Chapter 3
The Message of the Major Prophets
Isaiah: Overwhelmed by God’s Holy Judgment and Salvation
Historical Context
God’s glory is on full display at the prophetic commissioning of the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 6). The time is the year that King Uzziah of Judah died (around 740 BC). In what is likely a visionary experience, Isaiah is in the temple where he sees the Lord seated on his throne, which was thought to be in the Holy of Holies since the arks of the covenant was his footstool (1 Chron. 28:2; Pss. 99:5; 132:7). The temple was the place that heaven touched earth and, while Isaiah may only see the bottom part of God’s robe (6:1), he also sees the powerful spiritual beings known as the seraphim flying about and saying: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:3). Isaiah is understandably terrified and confesses that he is a man of “unclean lips,” implying that he was not worthy to speak on the Lord’s behalf. One of the seraphim then takes a coal and touches his mouth after which Isaiah is ready to be God’s commissioned messenger. The first verse of the book (1:1) confirms that Isaiah’s ministry began at the time of Uzziah, but then continued down through the reign of King Hezekiah (727–686 BC).
The mention of these kings places Isaiah’s ministry in the latter half of the eighth century BC. He was a prophet who was active in the southern kingdom of Judah during the time of the Assyrian defeat of the northern kingdom of Israel (722 BC) and after. During this time period, Judah was also under threat from the Assyrians, and these events provide the background of many of Isaiah’s prophetic oracles.
The book of Isaiah also looks beyond the prophet’s contemporary situation particularly to the future threat to Jerusalem due to their sin. Indeed, many of the prophecies seem to point forward to a future restoration that will take place after the future judgment that will come on Judah from Babylon.
Basic Outline of Book
Reading through Isaiah can be a difficult and even confusing experience, illustrating Martin Luther’s comment quoted above that the prophets have “a strange way of talking.” The book’s length (66 chapters) also makes it hard to keep the structure of the book in mind.
Even so, close reading does show that the book falls into different sections that can be helpful to know in order to understand the book well.
Chapters 1–12: Israel’s Present Sin and the Coming Judgment
While Jeremiah and Ezekiel begin with an account of their divine commission as prophets, Isaiah delays. Instead, the book starts with a series of judgment oracles, naming the sins of God’s people. They also hint at restoration after the purification produced by God’s judgment.
The story of Isaiah’s commission (told above) is given in chapter 6, and then chapters 7–12 return to the subject of sin, judgment, and ultimate restoration. The difference between these chapters and the first five is that chapters 7–12 are clearly rooted in the events of the day. King Ahaz of Judah is threatened by his northern neighbors, Pekah of Israel and Rezin of Syria, because he has refused to join them in an alliance against Tiglath–pileser III of Assyria. Isaiah urges him to depend on God alone and not ask the Assyrian king to intervene. Ahaz, however, does not listen.
Chapters 13–23: Judgment on the Nations
God is not just the God of Israel, but of the whole world. In chapters 13–23, God through the prophet turns his attention on the foreign nations and announces future judgment on them. In turn, he addresses Babylon, Assyria, Philistia, Moab, Damascus, Cush, Egypt, Babylon [a second time], Edom, Arabia, and Tyre). In the previous section, we observed that King Ahaz developed an alliance with a foreign nation to solve his problems. This section demonstrates that only God can be his people’s savior.
Chapters 24–27: Judgment on the Whole Earth
The previous section spoke of God’s judgment on the individual nations that surrounded Judah. This then leads to the proclamation of judgment on the whole earth. While the wicked will come to an end, God’s people will flourish in the future once God slays “Leviathan,” a serpent representing evil (Isa. 27:1).
Chapters 28–35: Trust God Not the Nations
Earlier, we have seen that the prophet urges the people to trust God and not the nations. That theme continues in this section.
Chapters 36–39: Hezekiah Trusts God
In Isaiah 7–12 we had the example of a king of Judah, Ahaz, who chose to trust a foreign nation rather than God. In these chapters, Ahaz’s son and successor Hezekiah is an example of a king who, though tempted, ultimately listens to Isaiah and trusts God rather than a foreign nation. Like the earlier chapters, these two are intertwined with the events of the day, in Hezekiah’s case, an invasion by the Assyrian king Sennacherib.
