Ortlund Isaiah

God Saves Sinners
1. Auflage 2005
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1730-3
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 496 Seiten

Reihe: Preaching the Word

Isaiah is widely considered the deepest, richest, and most theologically significant book in the Old Testament. It is, without question, a profound statement by God about his own sovereignty and majesty spoken through his chosen spokesman, the prophet Isaiah. In this expository commentary on the book of Isaiah, Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., argues that Isaiah imparts a single vision of God throughout all sixty-six chapters. It is a unified, woven whole presenting God's revelation of himself to mankind, breaking through our pretense and clashing 'with our intuitive sense of things.' Ortlund makes a point of man's uninterest in God and his unfailing inclination to disbelief, and thus the need for God to 'interrupt our familiar ways of thinking.' The emphasis of this addition to the Preaching the Word series is this: God saves sinners. He saves them willfully and powerfully and needs no help from us, presenting himself in all his unmistakable glory. The message of Isaiah, shown thoroughly and thoughtfully in this commentary, will reignite a passion for the glory of God in the hearts of believers and will present that glory clearly and potently to those who have yet to be brought to saving faith. Part of the Preaching the Word series. Part of the Preaching the Word series.

 Ray Ortlund is the president of Renewal Ministries, the pastor to pastors at Immanuel Nashville Church, and a canon theologian with the Anglican Church in North America. He is the author of several books, including Marriage and the Mystery of the Gospel; The Death of Porn; and the Preaching the Word commentaries on Isaiah and Proverbs. He is also a contributor to the ESV Study Bible. Ray and his wife, Jani, have been married for fifty years.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ortlund, Ray

Leseproben

1

Introduction to Isaiah

ISAIAH 1:1

Who can tell us whether this awful and mysterious silence, in which the Infinite One has wrapped himself, portends mercy or wrath? Who can say to the troubled conscience whether He, whose laws in nature are inflexible and remorseless, will pardon sin? Who can answer the anxious inquiry whether the dying live on or whether they cease to be? Is there a future state? And if so, what is the nature of that untried condition of being? If there be immortal happiness, how can I attain it? If there be an everlasting woe, how can it be escaped? Let the reader close his Bible and ask himself seriously what he knows upon these momentous questions apart from its teachings. What solid foundation has he to rest upon in regard to matters which so absolutely transcend all earthly experience and are so entirely out of the reach of our unassisted faculties? A man of facile faith may perhaps delude himself into the belief of what he wishes to believe. He may thus take upon trust God’s unlimited mercy, his ready forgiveness of transgressors, and eternal happiness after death. But this is all a dream. He knows nothing, he can know nothing about it, except by direct revelation from heaven.1

We can know, because God has spoken. Into our troubled world, God has spoken to us “from the borders of another world.”2 Our needs go deeper than the remedies on sale in the marketplace of ideas today. Whether you are a believer or an unbeliever, wouldn’t you agree that “the solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time”?3 No matter how many experts we consult or how much research we do, the ultimate questions of life remain unanswerable unless God speaks. And God has spoken to us, in plain language. Surprisingly, his message is good news for bad people like us. Will you listen to him thoughtfully, patiently?

God spoke eloquently through Isaiah. If you have any interest in the Bible at all, Isaiah will reward a close reading. It is “the most theologically significant book in the Old Testament.”4 “Of all the books in the Old Testament, Isaiah is perhaps the richest.”5 “From ancient times Isaiah has been considered the greatest of the Old Testament prophets.”6 The scholars who know what they are talking about prize Isaiah. What Bach’s first biographer said about his music applies to Isaiah’s prophecy:

[Bach’s music] is not merely agreeable, like other composers’, but transports us to the regions of the ideal. It does not arrest our attention momentarily but grips us the stronger the oftener we listen to it so that, after a thousand hearings, its treasures are still unexhausted and yield fresh beauties to excite our wonder.7

Isaiah deserves better than to be a “classic” — a famous book nobody reads anymore. His prophecy isn’t always easy to understand. But every day all around the world people take on challenges, from climbing the Matterhorn to learning Japanese to launching a new business. If God has spoken to us through Isaiah, let’s explore this literary Matterhorn. Let’s enjoy the view from the very top, and even the effort of getting there. Let’s reach out for new understandings.

Let us begin: “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” (1:1). This heading invites three questions: What? Who? When?

