The Gospel Before the Gospel

Isaiah 40:1–11 (with John 12:41; Acts 8:26–35)

Before this session, read Isaiah 40 in full. Then read John 12:37–41 and Acts 8:26–35 alongside it, and keep your Bible open as we go.

Isaiah said these things because he saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him.

John 12:41

Where the Psalms Left Us

At the close of the Psalms we did something deliberate. We had spent a whole volume on the prayer book of the church (the prayers, as Luther taught us to hear them, of Christ Himself and of His body), and at the very end we were not simply allowed to set the book down and wander off. We were handed forward. The last session pointed past the Psalter to a prophet, and told us to go and read a particular song: the song of a Servant despised and rejected, wounded because of our rebellious deeds, led like a lamb to the slaughtering block. We were sent to Isaiah 52:13–53:12 as a foretaste of where the series turns next. So we do not come to Isaiah by accident. We come already pointed somewhere, following a thread that was put into our hand on purpose.

That matters, because Isaiah is a large country, and a first-time traveler can lose the road. Sixty-six chapters; kings and coalitions long dead; oracles against nations whose names we can barely pronounce; visions that leap from an eighth-century throne room to the end of the world and back again in the space of a page. It would be easy to treat such a book as a quarry, a place to go digging when you need a verse, a prediction here, a comfort there, and to miss the thing entirely. This study means to keep us on the road. And the road has a destination, named for us before we set out: the Servant of the LORD, and the gospel that is preached through Him.

So before we open a single oracle, let the apostle John tell us what we will find. Writing of the unbelief that met the Lord Jesus, John reaches back and quotes Isaiah twice, once from the report no one believed in chapter 53 and once from the hardening announced after the vision of the thrice-holy God in chapter 6, and then says a startling thing: Isaiah said these things, John writes, because he saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him (John 12:41). Not that Isaiah guessed at a Messiah in the fog of the future. Not that he sketched, in the abstract, a deliverer yet to come. The beloved disciple says the prophet saw Christ’s glory, the glory of the Lord Jesus, and spoke about him. That sentence is the whole thesis of this study in a single line, and we have hung it at the head of this session on purpose. Isaiah saw Him.

The Fifth Gospel

There is an old way of speaking about this book. Jerome, in the preface to his Latin translation of Isaiah, said that the prophet should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, and from his remark the church in later centuries drew the name we still hear, the Fifth Gospel. Rightly so: the man writes as though Bethlehem and Calvary had already happened, as though he had stood at the manger and the cross and come back to tell us. He does not merely foretell a Savior at arm’s length. He preaches Him. Only the Psalter we have just left rivals Isaiah as the Old Testament book the New Testament takes up most often; the evangelists and the apostles return to it again and again, as though they could not tell the story of the Lord Jesus without it.

And once you have ears for it, you hear the gospel everywhere in him. A child has been born to us, a son has been given to us, and He is called … Mighty God (9:6). The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14, ESV), God with us. (We quote the ESV here because Matthew reads the verse as The virgin will conceive [Matthew 1:23], and the apostle’s reading governs ours.) A shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, and the LORD’s Spirit will rest on him (11:1–2). A voice cries out, In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD (40:3). A Servant is wounded because of our rebellious deeds, and because of his wounds we have been healed (53:5). A herald on whom the Spirit rests is commissioned to encourage the poor (61:1). The feast is spread and the invitation goes out to every empty-handed beggar: Hey, all who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come! (55:1). If you did not know better, you would think you were reading the back pages of the Bible, not the front.

Some in our classes will know more of Isaiah than they realize, and from an unexpected teacher. Anyone who has sat through a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Christmas has heard Isaiah sung: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people; For unto us a child is born; Surely he hath borne our griefs; All we like sheep have gone astray. Handel and his librettist knew what they were doing. They reached for Isaiah because Isaiah already sings the gospel. The prophet got there first.

Why should that matter for a study like ours? Because it changes the posture we bring to the book. If Isaiah were only a sealed file of predictions, we would read it the way we read an almanac, checking each forecast against the record to see whether it came true, and then closing the cover, satisfied. But a gospel is not read to be verified. It is read to be believed, and to do its work upon the one who reads. We will keep the predictions, and gladly; they are real, and they are part of the Lord’s own credential against the idols. But we will not shrink the Fifth Gospel down to a scorecard of forecasts fulfilled. We will read it the way the church has always read the other four: open, expectant, hungry, to meet the Christ that it preaches.

