Isaiah
Part 1
Prophets
Pastor Charles Price
If you have got your Bible this morning I am going to read from the book of Isaiah. Now I know that in North America you often pronounce this name in a way I can’t even pronounce it – Isaiah? Is that how you say? Isaiah.
Well Isaiah is the way I grew up pronouncing it – I guess it’s the English way – and it is indelibly fixed in my mind, so even if I tried to pronounce it incorrectly to please some of you, I would revert back to my traditional understanding.
When I was a boy in the little church I used to go to, we had guest speakers; visiting speakers, most Sunday evenings and we had a man who had a rather unusual face which was slightly distorted. One side of his face seemed higher than the other and the other side lower, and we used to call him Isaiah because one eye is higher than the other.
And so that’s who I picture when I think of Isaiah.
But I want to read to you from Chapter 1 and Verse 1, which says,
“The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz, saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.”
Now for some of you, your eyes are already starting to glaze over with names of people you don’t know, not quite sure where they all fit in. But Isaiah there simply introduces us to the historical context of his ministry which extended up to 60 years. That would be the period covered by those reigns.
But now turn to Chapter 8 and let me read to you the first three verses. Chapter 8:1:
“The LORD said to me, ‘Take a large scroll and write on it with an ordinary pen: Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.
“And I will call in Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Jeberekiah as reliable witnesses for me.’
“Then I went to the prophetess, and she conceived and gave birth to a son. And the LORD said to me, ‘Name him Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.
“Before the boy knows how to say, ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria.’”
That is as far as I am going to read.
If we were to live next door to Isaiah and his family, we might find them to be rather unusual neighbors. Isaiah was a prophet, which meant that he spent much of his time telling people things they really didn’t want to know.
Basically a prophet specialized in talking about three things. First of all they told people what was wrong with the world, and in particular, what was wrong with Israel and Judah, the land in which Isaiah was living.
Their messages were diagnostic in nature in the first instance. They might say, “This is what is happening, but this is why it is happening.” And they would tell people what was wrong with the people.
The second ingredient in their message was that they would tell the people that God was going to do something to bring about correction, and that usually involved chastisement, judgement and the threat of an invading foreign power that would overrun their nation.
In the early part of Isaiah, Assyria is the threatening power. In the middle part of Isaiah, Babylon is the threatening power. And in the last chapters, they are already occupied by Persia, and he talks about the Persian Empire and their role in disciplining and chastising the nation of Israel.
In today’s terms, that is Syria, Iraq and Iran. And these were the three threatening superpowers of the day when Isaiah was ministering.
The third ingredient was, in the midst of all of this, there was the offer of hope, that chastisement was not an end in itself. It was always remedial, designed to bring people back into fellowship with God.
And in the last 26 chapters, 27 chapters, in particular, of Isaiah, that hope is focused on the Messiah, the suffering servant, as He is portrayed by Isaiah. Although right from the early part of his book, he also talks about the fact that the Messiah is going to be the One in which they will place their hope, but that is going to be centuries into the future.
Isaiah’s wife was also a prophet. He refers to her as the prophetess. So she presumably talked about the same things.
So we probably wouldn’t be in much of a hurry to accept an invitation to go and have dinner with them. We would sit there and listen to what’s wrong with the world, what chastisement is coming our way. And the hope is over the horizon because it is going to be beyond our lifetime.
They had two sons to whom they gave bizarre sounding names – at least to our ears, they are. One son was called Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. Now he probably spent his life repeating that or spelling it out.
“What’s your name?”
“Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”
How do you spell that?”
“M-a-h-e-l-S-h-etc.”
It sounds almost as cruel as the Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue”. And this boy spent his life being beaten up for being called Sue.
Well I am sure Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz had something similar. And I will tell you why in just a moment.
But they had another boy they called Shear-Jashub – a little easier to pronounce.
But these boys weren’t allowed to just be boys. Their names carried a message.
Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz meant that Damascus and Samaria (that is, the capital of Israel, the Northern Kingdom) were going to be carried off into exile by Assyria and be wiped out.
Now you will remember, I am sure, that after the golden years of Israel’s history, which were the years when David came to the throne and then Solomon his son. And in Solomon’s day they built the temple, they built a huge palace, they expanded their territory, the people were at peace. In all of Solomon’s reign there was no enemy breathing down their neck. That was a new thing. So those were the golden years.
But at the end of Solomon’s reign, his son Rehoboam was to replace him as king. But he was challenged by a trade union leader called Jeroboam who said that Rehoboam must not continue the policies of his father, but must introduce a few more policies that cared for the workers and the underdogs. And it led to a civil war, which divided the nation into two.
There was Israel in the north, whose capital was Samaria, and they consisted of about 9 ½ of the original tribes. And in the south, smaller, the nation of Judah, with its capital Jerusalem, much of it desert, and 2 ½ tribes occupied that.
And for the remaining years those two nations coexisted side by side with their own kings and queens and hierarchy and structures. And eventually in 722 the Northern Kingdom was taken off into exile by the Assyrians and lost their identity and have never been traced since.
The Southern Kingdom, about 145 years later in 587 B.C. were taken off by the Babylonians and then when the Persians occupied Babylon, transferred there and then sent back to Judah. And those we know today as the Jewish people are descendants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah who returned back at the end of that time.
Now Isaiah was ministering in the south, though he had a lot of things to say about the north, which has not yet been taken off into exile.
Hosea and Amos were preaching in the north at the same time. And Micah, one of the other prophets, was preaching in the south along with Isaiah.
And there were two superpowers that dominated that part of the near eastern world. In the south was Egypt. It was a long established power but was at this time on the wane, losing some of its influence and its power and its might.
But in the north, Assyria was rising in its power and its influence.
And they were jostling for supremacy, and Judah and Israel were very convenient sort of buffer states between them. I am sure you can envisage the map where Egypt on the north east corner of the African continent is there, and then you have got Israel today, which included then Judah and Israel. And then above that, today’s Syria – you have the Assyrian Empire in roughly that same area.
And it has been convenient to keep both of them to keep Israel and Judah intact because if Assyria is going to invade Egypt it has got to go through Israel and Judah. That will slow them a little bit and give a little warning to the Egyptians, and vice versa if Egypt was to move north.
So this was a convenient arrangement all around for these two nations to stay intact. Though, eventually Assyria did occupy and destroy the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Now Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, the son of Isaiah; his name meant that Israel would be carried off by the Assyrians. So every time he was out and his mom was calling him to come back home for dinner, she was sending a message. Every time she shouted “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz!” she was shouting across the city, “Assyria is going to come and take Israel off into captivity!”
But actually the meaning was even more significant than that because the meaning of his name included “Hasten it up; speed the conquest!”
So here is a prophetess, the wife of Isaiah, calling to her son, “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz”, meaning, “Assyria is going to conquer Israel and hasten it up and speed the conquest.”
I don’t think that made them very popular neighbors. I am sure when the mother was calling “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz”, I am sure the neighbors were calling back, “Shut up! We don’t want to hear this!”
And then she would call his brother, Shear-Jashub, and that was a little better name, because Shear-Jashub meant “the remnant will return.”
So “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz!” (Assyria is coming and Israel is going to be destroyed – speed it up, let it happen” but Shear-Jashub! (There is a remnant that is going to return.) That remnant of course, we’re talking now about the nation in its totality, was going to be the Southern Kingdom, who would not be taken to Assyria; they would be taken to Babylon later, but they would return.
And so the whole family was a message. Isaiah himself; his name means literally “God is salvation”. The meaning, as people heard that name was this: “God saves sinners.” Why else do you need salvation?
And so in Chapter 8:18 Isaiah gives us some insight into his family. After Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was born, Isaiah said this in Verse 18:
“Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion.”
What he is saying is this: “I am not just a messenger. Being a prophet is not just a job that I went to seminary and got my prophet degree and now I am a prophet, so what do you want me to tell you? Anybody like to come and listen to me speak?”
No, he is saying it is something much, much, much deeper than that. And that is that “my whole life and the life of my family is itself a sign and a symbol from the LORD Almighty.” It is not just what they said that was the message; it was who they were that was the message as well.
Now this is significant. I am going to come back to this in just a few minutes. But I want to, over the next weeks that we meet together to look into this prophecy of Isaiah. We are going to have to be selective because there are 66 chapters and if we were to go through them all, even if one chapter a week (and it doesn’t divide up even as naturally as that), we would be here for a couple of years and a lot of you would have gone by then – gone to have found something more interesting.
