Isaiah 13

Isaiah got so many things right about the future that most scholars think he was cheating. It's not just his prophecies about Jesus. He was three steps ahead of everyone else when it came to politics, too. The Book of Isaiah contains unbelievably accurate information about things that happened hundreds of years after it was written.

That, at least, is what the Bible tells you. Modern scholarship has a different answer. Read about "Isaiah" in a history book and you will find that he was actually a composite character created by multiple authors over a huge span of time.

It all comes down to belief. Isaiah makes Nostradamus look like a blind man reading a Ouija board. There only two possible explanations for how:

1. He was a genuine prophet who heard the voice of God.
2. He was cheating.

Believing Christians, Muslims, and Jews have no trouble with #1. But people who don't believe in God aren't going to believe in prophets, either.

The most popular theory about the Book of Isaiah is that it has three authors: the Original Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 1-39 around 700 BC), Deutero-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 40-55 during the Exile) and Trito-Isaiah (who wrote Chapters 56-66 during the restoration of Judah after the Exile). So instead of Original Isaiah eerily predicting the future, Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just describing what they saw around them.

Those predictions or descriptions, depending on how you want to look at it, begin in Chapter 13. That's when the Book of Isaiah moves from talking about the Messiah and the fate of all mankind to focusing on its corner of the world. The first clue that something is off is the way that it describes Babylon:

Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Babylonians, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.

 - Isaiah 13:19

Babylon was not the "jewel of kingdoms" during Isaiah's lifetime. Like the rest of the ancient Middle East, it existed in the shadow of Assyria. The Babylonians didn't gain their independence until well after his death.

Then, after breaking free in 626 BC, they created an even more dominant empire of their own. They eventually finished what the Assyrians started, sacking Jerusalem in 597 BC and deporting the survivors as part of what became known as the Babylonian Exile.

Not only did Isaiah predict their rise, he also predicted their fall:

See, I will stir up against them the Medes, who do not care for silver and have no delight in gold. 

- Isaiah 13:17

The Medes were an obscure group of tribes in modern-day Iran on the very fringes of the Assyrian Empire in his lifetime:

You can already guess what happened next. The people in that area coalesced into a group whom we now know as the Persians, who then conquered Babylon in 539 BC.

Predicting all that 200 years in advance is insane enough. But where the Book of Isaiah really loses scholars comes in Chapter 45, when it specifically gives the name of the Persian king who frees the Jews and lets them return to Jerusalem:

"I will raise up Cyrus in my righteousness: I will make all his ways straight. He will rebuild my city and set my exiles free, but not for a price or reward, says the Lord Almighty." 

- Isaiah 45:13

The general scholarly consensus with this prediction can be summed up in six words: "Get the f*** out of here". Non-religious scholars who study the Bible for a living tend to be willing to give it the benefit of the doubt on a lot of things. But this is too much. There had to be someone giving messages from the future to the past to get a name right.

No one actually knows. The beauty of that type of theory is that it's impossible to prove a negative. How can you prove in 2020 that someone didn't add chapters in 500 BC to something that was written in 700 BC?

The only proof that could exist is a copy of the complete version of the Book of Isaiah that can be dated to a specific point of time. The closes thing we have to that is the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient manuscripts that were preserved in the Israeli desert around 200 BC and then discovered in the 1940s. That's the point where we know the Book was "finished". Everything before that is just speculation.

You can raise doubt about the available evidence in either direction.

People who believe in a unitary Isaiah will point to phrases that exist throughout every section of the Book (most notably "the Holy One of Israel") and appear nowhere else in the Bible, as well as descriptions of things like plants and animals native to ancient Israel and the lack of the same descriptions of things from ancient Babylon, where Deutero-Isaiah was supposed to exist. But the proponents of the multiple Isaiah theory respond by saying that Deutero and Trito-Isaiah were just covering their tracks.

Beyond the eerily precise predictions, they also point out that the subject matter changes between the three sections, as does the style of writing. But that doesn't prove anything, either. Writers change topics and write in different styles all the time. Just because I normally write about basketball doesn't mean this blog was written by someone else.

There's a thin line between historical speculation and conspiracy theory. You can use computer analysis to "prove" that multiple people wrote the Book of Isaiah, but you can also use it to "prove" that Barack Obama didn't actually write his memoir.