This is what we will mean, all through the study, when we say the gospel is preached before the gospel. The good news did not begin in a stable. It was announced, in the hearing of God’s people, some seven centuries before, by a prophet who saw the glory of the coming Christ and could not keep it to himself. Isaiah is not a waiting room outside the gospel. Isaiah is the gospel, opened early.

One Book, One Spirit

Here we must be honest with our readers, because if we are not, someone else will be, and less kindly. Pick up almost any modern study Bible and you will find a note, somewhere around chapter 40, suggesting that Isaiah was not all written by Isaiah. The common theory divides the book in two, or in three: a First Isaiah of the eighth century, the prophet of Jerusalem who confronted Ahaz and Hezekiah (chapters 1–39); and a Second Isaiah, an anonymous voice from the time of the Babylonian exile a century and a half or more later (chapters 40–55), with perhaps a Third Isaiah after that. The lay reader meets this casually, presented as settled fact, and is left quietly wondering whether the floor of the book is solid.

It is worth knowing why the theory exists, because the reason is more revealing than the theory. The dividing line falls where it does because, from chapter 40 on, the prophet speaks of the Babylonian exile as though it were present, and, most striking of all, names Cyrus, the Persian king who would let the exiles go home, by name (44:28; 45:1), about a century before the man was born and some century and a half before his decree set them free. To many scholars that is simply impossible; prophecy of that precision cannot happen; therefore the Cyrus passages must have been written after the fact, by a later hand, and labeled prophecy. Notice what is doing the work in that argument. It is not a new manuscript. It is not a fresh discovery. It is a prior decision: that God does not, and cannot, declare a thing before it comes to pass.

And that is exactly the claim Isaiah himself stakes everything on. Over and over the Lord summons the idols of the nations to a contest, and the terms of the contest are precisely this: Predict how future events will turn out, so we might know you are gods (41:23; see 41:21–23). The Lord’s own credential, the thing that marks Him off from every carved and gilded nothing, is that He announces the end from the beginning and reveals beforehand what has not yet occurred (46:10). The naming of Cyrus is not an embarrassment to be managed. It is the demonstration. It is the Lord doing in the open the very thing He dared the idols to do and they could not. To cut it out of the book is to perform surgery on the patient precisely where his heart is.

So we receive Isaiah as one book: the word of the one prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz, and behind him the one Spirit who, as the Creed confesses, spoke by the prophets. And we are in good company. The apostle John, quoting both chapter 6 and chapter 53, names Isaiah as the author of both halves without a flicker of doubt; the Lord Jesus stands up in the synagogue at Nazareth, is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah (Luke 4:17), reads from what the critics call its third part, and hands it back as one book. We will use the three movements of Isaiah (the indictment and its child-king, 1–39; the comfort and the Servant, 40–55; the glory to come, 56–66) as a map of the book’s terrain, never as a claim of three authors. The seams are real; they are the joints of one body, not the stitches of a forgery. This is one of the roads the critical-historical reading takes and we do not, and we are content to say so plainly, and without rancor: the question between us is not finally about Hebrew style. It is about whether God foretells. We confess that He does.

A word, then, to anyone who has met that little note in the margin and felt the floor tilt. You have not been handed a secret that the church somehow missed; you have been handed an assumption dressed as a discovery. The men who write our study Bibles are often careful and learned, and we owe them no scorn. But where their note begins with the quiet premise that God does not foretell, we begin somewhere else, with the Lord who stakes His very godhood on announcing the end from the beginning. So when you read of a “Second Isaiah” in a footnote, you need neither panic nor pretend the question away. You may simply set the one assumption beside the other and ask which God you are dealing with: the silent one of the critic, who can only describe a future after it has safely arrived, or the living one of the prophet, who names Cyrus before the man’s own mother does. We have made our confession. The book is one because the Spirit who spoke by the prophets is one, and He is not embarrassed by His own foreknowledge.

How We Will Read Isaiah

Those who have walked with us through Genesis and the Psalms know that this series reads the Old Testament under four commitments, settled at the start and carried into every volume. They are worth saying again at the threshold of a new book, because Isaiah will test all four and reward all four. We hold them lightly as method and firmly as conviction.