Chapters 40–66: Restoration after the Judgment
In chapters 1–39, we observed an emphasis on Israel’s sin and God’s judgment, but with glimpses of future restoration. In the last major section of the book (chaps. 40–66), the reverse is true with an emphasis on restoration, but also the acknowledgment that there is still corruption among the people.
In chapters 40–55, the prophet speaks as if already living during the future time of judgment, the exile of God’s people to Babylon. It envisions the return to the land. In chapters 56–66, the prophet speaks as if living during the period when Persia dominated God’s people. The book ends with a vision of the new heavens and the new earth to be described below.
Central Message: Judgment for Israel’s Sin and Future Glorious Restoration
Isaiah’s structure might be at first sight confusing and its imagery overwhelmingly powerful, the message of the book is quite clear and similar, as we will see, to both Jeremiah and Ezekiel. God’s people have sinned and, unless they repent (which they don’t), God will judge them (which he does). But he is not done with his people. Once they have been refined by judgment he will restore them.
Important Themes: God’s Holiness; the Servant of the Lord: New Heavens and Earth
Powerful themes reverberate throughout the book and support the central message. We can only name a few, putting our emphasis on the rich themes of judgment and restoration.
Right from the moment of his calling, the emphasis is on God’s holiness. The seraphim call out “holy, holy, holy” (6:3) and throughout the book God is called “the Holy One of Israel” (1:4 through 60:9, at least a couple dozen times). Because he is holy, he cannot abide Israel’s sin.
One of the most intriguing themes of Isaiah is the “servant of the Lord,” featured in the second part of the book (41:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12). In a number of passages (including 41:8–9; 44:1–2, 21; 45:4; 48:20; 49:3–6) the servant stands for the remnant of God’s people refined by the judgment. Below we will see that the New Testament associates the servant with none other than Jesus.
Finally, Isaiah dazzles us with the vision of the original creation marred by human sin giving place to a new heavens and a new earth (chaps. 65–66). The book of Revelation concludes with a magnificent metaphor of this new creation in the form of a new Jerusalem, whose symbolism points to an absence of evil (no sea; Rev. 21:1) and a restoration of Eden, where humans lived in harmony with God.
Jeremiah: The Weeping Prophet
Historical Context
The major prophets considered it important to give an account of their call to their prophetic task, and Jeremiah is no exception as we see in 1:4–10. Jeremiah reports that the word of the Lord came to him and told him that God “appointed him as a prophet to the nations” (1:5). Like Moses before him, Jeremiah objected saying that he was too young, but God assured him, and, like Isaiah before him, God touched his mouth and gave him his words in order to speak them to the people. When Jeremiah spoke to the people, he was speaking the very words of God.
While these verses do not date Jeremiah’s call, the first three verses of Jeremiah tell us about the time period in which Jeremiah spoke as a prophet and inform us about the historical situation into which he spoke his divinely–given message. We learn that “the word of the Lord came to him in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah,” which would be 626 BC and that he continued to speak “down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah,” which would be 586 BC, the year that the Babylonians captured the city of Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and deported the leading citizens of the city back to Babylon.
The original hearers of Jeremiah’s words as well as those who first read the book had a more immediate knowledge of the events of this time period. But we can recreate these events ourselves from books like Kings and Chronicles as well as Babylonian sources. To give the big picture, Judah and the areas surrounding it were in turmoil in the period between 626 and 586 BC. Babylon was undermining the great Assyrian empire and over this time was furthering its reach toward Jerusalem. Jeremiah under divine inspiration was warning the people of God that unless they repented God would use the Babylonians to judge them. Accordingly many of Jeremiah’s prophecies were judgment oracles calling on the people to repent. Since Jeremiah takes us up to (and actually beyond), the destruction of Jerusalem, we know that they did not repent and God’s judgment came. Below we will see that the prophet did look into the more far distant future to see a restoration after the judgment.
Basic Outline of Book
While Jeremiah’s speeches and stories do not fall into a chronological or even strictly topical order, we can see some helpful groupings of materials in this book, which is the longest by word count.