But we will pick selectively some of the central themes of Isaiah. But I felt that this morning it would be important to introduce the prophets as a whole so that we can understand in particular Isaiah’s ministry when we have some idea of the general picture of the prophets in the Old Testament.
You see, for many people I think that the Old Testament prophets and their books are a little like dark mysterious houses that, when you walk in through the first chapter, they seem a little dark, a little confusing. You wish somebody would switch the light on so that you could see things more clearly.
There are kind of judgements coming out of you over here and rebukes coming out of you over here, and there is little glimpses of light that come once in a while. And when you are reading some of these prophets in your quiet time or in your devotions, it’s a bit like looking for diamonds in the rough.
And you have got to go through all the dirt and the rubble and, “here’s a diamond that sticks out and glistens” and then you go through the dirt and rubble again, “here’s another diamond”.
And that is sometimes how we read books like Isaiah. And if I said to you, “Anybody got a favorite verse in the book of Isaiah?” a lot of you would because there are lots of diamonds in the book of Isaiah.
But if I then said to you, “What did that verse mean when Isaiah wrote it?” you probably would not know, because getting into the context is hard work. I hope we can simplify it a little bit because of the benefit that comes from understanding these diamonds as they are, these beautiful truths in their context, which usually makes them more beautiful than we thought they were when we just took them as an isolated verse.
There are 16 written prophets in the Old Testament. They occupy the last 17 books of the Old Testament.
Four of them we call Major Prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. And the reason we call them that is simply because they wrote longer books than the others. That’s the only reason why they are Major as opposed to Minor.
There are 12 minor prophets and Jeremiah wrote a post script to his prophecy, which he called Lamentations, walking through the destroyed city of Jerusalem after the Babylonians had overrun it and he is weeping and mourning and lamenting as he does so, which is why he calls that book Lamentations, and why there are 17 books, although 16 prophets.
They wrote in three periods of time. There are some who wrote before the exile, both the exile to Assyria by Israel, the exile to Babylon by Judah. And most of the prophets – the majority, should I say – were writing and speaking during that time.
They didn’t just preach to Israel and Judah. There are two prophets who were ministering only to Nineveh – Jonah (and you probably know the story of Jonah – that’s not about his message – that is a little different to the other prophets because it is the story of Jonah) and then Nahum also has a prophecy that is specifically to Nineveh.
But most of them are in that period before the exile.
Then during the exile itself Daniel, who has been taken to Babylon initially before his book finishes, he has been moved on to Persia. And he came from royal stock in Judah and he is up amongst the leaders of Babylon and Persia – had a remarkable ministry.
Nebuchadnezzar, the great king of Babylon was converted and Chapter 4 of Daniel is his story of his conversion, largely through Daniel’s witness to him. In fact Chapter 4 of Daniel is Nebuchadnezzar’s own story that he wrote and distributed throughout the Babylonian Empire.
And then you move into Persia when Persians occupied Babylon and took the occupied peoples with them. And Daniel is in Persia. And it was from there that they were then sent back.
So Daniel, Ezekiel ministers during that time; he sits down by the rivers of Babylon and has visions of God.
Interestingly, and we’ll comment on this on another day, Isaiah, who wrote a couple of hundred years before the exile – or 100 years before the exile – his last 27 chapters are prophetic in the sense that they look ahead to the period in the exile and he speaks, even names names. That’s given rise to thoughts that maybe there were two Isaiah’s that have been moulded together into one.
But for reasons I am not going to give you this morning, this is no reason to believe that if we believe in the ability for God to reveal the future to His prophets as He did on a number of occasions.
So there are about 300 years covering those three periods. There were other prophets who were not written prophets – they were simply spoken and preaching prophets.
In fact in the book of Acts it speaks of all the prophets from Samuel on. Samuel started some schools of the prophets and probably the best known of those prophets would be Elijah and Elisha, people like that.
So that’s who the prophets were altogether. I want to ask two questions. What was the prophet’s message, first, and what were the prophets’ methods, secondly.
What was the prophet’s message? Now I’ll address this very quickly. The earliest description we find is actually in the book of Exodus when in Exodus 7:1,
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet.”
Now what did he mean? “You will be like God, Moses, and Aaron will be like your prophet.”
What did He mean by that? Well, if you go back to Chapter 4 of Exodus and Verse 14 when Moses said, “I can’t speak”, it says,
“The LORD’s anger burned against Moses and he said, ‘What about your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well. He is already on his way to meet you, and his heart will be glad when he sees you.’”
Listen to this:
“’You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth; I will help both of you speak and will teach you what to do. He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth and as if you were God to him.’”
“Aaron will be your mouth,” He says in Chapter 4, “and you will be like God to Aaron, putting words into his mouth.”
And in Chapter 7 He says, “Aaron will be your prophet and you will be like God to him.”
So what does it mean to be a prophet? A prophet is the mouth of God. That’s the definition that we can take from that description in the book of Exodus.
So at its simplest, a prophet is being the mouth of God.
People have debated: is prophecy foretelling, is it predictive, by definition, looking into the future? Or is it forth-telling – that is, is it proclamation? People debate is it one or the other?
I would say to that, that neither of those two things define prophecy. That prophecy is not defined by its content; it’s defined by its origin. This is the word of God. This is God speaking.
You see in 2 Peter 1:20 Peter writes,
“You must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
So Peter says don’t congratulate a prophet nor blame a prophet for his message. If you like it, don’t put him on a pedestal; if you don’t like it, don’t get rid of him because he is not responsible for his message.
They were men carried along by the Holy Spirit and it never had its origin in the will of man, but their message had its origin in God.
Isaiah says of himself, Isaiah 50:4,
“The Sovereign LORD has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.”
Isaiah says, “I have an instructed tongue. Why? Because I’m smart? No. Because my ear is tuned to God.”
“I have nothing to say that originates in me,” is the implication there. “I only have to say what originates in God, and therefore it is an instructed tongue.”
Now I can give you other verses where prophets say similar things, but I think the point is made that a prophet, by definition, was the mouth of God.
And if he was the mouth of God, that means he spoke the word of God. And the word of God is the word of God because of its origin. It is God speaking.
So that was the prophet’s message. It doesn’t have a criterion to determine its message regarding content; its only criterion is, is this the word of God, does this come from God?
Second thing I want to talk about is the prophet’s method. And I have been reading the Prophets these last weeks and enjoying reading them very much. And I want to suggest to you seven methods by which they communicated to the people.
I will go through some of these more quickly than others but I will give you all seven, and I think we will find they will begin to become very relevant and very personal to us as well.
The first method is the most obvious one, and that was speaking, preaching, standing up and talking. The bulk of their ministry is prefaced in some way or other by words that mean “Thus says the Lord, the Word of the Lord came to me saying.” You get these phrases all the way through the prophets and they stand up and they speak.
So they were preachers first of all.
The second way they communicated was by writing. Now we have, of course, these 17 books that are written by prophets, so that’s very obvious to us.
Jeremiah in Jeremiah 36 called his secretary Barak, and Jeremiah dictated all the words the Lord had spoken to him and Barak wrote them on a scroll. And so they describe this writing down, writing down, writing down the prophecies that were being given.
Interestingly, and I only discovered this, this morning; I was going through my message earlier this morning and my mind went off a little bit of trivia. And I thought I wonder how many chapters there are that the prophets wrote in the last 17 books of the Old Testament, and I found there are 250 chapters exactly of prophecy.
I then thought to myself, how many chapters make up the gospels? The answer is 89. How many chapters make up the writings of Paul? The answer is 87. So I thought, well how many chapters make up the whole of the New Testament? The answer is 260, only ten chapters more than these prophets wrote.
That means that they wrote and gave to us almost as much of the Word of God as the entire New Testament. But I would guarantee that some of the cleanest pages in your Bible are in the Prophets.
You know, you have got some favorite bits and so they get dirty and you lick your finger and you make a mess and you spill some coffee on it or your drop some egg on it or something. Or you know, my Bible is dirty, it’s torn, it’s got all kinds of marks, cello tape to patch it up.
But when you start going backwards, you get into the Prophets, it cleans up a little. I haven’t been there lately. I would think that the cleanest book in your Bible is Leviticus, but I think the Minor Prophets come close.
