Story 1: The Story of Humanity from the Perspective of God
Before we investigate the book of Isaiah, it is important for us to remember what happened in the story that comes before it. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He made it all out of absolutely nothing…the stars and the oceans, the air, and the birds and all the animals and plants on the earth. He is so powerful that He just spoke, and they all came into being. The special, high point of God’s creation were two very interesting creatures. Their names were Adam and Eve, and they were the very first humans. They are the parents of every human being on earth.
God put the first humans in a beautiful, perfect Garden. It was God’s special temple sanctuary where He could walk with His children in the cool of the day. How He loved them! But instead of returning God’s lavish love, they mutinied against Him. He had given them one rule, one thing they could not do to protect them, and they violated it. That rebellion against the God who made them brought a terrible curse into the world. They separated themselves from His perfect goodness and put themselves at the mercy of Satan.
The souls of humanity were not meant to be torn away from their Maker. God had created them in His own image, endowing them with infinite worth. But now that image was broken. Their separation from God brought twisted distortion to their very souls. Before their devastating choice to reject Him, they were His servants and were able to be effortlessly pure and right, and holy. They didn’t have to fight the temptation to sin. They didn’t even know what evil was. Through their embrace of Satan, they had invited the knowledge of sin and the driving power of temptation into their hearts. It was like a poison that infected their very DNA. It brought the curse of death and decay on them and all the children that would be born after them. It brought the same curse on every plant and animal in the world.
The Covenant of Abraham
“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country, And from your relatives And from your father’s house, To the land which I will show you; 2 And I will make you into a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And you shall be a blessing; 3 And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who [a]curses you I will [b]curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”
But God is holy and good, and He had an epic plan to bless. He knew that Adam and Eve would fall into sin. He knew the thousands of years of shame and suffering that they would bring into the world. And He knew exactly how He was going to save them. The Lord raised a special people for Himself. He made a covenant with Abraham and promised to make a great nation out of His descendants. He would give them a Land of Promise where they could thrive. The Lord also warned Abraham that there would be a season where his descendants would go through a trial. Their homeland would go through a terrible famine, and they would travel to Egypt in order to survive. They would end up living there for four hundred years, and by the end of it, they would live as slaves under the Pharoah’s rule. Yet even in the midst of these terrible developments, the children of Abraham would grow to over two million people. God’s purposes were marching forward despite the evils of this world.
The Mosaic Covenant
“And Moses went up to God, and the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, “This is what you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the sons of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings, and brought you to Myself. Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel.”
When the right time came, the Lord raised up a man to break the children of Abraham out of their bondage in Egypt and lead them back to the Land of Promise. Along the way, the Lord made a new covenant with Moses and the children of Abraham. They would be a light to all the other nations. They would help those nations see the greatness and holiness of the Most High God. However, this covenant was different from the first. For this covenant, the Hebrew people had to respond to God’s gracious gift with their own effort. The nation of Israel would receive special lessons from God. He was going to teach them His holy ways. He would provide laws with great wisdom and insight that would empower them to live rightly before God and with each other. If they obeyed Him, they would set a beautiful example of what it was like to be pure and blameless in a cursed world. The other nations would see them and see what it was like to live in a society that was free of corruption and fear. They would see that the God the nation of Israel worshipped was the true and living God. They would have the opportunity to follow after the God of Israel and live in right relationship with Him.
One would think that having this great honor bestowed upon them would have motivated the nation of Israel to wholeheartedly embrace the righteous ways of God. One would think that after God set the entire nation free from slavery, they would have had some deep internal drive to follow Him. There were periods of time when the people of Israel truly did rise in faith and honor their Lord. Most of the time they did not. They were just like the rest of humanity. Broken and incapacitated by their weak and sinful souls, easily captured by the temptations of the world and the evil one, they fell away and failed.
Several hundred years after they settled in the Land of Promise, the people of Israel began to grumble and complain. They wanted to be like the nations around them. They wanted a King. So the Lord appointed Saul to be king over the nation. Saul was foolish and unfaithful to the Lord, so God declared he would remove him from power and raise up a different man to rule over His people. Saul refused God’s plan, and so a great civil war ensured, causing great suffering harm to the nation, but in the end, the man of God’s choosing prevailed. King David was a man after God’s own heart. While he made many mistakes as king, he sought the ways of the Lord and honored His covenants. Then God made a special covenant with David. The Lord promised King David that He would establish David’s throne over the nation of Israel forever (Psalm 89 and 2 Samuel 7:8-17). That means that David’s descendants would rule over God’s people for eternity.
The Davidic Covenant
“Now then, this is what you shall say to My servant David: ‘This is what the Lord of armies says: “I Myself took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, to be leader over My people Israel. And I have been with you wherever you have gone, and have eliminated all your enemies from you; I will also make a great name for you, like the names of the great men who are on the earth. And I will establish a place for My people Israel, and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place and not be disturbed again, nor will malicious people oppress them anymore as previously, even from the day that I appointed judges over My people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. The Lord also declares to you that the Lord will make a house for you. When your days are finished and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your descendant after you, who will come from you, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him and he will be a son to Me; when he does wrong, I will discipline him with a rod of men and with strokes of sons of mankind, but My favor shall not depart from him, as I took it away from Saul, whom I removed from you. Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.”’” In accordance with all these words and all of this vision, so Nathan spoke to David.”
David had a son named Solomon who followed him as king over God’s holy nation. King Solomon built a magnificent Temple in the city of Jerusalem where everyone would come and worship the LORD their God. Daily sacrifices were made by the priests. Three times a year the people from all the tribes of Israel brought offerings of thanks to God and made sacrifices for their sins. They gathered as a whole nation to show their gratefulness for God’s blessings and their repentance about all the ways they had rebelled against the LORD.
The Temple was one of many projects that King Solomon initiated. The cost of these things put a terrible burden on the backs of his people. After he died, his son Reheboam was made king. The wise men of Israel came to Reheboam and asked him to take the heavy burden of taxes away from the people. Reheboam refused. In anger at the unfair laws, ten of the twelve tribes of Israel split away from King Reheboam. They chose a different king, Jereboam, to reign over them. Now King Reheboam, the descendent of David, would only rule over the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the South. He ruled out of the great city of Jerusalem, the City of David, where the priests at the majestic Temple of Solomon continued to offer sacrifices to the LORD Most High every day. The rest of the nation to the north…all ten tribes…were separated from the Davidic line and their house of worship. Sometimes the Northern Kingdom was also called Samaria or Ephraim.
The Southern Kingdom was often in rebellion against the LORD. Their kings would sin against their God, and the people would follow after false idols. But the LORD would bring them to repentance. He would show them their sin and He would raise up good kings who were faithful to the LORD just as King David had been.
The Northern Kingdom would go even farther in their sin and idolatry than the Southern Kingdom. Every last one of their kings were bad. Not one of them served the LORD God of Israel wholeheartedly. The people worshipped demonic gods, rejected God’s holy law, and committed sins that were outright horrifying.
The story we are about to read is a story about the Southern Kingdom. At this time in the nation of Israel, it had been over two hundred years since King Solomon built the Temple. Over the years, they had begun to worship false gods. They built altars to idols on the high places in their land and worshipped demons under trees. They were unfaithful to their LORD. It was at just this moment that God sent a great prophet to their kings to help them honor God. His name was Isaiah, and he wrote the book we are here to learn about.