Jeremiah 1–24: Prophetic Speeches and Dramas
We have already discussed above the superscription and divine commissioning that open the book of Jeremiah (1:1–10). The rest of this opening section of Jeremiah contains various prophetic speeches and actions that are not dated to specific years in Jeremiah’s long ministry. The message of these speeches and acts call God’s people to repent of their sins under threat of coming judgment. Some of these speeches seem to come from a time after the people have rejected the idea of repentance, so they simply announce the coming judgment).
While the speeches are fairly straightforward, we need to add a word of explanation about prophetic acts. Jeremiah not only spoke his message to the people, but he performed what we today might call street theatre to illustrate his point. Jeremiah 13:1–11 describes how God told Jeremiah to go put on a “linen belt,” wear it, but not wash it. To understand the full impact of this story, we need to realize the this “linen belt” is equivalent to our underwear. After wearing it and not washing it for a while, God says go and take it to a place called Perath (maybe the Euphrates River) and put it in a crevice of a rock for a while. Later, when Jeremiah goes and gets it, it “was ruined and completely useless” (11:7). The word of the Lord then explained that the soiled underwear was like the sinful people of God. We can imagine the reaction of people in the streets when they saw Jeremiah carrying his dirty underwear around town and telling them that it represented their sinful selves.
Jeremiah 25–29: More Speeches and Stories about Jeremiah
The next section of the book is in one sense more of the same. The difference is that these speeches and stories are dated to specific moments in Jeremiah’s ministry. The dramas continue as Jeremiah walks around town with a wooden yoke around his head representing the future defeat of Judah by Babylon. When a false prophet, Hananiah, rips the yoke off from Jeremiah’s head and breaks it, Jeremiah comes back to town saying that now an iron yoke will be placed around the heads of God’s sinful people (Jeremiah 27 and 28).
Jeremiah 30–33: The Book of Compassion
Almost all of the first twenty–nine chapters of the book describe the coming judgment, but in these chapters we have a collection of speeches that talk about the restoration after the judgment, earning it the name “The Book of Compassion.” At the heart of this section is talk of a future New Covenant (31:31–34; see below).
Jeremiah 34–39: Even More Judgment Oracles
After the book of compassion, Jeremiah returns to even more judgment speeches. These are also given dates in Jeremiah’s lifetime, though they are not in chronological order. Jeremiah 39 gives a historical report of the fall of the city of Jerusalem to Babylon. Since neither the leaders nor the people repented, God allowed the Babylonians to conquer the city, burn the temple, and deport its leading citizens.
Jeremiah 40–45: Events in Jerusalem after Its Defeat
The Babylonians apparently caught wind of Jeremiah’s message of repentance and surrender. They did not understand that Jeremiah was addressing the people’s sin at God’s request. Even so, they allowed Jeremiah to choose between going to Babylon and staying in Jerusalem with the vast majority of people who were not deported (only the elites of Judaean society were deported). The Babylonians appointed a native governor of Jerusalem, Gedaliah, but he was assassinated by a Judaean insurgent named Ishmael. Fearing reprisal from Babylon, some Judaeans kidnapped Jeremiah and took him forcibly to Egypt against the prophet’s desire to stay and God’s promise that they would be fine if they did. Even after the destruction of Jerusalem, the people are not listening to the word of God as spoken by his prophet.
Jeremiah 46–52: Judgment against the Nations
According to his commission, Jeremiah was “a prophet to the nations” (1:5), not just to Judah. As we saw in Isaiah (chaps. 13–23), Jeremiah speaks of the judgment that will come on the nations that surround Jerusalem, particularly those like Babylon whom God used as an unwitting agent of his judgment on that city. The book ends with what is essentially a repeat of Jeremiah 39 (and also 2 Kings 25) that narrates the fall of Jerusalem.
Central Message: Judah has Broken God’s Covenant and Will Suffer the Consequences. But God Will Restore the Remnant (Jeremiah 30–33)
Our survey of the contents of the book brings out the main theme that is repeated time and time again in the speeches and the acts that Jeremiah performed. Judah has sinned and therefore God will judge them. After the judgment will come restoration.