But we neglect them to our peril. These are the words of God. Now they are harder work to read because they don’t always explain the context. So to read the Prophets you have got to read Kings and Chronicles as well (so it’s getting even bigger now) to know something of the background and context.
But they wrote, and what they wrote was the words that God had given them to write.
The third way they communicated was by music. You know Isaiah was a bit of a singer himself because in Isaiah Chapter 5 he says,
“I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard.”
And so he sings this song:
“There was a vineyard on a fertile hillside…”
I don’t know what the tune was, but he sang it and it was a nice little ditty about this little beautiful vineyard that was growing up, beautiful at first.
“But then I built this watchtower and stood on the side and I watched my vineyard and I waited for the grapes to appear and I waited for the grapes to appear, (this is the chorus) and I waited for the grapes to appear, and I waited…and no grapes appeared. It was barren, it was dull, so I came down from my watchtower and I chopped down the vineyard.”
And the next verse says, “This is a song about Jerusalem, because Jerusalem I planted to be fertile and prosperous and I couldn’t find any fruit so I am coming down to chop it down.”
That was the song in Isaiah Chapter 5. I am sure it didn’t make the Number 1 spot in the Jerusalem charts, but he communicated with music.
We have sung some wonderful songs of music this morning. This isn’t just the warm-up part of the service, this isn’t just, you know, to break us in gently. These songs extol truths about God - hymns, psalms, spiritual songs, is what Paul wrote about in Colossians – hymns – doctrine put to music, psalms – Scripture in music, spiritual songs – the response of expressing our love to God.
So they communicated with music, with songs - with poetry. Lots of the prophets wrote in poetic form using images and metaphors and rhythm that aids memory.
Now some of that is lost in translation and so sometimes translation is not easy to read some of the poetry because it is no longer poetry in the way the translators have translated it. It doesn’t have the same rhythm and the same metaphors often don’t communicate in the same way.
But poetry – memorable – it’s a good way to communicate.
Fifthly, they communicated by allegory. They told stories. Some of them were graphic and gruesome. I mean Ezekiel 16 is entitled – in my Bible it is entitled “An Allegory of Unfaithful Jerusalem”. And it’s a ghastly story of a baby girl who was born and her parents did not want a baby girl and so they threw her out before the placenta had been cleaned from her body, before she had been washed and they threw her out into an open field and she was left there rejected, dirty, hungry, thirsty, despised.
And somebody walked by and heard the baby in the field and came over and said to the baby, “Live.” And then he picked her up and he took her home and he washed her and he cleansed her and he fed her and he cared for her and he loved her and he adopted her.
And this baby girl grew up to be a beautiful woman and she was courted and married to a wonderful man. And she became clothed in beautiful costly clothing. She had beautiful jewelry, which her husband bought her. She fed on the best food and the best wine and she became famous because of her beauty.
But her beauty became her problem; she trusted it, she flaunted it, she used it to attract men, she discovered she had sexual power and she took lovers and eventually became a prostitute. She developed a sense of entitlement. And when she gave birth to children through her prostitution; they didn’t have the option of abortions, so she sacrificed them to idols, so all her babies died.
And then somebody found her and rescued her and loved her, and put her back on her feet and made her beautiful again. And Ezekiel tells this graphic story, and then he says this is the story of Jerusalem, how God rescued you from the gutter, made you beautiful, but you went off with other lovers, etc.
They would have gone home that night having listened to Ezekiel preaching on the street of Jerusalem. They would never forget that story. “And remember, it’s about us, it’s about us; it’s about Jerusalem.”
So allegory, story – great way in which they communicated.
They communicated through drama. In Isaiah – had an embarrassing drama to an act in Isaiah Chapter 20 where he had a prophecy against Egypt.
And he had to strip from the waist down and walk around with a bare backside for three years, humiliated, and demonstrating that the Egyptians would be overrun by the Assyrians and be humiliated with bare buttocks and it would be to the shame of Israel as well because they had been trusting in Egypt and they too would be walking around with bare backsides.
That’s another good reason why you wouldn’t want to be Isaiah’s neighbor. Every morning, “Oh boy, Good morning, Isaiah. Would you like to borrow a tablecloth or something?”
“No, no, I’m preaching.”
“What do you mean you are preaching?”
Just demonstrating the humiliation that the people are going to go through.
Jeremiah – we haven’t got time to give you all the dramatic things they had to do. Although Jeremiah did have a yoke put around his neck – a wooden yoke showing that Judah was going to be yoked to Babylon.
And a man called Hananiah, who was a false prophet, came and he broke the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck and Jeremiah was relieved (“Phew, that was heavy anyway”). And he said, “This is nonsense; you are not going to be yoked to Babylon etc. Go back home Jeremiah.
So Jeremiah went home feeling light and relieved, “at last I got rid of that yoke”.
And God said, “Hananiah broke the wooden yoke. You are going to put on an iron yoke. He will never break the iron yoke. “
So next thing here’s poor Jeremiah walking around with an iron yoke around his neck showing that they are going to be yoked to Babylon.
They had to enact and demonstrate some of these things.
I think Ezekiel had the biggest challenge of all. In Ezekiel Chapter 4 he had to make a model of Jerusalem and then construct – well he had to draw Jerusalem but make a model of some siege against it with ramps and bashing rams and catapults and little model soldiers.
And then he had to get a big pan like a frying pan and he had to put the frying pan between himself and the model he had just made and then lie on the ground and stay lying on the ground for 390 days.
“Don’t get up,” said God. “Folks will bring you some food but you cook your own food, cook your own millet.” He told him at first to use his own human excrement dried, to burn, to make the fire to cook his food.
And Ezekiel said, “Please, don’t let me do that. I have never done anything that is unclean.”
And God said, “Alright you can use cow manure.”
So they brought him cow manure and he cooked this for 390 days to demonstrate God is saying, “I am distant from Jerusalem, there is a big pan between us, there is a big wall between us.”
And after 390 days he got up, was able to stretch, must have felt really good. And God said, “Now take the pan and lie down on your right side” and he lay on his right side for 40 days.
390 days was demonstrating how long Assyrians would be in captivity, and the 40 days to represent the 40 years – 390 years and 40 years that Judah would be in captivity.
And this was all to portray to the city of Jerusalem God’s judgement that was coming.
So they had to engage in drama. Sometimes it went on and on and on.
But the seventh thing I want to point out to you – and this is so important – is that God spoke through their personal circumstances. And in those personal circumstances He often had to break them and break their hearts to create in them a brokenness that sent a message to the people.
We already mentioned that Isaiah’s family was a message. Jeremiah (we probably all have a favorite prophet – Jeremiah is my favorite prophet) – Jeremiah was of melancholic temperament. He loved the warmth of the fireplace sitting by an open fire. He talks about these things – the lighted candle burning.
He used to weep a lot. He is often called the weeping prophet. His second book is called Lamentations, which means crying. He once said, “I wish my head was like a well and my eyes like fountains and I could spurt my tears and I could cry day and night.”
He is the man who asked God more questions about why, why, why than any other prophet. And Jeremiah was the kind of man who needed company and needed friendship. And God said to him in Jeremiah 16, “Jeremiah, I do not want you to marry. I want you to stay single.”
And Jeremiah said, “Why?”
“Because if you marry and have children, your having children will send the message that you believed in the future and I don’t want you to send that message. I want you to send the message that Judah is coming to an end. So don’t marry.”
And Jeremiah had to endure what was contrary to the kind of nature that he had.
He was told, “Don’t go to any party, because if you do, you will start celebrating. Jeremiah you must give the impression there is nothing to celebrate - no marriage, no parties.”
And Jeremiah carried that as a burden, as a pain in his heart.
Ezekiel, on the other hand, was happily married. His wife is described as the delight of his eyes. And in Ezekiel 24:15,
“The word of the LORD came to me: ‘Son of man, with one blow, I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead.
“So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died.”
“I am taking away the delight of your eyes, but don’t weep, don’t mourn. If you have to groan, groan quietly. And I’ll tell you why Ezekiel: because the delight of the eyes of the people is Jerusalem and Jerusalem is going to die and you are not going to mourn that because this is God’s chastisement on them.”
And Ezekiel had to live with a broken heart to demonstrate to the people the message that he was bringing to them.
This is deep stuff, isn’t it?
