I very recently started rereading the book of Isaiah. In the last few years it’s something I have striven to do once a year. I usually begin either during Advent (so that sometime during those weeks I get to the wonderful passages foretelling the Messiah’s birth) or during Lent (so that at some point during that time I’ll be reading about the Suffering Servant). Isaiah is, of course, the Word of God. (If you doubt that, the rest of what I’m going to say won’t be relevant to you so you may want to stop reading now.)
Isaiah expresses God’s message in stark but beautiful and often poetic language. If you’re a reader at heart and you love poetry, and — most importantly — you have a heart open to the message God had and has through the prophet Isaiah, what an exhilarating and Spirit-infused experience reading this biblical book is! But that said, when you come to it “cold” it can be tough sledding (pardon the punning illusion). What does it all mean? Much of the meaning of its 66 chapters seems awfully complicated, and many of the ancient references of this 5000-or-so-year-old book are likely to strike the average Bible reader as not only complicatedly remote but somewhat irrelevant to us self-regarding sophisticated human beings in the 21st century (if he or she is entirely honest).
My own reaction was frustration when in the past I would try to read through Isaiah . I would start out fine and then get bogged down, knowing there was much I was missing and not understanding. I would usually quit before I finished the book, or I’d start skipping around to familiar or easier-to-understand passages. Short of being in a church where an insightful pastor was preaching through the entire book (don’t I wish!) I had to do something about that.
So a few years ago I went on a quest to look for a guide to help me: a commentary or other resource whose author I could trust to interpret the book a holistic manner which sees context, uses Scripture to interpret Scripture and sees that all of the Bible is “living and active” Word of God, and therefore never irrelevant and always speaking to those who have ears to hear (what I would call a Reformed approach to reading Scripture). What ended my search and what I decided to buy was The NIV Application Commentary on Isaiah by John N. Oswalt, published by Zondervan, as is the NIV Bible (New International Version).
The commentary is set up like this: First you’ll read the biblical text of the section of Isaiah covered in that particular commentary chapter (a great feature so that you can read Isaiah itself and the commentary from this one hefty book); then a section on “Original Meaning”; a section called “Bridging Contexts”; and a final “Contemporary Significance.” Each commentary chapter covers a specific “chunk” of Isaiah. The breaks are based on its content, not necessarily on the ends of the biblical chapters. Oswalt begins the whole effort with a lengthy and very helpful introduction which presents the historical setting of Isaiah, what was going on in Israel and Judah at the time, and in the surrounding pagan nations. He addresses Isaiah’s authorship and date. Then he lays out what he convincingly argues are the book’s central themes: Judgment and Hope, Servanthood and Kingdom, Trust and Rebellion, Arrogance and Humiliation, The Uniqueness of Yahweh, The Nations, Righteousness. He ties those in again when he addresses “The Relevance of the Book of Isaiah Today.” There’s also an outline of Isaiah so you can see at a glance how and when those themes are interwoven into the biblical book.
If all that sounds just as complicated as reading Isaiah on your own can be, it’s not. Not at all. Oswalt writes in an easy style. And remember: this is an application commentary: its purpose is to better help you and me understand the Bible, not just to present biblical scholarship for other scholars, and which may or may not get read outside of academia and may or may not have relevance to Christians in general. (Not incidentally, many, perhaps even most biblical scholars today are not Christians, and some number are actually atheists.) To put it mildly, this hardcover commentary is well worth the $20-$25 it will cost you at amazon.com. In periodic future posts I’ll speak to some of the specifics that have particularly hit me — and how utterly relevant they are to our own time.
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Reformed Revelry
Isaiah: Help with reading a difficult book
I very recently started rereading the book of Isaiah. In the last few years it’s something I have striven to do once a year. I usually begin either during Advent (so that sometime during those weeks I get to the wonderful passages foretelling the Messiah’s birth) or during Lent (so that at some point during that time I’ll be reading about the Suffering Servant). Isaiah is, of course, the Word of God. (If you doubt that, the rest of what I’m going to say won’t be relevant to you so you may want to stop reading now.)
Isaiah expresses God’s message in stark but beautiful and often poetic language. If you’re a reader at heart and you love poetry, and — most importantly — you have a heart open to the message God had and has through the prophet Isaiah, what an exhilarating and Spirit-infused experience reading this biblical book is! But that said, when you come to it “cold” it can be tough sledding (pardon the punning illusion). What does it all mean? Much of the meaning of its 66 chapters seems awfully complicated, and many of the ancient references of this 5000-or-so-year-old book are likely to strike the average Bible reader as not only complicatedly remote but somewhat irrelevant to us self-regarding sophisticated human beings in the 21st century (if he or she is entirely honest).
My own reaction was frustration when in the past I would try to read through Isaiah . I would start out fine and then get bogged down, knowing there was much I was missing and not understanding. I would usually quit before I finished the book, or I’d start skipping around to familiar or easier-to-understand passages. Short of being in a church where an insightful pastor was preaching through the entire book (don’t I wish!) I had to do something about that.
So a few years ago I went on a quest to look for a guide to help me: a commentary or other resource whose author I could trust to interpret the book a holistic manner which sees context, uses Scripture to interpret Scripture and sees that all of the Bible is “living and active” Word of God, and therefore never irrelevant and always speaking to those who have ears to hear (what I would call a Reformed approach to reading Scripture). What ended my search and what I decided to buy was The NIV Application Commentary on Isaiah by John N. Oswalt, published by Zondervan, as is the NIV Bible (New International Version).
If all that sounds just as complicated as reading Isaiah on your own can be, it’s not. Not at all. Oswalt writes in an easy style. And remember: this is an application commentary: its purpose is to better help you and me understand the Bible, not just to present biblical scholarship for other scholars, and which may or may not get read outside of academia and may or may not have relevance to Christians in general. (Not incidentally, many, perhaps even most biblical scholars today are not Christians, and some number are actually atheists.) To put it mildly, this hardcover commentary is well worth the $20-$25 it will cost you at amazon.com. In periodic future posts I’ll speak to some of the specifics that have particularly hit me — and how utterly relevant they are to our own time.
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