Nor is there an obvious place to stop once you start dividing a book into sections. There are some scholars who believe there were at least seven different authors -- 1-12, 13-23, 24-35, 36-39, 40-48, 49-57, and 58-66. There are others who think there are dozens, if not hundreds. Maybe the Book of Isaiah was just the first Wikipedia page?

The lack of concrete proof means that both sides are building their arguments on faith. It's obvious enough to see that with the unitary Isaiah people. But the same thing holds true for their counterparts.

The book "A History of The Bible" by John Barton, a liberal Christian theologian, is a perfect example. His section on Isaiah is a well-written review of what everyone "knows" that seems convincing at first glance.

You will notice something interesting if you read through his book as closely as he reads through the Bible. In eight pages about Isaiah, Barton uses the word "probably" six times and "may" (as in "we may assume" or "whom we may guess") four. That doesn't even count phrases like "we must assume" and "seems likely".

He's guessing, just like everyone else.

It all comes back to first principles. If your worldview doesn't allow for supernatural explanations, than cheating is the only possible explanation for Isaiah's predictions and "you must assume" certain things about how it was written. If you do believe in God, than believing that Isaiah could see into the future is nothing. The seraphim that he describes seeing in the throne room of God are way crazier than his predictions.

There are two sets of prophecies in the Book of Isaiah that we can all agree are real, regardless of worldview. The first are the ones about the Messiah. Even if there was an eighth or ninth or tenth or thirteenth Isaiah sneaking in prophecies in 210 BC, right before the Dead Sea Scrolls were frozen in time, it's still incredible to see how much he anticipated about Jesus.

The second are the ones about things that are still happening:

[Babylon] will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; there no nomads will pitch their tents, there no shepherds will rest their flocks.

But desert creatures will lie there, jackals will fill her houses; there the owls will dwell, and there the wild goats will leap about.

Hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious places. Her time is at hand, and her days will not be prolonged.

- Isaiah 13:20-23 

Human civilization began in Babylon. It was New York City, London, and Beijing all rolled up into one. Historians believe that it had two stretches separated by over 1,000 years (1770-1670 BC and 600-300 BC) where it was the most populated city in the world. Jerusalem, where Isaiah lived, was a shabby collection of huts in comparison.

Here's what Babylon looks like now:

It has not been inhabited in thousands of years. Some people in the region believe there was a curse put on Babylon, and that anyone who tries to rebuild it will be destroyed. Just ask Saddam Hussein.

So how did Isaiah know that would happen?

Isaiah 12

Isaiah knew hard times. He's famous for his prophecies about Jesus, but what often gets missed is the context that he made them in.

He lived in a war zone. Assyria came this close to exterminating the Jewish people in his lifetime. Their armies were camped outside Jerusalem before being miraculously destroyed in a way that still baffles historians.

It would have been easy for Isaiah to despair and give up hope. Yet he never did, no matter how bad things got.

After prophesying about the Messiah in Chapters 9-11, he moves into a song of praise in Chapter 12:

In that day you will say:

“I will praise you, Lord. Although you were angry with me, your anger has turned away and you have comforted me. 

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. The Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my defense; he has become my salvation.” 

- Isaiah 12:1-2 

Being a Christian is like walking over a bridge. You know in your head that God will catch you if it collapses. But you would still rather not find out.

Then one day you look down and the bridge is gone. Then you have to decide if you are really going to believe any of this stuff.

That point has come for a lot of people in the last few months.

As a Christian, the best thing you can do in these moments is remember the times that God has come through in the past.

I always go back to when I first became a believer. I was 26. I was an editor and a writer at SB Nation while making money on the side writing about basketball for a few other websites.

My job was more than a paycheck. It was my life. I had spent the four years since college scratching and clawing to establish myself in the industry. I didn't have much else going for me. I didn't have any money. I lived in a run down one bedroom apartment. I hadn't dated anyone in years. The only thing I had to hang my hat on was that I had a cool job.

Then, all of a sudden, I didn't.

It was my own fault. The college basketball editor job at SBN came open, and I assumed that I would get it. After all, I was the best.

