Flight ISA01 - Part A

21 times Isaiah is quoted in the New Testament. He is called the Messianic prophet. He is the only prophet in scripture to specifically predict the Messiah will be born of a virgin. Isaiah is referred to as the Messianic prophet. He specifically predicted the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. Today on Connect with Skip Hitek, Skip shares revealing insight from Isaiah's prophecies about your future and your relationship with Jesus. And at the end of today's program, Skip and his wife Lenya share why it's vital for you to study prophecy. When you look at the predictions like in the prophet Isaiah, where you have an event predicted and then he and then other prophets add multiple contingencies to that layer upon layer, it gives evidence to supernatural origin of the Bible. Be sure to stay tuned after today's message to hear the full conversation. Now we want to tell you about a resource that shows you how the truth of Jesus resurrection transforms your life. The aftermath of 2020 has left so many of us wrestling with questions about the future and wondering what's next.

Here Skip Hitek. That's a question by the way that people ask anytime there is a catastrophe, any kind of catastrophic event causes people to ask the question, what's next? If there's a car accident that happens, well, what's next?

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To give online securely, visit connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888. Okay, we're in the book of Isaiah as Skip Hitek starts today's study. Turn in your Bibles to the book of Isaiah, or we should say, can you try to say that with me? Ishiyahu. Ishiyahu is how you say his name.

He wasn't born in Rochester, New York or in California or New Mexico. He was born in Israel and so his original pronunciation was Ishiyahu. And Ishiyahu, aka Anglicized Isaiah, was a prophet during four kings, actually five.

The last one may have actually killed him according to tradition. But Isaiah is like the prophet's prophet. He's like the most influential of the prophets. You know, sometimes God calls people to obscure ministries. Other times he calls them to very influential ministries. And Isaiah would fall in the latter category. He really had entrance into the palace. Some Jewish traditions hold that he was actually part of the royal family, if not at least an aristocratic family in Jerusalem.

So well known, well connected. Probably his pockets well lined originally, but he got a call from God on his life. You'll see that call in chapter 6. As we begin, and again, this is a survey of half of the book. The Bible has how many books in it? 66 books in the Bible, Old and New Testament. The book of Isaiah has interestingly 66 chapters. If you look at the Bible, the Old Testament has 39 books.

The New Testament has 27 books. If you look at the book of Isaiah, once again, it's fascinating that of those 66 chapters, the first 39 chapters are markedly different from the second part of the book, the last 27. In fact, the style is completely different. The subject is completely different.

The focus is completely different. First part is mostly condemnation. The second part is mostly salvation, as the Old Testament has a theme of God's sovereignty, God's majesty, God's work through the nations, but condemning a world apart from the good news of salvation introduced in the New Testament. So there are similarities between the book of Isaiah and the Bible itself.

Now, I don't think that's necessarily, well let me put it this way. We got chapters and verses in the year 1227. So Isaiah wasn't writing chapter 1, verse 1.

He was just writing. And it wasn't until 1227 that Stephen Langton, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, decided to make it easy and put numbers for chapters and verses. But it's just interesting how they coincide, 66 chapters, 66 books of the Bible. The first part is chapter 1 through 39. And these are prophecies of condemnation.

Let's just call it that. Not all of the material is condemning material. There's some lighter moments and some highlights, but generally they're prophecies of condemnation. Judgment is proclaimed. Strong pronouncements are made from God through the prophet Isaiah. Then chapters 40 through 66, that second part of the book, are prophecies of consolation.

It's a different style altogether. So prominently in the first section of Isaiah, chapter 1 through 39, it's government and law. Those are the kind of the grand themes, the government and law, both God's government and legal government, government and law. The second part of the book, grace and love. You'll see it.

You'll see it when we go through it next time. Now, Isaiah the prophet happens to be the most frequently quoted Old Testament book prophet quoted from the Old Testament in the New Testament. It's very obvious that the New Testament authors knew the prophecies of Isaiah, especially in reference to the Messiah. It's interesting that John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who came and announced the Messiah, when he first comes on the scene, he quotes out of the book of Isaiah.

A voice of one crying in the wilderness, he says, makes straight the way of the Lord. Right out of the book of Isaiah chapter 40. Jesus quoted from the book of Isaiah when he started his ministry.

He went into Nazareth. Remember when he went into the synagogue and he was the speaker who walked up to the podium, he opened up the scroll to Isaiah chapter 61. And he began, the spirit of the Lord God is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.

And he worked his way through the prophecy closed the scroll. And he said, today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. I'm here to fulfill what Isaiah predicted, beginning Isaiah chapter 61. 21 times Isaiah is quoted in the New Testament. He is called the Messianic prophet. He is the only prophet in scripture to specifically predict the Messiah will be born of a Virgin. There are other allusions to it, but the specific reference comes out of Isaiah chapter seven. That the woman, the Virgin will conceive, the Lord will give you a sign, a Virgin will conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel. Matthew says, which is translated God with us.

