Tomorrow we start our year-long journey through the Prophets: Isaiah – Malachi. Five books called “Major Prophets:” Isaiah, Jeremiah, (the) Lamentations (of Jeremiah), Ezekiel, and Daniel. Then 12 books called Minor Prophets, called “minor” because they are shorter.

For each it’s helpful to remember Israel’s history. The Kingdom split into the Northern tribes, “Israel,” and the Southern tribes, “Judah,” as recorded in 1 Kings 12. Then, Israel was scattered by the Assyrians, recorded in 2 Kings 17. The Southern Kingdom, Judah, was taken into captivity by the Babylonians, recorded in 2 Kings 24 and 25. The prophets were men who preached, mostly to Judah either before the exile (Isaiah and others), during the exile (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others), or after the exile (e.g., Haggai and Zechariah).

Isaiah is pre-exile, trying to turn the ship before it’s too late. He fails as predicted:

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” And he said, “Go, and say to this people: “ ‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”

Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, and the LORD removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. (Isaiah 6.8 – 12, ESV)

And preach he does. Remember, the job of the prophet is not so much to predict the future but to change people’s lives today. Here is part of what Eugene Peterson writes in his introduction to Isaiah:

For Isaiah, words are watercolors and melodies and chisels to make truth and beauty and goodness. Or, as the case may be, hammers and swords and scalpels to unmake sin and guilt and rebellion. Isaiah does not merely convey information. He creates visions, delivers revelation, arouses belief. He is a poet in the most fundamental sense—a maker, making God present and that presence urgent. Isaiah is the supreme poet-prophet to come out of the Hebrew people.

…

The book of Isaiah is expansive, dealing with virtually everything that is involved in being a people of God on this planet Earth. The impressive art of Isaiah involves taking the stuff of our ordinary and often disappointing human experience and showing us how it is the very stuff that God uses to create and save and give hope. As this vast panorama opens up before us, it turns out that nothing is unusable by God. He uses everything and everybody as material for his work, which is the remaking of the mess we have made of our lives.

“Symphony” is the term many find useful to capture the fusion of simplicity and complexity presented in the book of Isaiah. The major thrust is clearly God’s work of salvation: “The Salvation Symphony” (the name Isaiah means “God Saves”). The prominent themes repeated and developed throughout this vast symphonic work are judgment, comfort, and hope. All three elements are present on nearly every page, but each also gives distinction to the three “movements” of the book that so powerfully enact salvation:

• Messages of Judgment (chapters 1–39)
• Messages of Comfort (chapters 40–55)
• Messages of Hope (chapters 56–66). – Eugene Peterson, bulleted for clarity

So off we go. Meet me here tomorrow for the start of our adventure. Isaiah pulls no punches:

Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the LORD, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged. (Isaiah 1.4, ESV)