The first is that Christ is genuinely in the Old Testament, not merely predicted by it. Luther had a phrase for the rule that governs all our reading, was Christum treibet: what presses Christ upon you, what drives Him home. He could speak of the Old Testament as the swaddling clothes and the manger in which the Christ-child lies: humble wrappings, easy to overlook, but lay them open and there He is. We will not be hunting for hidden codes. We will follow where the apostles have already pointed: when the New Testament tells us that the Servant of chapter 53 is the Lord Jesus, that the voice in the wilderness is His forerunner, that the child of chapter 9 is the Son given to us, we take them at their word and read accordingly.

The second commitment will be the keynote of this whole study, because no Old Testament book sounds the two notes more sharply than Isaiah: the distinction between law and gospel. Walther taught a generation of pastors that rightly dividing these two words is the highest art of the theologian, and Isaiah is a master class in it. Hear the two extremes of the book in a single breath each. In chapter 6 the prophet stands before the thrice-holy God and is destroyed by what he sees: Woe to me! I am destroyed (6:5). That is the law in its full, killing force, the law that does not improve a man but unmakes him. And in chapter 40 the same book opens its arms: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God (40:1). That is the gospel, sheer consolation, spoken to people who have nothing in their hands to bring. Even within a single verse Isaiah holds them together: Though your sins have stained you like the color red, you can become white like snow (1:18). The red stain is the law’s verdict; the snow is the gospel’s gift. Learn to name these two words rightly in Isaiah and you will be able to name them anywhere.

The third commitment is that the Old Testament is real history, and that we read each of its genres as what it is. Much of Isaiah is poetry and prophecy, and we will read it as such: a prophet’s oracles, not a flat chronicle, taking its soaring images the way Hebrew poetry means them, and reading prophecy as prophecy, the word of a preacher to his own day that also reaches forward. But Isaiah holds plain history too (a real Ahaz refusing a real sign, a real Hezekiah whose faith and folly fill four narrative chapters, 36–39), and that we read as history, because it happened, and because, as we will see, typology gets no foothold unless the events are real. This is also where our Lutheran realism about the saints belongs. The word of God does not come to an idealized people, and it is not carried by porcelain heroes. Isaiah confesses, my lips are contaminated by sin, and I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin (6:5); Hezekiah is a king we will admire and wince at in the same breath. That is no flaw in the book. It is the gospel’s whole point: the Lord comes to sinners, or He does not come at all.

The fourth commitment is a guardrail on the first. We read the Old Testament typologically, so that its persons and events and institutions point beyond themselves to Christ; but typology is governed, not freelance. The line we will not cross is this: we build on the correspondences the apostles and the New Testament writers draw, and we do not invent our own. When Isaiah’s Servant is read as the Lord Jesus, it is because Philip read it that way to the Ethiopian, because Peter read it that way over the Lord’s passion, because Matthew and Paul and Luke read it that way. That is warrant, not whim. It keeps us clear of the old abuse of allegory, where every detail becomes a riddle and the text is made to say whatever the reader is clever enough to wring from it. We are after the plain sense that drives to Christ, not a treasure hunt.

Four commitments, then, and they are not four separate tools but one habit of reading. We come to Isaiah expecting to meet Christ; we let the law wound and the gospel heal; we read each genre as what it is, prophecy as prophecy, history as history, among real and sinful people; and we follow the typology the apostles have already drawn rather than our own cleverness. Hold them together and they will carry us through every chapter ahead. Let any one of them slip and the book warps in our hands, into a code to be cracked, or a flat little morality, or a chart of the last days, or a gallery of plaster saints. Kept together, they keep us on the road; and the road, we have said, has a destination with a name.

The Servant of the LORD

If this study has a center of gravity, it is a single figure who walks through the second half of the book and gathers everything to Himself: the Servant of the LORD. We name Him now, at the very start, so that the whole study can be read leaning toward Him. Watch, from here on, for the words my servant. They will reward your attention.

