Isaiah

Isaiah’s vision of the Lord on his throne turns on one cry: “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:3). The prophet answers, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips” (6:5), and a coal from the altar is laid on his mouth: “thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged” (6:7). Holiness here both condemns sin and removes it. Of the 31 verses in the KJV that use the name “the Holy One of Israel,” 25 are in Isaiah. It stands in the first charge, that the nation has “provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger” (1:4), beside “thy redeemer” in 41:14, and in the name Zion’s oppressors will give her, “The Zion of the Holy One of Israel” (60:14).

The law gave the next of kin the right to buy back what a poor relative had sold (Leviticus 25:25). Isaiah does not use the kinsman’s word until 35:9, “the redeemed shall walk there,” and from chapter 41 it is one of God’s names: “thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel” (41:14). He redeems a people already his: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine” (43:1). The price is not money, “ye shall be redeemed without money” (52:3), and Peter names it: “not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold … But with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19). The promise is that he will come himself: “the Redeemer shall come to Zion” (59:20).

The servant is first the nation: “thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen” (41:8). That servant is blind: “Who is blind, but my servant?” (42:19). Then a servant speaks who is called by the same name, “Thou art my servant, O Israel” (49:3), but whose task is “to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel,” and to be “a light to the Gentiles” (49:6). He gives his back to the smiters (50:6), and in chapter 53 he suffers in the place of others: “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” and “the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (53:5–6). “By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities” (53:11).

The book opened by calling heaven and earth to witness against a rebellious people (1:2). Near its end the LORD says, “behold, I create new heavens and a new earth” (65:17), the verb of the first creation, used in Isaiah in sixteen verses from chapter 40 on. Peter looks for the same thing “according to his promise” (2 Peter 3:13), and John sees it (Revelation 21:1). The verses that follow have been read in more than one way, since in them a child still “shall die an hundred years old” (65:20). Irenaeus placed them in the times of the kingdom, when the righteous shall bear rule upon their rising from the dead, the reign of Revelation 20:4. Ephrem held that These words point to the church. Jerome read them of the eternal city, where pain, sorrow and moaning have departed.