When I didn't, I began calling around to see what other jobs were out there for me. I even told my bosses what I was doing because obviously they would realize their mistake in passing over me.

You can already guess what happened. They fired me like it was nothing. No severance. Nothing. And all those other jobs that I had been talking too? None of them came through.

I ended up getting a part-time job stocking shelves on weekends. We would drive around to grocery stores in the morning, count the beer that had been sold the day before, and then go to the back of the store and replace it.

The funny part is that working in online media paid so little that I could make more money doing that in 20-25 hours a week than I could blogging and editing for 40.

The hard part was swallowing my pride. I went to a private high school with the sons of CEOs and politicians. They used to always tell us about how we were the future leaders of society. Do you remember in The Facebook Movie when Mark Zuckerberg is mad about not getting into one of the Finals clubs at Harvard? I knew kids in those. And here I was punching a clock with people who never went to college.

I prayed and prayed about what to do next. I felt like He told me to start a blog. It was an odd thing to do in 2014. Blogs had already died. Everyone was on social media. He might as well have told me to start a newspaper. Or a beeper company.

Nothing happened for a long, long time. My days were spent writing, stocking shelves, and going to church. I guess you could say it was my own version of Paul's time in Arabia after his encounter on the road to Damascus. There aren't many stories about those years in the Bible.

About nine months after I was fired, I was praying for a friend who had just broken up with the girl he thought he would marry. I could tell what was wrong. He was mourning not just the loss of the relationship but the pieces of his identity that he had put into it.

So I just kept telling him that she didn't define who he was. That his identity came from his relationship with God and not this girl.

And then I realized that I was really praying for myself. I had spent my whole life thinking that I had to be "successful". I had worked so hard to be somebody. But none of that stuff actually mattered. None of it would make me happy. I could be happy because God loved me. That was enough.

I was free.

Fast forward two years. I got an email from an editor about working for a start-up. The first thing he said was that he read my blog every day.


via GIPHY

I wish I could say that was the end of my story. That I learned an important lesson about identity and never putting too much of myself into my job. But that's not how life works. I've had to learn that lesson again and again over the last four years.

God has always been good to me, even as I kept making the same mistakes. He has always answered my prayers.

I was praying about getting into online dating right about the same time that I joined The Ringer. I felt like God told me not to do anything until a church-wide community service project that happened a few weeks later.

The project came and went without much happening. After it was over, a couple of us went to an outdoor patio. There was a pretty girl there who wanted to play sand volleyball with us.

Fast forward four years. Now we have a son.

Jackson Dean Tjarks was born on Friday. He’s in the 98th percentile for height and he’s incredibly cute! pic.twitter.com/GEflnApYAZ

— Jonathan Tjarks (@JonathanTjarks) March 23, 2020

In that day you will say: 

“Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done, and proclaim that his name is exalted. 

Sing to the Lord, for he has done glorious things; let this be known to all the world.” 

- Isaiah 12:4-5

Isaiah 11

The Book of Isaiah talks a lot about political power. The prophet was on the wrong end of it for most of his life. 

The Assyrian Empire was the dominant power in his region of the world. They conquered every country in their path, and came this close to destroying his homeland of Judah.

The Assyrians viewed their power as a sign of their own greatness. It's the way every empire throughout human history, including the U.S., has viewed themselves.

Isaiah saw things differently. He rejected the idea that any country could be great. They were all just trees in a forest to him. Assyria towered over its neighbors at the time. But God would chop them down to size:

See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will lop off the boughs with great power. The lofty trees will be felled, the tall ones will be brought low. He will cut down the forest thickets with an axe.  

- Isaiah 10:33-34 

In Chapter 11, he contrasts them with the coming Messiah:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.  

- Isaiah 11:1 

The Messiah, rather than a mighty tree, would be a humble branch of one that had already been cut down. The kings of Judah had all been descended from David, the most legendary king in Jewish history, and his father Jesse. They would eventually be removed from the throne a century after Isaiah's prophecy when the kingdom was conquered by Babylon.

For the next 600 years, the Jewish people waited for one of their descendants to emerge and claim the mantle of Isaiah. His prophecies gave them hope for their future as they were passed from one empire to the next, going from Babylon to Persia, Greece, and then Rome:

In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his resting place will be glorious.  