The word has a range, and we must respect it. Sometimes servant in Isaiah is the nation: You, my servant Israel, Jacob whom I have chosen, offspring of Abraham my friend (41:8; compare 44:1–2). Israel was called to be the Lord’s servant in the world, His witness among the nations, His light. And Israel failed; the book calls this servant blind and deaf, the very condition the nation was made to remedy. But then, in four great songs, the word narrows. It tightens from the many to One. There rises a Servant who is not blind, not deaf, not faithless; a Servant who does for Israel what Israel could never do for itself, and who is even sent on a mission to Israel (49:5–6). The failing servant-nation is not the last word. The true Servant is.

And who is He? We are not left to guess, and this is our fourth commitment in action. An Ethiopian official, riding home from Jerusalem, is reading aloud from the fourth of these songs, He was led like a sheep to slaughter, and he turns to Philip with the only question that matters: Please tell me, who is the prophet saying this about, himself or someone else? Philip, beginning with this scripture, proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him (Acts 8:32–35). There it is, settled at the Spirit’s prompting and set down in Holy Scripture. Peter takes the same song and lays it over the Lord’s suffering: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24). Matthew sees in Him the Servant who took our weaknesses and carried our diseases (Matthew 8:17). The question the Ethiopian asked has an answer, and the answer is the Lord Jesus Christ.

When we arrive at chapter 53 we will slow almost to a stop (we have given it two sessions, not one), because it is the clearest portrait of substitutionary, sin-bearing suffering anywhere in the Old Testament. There the Lord does not merely pity the sinner from a distance; He lays the sinner’s guilt on Another, and that Other bears it willingly and to the end: He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins … but the LORD caused the sin of all of us to attack him (53:5–6). This is the great exchange at the heart of our confession, our sin reckoned to Him and His righteousness reckoned to us, sketched in full color seven hundred years before the cross it describes. The whole study is built to bring us, unhurried, to that hill.

Hold that exchange close, because it is the answer to the question every honest conscience finally asks: what is to be done with my sin? Not managed, not minimized, not slowly improved away over a lifetime of trying harder, but laid on Him, so that the sin of all of us falls upon Him. The Lord does not pretend the scarlet is not scarlet; He carries it bodily onto Another, and there spends it to the last penny. And mark the mercy hidden in the very shape of the thing. Israel was made to be the Lord’s servant and could not be; we are called to serve Him and cannot either; and just there, where every servant fails, the true Servant steps into the gap to render the obedience and bear the penalty we owed and could never pay. So He is not finally our example, a brave sufferer to be admired from a safe distance in the pew. He is our substitute. When we come at last to chapter 53 we will not be studying a hero. We will be standing at the foot of a cross that has our name on the charge sheet and His blood over the writing.

Reading a Prophet

A word, before we begin, about how to read a prophet at all, because the genre throws people off, and a little orientation saves a great deal of confusion. We tend to hear the word prophet and think only of prediction, of a man peering into the future. Prediction is in it, surely. But a prophet is first a preacher. He is the Lord’s mouth to the people of his own day: a prosecutor pressing the covenant’s case against a faithless nation, and then, once the verdict has done its work, a herald of comfort. Forth-telling before fore-telling. Isaiah is preaching to a real Judah about real Assyrians and real idols, and his first hearers were not meant to file his words away for the twenty-first century. They were meant to repent, and to hope.

So we will read whole oracles, not fragments. The temptation with a book like this is to harvest single verses, a promise for a coffee mug, a comfort lifted clean out of its setting, and we mean to resist it. Each oracle, each song, each woe is a composition with its own shape, and it means what it means as a whole. We will take the units the way the prophet built them, and let the comfort land where it lands: on the far side of the indictment that makes it gospel.

We will also learn to see with the prophet’s double vision, the near horizon and the far horizon at once. Stand on a plain and look toward mountains, and a near hill and a far peak can line up along one sightline, so that they seem to be a single thing. Prophecy is often like that. The sign of Immanuel in chapter 7 had a near fulfillment in Isaiah’s own day, as Ahaz’s clock ran out, and a far, deeper fulfillment in the virgin’s Son whom Matthew names Emmanuel, which means God with us (Matthew 1:23). Both are true; neither cancels the other. We will keep both horizons in view, and refuse to flatten the one into the other.