Hosea was married to a woman called Gomer and they had three children. And their names all carried a message. Their first son was called Jezreel, because “I will punish Israel for the massacre of Jezreel” (that was a couple hundred years before under a man called Jehu). Now it’s coming back to haunt them that they might be punished by it.
So their son was called Jezreel, to keep shouting that name out to remind them that God will punish them for the massacre of Jezreel.
Then they had a daughter called Lo-Ruhamah, which means “I will not show love to you.” God is love and He always will be because that is His nature, but “I will not show love to you; there will be a barrier between you and any experience of My love – I will not show love to you.” That was the meaning of Lo-Ruhamah.
And then another son called Lo-Ammi, which says, “You are not My people, I am not your God. I am disowning you and I am separating from you.” That was sending them off into exile.
So again, these three children. And every time their mom, Gomer would call them in, “Jezreel”, she’s sending a message: “I am going to punish you for what happened in Jezreel.” “Lo-Ruhamah!” (I will not show you My love”). “Lo-Ammi” (“You are not My people; I am not your God.”)
Their kids were a message to the nation (this was in Israel in the Northern Kingdom where Hosea ministered.)
But more tragically for Hosea: his wife Gomer became a prostitute. He is told in the beginning of the book, “Go take an adulterous wife.” But that, I am sure, how we should understand that is it was written in retrospect. It was written, “Go find an adulterous woman and marry her, but go and take for your wife this woman Gomer.” And with retrospect, hindsight, he is saying she was going to be an adulterous, and she was.
And Hosea’s heart was broken by the behaviour of his wife. And eventually he bought her back on the slave market where she was up for sale as a female concubine and the price had been slashed in half because nobody wanted her. And he bought her back for half price and took her home to love her again.
And God in effect says to Hosea, “Hosea, how do you feel?”
And Hosea’s response is, “I can hardly bear the pain.”
And God said, “That’s how I feel. My people have committed adultery with other gods. They have looked to other nations for strength. They have forsaken Me. Hosea, you have entered into My heart, with the pain that you are enduring with the adultery of Gomer.
That gave Hosea a different message to Jeremiah’s message, for instance.
Jeremiah’s message was sin offends God. That was true.
But Hosea’s message was sin hurts God.
Jeremiah couldn’t preach that because Jeremiah didn’t know that. But Hosea did.
“What my wife Gomer has done in her adultery to break my heart is what you in your sin have done to break the heart of God.”
You see, God has a right to so mould our lives and so lead us into situations that in themselves intrinsically are not good ones in order to teach us something of His heart.
Some of us here this morning, and you have children who do not walk with God. God knows that pain and you know something of the pain of His heart. God has gifted you with touching His heart in your agony and sadness.
There are people here this morning; you have had those who have loved you and turned away from you and it has broken your heart. You understand something of God that others may not understand.
There are those of us who have been in covenants that have been broken, maybe a marriage covenant, and it has been broken and it has hurt you, it has broken you. But you know the heart of God in covenants that have been broken with Him.
Don’t think of God as remote, detached, reduced to propositions, unmoved, too big to enter into pain, too sovereign to enter into sorrow. That is not the God of Scripture.
Genesis 6:6 says,
“The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.”
(This is before the judgement in the day of Noah.) God’s heart was filled with pain and that’s why, if you want to know God, we are almost certainly going to enter into a heart that experiences pain.
Because we don’t know God simply propositionally – this is true and that is true and the other is true – and then you tuck it away in a notebook and you are indifferent.
No, we know God by knowing His heart. And His prophets – not just His prophets – Paul, we looked in 2 Corinthians a few months ago – Paul shares very deeply there some of his own pain that brought him into a greater knowledge of the grace of God.
Isaiah 53 tells us of Jesus that He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. We have no grounds to expect less than that we too will be familiar with suffering and sorrow.
You see the truth of God must come to us before it can ever go through us, and it comes to us again and again in the experiences of life often painful, sometimes joyful because those also teach us things about God and the joy of God.
We don’t get hold of truth in one hand up here and pass it like a baton to the other hand and then pass it on. And any of us who want to preach who preach like that will leave people dry and cold and be dry and cold ourselves. We have to let the Word of God come to us.
And we all are different. We all experience different things. But the Word of God must come to us. And it will break us if it is going to leave us with any authority and penetration.
Don’t allow your personal circumstances to go to waste. Don’t allow your personal pains to go to waste. Don’t allow the damage of your sins, though they have been forgiven, but the scars and damage that lingers from them – don’t allow that to go to waste. It will make you a channel of blessing to other people that somebody else could never be.
Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 45:3,
“I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.” Isaiah 45:3
That verse has a context that we won’t talk about this morning but the principle, “I will give you treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places.” Sometimes it is in the dark places of our lives and the dark experiences of our lives, in the secret things that we would never expect to find a revelation of God.
“I will give you these, “says God “the treasures of darkness that you may know that I am the LORD. You will know Me because in the darkness there are treasures, and even in the sin and brokenness and foolish things that we do.
When we bring them back humbly to God, we will turn back and look at the mess we left behind us and we will see a glittering diamond here and a glittering diamond there and we will find the treasures that will come out of the darkness, out of the pain.”
Hosea, with an adulterous wife, can speak with an understanding and an authority that he could never do so before.
Jeremiah, in his loneliness and isolation, could speak in a way he never could had he married with a lovely family and everything was fine in that area of his life.
Ezekiel, out of his deep mourning for his wife that he was not allowed to go public with, but going back home and closing the door and weeping himself to sleep at night. He was feeling the heart of God that equipped him to minister to others.
And often the things that do break our hearts are things which bring us back to a greater glimpse of God.
The psalmist wrote in Psalm 42:3,
“My tears have been my food day and night.”
And then in Psalm 56:8 he says,
“Put my tears into your bottle.”
Why does he ask God to put his tears into His bottle? Is it because God has some morbid interest in them? No. Because these tears were an investment in something bigger and something better.
“Keep my tears in Your bottle,” says the psalmist.
The NIV says, “Write them on Your scroll.” The image isn’t quite as good – I don’t know how you write tears on a scroll, but you can put them in a bottle and you can go back and look at them and say, “those tears, though they represent the darkest, the most painful time of my life, have become for me treasures.”
This is part of the message of the prophets to us. Jesus, you remember, as He approached Jerusalem in Luke 19:41, saw the city and He wept over it – wept over it. Not just analyzed it and said this is what wrong with them; He wept over it. His heart was connected.
And a little earlier in Luke 13:34 He said,
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”
Notice that. “I would gather you, but you are not willing.”
These were not crocodile tears as though everything is totally under control. No, these are genuine tears. “I would and you wouldn’t, and it breaks My heart,” said the Lord Jesus. He wept over the city.
The psalmist, writing about this in Psalm 126:6 says,
“He that goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying his sheaves with him.”
And I suggest that if there is little joy in the reaping, it could be because there are few tears in the sowing. There is no virtue in tears in themselves, but tears as they depict a broken heart that understands and identifies and feels with the heart of God.
And as we look into Isaiah over the next number of weeks, we are not looking into a museum, (“well, here’s something on display over here and here’s something over here, something else on the table over there); we are not looking into the Scriptures to explore some dark museum.
We are looking into a mirror to see the ways of God with people, the ways of God with wayward people, and the ways of God with godly people, in order that we too might be more godly and more fruitful and our Christian witness and our Christian lives is not just about what we say. It’s about being true and honest with what God has taught us about His heart in addition to what He teaches about His Word through the experiences of life that hurt us and break us, that equip us and strengthen us at the same time.
Let’s pray together.
Father, we are grateful this morning that You love every one of us. There are times we may not feel that. There are times when You allow us to go down paths, often of our own choosing, where we walk away from You and not to You.
But we pray, Lord Jesus, that whatever is going on in our lives at the moment, whatever hardships, whatever fears, whatever griefs, whatever sadnesses, whatever disappointments, that these may be stimulis in our life to not run away from You, but to walk back to You and find in You, not only Your comfort and Your peace, which You offer to us; we might find that we have learned something more of Your heart that causes us to view the world and view people, not on the grounds of obligation to them, but on grounds of deep compassion and love for them.
Work in our [hearts we pray. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.]
Part 1
Prophets
Pastor Charles Price
If you have got your Bible this morning I am going to read from the book of Isaiah. Now I know that in North America you often pronounce this name in a way I can’t even pronounce it – Isaiah? Is that how you say? Isaiah.
