaiah’s words or others’ words, they can be God’s words spoken to Isaiah or God’s words spoken by Isaiah. Over the course of a single chapter, you might hear all four of these ‘voices’, with little to no indication in the text that the ‘speaker’ has changed.  Some prophecies are directed to cities or geographical sites (e.g., cities, mountains, plains).  This is a little like modern news reports that refer to ‘Beijing’ or ‘the Kremlin’ responding to an international incident; in the news these names are used to mean official government sources who represent the leader of that nation. In the Bible, the prophetic word spoken to the king, capital city, god, or landmark often leaves no doubt that the pronouncement is going to effect the entire nation, and not just the ruler, a city, or a landmark.

One other significant characteristic of prophecy is that it blurs the lines between the past, present, and future. A prophet often speaks about events in the future as though they were already in the past. A warning that judgment is coming soon can transition into a promise of restoration so quickly that it sounds like the judgment might not be coming after all. (It should be further noted that many of the Bible’s prophecies of judgment were never intended to come true. As with Jonah’s preaching to Nineveh, the whole point in sending the prophet to pronounce judgment was to get the people to change their ways so that God would not have to judge.)

Perhaps the most complex feature of prophetic time is the fusing of events in the near future with events in the ultimate future. In these cases, the prophetic word has two (sometimes more) fulfillments in view: one in the near future (say, Israel’s return from exile in Assyria/Babylon) and one in the distant future (the creation of a new heavens and a new earth). Isaiah speaks of them as if they are one and the same event. But from our vantage point in history, we can see that many prophecies operate on the basis of initial, partial fulfillment and later, complete fulfillment.

Other interpretive challenges could be mentioned, but the ones provided above should give us a better picture of the world we’re wading into when we open the books of the prophets. With respect to the question, “What does all this mean for me, today?” the answer is comparatively simple. God has a plan for the world – that it be a place of truth, compassion, righteousness, justice, and peace. The world, for the most part, is nothing like that – and so it stands under God’s judgment. God also has a people in the world – a people called to introduce all the nations of the world to His ways, to be a community that points beyond itself to the kind of life that God wants for all people. There is, however, the danger that God’s people will become exactly like the world that currently stands under God’s judgment. In that case, they themselves will experience the same judgment as the rest of the world – and God will use the very nations that His people were supposed to introduce to His ways as the instruments of His judgment upon His people. He will not do that, however, without warning them again, and again, and again. The fact that there are so many prophetic books* in the Bible testifies to God’s commitment to giving His people every opportunity to return to Him.

The prophets essentially have one message: “Return to Me, or experience the awful destiny of those who have become the worst possible version of themselves” (which is what we all become unless we grab hold of God’s instructions on how to have our humanity restored to us). They use stories from the past both to encourage and to warn. They try to help people connect the dots between their rejection of God and the desperate situations they are facing. They prophesy devastation in the future to warn people about the results of their chosen paths – but more than that, to invite them to change direction. Above all, they promise a certain future restoration. God is absolutely unwilling to give up on the people He created. When His people have experienced what it is like to live completely outside of the good and loving boundaries He gave them, they will discover that, in the midst of the destruction that their own choices have led to, God’s gracious promises of restoration still stand. It will kindle within them the hope that they have not permanently forfeited their access to the essential promise of the prophet: “Return to Me, and I will return to You.” As Paul says in Romans: it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance.

On a personal level, the prophets remind me consistently of three things:

• God is deadly serious about sin, righteousness, and a judgment to come

• all of the nations, as they are, stand under judgment

• as someone who has been called into the people of God, I therefore have two responsibilities: First, I need to maintain my distinctiveness (i.e., holiness, godliness) in the world or else I make myself ineffective as a signpost to the life that God desires for everyone He has made, and I run the risk of becoming part of the world that will ultimately come under God’s judgment.

Second, I need to pray for God’s mercy on the nations. I have to want what He wants: that none should perish. Not only that, but I need to be actively seeking to put Him on display – to image the Kingdom – in every area of my life. The main purpose of my life is to invite as many people as possible into the life that God intends for each person to have – a life that is referred to as “eternal” both because of the incomparable quality of it in the present, and because it will last forever.

Failure to recognize the three points above is what resulted in the castrophic destruction of God’s land, God’s Temple, and God’s people. If you read Isaiah (or Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, etc.), and you keep these priorities in the foreground, you will have ‘heard’ the Word of God spoken through the prophet – and it will bear the fruit that God originally intended that His word would produce. For additional perspective, the map below might be helpful. Almost all of the places pictured on the map are referred to in Isaiah. It also (literally) puts Jerusalem on the map for you – a tiny little spec sandwiched in between two of the world’s most powerful empires ever. It was the experience of being so located that provided occasion for God’s people to be tempted to rely on so many things other than God – military might, international alliances, wealth, strategy, and other gods. Coping mechanisms also abounded: the pursuit of luxury, partying, drunkenness… Those people who had power used it to exploit those who did not, and became wealthier and wealthier on the backs of poor laborers. Women and children were sold as slaves… It turns out that the world of 8th Century BCE Israel might not be so different from ours after all.