Isaiah

Covers Isaiah 1

How God, in Isaiah 1, rejects Israel's faithful sacrifices and rituals as the trampling of his courts — calling them instead to seek justice and defend the fatherless and the widow, because he wants their hearts more than their religious observance.

Covers Isaiah 5

Isaiah 5's vineyard oracle — Israel as the beloved vineyard God prepared in every way that yielded only wild grapes — and his piercing question, what more could I have done? A picture later picked up by Jesus, and a rebuke to those who call God vindictive.

Covers Isaiah 6

Isaiah commissioned to a ministry God says will dull hearts rather than turn them back — and how that reframes spiritual success as faithfulness rather than visible fruit, tempering the prideful need to prove oneself by others' metrics.

Covers Isaiah 10

Assyria as the rod of God's anger against Israel — wielded as his instrument of judgment yet wholly unaware of it, and still held accountable for its own prideful intentions, raising the question of what else the cosmic chess master is doing unseen.

Covers Isaiah 19

How the opening image of Yahweh riding a swift cloud into Egypt works as a polemic against Baal, evidence for Jewish binitarian theology of two Yahwehs, and a passage Jesus later claims for himself in Matthew 24 as the Son of Man coming on the clouds.

Covers Isaiah 28

Isaiah 28's farming images — plowing, and threshing dill, cumin, and grain each according to its need — as assurance that God's discipline is purposeful and measured, never for destruction, and better submitted to than resisted.

Covers Isaiah 29

Israel honoring God with their lips while their hearts are far from him, their reverence a commandment taught by men — and how the church errs both by reducing faith to rule-keeping and by dismissing obedience, when God wants obedience that springs from the heart.

Covers Isaiah 30

Judah fleeing the Assyrians on horses rather than finding salvation in returning and rest — and how practicing trust in God through smaller, lower-stakes trials builds the assurance needed to rely on him when the stakes are highest.

Covers Isaiah 32

Heaven not as a disembodied existence among the clouds but as a restored physical world fulfilling the Eden mandate — Isaiah 32's vision of Christ reigning in righteousness, afflictions ended, the wilderness made a fruitful garden.

Covers Isaiah 36

The Rabshakeh's enticing offer to surrendering Israelites as a picture of how sin operates — half-truths that promise escape from the Lord's discipline, mirroring Satan's offers of relief that carry their own suffering but without God's redemptive purpose.

Covers Isaiah 37

How God's answer to Hezekiah's prayer about Sennacherib shows prayer changing reality — not moving God to do what he was unwilling to do, but advancing the timeline of the judgment on Assyria he had already decreed back in Isaiah 10.

Covers Isaiah 38

Why Hezekiah's healing in answer to his prayer should not be generalized into a theology that unanswered prayer or unhealed sickness signals a lack of faith or hidden sin — pointing to Moses and Paul, who were told no despite their faithfulness.

Covers Isaiah 40

Sitting in wonder at Isaiah 40's portrait of a God who holds the waters in the hollow of his hand and weighs the mountains on a scale — a being on a cosmic scale before whom we are insignificant, yet whom he loved enough to take on flesh and die for us.

Covers Isaiah 41

Arguing that God's challenge to the gods in Isaiah 41 to declare what is to come is not a test of foresight but a dare to overpower his will — since the rebel sons of God of Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82 likely stand outside time as he does.

Covers Isaiah 43

On the difficulty of Isaiah, and how Isaiah 43 — casting Babylon as the new Egypt — shows God blotting out Israel's transgressions for his own sake rather than theirs, using Israel in spite of herself to reclaim the nations through Christ.

Covers Isaiah 44

Isaiah's mockery of idolatry aimed not at the blinded nations God gave over at Babel but at Israel — who, having had God reveal himself directly to her, covers her own eyes to follow the nations into folly she should know better than to repeat.

Covers Revelation 12 · Isaiah 45

A Christmas-season pointer to using Revelation 12 to date Jesus' actual birth, paired with a reading of Isaiah 45 — God forming the earth not empty but to be inhabited — as a statement of intent that lends weight to a young-earth view.

Covers Isaiah 46

Bel and Nebo carried off into captivity alongside Israel, idols that cannot even carry themselves, contrasted with the Yahweh who has borne his people from birth — plus a caution against the modern habit of labeling everything an idol.

Covers Isaiah 48

What election in Isaiah 48 actually meant — God preserving an obstinate, rebellious Israel for his name's sake to bring forth the Messiah, not because she was worthy, and why misreading this leads to faulty New Testament theology of election.

Covers Isaiah 49

Isaiah 49's image of a nursing mother who could not forget her child — and how God promises that even were that possible, he would never forget Israel, an assurance Christians as his adopted children can lean on even more fully.

Covers Isaiah 53 · Revelation

How Isaiah 53 describes Jesus so plainly that even non-Christians would name him, yet no one grasped it until after the resurrection — and how the same intentional ambiguity in Revelation should keep us from claiming to have the end times all figured out.

Covers Isaiah 55

Isaiah 55's declaration that God's thoughts and ways are higher than ours as the heavens are above the earth — a truth easy to acknowledge but hard to live, since sin is, at root, trusting our own wisdom over his moment by moment.

Covers Isaiah 56

Why the Old Testament's focus on Israel and its condemnations of other nations do not mean God cares only for Israel — Isaiah 56 shows his choosing of Israel always aimed at blessing the nations, welcoming any foreigner who joins himself to the Lord.

Covers Isaiah 59

Isaiah 59's indictment, which Paul applies to all humanity in Romans 3 — how even well-meaning efforts apart from the Lord amount to spiders' webs, or worse, adders' eggs, with politics as a case where pursuing good by the world's means can do real harm.

Covers Isaiah 60 · Matthew 1

Isaiah 60 anticipates the nations flooding into God's people, while Matthew 1's genealogy shows the principle already at work — foreign women like Rahab and Ruth, from peoples under judgment, welcomed into the very line of the Messiah.

Covers Isaiah 66 · Matthew 5

How Isaiah 66 and Matthew 5 together address both sides of religious self-deception — heartless ritual compliance and the false confidence of merely avoiding sin — to show that God cares first about the alignment of the heart with Him.