- Isaiah 11:10 

Jesus claimed that mantle when he began his public ministry, reading a passage from Isaiah 61 and claiming that it was fulfilled. (Luke 4:16-21)

His people were ready for a savior. The Romans had conquered them 60 years before he was born. It was hard to have much hope of overthrowing them without divine intervention. They ruled the known world with an iron fist. Their evil was obvious. They wanted their emperor worshipped as a god, an incredible sacrilege for a people famous for refusing to worship their neighbor's gods, much less their actual neighbors.

So when Jesus performed his most public miracle, feeding 5,000 people with a basket of bread and fish, the people knew what to do:

After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.  

- John 6:14-15 

One of the most interesting things about Jesus' time on Earth is that he never got involved in politics. It's very counterintuitive.

The Jesus of the Gospels was essentially a superhero come to life. He walked on water, healed the sick, and even raised the dead. There was no limit to his power.

Yet he didn't fight the Evil Empire when he had the chance. Imagine if Luke Skywalker had heard about the Death Star and said "Render unto Vader" instead of joining the Rebellion.

Jesus isn't mentioned in any of the contemporary histories of the period, which has caused many modern observers to wonder if he ever actually existed. But, then again, why would he be? He didn't actually do much to make historians notice him. What would someone in Rome care about an itinerant preacher from a backwater province who was killed before his movement got off the ground?

It was his followers that changed the world, not him. We know that Jesus was real because we know that people like Peter and Paul were. They had to have come from somewhere.

That was the key to what Jesus did with his time on Earth. He spent his life investing in the people around him.

The only way to change the world is to change it one person at a time. The multiplier effect does the rest. If you change the lives of two people, and they change the lives of 2 people, and each of those people changes the lives of 2 more, the numbers add up fast.

Jesus never needed to rule a country. That was hustling backwards.

A century after his crucifixion, another Jewish preacher emerged to claim the mantle of Isaiah. His name was Simon bar Kokhba. Every historian of the time period knew his name. The Jewish people gathered around his banner and rose up against Rome for 3 years, creating an independent Jewish state.

But what was the result of the heroism of Simon and his followers? Rome crushed their rebellion, just as they had crushed a different one 40 years before. There would not be another. The Romans burned Israel to the ground and ethnically cleansed the whole area. There would not be a significant Jewish presence in the region again for almost 2,000 years.

And for what? An independent Jewish state had already been tried before. It hadn’t worked. The people had rebelled against God and been just as evil as any of their neighbors. They couldn’t handle the power that had been given to them. There was no reason to think it would be any different this time around.

The political class of Israel, just like it has been in most places and times in human history, was broken and filled with people who pretended to love God but were really just in it for themselves. Jesus criticized the Pharisees more than he ever did the Romans. The last thing he was going to do was launch a rebellion to help them gain power.

It was as Isaiah said. Why spend your life trying to grow a tree when it was going to get cut down anyway? All nations have a life span. Judea. Assyria. Babylon. Rome. Israel. The United States. Political power always has an expiration date.

Jesus had all the power in the world and he gave it away. It doesn’t mean anything. There are better ways to change the world.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death -- even death on a cross!  

- Philippians 2:5-8

Isaiah 10

God always had a plan for the Jewish people -- He would reveal himself to them and they would spread that knowledge to the rest of the world. But he didn’t reveal how that plan would actually work until he spoke through Isaiah.

Isaiah made prophecies that were fulfilled by Jesus more than 700 years later. The reason that it took so long is that a lot had to happen in between. The nations of Judah and Israel were no different than their neighbors in Isaiah’s time, worshipping other gods and ignoring God’s commands as if they had never heard them at all. They had to be punished and reshaped into something that God could actually use.

One of the most important parts of the Old Testament is the way that it shows God working through history. It wasn’t just Israel. Every country had a role to play. He raised up a tool that he would use against His own people — Assyria. The Assyrians were the most powerful military force the world had seen at the time. They conquered Israel and brought Judah to the brink of destruction, leaving the Jewish people no choice but to depend on God:

Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath. I send him against a godless nation, I dispatch him against a people who anger me, to seize loot and snatch plunder, and to trample them down like mud in the streets.  