Well Isaiah is the way I grew up pronouncing it – I guess it’s the English way – and it is indelibly fixed in my mind, so even if I tried to pronounce it incorrectly to please some of you, I would revert back to my traditional understanding.
When I was a boy in the little church I used to go to, we had guest speakers; visiting speakers, most Sunday evenings and we had a man who had a rather unusual face which was slightly distorted. One side of his face seemed higher than the other and the other side lower, and we used to call him Isaiah because one eye is higher than the other.
And so that’s who I picture when I think of Isaiah.
But I want to read to you from Chapter 1 and Verse 1, which says,
“The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz, saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.”
Now for some of you, your eyes are already starting to glaze over with names of people you don’t know, not quite sure where they all fit in. But Isaiah there simply introduces us to the historical context of his ministry which extended up to 60 years. That would be the period covered by those reigns.
But now turn to Chapter 8 and let me read to you the first three verses. Chapter 8:1:
“The LORD said to me, ‘Take a large scroll and write on it with an ordinary pen: Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.
“And I will call in Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Jeberekiah as reliable witnesses for me.’
“Then I went to the prophetess, and she conceived and gave birth to a son. And the LORD said to me, ‘Name him Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.
“Before the boy knows how to say, ‘My father’ or ‘My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the plunder of Samaria will be carried off by the king of Assyria.’”
That is as far as I am going to read.
If we were to live next door to Isaiah and his family, we might find them to be rather unusual neighbors. Isaiah was a prophet, which meant that he spent much of his time telling people things they really didn’t want to know.
Basically a prophet specialized in talking about three things. First of all they told people what was wrong with the world, and in particular, what was wrong with Israel and Judah, the land in which Isaiah was living.
Their messages were diagnostic in nature in the first instance. They might say, “This is what is happening, but this is why it is happening.” And they would tell people what was wrong with the people.
The second ingredient in their message was that they would tell the people that God was going to do something to bring about correction, and that usually involved chastisement, judgement and the threat of an invading foreign power that would overrun their nation.
In the early part of Isaiah, Assyria is the threatening power. In the middle part of Isaiah, Babylon is the threatening power. And in the last chapters, they are already occupied by Persia, and he talks about the Persian Empire and their role in disciplining and chastising the nation of Israel.
In today’s terms, that is Syria, Iraq and Iran. And these were the three threatening superpowers of the day when Isaiah was ministering.
The third ingredient was, in the midst of all of this, there was the offer of hope, that chastisement was not an end in itself. It was always remedial, designed to bring people back into fellowship with God.
And in the last 26 chapters, 27 chapters, in particular, of Isaiah, that hope is focused on the Messiah, the suffering servant, as He is portrayed by Isaiah. Although right from the early part of his book, he also talks about the fact that the Messiah is going to be the One in which they will place their hope, but that is going to be centuries into the future.
Isaiah’s wife was also a prophet. He refers to her as the prophetess. So she presumably talked about the same things.
So we probably wouldn’t be in much of a hurry to accept an invitation to go and have dinner with them. We would sit there and listen to what’s wrong with the world, what chastisement is coming our way. And the hope is over the horizon because it is going to be beyond our lifetime.
They had two sons to whom they gave bizarre sounding names – at least to our ears, they are. One son was called Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. Now he probably spent his life repeating that or spelling it out.
“What’s your name?”
“Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz.”
How do you spell that?”
“M-a-h-e-l-S-h-etc.”
It sounds almost as cruel as the Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue”. And this boy spent his life being beaten up for being called Sue.
Well I am sure Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz had something similar. And I will tell you why in just a moment.
But they had another boy they called Shear-Jashub – a little easier to pronounce.
But these boys weren’t allowed to just be boys. Their names carried a message.
Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz meant that Damascus and Samaria (that is, the capital of Israel, the Northern Kingdom) were going to be carried off into exile by Assyria and be wiped out.
Now you will remember, I am sure, that after the golden years of Israel’s history, which were the years when David came to the throne and then Solomon his son. And in Solomon’s day they built the temple, they built a huge palace, they expanded their territory, the people were at peace. In all of Solomon’s reign there was no enemy breathing down their neck. That was a new thing. So those were the golden years.
But at the end of Solomon’s reign, his son Rehoboam was to replace him as king. But he was challenged by a trade union leader called Jeroboam who said that Rehoboam must not continue the policies of his father, but must introduce a few more policies that cared for the workers and the underdogs. And it led to a civil war, which divided the nation into two.
There was Israel in the north, whose capital was Samaria, and they consisted of about 9 ½ of the original tribes. And in the south, smaller, the nation of Judah, with its capital Jerusalem, much of it desert, and 2 ½ tribes occupied that.
And for the remaining years those two nations coexisted side by side with their own kings and queens and hierarchy and structures. And eventually in 722 the Northern Kingdom was taken off into exile by the Assyrians and lost their identity and have never been traced since.
The Southern Kingdom, about 145 years later in 587 B.C. were taken off by the Babylonians and then when the Persians occupied Babylon, transferred there and then sent back to Judah. And those we know today as the Jewish people are descendants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah who returned back at the end of that time.
Now Isaiah was ministering in the south, though he had a lot of things to say about the north, which has not yet been taken off into exile.
Hosea and Amos were preaching in the north at the same time. And Micah, one of the other prophets, was preaching in the south along with Isaiah.
And there were two superpowers that dominated that part of the near eastern world. In the south was Egypt. It was a long established power but was at this time on the wane, losing some of its influence and its power and its might.
But in the north, Assyria was rising in its power and its influence.
And they were jostling for supremacy, and Judah and Israel were very convenient sort of buffer states between them. I am sure you can envisage the map where Egypt on the north east corner of the African continent is there, and then you have got Israel today, which included then Judah and Israel. And then above that, today’s Syria – you have the Assyrian Empire in roughly that same area.
And it has been convenient to keep both of them to keep Israel and Judah intact because if Assyria is going to invade Egypt it has got to go through Israel and Judah. That will slow them a little bit and give a little warning to the Egyptians, and vice versa if Egypt was to move north.
So this was a convenient arrangement all around for these two nations to stay intact. Though, eventually Assyria did occupy and destroy the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Now Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz, the son of Isaiah; his name meant that Israel would be carried off by the Assyrians. So every time he was out and his mom was calling him to come back home for dinner, she was sending a message. Every time she shouted “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz!” she was shouting across the city, “Assyria is going to come and take Israel off into captivity!”
But actually the meaning was even more significant than that because the meaning of his name included “Hasten it up; speed the conquest!”
So here is a prophetess, the wife of Isaiah, calling to her son, “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz”, meaning, “Assyria is going to conquer Israel and hasten it up and speed the conquest.”
I don’t think that made them very popular neighbors. I am sure when the mother was calling “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz”, I am sure the neighbors were calling back, “Shut up! We don’t want to hear this!”
And then she would call his brother, Shear-Jashub, and that was a little better name, because Shear-Jashub meant “the remnant will return.”
So “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz!” (Assyria is coming and Israel is going to be destroyed – speed it up, let it happen” but Shear-Jashub! (There is a remnant that is going to return.) That remnant of course, we’re talking now about the nation in its totality, was going to be the Southern Kingdom, who would not be taken to Assyria; they would be taken to Babylon later, but they would return.
And so the whole family was a message. Isaiah himself; his name means literally “God is salvation”. The meaning, as people heard that name was this: “God saves sinners.” Why else do you need salvation?
And so in Chapter 8:18 Isaiah gives us some insight into his family. After Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz was born, Isaiah said this in Verse 18:
“Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion.”
What he is saying is this: “I am not just a messenger. Being a prophet is not just a job that I went to seminary and got my prophet degree and now I am a prophet, so what do you want me to tell you? Anybody like to come and listen to me speak?”
No, he is saying it is something much, much, much deeper than that. And that is that “my whole life and the life of my family is itself a sign and a symbol from the LORD Almighty.” It is not just what they said that was the message; it was who they were that was the message as well.
Now this is significant. I am going to come back to this in just a few minutes. But I want to, over the next weeks that we meet together to look into this prophecy of Isaiah. We are going to have to be selective because there are 66 chapters and if we were to go through them all, even if one chapter a week (and it doesn’t divide up even as naturally as that), we would be here for a couple of years and a lot of you would have gone by then – gone to have found something more interesting.