That double vision guards us from two ditches, one on either side of the road, and naming them is part of why this series exists. On the one side is the ditch of the critic, who allows only the near horizon: Isaiah spoke to his own day and no further, the far peak is an illusion, and the Servant is at most a brave Israelite, never the crucified Lord. We have already seen where that road begins, in the refusal to let God foretell. On the other side is the ditch of the chart-makers, who fix their eyes only on a far, literal, ethnic-national horizon: the streaming of the nations to Zion (2:2–4), the wolf residing with the lamb (11:6), the new Jerusalem (65:17–19), all of it pressed into a program of real estate and end-times calendar for a restored national Israel, with the Lord Jesus oddly absent from His own prophecy. We will take neither ditch. We will read these glories as the New Testament reads them: fulfilled in Christ and in His church gathered out of all nations, and consummated in the new heavens and new earth that the last pages of the Bible promise (Revelation 21). Zion’s true children are those who trust the Servant; the new Jerusalem is the city God Himself is building. That is not us imposing a meaning on Isaiah. It is the apostles handing us the key.

Comfort, Comfort My People

All of which brings us, at last, to the passage set for this session, and it is the right doorway into the whole book, because it is the moment Isaiah turns from thunder to balm. For thirty-nine chapters the weather has been mostly storm: arraignment, woe, the gathering shadow of Babylon. And then, without warning, the sky breaks open: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God (40:1). The Hebrew word is nacham, to comfort, to console; and it is doubled, and it is a command. God is not coaxing His people to cheer up. He is commissioning comfort to be preached. Heaven has issued an order, and the order is consolation.

And mark to whom it is spoken. Not to the deserving. This comfort is addressed to a people under judgment, a people whose sin has earned the very exile that is coming, and the word speaks straight past the judgment to the pardon on the far side of it: tell her that her time of warfare is over, that her punishment is completed (40:2). That is the grammar of the gospel exactly. It does not wait for the sinner to mend; it announces the debt paid and the war over. The comfort of Isaiah 40 is not advice. It is amnesty.

This is worth dwelling on, because it cuts clean against everything the religion of the flesh expects. We assume that comfort must be earned, that God speaks tenderly only to those who have first gotten their house in order. Isaiah 40 turns that on its head. The command to speak kindly to Jerusalem is, in the Hebrew, literally to speak to her heart, the very language a man uses to woo, to console, to win back the one he loves. It is intimate, and it is unconditional, and it is spoken over a city that has earned the opposite of tenderness. Luther never tired of saying that this is simply how the gospel always works: it finds us with empty hands and fills them. Walther would press it on his students as a rule, that the gospel freely gives what the law demands and we cannot supply. Hear chapter 40 that way. Heaven has not waited for Judah to deserve consolation; heaven has commanded that consolation be preached to the undeserving, and has set the preacher to his work.

Then a voice cries out: In the wilderness clear a way for the LORD; build a level road through the rift valley for our God (40:3). All four Gospels will put that very cry in the mouth of John the Baptist, the forerunner who clears the road for One greater than himself. And what is the road being cleared for? Not a program, not a policy, but a Person: The splendor of the LORD will be revealed, and all people will see it at the same time (40:5). The whole point of the highway is the King who comes down it.

But the chapter knows our hearts, and it knows how frail our comfort can feel, so it sets that comfort on a foundation outside ourselves. The grass dries up, the flowers wither (and we are the grass; our resolve and our feelings wither like everything else), but the decree of our God is forever reliable (40:8). Peter would later take up those very lines, the word of the Lord endures forever, and tell the church, this is the word that was proclaimed to you (1 Peter 1:25), using the very verb for preaching the gospel. Our comfort does not rest on the strength of our grip. It rests on a word that does not wither, spoken by a God who does not change.

And the chapter ends not with a lecture but with an embrace. The same Lord who comes as a victorious warrior, whose military power establishes his rule (40:10), bends down in the very next breath: Like a shepherd he tends his flock; he gathers up the lambs with his arm; he carries them close to his heart; he leads the ewes along (40:11). Power and tenderness in one motion. The Good Shepherd who will one day say I am the good shepherd is already here, already gathering lambs, already carrying the ones who cannot keep up. This is where we begin the book of Isaiah, and it is exactly where the book wants us to begin: not as students assembling information about a Messiah who is coming, but as tired and frightened sheep, comforted by a Shepherd who is here.