 - Isaiah 10:5-6 

But the Assyrians had no concept of the Jewish God. They certainly didn’t believe in His power. So they looked at their military and political dominance and assumed that they were the ones responsible for it. They became proud and arrogant, believing their own myths because they were blind to the way the world actually worked. The same thing happens to any successful person or group of people who don't believe in God.

Faith in a higher power is the only thing that can keep people humble. The king of Assyria had nearly unlimited power. No country could stand in his way. No army could defeat him. Anything that he wanted, he could have. Why wouldn’t he think that he was a god?

When the Lord finished all his work against Mount Zion and Jerusalem, he will say, “I will punish the king of Assyria for the willful pride of his heart and the haughty look in his eyes.”  

For he says: “By the strength of my hand I have done this, and by my wisdom, because I have understanding. I removed the boundaries of nations, I plundered their treasures; like a mighty one I subdued their kings.”  

 - Isaiah 10:12-13 

Modern people who lack faith fall into the same trap. They take credit for their own success and develop an inflated opinion of themselves. There’s only one possible outcome once you start down that path. Their pride blinds them and they bite off more than you can chew.

Assyria was one of the first great empires in world history. But it certainly wasn’t the last. The same pattern repeats itself over and over — The more powerful they become, the more they lose any sense that there are limits to their power.

I’ve seen that first hand as an American citizen. Most US elections are portrayed as a battle of good and evil. The only question is which side is which. What gets lost are the underlying assumptions that both sides agree on. Every presidential candidate, whether Republican or Democrat, says that the US is the greatest and most powerful country in human history.

photo: charles roderick

Maybe we are. But having that type of power should worry everyone. It’s not something to be proud of.

This is how Ezekiel, another Old Testament prophet who lived about 120 years after Isaiah, described Assyria:

Consider Assyria, once a cedar in Lebanon, with beautiful branches overshadowing the forest; it towered on high, its tops above the thick foliage. So it towered higher above all the trees of the field; its boughs increased and its branches grew long, spreading because of abundant waters. All the birds of the sky nested in its boughs; all the animals of the wild gave birth to its branches; all the great nations lived in its shade.  

- Ezekiel 29:3-7 

Does this not sound like America? The US has the biggest economy and military in the world. The amount of money the US spends on its military compared to every other country is staggering:

There are a couple of temptations when you have this much power. The obvious one is that there is no one who can prevent you from imposing your will on the world stage. The only restraints you have are the ones you put on yourself.

The more subtle temptation is believing that your power is a sign of your superior virtue and wisdom. After all, if you are that successful, you must be doing something right.

Americans know the second temptation well. All you have to do is look back at the invasion of Iraq. The US didn’t credit God as the source of our prosperity. We looked at our economic and military power and figured that it came because we had a superior form of government. The natural conclusion is that we needed to spread that government to the rest of the world. So we invaded another country to free them, which hasn’t exactly turned out well over the last 15 years.

There aren’t many situations where a country operating on Biblical principles should be invading anyone. There’s nothing in the Bible about how Christian countries need to rule the world. If anything, it’s the opposite. The only mandate that Jesus gave his disciples was to go make more disciples. But they were supposed to do that on a personal level, not a political one. The idea was that they would create ministries like Jesus - traveling the world, investing in a few people at a time, and planting local churches wherever they went.

Both Peter (1 Peter 2:13-17) and Paul (Romans 13:1-7) urged their followers to stay out of politics. They didn’t want to destabilize governments. Their goal was to add more people to the church, not gain political power.

Nor was Israel ever supposed to be an empire in the Old Testament. Their political boundaries were firmly established. They were supposed to be a model for the world, not conquer it.

That was the lesson that Ezekiel drew from the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, which happened between Isaiah’s time and his own:

Therefore no other trees by the waters are ever to tower proudly on high, lifting their tops above the thick foliage. No other trees so well-watered are ever to reach such a height; they are all destined for death, for the earth below, among mortals who go down to the realm of the dead.

- Ezekiel 29:14 

There are a lot of warnings about the dangers of empires and nations who think too highly of themselves in the Old Testament. It always ends the same way.