It is the Messianic prophecy that specifically mentions the Virgin birth. Also, Isaiah is the only prophet that calls Satan Lucifer. We understand one of his names because of the prophecy of Isaiah. Now he's not the only one to speak about Satan. There are two old Testament prophets that speak about Lucifer, Satan, the devil and give a little more description. One is Isaiah.

The other is Ezekiel, but in Isaiah chapter 14, we get the name Lucifer. How are you fallen from heaven? Oh, Lucifer, one of the morning.

Oh, you who did weaken the nations, you're cut down to the ground for you set in your heart. I will ascend above the throne of God. I will rise up to the stars of God.

I will be like the most high. So his name is given in the book of Isaiah. Now, Isaiah is a Hebrew word that means salvation is of the Lord or the salvation of the Lord, the salvation of God. Now that's an interesting name because the word of salvation shows up 31 times in the 66 chapters of Isaiah. Okay, now we haven't even started in verse one yet and we have 39 chapters to go.

I know again, 30,000 feet, so hold on. Some people, Dr. Jones was mentioning that Isaiah was written by Isaiah. He said that and I agree with him, but not everybody would agree with him. There are some scholars who are of the more liberal persuasion in scholarship. They do not regard any miraculous occurrences in the scripture. They don't believe that God orchestrated the writing of the text, so they have come up with an interesting theory called the Deutero-Isaiah theory, that there wasn't one Isaiah, one author, but two authors. The chapters one through 39 was written by Isaiah, but chapters 40 through 66 was written around 540 B.C., around after the captivity and by either a student of Isaiah or just by somebody else. So, they come up with the two author or Deutero-Isaiah theory. Now, there's another theory called the Trito, T-R-I-T-O Isaiah theory, that the last 11 chapters were penned by yet another author.

So, these crazy things get spun and people get fascinated by them and they get shaken by them when the college professor says that and they come and ask us, well, I heard this and then they're all weirded out in their faith. All you have to do is look at the New Testament authors who were Jewish, who were closer to the time they were uttered or penned than we are. So, you have John who quotes both sections of Isaiah, the first part and the second part, what they would call Deutero-Isaiah, written by somebody other than Isaiah. And when he quotes the first part and when he quotes the second part, he says, as was spoken by Isaiah the prophet. Even Jesus himself quotes out of the second part of Isaiah saying that it was Isaiah who said it. So, that's good enough for me, the authors of the scripture, Jewish in their orientation, much closer to the events that happened than we are. It wasn't really until the last century that people started disputing the idea of Isaiah writing it. So, those are the theories of the authorship of Isaiah. You're going to see that Isaiah ministered during the reign of four kings. That's verse 1 of chapter 1, the four kings are mentioned. Actually, there's another king that is not mentioned where Isaiah ended his ministry during this king and that is one of the most wicked men in all of the Bible called King Manasseh. Now, I bring him up because tradition says that Isaiah died by King Manasseh murdering him. And the tradition is they took the prophet Isaiah, took a hollowed out log, put Isaiah in that hollowed out log in a very uncomfortable position, then took a huge saw and saw the log in half cutting him in two.

That's the tradition. I'm bringing that up because in the New Testament book of Hebrews, in that hall of fame of faith, remember that section, it says, who through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, became valiant in battle, turned to flight the armies of aliens, not from outer space but foreigners. Women received their dead race to life again and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, of chains and imprisonments. They were stoned.

Again, literally not the other way. They were stoned. They were sawn into, the writer of Hebrews says, sawn into. They were tempted, slain by the sword they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, etc. It's believed that the author of Hebrews was alluding to that tradition and thus perhaps because if he's referring to Isaiah, the fact that it was Manasseh who killed him by sawing him in two.

Now, something else I got to tell you. In 1946, a great discovery was made just south of the Dead Sea in these little rocky sandy hills in the ancient Essene community. They're called the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scroll of Isaiah itself was found 24 feet long, a single huge scroll. What we had in the Dead Sea Scrolls when we discovered that, when they discovered that, it wasn't around 1946, but when they discovered that in 1946, now what they had in their hands, not only Isaiah, but all these other Old Testament books, we had an Old Testament manuscript 1100 years older than the earliest manuscript we had until that date.

You follow me? Up till that date, the oldest Old Testament manuscript in existence was called the Ben Asher Codex, discovered in Egypt, which is the basis for what we call the Masoretic Text, which your Old Testament is based off of, the Masoretic Text. So the Masoretic Text is around 895 AD. That was the oldest text we had. Now in finding the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholarship has a text of the Old Testament 1100 years earlier.

Okay, stop right there. There must be lots of mistakes and discrepancies if you have something 1100 years earlier than that. Let's see what it really said and let's see how different it is with that passage of time.

You would expect enormous differences. When they examined the scroll of Isaiah, the only thing they discovered was the absence of mistakes. Only nine Hebrew letters were different.

