1471 - Introduction to Isaiah 53.

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1471. Today we're going to begin a study for a few days on Isaiah 53. We're going to look at its background, where it is located in the Word of God, and its important place in salvation and the work and ministry of Messiah. First of all, the book of Isaiah. The Hebrew name of the book is Yeshahu. That was Isaiah's name, and it means Hashem is salvation. The Lord is salvation. Yahu is salvation. In the English world, we use the name Yahweh or Yahweh. And it is the personal covenant name of God. You see in the book of Genesis chapter one, when God gives the summary and introduces himself as the creator, he uses the word Elohim. In chapter two and verse four, when he gets personal with man who was made in his likeness and image, he uses the word Yahweh because that is his personal covenant name. And the way he reveals himself to man, he is salvation. The book of Isaiah is a book that is quoted more than any other prophet in the New Testament. Sixty five times it is quoted in the New Testament. As I have shared with you before in the Tanakh, the law, the prophets and the writings, the Torah, the Neviim and the Ketuvim, it is in the Torah that Deuteronomy, the summary of the law is quoted more than any in that section. In the Neviim it is Isaiah. In the Ketuvim it would be the book of Psalms, which is the first in that major third division. And the book of Psalms is quoted more than any other book of the Tanakh in the New Testament. But of the prophets, Isaiah is the prince. Now it's interesting in the structure of the book that it is sixty six chapters. Now you and I know that the modern chapter and verse divisions are only a few hundred years old. And just for your information, uh because many of you are listening and have not followed me through the years or you have not had the opportunity to study maybe over the years and understand the background of the modern English divisions, which become the divisions for translations all over the world, except Hebrew, from which it came in the original language. Remember, the Bible is a Jewish book. It is written by Jews to Jews, primarily for Jews. And we as Gentiles, as the Goim, as those who are non Jews, we are grafted in by the grace of Almighty God, into the spiritual promises that God made to Abraham. Now God made to the nation and the bloodline, the DNA, the sons and daughters of Abraham. God made a national promise to them, to his people, and God will fulfill every one of those promises. A promise of land. You see, the land, the title deed to the nation of Israel that covers what is much of Jordan today, that is the western part of it, the nation of Jordan, and the entire land of Israel today. And in God's greater fulfillment of land promise that he promised to the children of Israel, it goes far beyond that into what is Syria and Lebanon today. But that's for another day. I just want you to understand that God made some promises to Israel that he's not finished with, and God has not cast his people off. The Church of Jesus has not replaced God's people. The promises of God are as bright and brighter than the morning sun, and they are more sure. When the sun no longer rises, the promises of God will be true. Over and over again, the Bible is replete in Old and New Testament showing that we have not, as the Church of Jesus, made up of Jew and Gentile, we have not superseded. We have not replaced all of the people of God called Israel. That is something of just modern days since the days of the last few hundred years that that's gained prominence. But it started way before then, all the way back at the Council of Nicaea and following. But that again is for another day. I want you to understand that the chapter and verse divisions that we have are not in the original Hebrew text nor in the original Greek text. The modern chapter divisions, they first appeared in an English version of the Bible in 1382 in the Weeklook Bible. And they were divided by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1227. His name was Stephen Langton. That's the modern chapter divisions. Now the modern verse divisions in the Old Testament, as far as I can research, first show up and were divided into verses by a Jewish rabbi named Nathan, and that's all that I could find. And then the New Testament verse divisions were put in place by Robert Estion, who is better known as Stephanus. And that was in 1555, and they first appeared in the Geneva Bible. Those are not inspired, as a matter of fact, even in the first two chapters of the Bible we see that they do not follow exactly the divisions as they are in the Hebrew text and would be in the Hebrew text. For instance, when you open up the Bible, the summary of what we would call creation in chapter one doesn't end until chapter two and verse four. And there it begins the generations of the heaven and the earth and chapter two and verse four. And that is the beginning of what should be chapter two. Now I'm giving you this detail because I'm going somewhere with this. It's very important that we understand that God rules and God overrules. And even though there were not original verses in there, there is structure, and God uses that structure, and I'm so happy for the chapter and verse divisions because for referencing it is very, very easy to find things and to study, and it makes the study of the Word of God easier. But the book of Isaiah is a microcosm of the entire Bible because it