It all comes back to first principles and how you view your place in the world. There are two ways to look at it. You can believe you are responsible for your own success. Or you can accept that God is ultimately in charge of your life.

One way leads to pride. The other leads to humility. Every person and country has to decide for themselves which path to follow.

Does the ax raise itself above the person who swings it, or the saw boast against the one who uses it? As if a rod were to wield the person who lifts it up, or a club brandish one who is not wood!  

 - Isaiah 10:14 

Isaiah 9

Isaiah wasn’t just sent to preach bad news. The prophet spends most of the first eight chapters of the Book of Isaiah warning about the coming judgment of God and the destruction of the nation of Judah.

But there was more to the story. God had a bigger plan for His people than giving them a small strip of land in the ancient Middle East:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing it and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.

- Isaiah 9:6-7 

This is one of the most famous passages in the Bible. If you go to a church service around Christmas, you will hear it. Christians believe that Jesus fulfilled this prophecy made around 700 years before he was born.

Before we get into the specifics of the prophecy, it’s worthwhile to think about what Jesus accomplished in his short time on Earth. He wasn’t a mythical figure like King Arthur or Hercules. He was a real person who lived and breathed and walked among us.

How do we know this? It’s pretty simple — if Jesus didn’t exist, where did the first Christians come from?

We don’t need the New Testament to date the religion. We know from Roman historians that Christians were in the city in the 60s, and were persecuted after the Great Fire of 64. The first primary historical document from a non-Christian source that mentions the new faith was a letter written by Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor of Turkey, to the emperor Trajan in 112.

Jesus died in the 30s. It would not have been possible to found a religion based on someone who had never existed and say that his life occurred within the historical memory of the people listening.

The best way to understand this from a modern perspective is to look at the Mormon religion, which was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. Imagine if he had never existed and people claiming to be Mormons had appeared in 2019 with a whole backstory they had made up. It wouldn’t make sense. Everyone would know the religion was founded in 2019 not 1830.

It would have been the same thing if these new Mormons had shown up in 1919 or 1869. People would have asked where they came from. No one needed to ask that question in 1830 because everyone already knew. Joseph Smith was gathering crowds around him to hear his new gospel. The people in those crowds became the first Mormons. And those people went out and converted others. That’s how religions start. There needs to be a critical mass at the beginning who actually heard from the founder and knew him personally. The pattern is the same whether it’s Jesus, Mohammed, or Joseph Smith.

There were plenty of critics of early Christianity in the Roman Empire. None said that Jesus was a myth. The most famous was a Roman philosopher named Celsus who wrote a long attack on the new religion in the 170s. He said that Jesus’ dad was actually a Roman soldier named Pantera. Celsus was trying to make an argument that people would actually believe. He wouldn’t say Jesus was made up anymore than a critic of Mormonism in 2019 would say that Joseph Smith was.

If everyone in that time, whether they were a Christian or not, accepted that Jesus was a real person, than we probably should too. From there, we don't even have to get into the supernatural stuff. Just looking at what he was able to accomplish as a flesh and blood human being is pretty amazing. He's by far the most influential person who ever lived. He's certainly the most famous.

But how? He wasn't a conqueror or a king or an artist or an athlete. He didn't actually do all that much. He wandered around a backwater province of the Roman Empire, gathered a small group of followers around him, and was killed. There have been countless people who did something similar and were quickly forgotten.

So what made Jesus special? The answer is pretty simple. The reason that he's still remembered today is because his followers said that he appeared to them after he died. It gave everything else that he said so much more weight because it meant that he wasn’t just another human. There was something else going on.

And it puts other parts of Isaiah’s prophecy in a new light:

For as in the days of Midian’s defeat, you have shattered the yoke that burdens them, the bar across their shoulders, the rod of the oppressors.

- Isaiah 9:4

None of us can know whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. We weren’t there when it happened (or didn’t). All we have is the word of the people who were. It wasn’t just his followers. One of their fiercest enemies — Saul of Tarsus — became a committed Christian after his encounter with the risen Christ.

But, if we take the resurrection on faith, it changes everything. Because then the implication of what Isaiah is saying is that the yoke that Jesus will shatter isn’t some foreign army. It’s death itself. That's how Jesus will reign on the throne of David for the rest of time. And while there is no throne that he currently rules from, the Christian church has been the most important mover in world affairs for the last 2,000 years. It's an awfully big coincidence.

