How to read Isaiah for God’s mission

The book of Isaiah is epic. It speaks deeply to our spiritual formation and our life on mission.

I live in Oklahoma. And everybody born in Oklahoma knows exactly what to do when the tornado siren goes off:

Grab a beverage and sit on the front porch to watch the show.

Piercing sirens. Red flashing lights. The screeching staccato of the Emergency Broadcast System. We have systems to get our attention in an emergency. Sure, a smoke alarm sounds irritating when it goes off, but if it didn’t go off, death is a serious possibility. Sobering stuff.

The prophets of the Old Testament are a bit like that. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not easy reading. Sometimes its difficult—places and characters we don’t know. Sometimes it’s difficult because God just downright sounds mean and angry, and God is supposed to be about love, right?

If there is a singular messages to the prophets, it’s “Don’t forget God!” In the Old Testament world, the book of Deuteronomy functioned like their constitution. It was their founding document It was the basis for the nation’s relationship with God, and it outlined specific, natural consequences if God was forgotten. And so throughout the history of the nation, that’s where the prophets come in. The prophets are the Deuteronomy Police.

If reading the Bible shapes our imagination, Isaiah is a treasure trove of vivid pictures. It’s imaginative scope is just awesome. Its poetic language rivals anything from Homer or Virgil. Swords into plowshares. A voice crying in the wilderness. A light in darkness. Ancient ruins rebuilt. To us a child is born. These are the images of Isaiah.

It’s so epic that when the New Testament writers sat down to tell the stories about Jesus, the images from Isaiah were forefront in their minds. Like that friend you have that always quotes movie lines, the New Testaments writers constantly drop references to Isaiah. Along with Deuteronomy and Psalms, Isaiah is the most quoted book in the New Testament.

Here are four things to keep in mind as you read Isaiah:

God as “the Holy One of Israel.”

First and foremost, Isaiah is about God and God’s holiness. God is the central character in the book of Isaiah, and God is holy. What this means is there is a very strange yet compelling “different-ness” of God. God is wholly different from humanity, and God is different from the gods of the nations. One of these is not like the others, and that one is God.

The title “Holy One of Israel” appears 28 times in the book of Isaiah, just six other times in the rest of the Old Testament. So, there’s something special about this characteristic of God in this book.

It also means there is an appropriate distance to God. We have not figured out God. Maybe this is mystery. God is not within our grasp or control. God is always just over the horizon. God is not us. And we are not God.

God, the different one in our community, in our neighborhood, in our midst. God, the wholly other.

As Eugene Peterson writes, “Holiness is the most attractive quality, the most intense experience we ever get of sheer LIFE—authentic, firsthand living, not life looked at and enjoyed from a distance.”

It speaks to justice in God’s world.

“The children I raised and cared for have rebelled against me” (1:2).

Chapters 1–39 have to do with this theme of justice. Justice means that everything wrong in the world God is making right. It means that every rebellious act against God, every act of oppression against other people, will have an accounting. There are consequences for sin, and there is judgment for behaving badly. There are words of judgment against religious and political corruption within Israel, as well as against the nations that opposed God’s plan in Israel. These chapters are associated with the career of a prophet named Isaiah who consulted to kings Ahaz and Hezekiah prior to the exile.

For us today, it means that God sees all of the injustice in our communities. And we can rest assured that God is already at work doing something about it.

It speaks to comfort in God’s world.

“‘Comfort, comfort my people,’ says your God. ‘Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Tell her that her sad days are gone’” (40:1, 2).

Chapters 40–55 are all about comfort. These chapters come during the time of the exile in Babylon, a time in the history of Israel that is anything but comfortable.

It’s possible that something like a “school of disciples” or “monastic order” developed that carried the legacy of the prophet Isaiah in later generations. It may be that these later sections come out of that tradition.

These are words that remind the people of Israel that, though their ancestors may have forgotten God, God has not forgotten them. Though they’ve suffered greatly, that time is coming to a close. Even in exile, even in enemy territory, the people are still among God’s presence. God heals the broken places.

For us today, it’s a reminder that God doesn’t gloat over broken people or broken communities. God’s hope is restoration and healing for those of us hurting and those around us aching.

It speaks to hope in God’s world.

“Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth” (65:17).

This last section, chapters 56–66, speaks to hope. These include visions of the end of the world, and they are visions, not of the world falling apart, but of God putting all things back together. Mount Zion, the site of the temple in Jerusalem, is anticipated as ground zero of this restoration.

What’s radical in this section is that this restoration includes all of the nations, not just Israel. Even Babylon. God’s restoration includes the whole world. It’s these passages that formed the imagination of the church in Acts. What is read as “the nations” in Isaiah was later read as “Gentiles” in the early church. When Jesus kicks off his ministry (Luke 4), he reads from a passage in this section of Isaiah.

For us today, we can see the “end game” of what God is up to in the world. God’s people are a sign and witness to God’s new creation. God, through his people, is drawing every single person back to himself. God’s new creation is the final word.

May the words of Isaiah richly shape your imagination for God and what God is up to in your neighborhood.

To dive deeper, check out:
Isaiah for Everyone by John Goldingay
The Book of Isaiah: Volume 1 and Volume 2 by John Oswalt

About the prophets, in general:
The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann
The Prophets by Abraham Heschel