has sixty-six chapters. The Bible has sixty-six books. And the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah are more like what we would call the Tanakh, the Old Testament. Even though the Tanakh does not have the same number of books as our English Bibles, as the Septuagint would be broken down as far as the order of books, it's a different type of categorization. For instance, there's not twelve minor prophets in the Hebrew breakdown of the Old Testament. It's just the book of the twelve. And I could give you other examples where there is more books in the Septuagint translation and in our English Bibles that follows that translation than there were in the Hebrew Bible. But I want you to understand that in our English Bibles there's sixty-six books. There's thirty-nine the Old Testament, twenty-seven in the New Testament. Well, the sixty-six of Isaiah break down very naturally, and that is the first thirty-nine are more comparable to the message of what we would call the Old Testament. Chapter forty through chapter sixty six deals with those things that would be more identifiable with the New Testament. As a matter of fact, Isaiah chapter forty begins calling for God's people to be comforted. Comfort, yes, comfort my people, says your God. Speak comfort to Jerusalem and cry out to her, that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, for she has received from the Lord's hand double for all of her sins, and anyone who follows history and the history of the Jewish people and antisemitism and Jew hatred from Satan himself down through the ages, you will know that that's exactly what happened. The Lord's people, the Jews, have received double for their sins. Are they sinful? Yes, just like everyone else. And to whom much is given, much will be required, and the Jews have had great privilege. They have had the law of God, the oracles of God were given unto them, the law, the prophets, and all of those great blessings. So with that comes a lot of responsibility. But it's interesting that in chapter forty you begin those last twenty seven chapters which correspond to the twenty seven books of the New Testament. And when you look at verse three of chapter forty, yes, that is familiar, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill will be brought low, the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places smooth, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. Now you say, Well, what's that got to do with the New Testament? Well, as you'll recall, I have taught you in days past that there are four gospels, and the reason is the multifaceted work of Jesus the Messiah is so great that one author, one writer, could not contain and explain all of the multifacets of Messiah's work. So the Gospel of Matthew, the first of the four gospels, ties the Messiah to the greatest two figures concerning salvation in the Tanakh in the Old Testament, who would be Abraham and David. So when you open the Gospel of Matthew, it says this is the genealogy, this is the history, this is the birth record and ancestry of Jesus, the Messiah, Yeshua Hamashiach, that he is the anointed one. He is the son of David, who is the son of Abraham. And then when you go to the Gospel of Luke, then immediately you're in a different emphasis altogether, whereas Matthew talks more about the king and the kingdom than any other of the gospels because he introduces Jesus as king. That's when the Magi come and worship him when he was a toddler. And we have that recorded only in the Gospel of Matthew because that was his emphasis. Luke traces his genealogy not back to Abraham, but all the way back to Adam. Why? Because in Luke, he is presented as the Son of Man. And then in John, John doesn't go to an earthly ancestry, but he says, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and everything was made by this word. And then in verse 14 he says, And the Word became flesh, and he dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. The glory as of the monogones, the one single gened son, the one of a kind Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. And so those are the three gospels, but in the Gospel of Mark, there is no birth record. It begins with a ministry. And in the Gospel of Mark, it starts out in the beginning, the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his way straight. And John came baptizing in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins. And then you have the story of Jesus being baptized. That is the fulfillment of chapter 40 and verse 3. So begins Isaiah's last 27 chapters. It's interesting. We're going to learn the place of Isaiah 53. It is in the heart of the three sections, the three sections of nine chapters each that we're going to learn about in the book of Isaiah in our study in the days ahead. I cannot believe it's already been 15 minutes, but I just want to encourage you to share these with others. This week is going to be a week to remember. I pray that God would whet your appetite, that He would instill in you this week a desire to study the book of God like you never have before, because we're going to discover the marvel and the majesty of Jesus, the Messiah, and we will see that everything that He is predicted to do, He does. And He fulfills down to the very letter, to every jot and tittle what was predicted of Him and foretold of Him. And as we study Isaiah 53, we're going to be blessed beyond measure as we walk on the way. This is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.