Important Themes: The Old and New Covenants
The most important themes of the book relate to God’s covenant with his people, especially the covenant that God made with Israel at Mount Sinai at the time of Moses. At that time, God called on Israel to obey his law so that they might lead flourishing lives. He also threatened that if they did not, then he would punish them by bringing the curses of the covenant down on their heads. Nevertheless, in the Book of Compassion God also foresaw a future New Covenant that would take the place of the Mosaic covenant, and initiate a more intimate, internal, and immediate relationship between God and his people.
Ezekiel: Captivated by the Glory of God
Historical Context
The destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians took place in 586 BC, but Judah was first made a subject nation (a vassal) to the Babylonians at the time of Daniel (605 BC, see Dan. 1:1–2). In this way, King Jehoiakim was forced to be a puppet king of the Babylonian king whose name was Nebuchadnezzar. But for reasons we don’t completely understand (maybe he thought he was going to get help from Egypt) Jehoiakim rebelled against the Babylonians in 597 BC.
Nebuchadnezzar quickly came and subdued the rebellion at which time he carried off a number of leading citizens to Babylon, including a young priest named Ezekiel.
No wonder then that when the book of Ezekiel opens, Ezekiel tells us he was “among the exiles by the Kebar River” (1:1), which is in Babylon. Ezekiel goes on to tell us that the word of the Lord came to him “in the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachim” (592 BC; 1:2). And then Ezekiel goes on to give us a lengthy account of how God in all his glory appeared in order to commission him to his task. God appeared to him and filled him with words to speak to the people (described as the prophet eating a scroll; 3:1–3). God is sending him to his people to confront them with their rebellion and call them to repentance.
Interestingly, Ezekiel’s prophecies overlap with Jeremiah’s. But while Jeremiah prophesies back home in Jerusalem, Ezekiel prophesies from Babylon.
Basic Outline of Book
Compared to Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel has a pretty straight forward structure! That is not to say that reading through the book does not present its difficulties.
Ezekiel 1–3: Ezekiel’s Prophetic Commissioning
The book starts with Ezekiel’s calling to his prophetic task. God appears to him in Babylon where he is in exile having gone there in 597 BC. God is on a chariot surrounding by the powerful spiritual beings known as the cherubim. Like Isaiah in the previous century and his contemporary Jeremiah back in Jerusalem, God sends Ezekiel to his people to confront them because of their sinful rebellion against him.
Ezekiel 4–24: Oracles of Judgment against God’s Sinful People
Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel also performed certain acts that supported his prophetic words. This section opens with God’s instructions to take a clay tablet and draw the city of Jerusalem under siege on it. Then God tells him to lie on his left side for 390 days, one for each year that Israel sinned, then on his right side for 40 days, once for each year that Judah sinned.
But the largest part of this section contains judgment speeches against God’s people. Significantly, Ezekiel 8–11 pictures God’s glorious presence rising up from the Holy of Holies in the temple and departing to the east before its destruction.
Ezekiel 25–32: Judgment against the Nations
Isaiah and Jeremiah had a number of oracles against foreign nations. Ezekiel is no different with its oracles directed toward Ammon, Moab, Edom, Tyre, Egypt, and Lebanon.
Ezekiel 33–48: Future Blessings on God’s Restored People
Again, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel speaks of a future restoration of his chastised people. Most notable is the description of the future temple described in detail in chapters 40–48. People debate over whether this temple anticipates a new physical temple in Jerusalem or is symbolic of a restored community of God’s people.
Central Message: Also Judgment and Restoration
The three major prophets all share the same central message. God’s people have sinned, and unless they repent (which they don’t), they will suffer God’s judgment in the form of defeat at the hands of their enemies. Nonetheless, after that judgment, God will restore his people.
Central Themes: God’s Glory, Grace, Sovereignty, and Human Responsibility
God is above all things and in control (that is sovereign) over all the nations, not just his own people. He is also set apart (holy) in all his glorious splendor. For that reason he judges sin. But he is still gracious toward his people and works toward their restoration. God’s people are not only guilty because of their collective and long history of sin, but because they are also all individually responsible for their own rebellion (18:1–32; 33:10–20).
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