The oldest group of Old Testament manuscripts ever found and found in an earthen vessel. Now here's the connection that you make if you have the Spirit of God. You might miss it if you don't.
If you miss it, it doesn't mean you're not born again and you don't have the Spirit. But remember, they found the scroll in an earthen vessel. That scroll, more than any other Old Testament document, proclaimed Christ and the liberty that He brings to the soul. This is Cross Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Isaiah.
Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of Isaiah chapter 1 with today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. If you have your Bibles open to the book of Isaiah, we are going to start our 66th chapter trek. With an introduction to Isaiah, hopefully we'll get the first nine verses. Prophecies like this merit an introduction. At the end, I'll close hopefully with a quote from Ecclesiastes, but I am very uncomfortable with the thought of not having the Bible knowledge that God has allowed me to accumulate over the last few decades. And I say that to say that it counts. Bible study counts.
It matters. It's not a magic wand. It is a shield. It is a sword.
It is a helmet. It is the armor of Christ. All of that comes from the word of God. And if you ever doubt how important it is, your knowledge of the scripture, think of those places that have no knowledge of the Bible. And I would add to that, it makes it difficult, more difficult, for the devil to bamboozle you if you have a knowledge of the word.
Not enough to only have the knowledge of the word, but without it, you're a sitting duck. I'd like to start this introduction off with a quote from the Gospel According to Luke. In the fourth chapter we read, and he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. If you're not a student of the scripture and you come to the Gospel of Luke and you read that, it doesn't have the same meaning as opposed to someone who knows what Isaiah is all about from beginning to end.
It's not very difficult. I'll give a brief outline of what the book is about soon. But the first recorded sermon of our Lord when he was on earth was not preached from Genesis or Psalms or any other book that you might expect for him to have preached from. It was Isaiah. It was from the scroll of Isaiah, our chapter 61, that great scroll of righteousness and redemption. Righteousness is God saying this is the right way.
Redemption says you couldn't do it the right way, so you had to be redeemed. And all of that is captured in the Gospel, you could say, of Isaiah. It is the good news of the Old Testament. God in the first 35 chapters, this is the righteousness, and you failed. And then with a brief intermission of a narrative of history, which is imperative, we'll get to that maybe, then comes the redemption.
Comfort, yes, comfort my people. And then the story of Messiah really flashes to the front. And so going back to the Gospel of Luke, we need to take the context of what is going on. It tells a story I won't need to comment much. Now, when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.
It wasn't gone for good. Then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee. And news of him went throughout all the surrounding region, and he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all. So he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written.
The Spirit of Yahweh is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of Yahweh. They expected him to complete Isaiah's last sentence. They expected him to continue to read and the day of vengeance of our God, but he does not read that part. He stopped right before it to proclaim the acceptable year of Yahweh.
They wanted Messiah to strike with wrath those Gentile dogs of Rome. Instead, he chose the book. He closed the book and returned it to the synagogue custodian. And then he sat down. The silence that was there the whole time.
As he rolls the scroll, as he hands it away, as he makes movement to his seat, silence. Everyone is expecting comment from him. That day of wrath that is going to come, that kind of thing had not come yet. He had not come to condemn the world, but that the world through him might have salvation. And it still has not come after all these years, but it is coming. But then he broke the silence with words that exploded like a bomb.
If you can imagine being Jewish in Israel at that time in history, despising the Gentiles and even more the Roman Gentiles. And to have someone bring up that section of scripture and stop short of their punchline. It wasn't God's punchline. God has punchlines all over the place.
And they were going to have to learn to conform to that, which many of them did not. And so he breaks the silence with these words. Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Well, what is fulfilled? The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. He has sent me. Jesus was saying, I am your Messiah. There was no ambiguity to it.
This is it. I am him, straight out. And he, the village carpenter, had no right to make such an announcement in their eyes. That he was Yahweh's chosen one, in distinction of everybody else, above David, above Abraham. The one whom Yahweh had written these words some 700 years earlier were now being embraced by him. And they were moved by the preaching and the hope that Isaiah gave, just for a little bit of time. Then, unbelief robbed them, and they hardened their hearts. The admiration nosedived into anger, and their anger into violence. A murderous mob was born in church.
They're going to kill them for this. From the scroll of Isaiah, Jesus declared, again, without any confusion, that he is Messiah. He proclaimed his Messiahship. Well, we call him the Christ, which means he is the Messiah.
It's just a Greek word for the Jewish word Messiah. Isaiah, he wrote more of the coming of Jesus as Messiah, which they, of course, did not understand his name would be Jesus until the revelation unfolded in the days of Joseph and Mary. But Isaiah wrote more about the coming Messiah than any other Old Testament prophet. He is the most quoted Old Testament prophet in the New Testament. His entire prophecy was among the Dead Sea Scrolls found in 1947. The oldest group of Old Testament manuscripts ever found, and found in an earthen vessel. Now, here's the connection that you make if you have the Spirit of God. You might miss it if you don't.