But we will pick selectively some of the central themes of Isaiah. But I felt that this morning it would be important to introduce the prophets as a whole so that we can understand in particular Isaiah’s ministry when we have some idea of the general picture of the prophets in the Old Testament.
You see, for many people I think that the Old Testament prophets and their books are a little like dark mysterious houses that, when you walk in through the first chapter, they seem a little dark, a little confusing. You wish somebody would switch the light on so that you could see things more clearly.
There are kind of judgements coming out of you over here and rebukes coming out of you over here, and there is little glimpses of light that come once in a while. And when you are reading some of these prophets in your quiet time or in your devotions, it’s a bit like looking for diamonds in the rough.
And you have got to go through all the dirt and the rubble and, “here’s a diamond that sticks out and glistens” and then you go through the dirt and rubble again, “here’s another diamond”.
And that is sometimes how we read books like Isaiah. And if I said to you, “Anybody got a favorite verse in the book of Isaiah?” a lot of you would because there are lots of diamonds in the book of Isaiah.
But if I then said to you, “What did that verse mean when Isaiah wrote it?” you probably would not know, because getting into the context is hard work. I hope we can simplify it a little bit because of the benefit that comes from understanding these diamonds as they are, these beautiful truths in their context, which usually makes them more beautiful than we thought they were when we just took them as an isolated verse.
There are 16 written prophets in the Old Testament. They occupy the last 17 books of the Old Testament.
Four of them we call Major Prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. And the reason we call them that is simply because they wrote longer books than the others. That’s the only reason why they are Major as opposed to Minor.
There are 12 minor prophets and Jeremiah wrote a post script to his prophecy, which he called Lamentations, walking through the destroyed city of Jerusalem after the Babylonians had overrun it and he is weeping and mourning and lamenting as he does so, which is why he calls that book Lamentations, and why there are 17 books, although 16 prophets.
They wrote in three periods of time. There are some who wrote before the exile, both the exile to Assyria by Israel, the exile to Babylon by Judah. And most of the prophets – the majority, should I say – were writing and speaking during that time.
They didn’t just preach to Israel and Judah. There are two prophets who were ministering only to Nineveh – Jonah (and you probably know the story of Jonah – that’s not about his message – that is a little different to the other prophets because it is the story of Jonah) and then Nahum also has a prophecy that is specifically to Nineveh.
But most of them are in that period before the exile.
Then during the exile itself Daniel, who has been taken to Babylon initially before his book finishes, he has been moved on to Persia. And he came from royal stock in Judah and he is up amongst the leaders of Babylon and Persia – had a remarkable ministry.
Nebuchadnezzar, the great king of Babylon was converted and Chapter 4 of Daniel is his story of his conversion, largely through Daniel’s witness to him. In fact Chapter 4 of Daniel is Nebuchadnezzar’s own story that he wrote and distributed throughout the Babylonian Empire.
And then you move into Persia when Persians occupied Babylon and took the occupied peoples with them. And Daniel is in Persia. And it was from there that they were then sent back.
So Daniel, Ezekiel ministers during that time; he sits down by the rivers of Babylon and has visions of God.
Interestingly, and we’ll comment on this on another day, Isaiah, who wrote a couple of hundred years before the exile – or 100 years before the exile – his last 27 chapters are prophetic in the sense that they look ahead to the period in the exile and he speaks, even names names. That’s given rise to thoughts that maybe there were two Isaiah’s that have been moulded together into one.
But for reasons I am not going to give you this morning, this is no reason to believe that if we believe in the ability for God to reveal the future to His prophets as He did on a number of occasions.
So there are about 300 years covering those three periods. There were other prophets who were not written prophets – they were simply spoken and preaching prophets.
In fact in the book of Acts it speaks of all the prophets from Samuel on. Samuel started some schools of the prophets and probably the best known of those prophets would be Elijah and Elisha, people like that.
So that’s who the prophets were altogether. I want to ask two questions. What was the prophet’s message, first, and what were the prophets’ methods, secondly.
What was the prophet’s message? Now I’ll address this very quickly. The earliest description we find is actually in the book of Exodus when in Exodus 7:1,
“The Lord said to Moses, ‘See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet.”
Now what did he mean? “You will be like God, Moses, and Aaron will be like your prophet.”
What did He mean by that? Well, if you go back to Chapter 4 of Exodus and Verse 14 when Moses said, “I can’t speak”, it says,
“The LORD’s anger burned against Moses and he said, ‘What about your brother, Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well. He is already on his way to meet you, and his heart will be glad when he sees you.’”
Listen to this:
“’You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth; I will help both of you speak and will teach you what to do. He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth and as if you were God to him.’”
“Aaron will be your mouth,” He says in Chapter 4, “and you will be like God to Aaron, putting words into his mouth.”
And in Chapter 7 He says, “Aaron will be your prophet and you will be like God to him.”
So what does it mean to be a prophet? A prophet is the mouth of God. That’s the definition that we can take from that description in the book of Exodus.
So at its simplest, a prophet is being the mouth of God.
People have debated: is prophecy foretelling, is it predictive, by definition, looking into the future? Or is it forth-telling – that is, is it proclamation? People debate is it one or the other?
I would say to that, that neither of those two things define prophecy. That prophecy is not defined by its content; it’s defined by its origin. This is the word of God. This is God speaking.
You see in 2 Peter 1:20 Peter writes,
“You must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
So Peter says don’t congratulate a prophet nor blame a prophet for his message. If you like it, don’t put him on a pedestal; if you don’t like it, don’t get rid of him because he is not responsible for his message.
They were men carried along by the Holy Spirit and it never had its origin in the will of man, but their message had its origin in God.
Isaiah says of himself, Isaiah 50:4,
“The Sovereign LORD has given me an instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.”
Isaiah says, “I have an instructed tongue. Why? Because I’m smart? No. Because my ear is tuned to God.”
“I have nothing to say that originates in me,” is the implication there. “I only have to say what originates in God, and therefore it is an instructed tongue.”
Now I can give you other verses where prophets say similar things, but I think the point is made that a prophet, by definition, was the mouth of God.
And if he was the mouth of God, that means he spoke the word of God. And the word of God is the word of God because of its origin. It is God speaking.
So that was the prophet’s message. It doesn’t have a criterion to determine its message regarding content; its only criterion is, is this the word of God, does this come from God?
Second thing I want to talk about is the prophet’s method. And I have been reading the Prophets these last weeks and enjoying reading them very much. And I want to suggest to you seven methods by which they communicated to the people.
I will go through some of these more quickly than others but I will give you all seven, and I think we will find they will begin to become very relevant and very personal to us as well.
The first method is the most obvious one, and that was speaking, preaching, standing up and talking. The bulk of their ministry is prefaced in some way or other by words that mean “Thus says the Lord, the Word of the Lord came to me saying.” You get these phrases all the way through the prophets and they stand up and they speak.
So they were preachers first of all.
The second way they communicated was by writing. Now we have, of course, these 17 books that are written by prophets, so that’s very obvious to us.
Jeremiah in Jeremiah 36 called his secretary Barak, and Jeremiah dictated all the words the Lord had spoken to him and Barak wrote them on a scroll. And so they describe this writing down, writing down, writing down the prophecies that were being given.
Interestingly, and I only discovered this, this morning; I was going through my message earlier this morning and my mind went off a little bit of trivia. And I thought I wonder how many chapters there are that the prophets wrote in the last 17 books of the Old Testament, and I found there are 250 chapters exactly of prophecy.
I then thought to myself, how many chapters make up the gospels? The answer is 89. How many chapters make up the writings of Paul? The answer is 87. So I thought, well how many chapters make up the whole of the New Testament? The answer is 260, only ten chapters more than these prophets wrote.
That means that they wrote and gave to us almost as much of the Word of God as the entire New Testament. But I would guarantee that some of the cleanest pages in your Bible are in the Prophets.
You know, you have got some favorite bits and so they get dirty and you lick your finger and you make a mess and you spill some coffee on it or your drop some egg on it or something. Or you know, my Bible is dirty, it’s torn, it’s got all kinds of marks, cello tape to patch it up.
But when you start going backwards, you get into the Prophets, it cleans up a little. I haven’t been there lately. I would think that the cleanest book in your Bible is Leviticus, but I think the Minor Prophets come close.