WHAT?

“The vision of Isaiah . . . which he saw . . .” This book is a prophetic vision. Not that Isaiah went into a trance, for 2:1 says that Isaiah saw a “word” from God. But this book puts before us a way of seeing. And it isn’t our own brainstorm. God is the one offering us a new perspective on everything.

Left to ourselves, we live on the level of impressions and hunches and gut reactions. We are blind to the things we most need to know. But a prophet was enabled to see beyond the immediate. A prophet was not fooled or stampeded. He was a seer.

For example, Elisha was surrounded one night in Dothan by the army of the Syrians (2 Kings 6:15-17). A young man was with him there — a prophet-in-training. He got up one morning to find the area swarming with enemy troops. He was terrified. But when he alerted Elisha, the old man didn’t panic. Elisha said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” His young friend must have thought, This old guy is past his prime! He doesn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. But what did the prophet do? He prayed, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” God did. And the young man saw that the surrounding mountains were filled with horses and chariots of fire. The prophet could see through appearances into reality, which is why the prophets were misunderstood.

Isaiah himself was enabled to see the divine King enthroned in the heavenly court (Isaiah 6). What he never could have stumbled onto, God revealed to him. This makes the prophetic vision of the Bible our clearest view into reality. Our natural outlook focuses on everything secondary. But in the Bible God is the central, unavoidable figure everywhere. All the basic questions of life are, in fact, God-questions. As John Calvin put it, “The Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life.”8 That is a prophetic way of seeing. But this awareness clashes with our intuitive sense of things. We dislike God’s word and defend ourselves against it. But Isaiah begs us, “Come, let us walk in the light of the LORD” (2:5). Let’s respect God enough to be open and think it through.

The heading in Isaiah 1:1 alerts us that his book will interrupt our familiar ways of thinking. Isaiah walks up to us, taps us on the shoulder as we struggle with our problems, and says, “There’s another way to look at all this. Interested?” God is disruptive. Without his word, we are confined to our own pretenses and bluffs. With his word, new realities open up. But if we want to get anything out of Isaiah, we have to be ready to adjust.

The other thing we should see about the What is this: The verse says “the vision” (singular), not “the visions” (plural). That is surprising. Why? Because this book is an anthology of Isaiah’s lifetime of prophetic work. He preached many sermons and made declarations for God on many occasions. What we have in this book is an edited collection of his whole career. Toward the end of his life, Isaiah gathered his papers and notes and memories together and wove them into one coherent presentation. So the unfolding sections of this book come from who knows how many different occasions, and not always in chronological order. But they all unite as one compelling new way of seeing everything. “The vision . . . which he saw . . .”

WHO?

There are two answers to the Who question. The first is obvious: “Isaiah the son of Amoz.” The Bible does not tell us who his father Amoz was, but rabbinic tradition claims that Amoz was brother to Amaziah, King of Judah, putting Isaiah into the royal family.9 We know that Isaiah was a married man with children. We think he was a resident of Jerusalem. We can see he was a literary genius. But the most important thing about Isaiah is his name.

His Hebrew name means “The Lord saves.” This man’s very identity announces grace from beyond ourselves. We don’t like that. We want to retain control, save face, set our own terms, pay our own way. Every day we treat God as incidental to what really matters to us, and we live by our own strategies of self-salvation. We don’t think of our choices that way, but Isaiah can see that our lives are infested with fraudulent idols. Any hope that isn’t from God is an idol of our own making.

Idolatry is Isaiah’s primary concern about us. This is offensive, because we thought we left idolatry behind centuries ago. But Isaiah, who understands the power of God, also understands the power of non-gods. It works on our minds. Every day we shift our deepest fears around behind amusements, professional achievements, and even lesser fears. As we drive slowly around a serious car accident, we think, It wasn’t me, to distance ourselves mentally. We think, They must have been driving recklessly, because blaming feels reassuring. We sense how vulnerable we are.10 But any evasion of plain dealing with God is idol-manufacture. And we do not let go of our idols easily.

In heaping our idolatries together, we assemble a culture — a brilliant, collaborative quest to prove ourselves. Our modern culture rarely represents itself with religious language. But Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, explained how we serve it every day with faithful devotion:

We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.11

We crave reassurance that our lives are not zeroes. But unless we are resting in God, our uncertainty generates “a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a...