If you miss it, it doesn't mean you're not born again, and you don't have the Spirit. But remember, they found the scroll in an earthen vessel. That scroll, more than any other Old Testament document, proclaimed Christ, and the liberty that he brings to the soul. 2 Corinthians 4-7. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. Now, Paul, of course, he's talking about the body and the Holy Spirit. And we have this treasure in earthen vessels. We're just clay. And yet, yet, does it not also fit the discovery of this word from God to man, sort of, you know, God accentuates the point.
It's an exclamation mark. We had the scripture before the scrolls in the Qur'an were found. We understood. We didn't need them. But God says, I'm going to give them to you anyway.
Sort of a bonus. This man, Isaiah, he saw, again, some 700 years before Christ, he saw the glory of Christ. Well, how do we know that? Jesus tells us right out. John chapter 12, verse 41. These things Isaiah said when he saw his glory and spoke of him.
Well, John adds that, of course. Jesus was the one that Isaiah saw when he said, I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and his glory filled the temple, the train of his robe. It was just this magnificent moment in the life of Isaiah. And he wrote it down so we could all get a piece of it.
And he wrote so much more. And you think about the quotations we have from the book of Isaiah. I had a bunch, you know, maybe I'll just quote a few of them.
I just got out of hand. I said, okay, you can't do that. Therefore, Jesus Christ, Yahweh of the Old Testament, I want to hear from the man who heard from God and saw his glory. And that's why we don't reduce and say, ah, yeah, it's just the Old Testament. It's not the New Testament. No, it's not the New Testament. It's equal with. It's all God's word.
It's what you do with it that matters very much to God, to yourself, and to others. Isaiah 40, verse 8, the grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of God stands forever. And that's what we're seeing.
That's what we are seeing. Well, we can still have a little bit more introduction, then we'll hit the verses. Because this prophet Isaiah spent his whole life under the shadow of death, which would have been Assyria. He never knew a time in his life where the menace of Assyria was not threatening to come and take them all away as slaves, kill, pillage, and loot. He exercised his ministry exclusively in the borders of Judah. Jerusalem was part of that. Jerusalem is within Judah. He preached, he prophesied to her correction and her comfort.
And that's critical. Because when we preach against sin, hopefully we have also the opportunity to preach the solution, and not just the condemnation. And the prophets were notorious. The prophets had so much hope for the future. They spoke so much about the millennial reign of Messiah, the Kingdom Age. To them, the Kingdom Age was something that they held up like we hold up the rapture.
We look forward to getting away from the curse. And both the rapture and the millennial kingdom offer those things to those who have been born before the millennial age and before the rapture. And so he preached. His preaching, his prophecies, his walk with God, these things validated his public ministry. The people knew he was a prophet.
There was no question. The first 35 chapters confirm that God was reaching out to a backslidden and apostate people, but there was a remnant within. And at every opportunity, God gave the people a chance to turn to him, but they neglected and rejected it enough to bring on themselves consequence. Well, not much different from the time we live in. There is a significant difference between Isaiah chapter 1 as we know it through chapter 35 and chapters 40 through 66.
There's a big difference. If you read the two, you say, two different people write this? In fact, a lot of, I think, very short-sighted commentators suggest, well, there are actually, you know, one book named Isaiah, but different authors.
No one man could have done this. Well, when Christ quotes from the earlier section in the New Testament, he says, the prophet Isaiah said. And then when he quotes the latter verses from Isaiah, he says the prophet Isaiah said. He doesn't say, well, Leonard also said, who also wrote. And so I go with Jesus and not these guys who overthink. Some of them mean well, some of them don't.
They tried that with Daniel too. Well, nobody could have prophesied these things. Well, that's the meaning of prophesy you knit with.
I mean, a prophecy is telling the future. It's spiritual. It's miraculous. And so, you know, to say, well, I don't believe in miracles. That's a miracle. It's a miracle somebody could be so blind. Where does that come from? Because you think, you look up and you see the sun in the sky and you say, why does this thing not eat us?
Something must be holding it in place in check. Well, anyway, back to this fabulous story of Isaiah the prophet. As I mentioned, there's this brief historical narrative. And the reason why you get this break between the condemnations, the righteousness, and then the Messiah and the redemption. The reason why we have this little piece in the middle is because the nation almost perished.
But for this little time period, Syria was there at the gates of Jerusalem. And God wanted to tell his people, I am the one that beat them back. You didn't do it. It wasn't by mistake.
I did this. And so it is a very big deal because that would have been it for everything. We would not be here tonight if it weren't for that little piece of history between chapters 36 and 39. It is a big deal.
Everything in your Bible is a big deal. And if you don't yet see that, it doesn't mean it's not there. It's just you don't see it yet. That's when you come to me. And if I don't know, I'll confuse you enough to make you think that you should have known and I know and you don't.
And you'll be happy with that. Anyway, let's summarize the outline of this book. We can just divide it into three parts. You could do it different ways, but I like this way.