But we neglect them to our peril. These are the words of God. Now they are harder work to read because they don’t always explain the context. So to read the Prophets you have got to read Kings and Chronicles as well (so it’s getting even bigger now) to know something of the background and context.
But they wrote, and what they wrote was the words that God had given them to write.
The third way they communicated was by music. You know Isaiah was a bit of a singer himself because in Isaiah Chapter 5 he says,
“I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard.”
And so he sings this song:
“There was a vineyard on a fertile hillside…”
I don’t know what the tune was, but he sang it and it was a nice little ditty about this little beautiful vineyard that was growing up, beautiful at first.
“But then I built this watchtower and stood on the side and I watched my vineyard and I waited for the grapes to appear and I waited for the grapes to appear, (this is the chorus) and I waited for the grapes to appear, and I waited…and no grapes appeared. It was barren, it was dull, so I came down from my watchtower and I chopped down the vineyard.”
And the next verse says, “This is a song about Jerusalem, because Jerusalem I planted to be fertile and prosperous and I couldn’t find any fruit so I am coming down to chop it down.”
That was the song in Isaiah Chapter 5. I am sure it didn’t make the Number 1 spot in the Jerusalem charts, but he communicated with music.
We have sung some wonderful songs of music this morning. This isn’t just the warm-up part of the service, this isn’t just, you know, to break us in gently. These songs extol truths about God - hymns, psalms, spiritual songs, is what Paul wrote about in Colossians – hymns – doctrine put to music, psalms – Scripture in music, spiritual songs – the response of expressing our love to God.
So they communicated with music, with songs - with poetry. Lots of the prophets wrote in poetic form using images and metaphors and rhythm that aids memory.
Now some of that is lost in translation and so sometimes translation is not easy to read some of the poetry because it is no longer poetry in the way the translators have translated it. It doesn’t have the same rhythm and the same metaphors often don’t communicate in the same way.
But poetry – memorable – it’s a good way to communicate.
Fifthly, they communicated by allegory. They told stories. Some of them were graphic and gruesome. I mean Ezekiel 16 is entitled – in my Bible it is entitled “An Allegory of Unfaithful Jerusalem”. And it’s a ghastly story of a baby girl who was born and her parents did not want a baby girl and so they threw her out before the placenta had been cleaned from her body, before she had been washed and they threw her out into an open field and she was left there rejected, dirty, hungry, thirsty, despised.
And somebody walked by and heard the baby in the field and came over and said to the baby, “Live.” And then he picked her up and he took her home and he washed her and he cleansed her and he fed her and he cared for her and he loved her and he adopted her.
And this baby girl grew up to be a beautiful woman and she was courted and married to a wonderful man. And she became clothed in beautiful costly clothing. She had beautiful jewelry, which her husband bought her. She fed on the best food and the best wine and she became famous because of her beauty.
But her beauty became her problem; she trusted it, she flaunted it, she used it to attract men, she discovered she had sexual power and she took lovers and eventually became a prostitute. She developed a sense of entitlement. And when she gave birth to children through her prostitution; they didn’t have the option of abortions, so she sacrificed them to idols, so all her babies died.
And then somebody found her and rescued her and loved her, and put her back on her feet and made her beautiful again. And Ezekiel tells this graphic story, and then he says this is the story of Jerusalem, how God rescued you from the gutter, made you beautiful, but you went off with other lovers, etc.
They would have gone home that night having listened to Ezekiel preaching on the street of Jerusalem. They would never forget that story. “And remember, it’s about us, it’s about us; it’s about Jerusalem.”
So allegory, story – great way in which they communicated.
They communicated through drama. In Isaiah – had an embarrassing drama to an act in Isaiah Chapter 20 where he had a prophecy against Egypt.
And he had to strip from the waist down and walk around with a bare backside for three years, humiliated, and demonstrating that the Egyptians would be overrun by the Assyrians and be humiliated with bare buttocks and it would be to the shame of Israel as well because they had been trusting in Egypt and they too would be walking around with bare backsides.
That’s another good reason why you wouldn’t want to be Isaiah’s neighbor. Every morning, “Oh boy, Good morning, Isaiah. Would you like to borrow a tablecloth or something?”
“No, no, I’m preaching.”
“What do you mean you are preaching?”
Just demonstrating the humiliation that the people are going to go through.
Jeremiah – we haven’t got time to give you all the dramatic things they had to do. Although Jeremiah did have a yoke put around his neck – a wooden yoke showing that Judah was going to be yoked to Babylon.
And a man called Hananiah, who was a false prophet, came and he broke the yoke off Jeremiah’s neck and Jeremiah was relieved (“Phew, that was heavy anyway”). And he said, “This is nonsense; you are not going to be yoked to Babylon etc. Go back home Jeremiah.
So Jeremiah went home feeling light and relieved, “at last I got rid of that yoke”.
And God said, “Hananiah broke the wooden yoke. You are going to put on an iron yoke. He will never break the iron yoke. “
So next thing here’s poor Jeremiah walking around with an iron yoke around his neck showing that they are going to be yoked to Babylon.
They had to enact and demonstrate some of these things.
I think Ezekiel had the biggest challenge of all. In Ezekiel Chapter 4 he had to make a model of Jerusalem and then construct – well he had to draw Jerusalem but make a model of some siege against it with ramps and bashing rams and catapults and little model soldiers.
And then he had to get a big pan like a frying pan and he had to put the frying pan between himself and the model he had just made and then lie on the ground and stay lying on the ground for 390 days.
“Don’t get up,” said God. “Folks will bring you some food but you cook your own food, cook your own millet.” He told him at first to use his own human excrement dried, to burn, to make the fire to cook his food.
And Ezekiel said, “Please, don’t let me do that. I have never done anything that is unclean.”
And God said, “Alright you can use cow manure.”
So they brought him cow manure and he cooked this for 390 days to demonstrate God is saying, “I am distant from Jerusalem, there is a big pan between us, there is a big wall between us.”
And after 390 days he got up, was able to stretch, must have felt really good. And God said, “Now take the pan and lie down on your right side” and he lay on his right side for 40 days.
390 days was demonstrating how long Assyrians would be in captivity, and the 40 days to represent the 40 years – 390 years and 40 years that Judah would be in captivity.
And this was all to portray to the city of Jerusalem God’s judgement that was coming.
So they had to engage in drama. Sometimes it went on and on and on.
But the seventh thing I want to point out to you – and this is so important – is that God spoke through their personal circumstances. And in those personal circumstances He often had to break them and break their hearts to create in them a brokenness that sent a message to the people.
We already mentioned that Isaiah’s family was a message. Jeremiah (we probably all have a favorite prophet – Jeremiah is my favorite prophet) – Jeremiah was of melancholic temperament. He loved the warmth of the fireplace sitting by an open fire. He talks about these things – the lighted candle burning.
He used to weep a lot. He is often called the weeping prophet. His second book is called Lamentations, which means crying. He once said, “I wish my head was like a well and my eyes like fountains and I could spurt my tears and I could cry day and night.”
He is the man who asked God more questions about why, why, why than any other prophet. And Jeremiah was the kind of man who needed company and needed friendship. And God said to him in Jeremiah 16, “Jeremiah, I do not want you to marry. I want you to stay single.”
And Jeremiah said, “Why?”
“Because if you marry and have children, your having children will send the message that you believed in the future and I don’t want you to send that message. I want you to send the message that Judah is coming to an end. So don’t marry.”
And Jeremiah had to endure what was contrary to the kind of nature that he had.
He was told, “Don’t go to any party, because if you do, you will start celebrating. Jeremiah you must give the impression there is nothing to celebrate - no marriage, no parties.”
And Jeremiah carried that as a burden, as a pain in his heart.
Ezekiel, on the other hand, was happily married. His wife is described as the delight of his eyes. And in Ezekiel 24:15,
“The word of the LORD came to me: ‘Son of man, with one blow, I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes. Yet do not lament or weep or shed any tears. Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead.
“So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died.”
“I am taking away the delight of your eyes, but don’t weep, don’t mourn. If you have to groan, groan quietly. And I’ll tell you why Ezekiel: because the delight of the eyes of the people is Jerusalem and Jerusalem is going to die and you are not going to mourn that because this is God’s chastisement on them.”