Isaiah left other clues about who the Messiah would be. He didn't just say what that person will do. He also said where they will come from: 

In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the nations, by the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan — The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.

— Isaiah 9:1-2 

Remember that backwater province of the Roman Empire? That was the same area that Isaiah was talking about -- a land humbled by the Assyrians. The northern Jewish kingdom of Israel, unlike the southern kingdom of Judah, was not saved by miraculous intervention.

It would see a different kind of miracle. A child would be born and a new light would dawn from there. And guess what? Jesus spent almost his entire ministry in the area around the Sea of Galilee, in the northern part of Israel. The coincidences are starting to add up.

That is the real miracle of Christmas. It's not just that an unimportant person from an unimportant part of the world who died without a penny to his name would found the most influential religion in human history. It's that it was all predicted by a prophet almost 1,000 years beforehand. God called His own shot, just like Babe Ruth in the 1932 World Series.

Look at it backwards. Assume for a second that there is a Creator of the universe. And that He came down from heaven and took on the form of the creatures that He made. What would you expect would happen? You would probably expect that person to become the most influential and famous human being to ever live.

My favorite passage of the Bible is from the First Letter of John. John was one of the original 12 disciples. He was the only one who was at the cross and the one whom Jesus asked to look after his mother. In his letter, John writes to future audiences about his experiences:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have looked at and which our hands have touched — this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.

The life appeared; we have seen and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and appeared to us.

We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may also have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.

- 1 John 1:1-4 

I love this passage because this is exactly what anyone would say if they were in John’s shoes. “I know this sounds crazy. I know you won’t believe this. But I was there. It actually happened. I saw this man with my own two eyes and I touched him with my two hands. This is real.”

When Isaiah wrote that someone from his small tribe would change the world, there was no reason for anyone outside of that tribe to believe it. But that is exactly what happened.

You have to ask yourself -- maybe Isaiah knew something. Maybe there's a greater purpose to everything that happens in this world. Maybe there is a God. And maybe, just maybe, He already came to Earth.

Merry Christmas!

Isaiah 8

Isaiah preached during some of the darkest times in Judah’s history. Fifteen years after his ministry began, it was invaded by two larger northern neighbors -- Syria and Israel. And that was only the beginning.

In Chapter 7, Isaiah told King Ahaz not to fear the invasion. God would protect them. But Ahaz wouldn’t listen. Instead, even though Isaiah warned him against it, he reached out to Assyria for protection, a decision which would have disastrous consequences.

In Chapter 8, after Ahaz ignores him, Isaiah tells his countrymen how to respond to what was coming:

This is what the Lord says to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people: ‘Do not call conspiracy everything this people call a conspiracy; do not fear what they do not fear, and do not dread it.’

- Isaiah 8:11-12 

There were two paths ahead of them, as things got worse. They could either fear Man or God.

Ahaz chose the first path. He panicked when he saw the armies of Syria and Israel. He thought he needed an ally who would even the odds. The obvious choice was Assyria.

Isaiah wanted his people to choose the second. He looked at the world like a game of Risk. The pieces on the board didn’t matter. There was an invisible hand controlling everything. Not even the armies of Assyria, the most powerful the world had ever seen, had any real power in the grand scheme of things. God could wipe them off the board with a flick of His wrist, which is exactly what He did in 701 BC. 


Photo: Melanie Hayes

It all comes down to how you view the world. Most historians believe the outlines of the story told in the Book of Isaiah actually happened. There really were two invasions of Judah at the end of the eighth century BC, first by an alliance of Syria and Israel and then a much larger one by Assyria that reached the gates of Jerusalem. But then, right on the cusp of victory, thousands of their soldiers died suddenly without any explanation.

Isaiah saw the hand of God in the destruction of the Assyrian army. He said an angel of the Lord came down in the middle of the night and killed them. Historians have speculated that a plague might have swept through their camp.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. It’s not an either or question. Think of it this way -- wouldn't a plague be the simplest way for an angel to wreck an army in one night? There would be no way to tell the difference from the outside.