It's the better way. There's the prophetic section of Israel and Gentiles. That's the nations. Kind of heavy duty reading and hopefully when we get there we'll skim over much of that. And there we find out what's going to happen to Assyria and some of the other nations. That's prophetic. Then there's the historic interlude that I mentioned with King Hezekiah and the Assyrians coming in.
We cover that in Kings. And finally, we have the last 27 chapters, which are messianic. Especially so, regarding the deliverance of Israel and the surviving remnant. And I've used that word remnant already and it's a significant word to the Jewish prophets. That was a doctrine to them and it should be to us.
These are the righteous survivors. And we'll get some of that, I think, in verse 7. And so Isaiah, he preaches the severity of God and he preaches the solution of God and we should be doing it the same way because Christ did it that way. Paul, Peter, they all did it that way because that is the right way.
And Satan hates it so. So now, well, here's another interesting thing I'd like to bring up. This writing style of Isaiah has no rival.
He was well educated, plugged in, probably he may have been part of the royal line. It gets a little deep and not that necessary. But the versatility of expression, how he phrases things, comes at the same thing from a different angle. The brilliance in his imagery that he uses, just a rich vocabulary. And so here he has a range and you have to appreciate those scholars that put these numbers together for us. All I have to do is come up and read them instead of count them. But he has 2,186 different words in the Hebrew.
If you don't believe me, you go count it and get back to me. Psalms has 2,170. Isaiah, 2,186.
And so he beat them by 16 words. Jeremiah has 1,653. You read Jeremiah, you think he has 20,000. And Ezekiel, 1,535.
And so, not that those men were less intelligent, not at all. But just to show you this, it's sort of like when God said, I need somebody to do something different, announcing Messiah. And he found it in this man, Isaiah.
Well, now we look at verse 1. The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Now, when he says the vision, it refers to truth disclosed by God. He is not using it in the strict sense that every time God spoke to him, he was sort of in a trance-like state, as Paul was when he saw the Macedonian, you know, say, hey, come over and help us. Isaiah has some of that. He does, in the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. That was one vision that he had. But much of this information was imparted to him, as it is to this day. And the New Testament highlights that for us.
2 Peter 1, verse 21, For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Spirit of God. Who cannot love that? I love that stuff. I love that God has given me a love for his word.
I don't always like how it ends up in life. That is the fight. Otherwise, there'd be no conflict.
This would be heaven if all we did was work. I just love the Bible, and that was it. What right do I have to enjoy teaching the Bible in a country that's still free enough to teach it, where in other places you can't even come close to standing up in a public environment and preach the word?
Well, God gives me the love for it and the orders to do it, and others have been doing it for centuries, and it has been beneficial to mankind, whether they know it or not. Isaiah chapter 2, verse 1, The word that Isaiah the son of Ammon saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. The word that he saw, not the vision. And this is part of the vision, though, under the umbrella of the vision of Isaiah.
And with that comes that brilliant imagery and his use of language that I mentioned earlier. And when he says, when Isaiah says, Thus says the Lord, he's not fooling around. And he goes on to say, Thus says the Lord, and I'm telling you what he said, because he's shown it to me, and he's imparted this information. And much of his prophecies came true in his lifetime, certainly not the messianic ones and millennial ones, but others did, and the people respected him for it. This formal announcement is saying to the people that Yahweh is speaking through me, and the righteous loved it, the unrighteous hated it.
And I'm not going to get in, well, maybe I should. Some of the rabbis have said, Well, Isaiah was hated by Manasseh so much for not conforming to Manasseh's wickedness that he essentially put him in a log and saw the log in two, which Hebrews alludes to it. But we don't have proof of that, and I guess I say that because some of you may be expecting me to say that.
Now you can relax a little bit. But anyway, this prophet continues here in verse 1, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. They are the subject. He was alive when the northern kingdom was still intact, although spiritually it was a disaster, it was dismantled, but physically it was still a kingdom. And he saw the Assyrians come and defeat them. He knew the prophecies of Hosea and Amos.
He knew they were right, and there was nothing he could do about it. But he did a lot to stop the same thing from happening in Judah. Jeremiah will come along a hundred years later and won't be able to pull it off. Not that it wasn't for him to do, just the messenger of the Lord. But Jeremiah will not have the victory that Isaiah enjoyed. However, Isaiah saw the cities of Judah burned, fortified cities. But Sennacherib says there were 46 of them. We have no reason to doubt that, that he conquered. And I'll quote that later also.
But this vision for Judah and Jerusalem, it's over into the thousand-year reign of Christ, and much of it fulfilled. Thanks for tuning in to Cross Reference Radio today. Cross Reference Radio is a ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel, Mechanicsville in Virginia. If you'd like to learn more about this ministry, we invite you to visit our website, crossreferenceradio.com.
You'll find a number of teachings from Pastor Rick available there. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast. When you subscribe, you'll be notified of new editions of Cross Reference Radio. Just search for Cross Reference Radio on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow the links at crossreferenceradio.com. We're glad we were able to spend time with you today. Tune in next time to continue learning from the book of Isaiah with Pastor Rick, right here on Cross Reference Radio.