And Ezekiel had to live with a broken heart to demonstrate to the people the message that he was bringing to them.
This is deep stuff, isn’t it?
Hosea was married to a woman called Gomer and they had three children. And their names all carried a message. Their first son was called Jezreel, because “I will punish Israel for the massacre of Jezreel” (that was a couple hundred years before under a man called Jehu). Now it’s coming back to haunt them that they might be punished by it.
So their son was called Jezreel, to keep shouting that name out to remind them that God will punish them for the massacre of Jezreel.
Then they had a daughter called Lo-Ruhamah, which means “I will not show love to you.” God is love and He always will be because that is His nature, but “I will not show love to you; there will be a barrier between you and any experience of My love – I will not show love to you.” That was the meaning of Lo-Ruhamah.
And then another son called Lo-Ammi, which says, “You are not My people, I am not your God. I am disowning you and I am separating from you.” That was sending them off into exile.
So again, these three children. And every time their mom, Gomer would call them in, “Jezreel”, she’s sending a message: “I am going to punish you for what happened in Jezreel.” “Lo-Ruhamah!” (I will not show you My love”). “Lo-Ammi” (“You are not My people; I am not your God.”)
Their kids were a message to the nation (this was in Israel in the Northern Kingdom where Hosea ministered.)
But more tragically for Hosea: his wife Gomer became a prostitute. He is told in the beginning of the book, “Go take an adulterous wife.” But that, I am sure, how we should understand that is it was written in retrospect. It was written, “Go find an adulterous woman and marry her, but go and take for your wife this woman Gomer.” And with retrospect, hindsight, he is saying she was going to be an adulterous, and she was.
And Hosea’s heart was broken by the behaviour of his wife. And eventually he bought her back on the slave market where she was up for sale as a female concubine and the price had been slashed in half because nobody wanted her. And he bought her back for half price and took her home to love her again.
And God in effect says to Hosea, “Hosea, how do you feel?”
And Hosea’s response is, “I can hardly bear the pain.”
And God said, “That’s how I feel. My people have committed adultery with other gods. They have looked to other nations for strength. They have forsaken Me. Hosea, you have entered into My heart, with the pain that you are enduring with the adultery of Gomer.
That gave Hosea a different message to Jeremiah’s message, for instance.
Jeremiah’s message was sin offends God. That was true.
But Hosea’s message was sin hurts God.
Jeremiah couldn’t preach that because Jeremiah didn’t know that. But Hosea did.
“What my wife Gomer has done in her adultery to break my heart is what you in your sin have done to break the heart of God.”
You see, God has a right to so mould our lives and so lead us into situations that in themselves intrinsically are not good ones in order to teach us something of His heart.
Some of us here this morning, and you have children who do not walk with God. God knows that pain and you know something of the pain of His heart. God has gifted you with touching His heart in your agony and sadness.
There are people here this morning; you have had those who have loved you and turned away from you and it has broken your heart. You understand something of God that others may not understand.
There are those of us who have been in covenants that have been broken, maybe a marriage covenant, and it has been broken and it has hurt you, it has broken you. But you know the heart of God in covenants that have been broken with Him.
Don’t think of God as remote, detached, reduced to propositions, unmoved, too big to enter into pain, too sovereign to enter into sorrow. That is not the God of Scripture.
Genesis 6:6 says,
“The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.”
(This is before the judgement in the day of Noah.) God’s heart was filled with pain and that’s why, if you want to know God, we are almost certainly going to enter into a heart that experiences pain.
Because we don’t know God simply propositionally – this is true and that is true and the other is true – and then you tuck it away in a notebook and you are indifferent.
No, we know God by knowing His heart. And His prophets – not just His prophets – Paul, we looked in 2 Corinthians a few months ago – Paul shares very deeply there some of his own pain that brought him into a greater knowledge of the grace of God.
Isaiah 53 tells us of Jesus that He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering. We have no grounds to expect less than that we too will be familiar with suffering and sorrow.
You see the truth of God must come to us before it can ever go through us, and it comes to us again and again in the experiences of life often painful, sometimes joyful because those also teach us things about God and the joy of God.
We don’t get hold of truth in one hand up here and pass it like a baton to the other hand and then pass it on. And any of us who want to preach who preach like that will leave people dry and cold and be dry and cold ourselves. We have to let the Word of God come to us.
And we all are different. We all experience different things. But the Word of God must come to us. And it will break us if it is going to leave us with any authority and penetration.
Don’t allow your personal circumstances to go to waste. Don’t allow your personal pains to go to waste. Don’t allow the damage of your sins, though they have been forgiven, but the scars and damage that lingers from them – don’t allow that to go to waste. It will make you a channel of blessing to other people that somebody else could never be.
Isaiah wrote in Isaiah 45:3,
“I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name.” Isaiah 45:3
That verse has a context that we won’t talk about this morning but the principle, “I will give you treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places.” Sometimes it is in the dark places of our lives and the dark experiences of our lives, in the secret things that we would never expect to find a revelation of God.
“I will give you these, “says God “the treasures of darkness that you may know that I am the LORD. You will know Me because in the darkness there are treasures, and even in the sin and brokenness and foolish things that we do.
When we bring them back humbly to God, we will turn back and look at the mess we left behind us and we will see a glittering diamond here and a glittering diamond there and we will find the treasures that will come out of the darkness, out of the pain.”
Hosea, with an adulterous wife, can speak with an understanding and an authority that he could never do so before.
Jeremiah, in his loneliness and isolation, could speak in a way he never could had he married with a lovely family and everything was fine in that area of his life.
Ezekiel, out of his deep mourning for his wife that he was not allowed to go public with, but going back home and closing the door and weeping himself to sleep at night. He was feeling the heart of God that equipped him to minister to others.
And often the things that do break our hearts are things which bring us back to a greater glimpse of God.
The psalmist wrote in Psalm 42:3,
“My tears have been my food day and night.”
And then in Psalm 56:8 he says,
“Put my tears into your bottle.”
Why does he ask God to put his tears into His bottle? Is it because God has some morbid interest in them? No. Because these tears were an investment in something bigger and something better.
“Keep my tears in Your bottle,” says the psalmist.
The NIV says, “Write them on Your scroll.” The image isn’t quite as good – I don’t know how you write tears on a scroll, but you can put them in a bottle and you can go back and look at them and say, “those tears, though they represent the darkest, the most painful time of my life, have become for me treasures.”
This is part of the message of the prophets to us. Jesus, you remember, as He approached Jerusalem in Luke 19:41, saw the city and He wept over it – wept over it. Not just analyzed it and said this is what wrong with them; He wept over it. His heart was connected.
And a little earlier in Luke 13:34 He said,
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”
Notice that. “I would gather you, but you are not willing.”
These were not crocodile tears as though everything is totally under control. No, these are genuine tears. “I would and you wouldn’t, and it breaks My heart,” said the Lord Jesus. He wept over the city.
The psalmist, writing about this in Psalm 126:6 says,
“He that goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying his sheaves with him.”
And I suggest that if there is little joy in the reaping, it could be because there are few tears in the sowing. There is no virtue in tears in themselves, but tears as they depict a broken heart that understands and identifies and feels with the heart of God.
And as we look into Isaiah over the next number of weeks, we are not looking into a museum, (“well, here’s something on display over here and here’s something over here, something else on the table over there); we are not looking into the Scriptures to explore some dark museum.
We are looking into a mirror to see the ways of God with people, the ways of God with wayward people, and the ways of God with godly people, in order that we too might be more godly and more fruitful and our Christian witness and our Christian lives is not just about what we say. It’s about being true and honest with what God has taught us about His heart in addition to what He teaches about His Word through the experiences of life that hurt us and break us, that equip us and strengthen us at the same time.
Let’s pray together.
Father, we are grateful this morning that You love every one of us. There are times we may not feel that. There are times when You allow us to go down paths, often of our own choosing, where we walk away from You and not to You.
But we pray, Lord Jesus, that whatever is going on in our lives at the moment, whatever hardships, whatever fears, whatever griefs, whatever sadnesses, whatever disappointments, that these may be stimulis in our life to not run away from You, but to walk back to You and find in You, not only Your comfort and Your peace, which You offer to us; we might find that we have learned something more of Your heart that causes us to view the world and view people, not on the grounds of obligation to them, but on grounds of deep compassion and love for them.
Work in our [hearts we pray. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.]