Finishing Isaiah
Isaiah is a difficult book for me. I love the story of King Hezekiah in the narrative chapters at the middle of the book. I love the passages where Isaiah’s vision soars and inflates into a magnificent vision of a redeemed earth. I’ve always loved the story of Isaiah’s calling. And I have a respect hard to express for this prophet who was true to his calling, a very quiet presence behind a very grand vision, who tradition says was martyred — is even perhaps the one “sawn in two” referred to in Hebrews.
But in general, reading prophecy isn’t my comfort zone. I despair of having an intuitive grasp on its symbolism, and I often feel I’m being tossed from wave to wave in a sea of different currents without having a clear sense of how it all fits together. That’s a long way of saying, a story it’s not. Instead, it’s a series of different oracles, some of them filled with doom, others filled with an over-the-top picture of glorious love and glorious reconciliation. When I closed my Bible this morning, I was glad I’d finished it, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
Looking through this resource and this one helped. I had a sense of its historical context as I was reading, thanks to the notes in my study Bible. But Ryken’s Literary Guide to the Bible helped me to understand its unity. William F. Gentrup writes in the chapter on Isaiah,
The uninitiated reader may encounter difficulties when first reading Isaiah. Prophetic books do not normally achieve a narrativelike coherence (though there are exceptions like Jonah). Because of its length, Isaiah, more than other prophetic books, will probably seem like a miscellaneous collection of doom-and-gloom judgments and ecstatic promises of blessing. There are several basic strategies readers can employ to avoid getting lost in the book…
“Ahh,” says half of me, “if only I’d read this essay before reading Isaiah!” But the other half knows that it wouldn’t have made much sense to me without this most recent visit to the book under my belt.
As a book geek, I enjoyed reading of Isaiah’s significance to Shelley and other writers of the Romantic movement, and seeing how the structure of thought compares to Shakespeare, and revisiting all the technical terms for Isaiah’s poetic artistry and literary craftsmanship.
But like many readers before me, I think what’s most meaningful to me about the book of Isaiah is its foretelling of Christ, and how many ways Isaiah finds to talk about him. A close second would be the future visions that are so beautiful and satisfying. I still struggle a bit with the back-and-forthness of God’s favor in the book; one minute he’s violently angry, the next minute he’s promising that his anger is over for good. This week celebrates the making of lasting peace in a specific moment in human history through Christ. So while my mind hasn’t sorted out all my questions yet, I put my faith in that one grand overture of divine love, and look forward to the day when things as they are change in the twinkling of an eye to things as they were created to be, under their rightful King.