Just variant spellings is all. Nine letters difference from the Ben Asher Codex, Masoretic Text, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1100 years ago, shows you the meticulous nature of the copying and recopying of the scribes in their discipline. Amazing. I wanted to bring that up. I get stoked at that stuff. Okay, so part one, yeah, the book of Isaiah, we got to get to this. Okay, so the first part, first 39 chapters, all about condemnation, proclamations of judgment, announcements of judgment on Judah, on surrounding nations, on Babylon, on Assyria, and on Israel as well as Israel and Judah together. And then there's a little interesting section. I'm just giving you a little prelude to where we're going tonight. There's this little intermission that is four chapters long, chapters 24 through 27, which I'm just going to whet your appetite with now and I'll explain it as we get to it. One of the notable features of all prophecy and it's seen in Isaiah, though we're not going to be able to really uncover this, we have done it in the past, is the near far fulfillment.

Are you familiar with that? So the prophets, picture this way, they wore bifocals. I'm doing that because I have to do that. I have a progressive lens, they call it. It's progressive in that it's just sort of you can see up close, but then as you work your way up to the top of the lens, you can see at a distance.

And I find that I need that or I need the contacts I have in my head right now, one to focus on up close, one to focus at a distance. That's how the prophets often wrote. They were with one part of their meaning, part of their vision, they were focusing up close on something that would happen in the very near future, given the circumstances around them at the time. And at the same time, like a variable focal length on a camera, they could zoom out to the future. So in one breath, they might say something's going to happen in a few years and it did, but then that becomes a template of a greater fulfillment. And it's obvious by the context that it is far reaching, sometimes worldwide, et cetera.

So there's a near far fulfillment. The prophets did this a lot. It's one of the particular aspects of Hebrew prophecy. So Isaiah chapter one, verse one, we begin with the denunciation against Judah. Do you know what I mean when I say Judah? Do you know what I mean when I say Israel?

Once again, let me give you the delineation. Judah is the name, not of just the tribe, but now when I say it in Isaiah, I'm speaking of the southern kingdom of two tribes, Judah and Benjamin. When I say Israel, I don't mean all the 12 tribes. I mean 10 tribes that are up north, the rest of the 12 tribes.

So two in 10. Israel is the 10 tribes. Judah are the two southern tribes. Judah is the southern kingdom. Isaiah is a prophet to the southern kingdom, those two tribes.

And this is a denunciation of Judah for their failure to trust God. Verse one, the vision of Isaiah or Isaiah, the son of Amos, not the son of Amos. Amos was a prophet. By the way, he was a prophet concurrent to Isaiah. He was a contemporary of Isaiah, but he was preaching to the northern kingdom, so he's not around. Amos is somebody different. We don't know anything about him other than his name. So Isaiah was the son of Amos, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, and it describes him as kings of Judah.

Why is that important? It tells us how long this dude's ministry was. Fifty years in the pulpit. Isaiah preached for about 50 years.

He influenced the nation for 50 years. I know I've only made it through one verse. Bear with me.

You were hoping that I would do it in three weeks. Instead of two, you might get your wish. When you think of a prophet, you think of them foretelling the future, right? That's only part of prophecy. The other part of prophecy is forthtelling, speaking forth at the circumstance, at the time of need the nation was going through.

It would be a message of God speaking forth to the nation about what they were going through. Isaiah isn't just foretelling their future, but he is forthtelling their failure, their failure to obey God. That's Skip Heitzig with a message from the series The Bible from 30,000 Feet. Now let's go in the studio with Skip and Lenya as they share why it's vital for you to study prophecy. Today we're picking back up our series The Bible from 30,000 Feet, soaring over the book of Isaiah. The person Isaiah is one of the most notable prophets in the Bible, and in this book we read a lot about prophecy about the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Skip, let's talk about why studying prophecy is so vital for our faith.

Yeah, boy, Isaiah had a lot to say, didn't he? Sixty-six chapters, biggest book, longest book in the Bible, and a lot of it is prophetic. And prophecy is simply history written in advance. It is part of one of the characteristics of God. God is omniscient.

He knows everything. Thus, he knows the end from the beginning, and he can predict it. When we study prophecy, it's good for us because it strengthens our faith. Jesus told his disciples, I'm telling you these things in advance, so when they come to pass, you may believe. So we believe stronger when we see the fulfillment of prophecy. And when you look at the predictions, like in the prophet Isaiah, where you have an event predicted, and then he and then other prophets add multiple contingencies to that layer upon layer, it gives evidence to supernatural origin of the Bible. Other books don't have that. The Qur'an does not have predictive prophecy. The Bhagavad Gita do not have predictive prophecy.

The writings of Buddha do not have them. So predictive prophecy is one of God's calling cards that strengthens our faith. Thank you, Skip and Lenya. We hope this conversation refreshed you spiritually.

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800-922-1888. Thank you. Tune in tomorrow as Skip Heitzig shares about the hope God gave to the Israelites in their difficult times and how you can have hope today in yours. Be sure to join us. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.