The same thing held true for the rise of the Assyrians. Maybe it was a matter of geopolitics, as a history book would say. Or maybe, like Isaiah said, they had been raised up by God to punish the Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah for their sins:

Because this people has rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah and rejoices over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, therefore the Lord is about to bring against them the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates -- the king of Assyria with all his pomp. 


 -- Isaiah 8:6-7 

Once again, both interpretations could be true. Figuring out the right answer is not about having the right facts. It’s about the worldview that you use to interpret those facts.

Isaiah saw through the world through the prism of religion. But everyone, whether they are religious or not, has a worldview. Many turn to political parties and ideologies for a framework to understand the world around them. There are a lot of people who don’t explicitly choose a worldview — they go with some combination of what they were taught growing up and what the culture around them believes without thinking about it too much.

The bottom line is that every human being needs some type of filter to process reality. The universe is far too complicated to understand without one.

Every worldview is built on a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of life. Philosophers call these ideas first principles.

The easiest way to understand how the process works is to go back to high school geometry. Euclidean geometry is built on five ideas (or postulates) about shapes in 2-dimensional space. The first four are fairly self-explanatory:

1. A straight line can be drawn between any two points.
2. It can be extended indefinitely and be straight.
3. In a segment of a straight line, a circle can be drawn with the segment as the radius and one endpoint as the center.
4. All right angles are identical. 

The reason they are called postulates is that you can't actually prove any of them. How do prove that a straight line can be drawn between two points? It just depends on how you define concepts like "straight" "line" and "point".

But, once you accept those postulates as true, you can use them to prove 28 increasingly complex theorems, all the with the same structure: "If A and B, then C, D, and E."

The postulates are the building blocks upon which everything else depends. Euclidean geometry is incredibly useful. Engineers still use it thousands of years after it was first discovered. But it all depends on a starting point of taking a few things on faith and then working your way up from there. If you remove the postulates as givens, the whole thing falls apart. They are the bottom level of the Jenga tower.

First principles, as the foundation of a worldview, work the same way. Most political and religious arguments ultimately come down to first principles. That's why two worldviews can reach the exact opposite conclusions from the same set of facts and both be logically consistent.

So the question becomes -- what first principles to accept? What things do we believe about the world simply on the basis of faith?

The first principle of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The basic facts about his life, just like the story told in the Book of Isaiah, are not disputed by most historians. They believe there really was an itinerant Jewish preacher named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago in ancient Israel and was crucified by the Roman Empire. What no history book can tell you is whether he actually rose from the dead.

Christian theology is logically consistent. You can reason your way to every point of it — as long as you start from the premise of the resurrection. The problem is that it’s not something you can prove with any certainty. You just have to take it on faith:


For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

- 1 Corinthians 1:18-20

What the Apostle Paul is saying here is that God didn’t want the resurrection to be something that only smart people could figure out. The secret to understanding the universe isn't a secret at all. It's not the theory of relativity or some other piece of abstract knowledge. The resurrection is something that anyone, no matter how intelligent, can grasp.

Conversely, it doesn't matter how smart you are if you don't accept it. If you don’t take the resurrection on faith, than it becomes a stumbling block for you, preventing you from seeing the world as it really is. As Ghostface Killah said, there are a lot of smart dumb people out there.

Paul was echoing something that Isaiah wrote 700 years before. For him and his people, the stumbling block wasn't the resurrection. It was believing in God in the first place, and that He was in control of their affairs:


The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread. He will be a holy place; for both Israel and Judah he will be a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare.

- Isaiah 8:13 

Isaiah knew that most of his countrymen would fail that test, just like King Ahaz. They would be far more afraid of the Assyrians than He who sent them, which would cause them to make short-sighted decisions that would send their lives down the wrong path. That's the reality of the human experience. Most people will put their trust in what they can see than what they cannot.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

- Matthew 7:13-14 

Every believer since the beginning of time has walked the same path. What making a leap of faith comes down to is changing your first principles. It's a scary process that most people won’t do. All we can do is offer a hand and tell them that the leap isn’t as crazy as it seems. It only makes sense when you get to the other side.

The Gospel Coalition

I worked with the good folks over at The Gospel Coalition to re-purpose my blog on Isaiah 5 as a stand-alone piece.