Gathering the Threads

Set down, then, what this first session has put in our hands. We have come to Isaiah not as strangers but as travelers handed a thread at the end of the Psalms, pointed from the start toward a Servant. We have learned the old, true name for the book, the Fifth Gospel, and the reason for it: here the gospel is preached before the gospel, sung centuries early by a prophet who, John tells us, saw Christ’s glory and spoke about Him. We have faced honestly the claim that Isaiah is two prophets or three, and found that the dividing knife is really aimed at a single conviction, that God can announce the end from the beginning; and we have confessed, with the apostles and the Creed, that He does, and that the book is one.

We have laid out the four commitments that will steer us: Christ truly present and not merely foretold; law and gospel held at full strength, with chapter 6 and chapter 40 as the two poles; the book’s genres read as what they are, prophecy as prophecy among real people with sin-stained lips; and typology kept on the apostles’ leash. We have named the Servant in advance and learned to watch for Him. We have learned to read a prophet as a preacher with double vision, and to keep out of the two ditches, the critic’s and the chart-maker’s, that run alongside this road. And we have begun where the book begins its comfort, in chapter 40, with an amnesty announced, a highway cleared for the King, a word that will not wither, and a Shepherd already gathering His lambs. Hold that opening word over the whole study to come. Whatever else Isaiah is, it is, from the lips of God Himself, a command to comfort His people; and the comfort has a name.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the doctrine it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. John 12:41 says that Isaiah saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him. How does that single apostolic sentence change the way you expect to read all sixty-six chapters? And how is “Isaiah saw Christ’s glory” different from “Isaiah predicted a Messiah”?

2. Critical scholars often divide Isaiah into two or three authors, and the naming of Cyrus (44:28; 45:1) is the hinge of the argument. What assumption is really driving that division? How does Isaiah’s own contest with the idols (41:21–23; 46:10) answer it? And why does the confessional reading receive predictive prophecy as a gift rather than a problem?

3. When the Ethiopian asked whom the prophet was speaking about (Acts 8:34), Philip answered by preaching the Lord Jesus from Isaiah 53. Why does it matter that Scripture itself, and not our own ingenuity, settles who the Servant is? How does that protect us from uncontrolled allegory?

4. Chapter 6 cries Woe to me! I am destroyed, and chapter 40 cries Comfort, comfort my people. Name each word rightly: which is law and which is gospel? Why does the comfort of chapter 40 only land as good news once the woe of chapter 6 has done its full work?

5. Isaiah 40 deliberately grounds our comfort outside ourselves: we are grass that dries up, but the decree of our God is forever reliable (40:8; 1 Peter 1:24–25). How is a comfort founded on the enduring word of God steadier than a comfort founded on how strongly we happen to feel on a given day?

Looking Ahead

We began with comfort, but we cannot rest long in the comfort until we have stood where the prophet stood when he first met the holiness that makes comfort necessary. Next we go back to the beginning of Isaiah’s ministry, to the year of King Uzziah’s death, into the throne room where the prophet sees the Lord seated on a high, elevated throne and hears the seraphs cry Holy, holy, holy. There the comfort of chapter 40 gets its full weight, because there a man is destroyed by the holiness of God, and then, astonishingly, cleansed by a hot coal carried from the altar. It is the law and the gospel of this whole book pressed into one vision. And John, again, will tell us whose glory it was that Isaiah saw in that room.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 6 in full, and read John 12:37–41 once more. As you read, ask why the holiest moment of the prophet’s life begins with “Woe to me! I am destroyed,” and notice exactly where the cleansing comes from, and where it does not.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God and Father, You did not leave Your people to grope after You in the dark. You raised up Your prophet Isaiah, and gave him to see the glory of Your Son, and to speak of Him long before the fullness of time was come. We thank You that the gospel was preached before the gospel, and that the comfort You commanded then is the comfort You speak still: that our time of warfare is over, that our punishment is completed in Him, that Your word is forever reliable when all our grass has dried up.

As we open this book, teach us to hear the law as law, that we may be undone; and to hear the gospel as gospel, that we may be comforted. Hold our eyes on the Servant until we come with the prophet to His cross, and let us read of Him not as those merely gathering knowledge, but as Your weary sheep gathered into the arms of the Shepherd. Keep us on the road, and bring us, through this whole book, to the One of whom it speaks; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.