Reading Isaiah with Lutheran Eyes

This is the third of four volumes in The Things Concerning Himself, a confessional Lutheran study of the Old Testament written for the people who actually teach and study it: the adult Sunday school teacher, the lay leader of a midweek group, the believer in the pew who simply wants to know what his Bible is saying. The series takes its title from the road to Emmaus, where the risen Lord, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, … interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures (Luke 24:27). That is our whole method in a single sentence. We open the Old Testament to find Christ, because He Himself told us that He is there.

The need is real, and nowhere more than here. A confessional Lutheran who goes looking for help with Isaiah finds the shelves at once full and thin. Most of the popular material runs in one of two channels. There is a dispensational stream that reads Isaiah’s mountains and highways as a coded timetable for national Israel, with the Lord Jesus oddly off to the side of His own book. And there is a critical stream that files Isaiah away as the religious literature of an ancient people, interesting for history but emptied of prophecy and of Christ. Lutheran material for the layperson (Christ-centered, ordered by law and gospel, neither dispensational nor Reformed) is astonishingly scarce. That is the gap this series means to fill.

Four commitments govern every session that follows. They are stated, defended, and shown at work at length in the Series Introduction in Volume One, and we will not rehearse that whole defense again here. But because they steer everything we do, and because Isaiah will test all four and reward all four, here they are in brief.

The Four Commitments in Brief

Christ is in the Old Testament. Not merely predicted by it, but present in it. Luther had a phrase for the rule that governs all our reading, was Christum treibet, what presses Christ upon us and drives Him home; he could call the Old Testament the swaddling clothes and the manger in which the Christ-child lies. Isaiah says as much through the apostle John, who tells us the prophet saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him (John 12:41). We will not read Isaiah as a file of distant forecasts to be checked off, but as a book whose true subject, on page after page, is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Law and gospel run through the whole Bible. They are not two eras, a stern Old Testament and a kindly New, but the two ways God’s word always addresses sinners: the law that exposes and condemns, the gospel that forgives and raises the dead. No Old Testament book sounds the two notes more sharply than Isaiah. In chapter 6 a man is undone before the thrice-holy God (Woe to me! I am destroyed), and in chapter 40 the same book opens its arms: Comfort, comfort my people. At times both fall within a single verse: Though your sins have stained you like the color red, you can become white like snow (1:18). Learning to tell these two words apart in Isaiah is among the most useful things this study can teach.

The Old Testament narratives are history, and each genre is read as what it is. Much of Isaiah is poetry and prophecy, and we read it accordingly, as a prophet’s oracles with all their soaring imagery rather than a flat chronicle; and we read prophecy as prophecy, a preacher’s word to his own day that also reaches forward in time. But where Isaiah gives us plain history (Ahaz on his throne, Hezekiah’s faith and folly in chapters 36–39) we take it as history, because it happened, and because typology gains no foothold unless the events are real. Real history also means real people, not porcelain heroes: Isaiah confesses that his lips are contaminated by sin, and the book never pretends otherwise.

Typology, with guardrails. If Christ is genuinely in these books, then their persons and events and institutions point beyond themselves to Him. But typology must be governed, or it collapses into the old free-for-all of allegory, where the text means whatever a clever reader wants. Four guardrails keep it honest: the historical reality of the type is preserved; the connection to Christ must be more than a shared word; the fulfillment always exceeds the figure; and the safest correspondences are the ones the New Testament itself draws. When we read Isaiah’s Servant as the Lord Jesus, it is on that last and best warrant, for Philip drew the line first (Acts 8:35). The Series Introduction lays these guardrails out in full.

A Word About Isaiah

These four commitments meet a particular kind of book in Isaiah, and it is worth saying how. Jerome said Isaiah should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, and later readers gave the book a fitting name, the Fifth Gospel. Isaiah does not merely foretell a Savior from a safe distance; he preaches Him. A child is born and called Mighty God; the virgin’s son is named Immanuel, God with us (7:14, ESV; see Matthew 1:23); a Servant is wounded because of our rebellious deeds; a free invitation goes out to all who are thirsty and have no money. Only the Psalms rival it among the Old Testament books the New Testament quotes. Here, centuries early, the gospel is preached before the gospel.

A reader of Isaiah will sooner or later meet a footnote dividing the book into a “First” and a “Second” Isaiah, even a third, largely on the strength of the prophet’s naming Cyrus by name (44:28; 45:1) about a century before that king was born. We receive Isaiah as one book: the word of the one prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz, and behind him the one Spirit who announces the end from the beginning (46:10), and who is not embarrassed by His own foreknowledge. The first session takes that question up in full; here it is enough to say that the book is whole, and that we will read it whole.

Above all, this study has a center of gravity: the Servant of the LORD, who comes most clearly into view in the fifty-third chapter, wounded because of our rebellious deeds, bearing the sin of all of us. We read the whole book leaning toward Him, watching for the words my servant; and we read its prophecy with the prophet’s double vision, a near horizon in Isaiah’s own embattled Judah and a far horizon in Christ and in His church gathered out of every nation, without flattening the one into the other. The sessions of this study are arranged to bring us, unhurried, to that Servant and to His cross.

Before We Begin

The sessions follow the book’s own movements: the Holy One and His indictment (chapters 1–12); the Lord of the nations and of history (13–39); the book of comfort and the Servant (40–55); and the book of glory (56–66). A closing session gathers the whole and hands us forward to the Twelve, the final volume in the series. Each session names the chapters to read before it. Read them.

One last word, and it is the most important in this study. This introduction is a summary, and a summary is no substitute for Isaiah himself. Keep your Bible open beside this study the whole way through. The Spirit works faith through the word of God, through the prophet’s own words on the page, and not through our notes about them. So read Isaiah. We are only here to help you see, in him, the One whom he saw.

A Prayer to Begin

Lord Jesus Christ, whose glory the prophet Isaiah saw, and of whom he spoke: open our eyes as we open this book, that we may find You where You truly are, seated on a high and elevated throne in the temple, born to us as a child, crushed because of our sins, and gently gathering Your lambs in Your arms. Teach us to hear the law as law, that we may be undone, and the gospel as gospel, that we may be comforted; and bring us, through the whole of this book, to Yourself. With the Father and the Holy Spirit You live and reign, one God, now and forever. Amen.