Isaiah [Part 13] - Divine Divorce & Redemption

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom. We're entering now into the Messianic texts. Chapter 50: "This is what the Lord says." When I say "the Lord," it is for the Tetragrammaton, for Jehovah. We don't like to say Jehovah as Jews because we're not sure exactly how to pronounce it. We prefer not to say it, so we say "the Lord."

This is the beginning of a new section, a new section that is dealing with the Messiah, with repentance, with the need to restore Israel back to its former glory. Whenever that was in history, I don't particularly remember, but the prophet thinks that Israel has gone astray and that God has given Israel a bill of divorce. Extremely sad:

I remember Jeremiah, chapter 2, verse 2, which says, "Guys, I remember the days of your youth when you followed me in the wilderness as a brand-new bride," talking about God's honeymoon with Israel. The marriage service was at the foot of Mount Sinai when Moses brings down the Ten Commandments written on the rock. That was our contract, and now, several hundred years later. God is talking about divorcing his wife, Israel. Hosea the prophet, chapter 2, talks about Israel being a prostitute that prostituted with the idols of our neighbors around our borders. There, God doesn't divorce his wife; there, God fences her in, shows her his generosity and his love, proves to her that he is the real provider, that he is the real caretaker, that he is the real lover of Israel, and brings her to repentance.

In this case, Isaiah is talking about a divorce, talking about sending Israel to exile. "I sold you into slavery," in verse 1. And he gives the reason: your wickedness, your transgressions, the transgressions of your mother. And there was no one there that, when God showed himself in the history of Israel, when God came, no one was there to receive him. No one was there to answer his call. A very, very sad text. Isaiah is a prophet of hope, is a prophet of God's grace, but here in this chapter, the sadness of a broken relationship between a husband and wife is the paradigm of God's relationship with Israel then. He has never rejected Israel. We see that in Jeremiah 31, verses 34 to 37, that as long as the moon is up in the sky at night and the sun at daytime, God has not rejected Israel. And there is a rainy day outside in Jerusalem. The sun is not there, but behind the cloud, the sun will peek through several times in the day today because the rain is about to end.

The prophet continues:

The prophet is describing God's power over the universe, over the Earth, in order for us to realize that he can, in a sense, that he will save Israel and save the world through Israel. The prophet realizes that, in my opinion, that only severe measures can turn the hearts of Israel back to our Abba, to our Father in heaven. Only severe measures, like divorce, can shake and shock the people of his day and today because we are all kind of used to believing that God is this benevolent old man in the sky, half impotent. He is not; he is not. And here, in Isaiah's days, he is revealing to Isaiah his power.

Verse 4 of chapter 50:

It's hard to say from this text: is the prophet talking about himself, or is he talking about, again in a parabolic way, about Israel? I personally believe that he's talking about himself. All the prophets, classical prophets, were persecuted. Isaiah and his whole family were persecuted. For three years, he was ostracized from the community in Jerusalem and probably in all of Judea for what he said. Jeremiah was beaten, slapped, put in jail, thrown into a well. Amos was thrown out of town. And oftentimes, those who speak the truth have to pay a price. I know it from my own life. There have been three attempts to kill me—real attempts to kill me—that miraculously, with God's grace, I survived. I have been beaten physically, spit upon, property damaged. Forty live mice were thrown into my apartment when my children were little. My mother was there, my wife was there, and I had a brother who was staying with us was there. Salim.

Yep, you speak the truth anywhere, even in Jerusalem, even in Israel, and especially in our days, you can be severely persecuted, even thrown into jail. Yes, there is a price. The prophets of Israel paid the price. They paid the price of speaking the truth. They paid the price of hearing God, obeying God, rather than fearing men. I'm not going to belabor this point because I want to go on.

After the prophet kind of gives this complaint to what he's going through, in verse 9 of chapter 50, he says:

Who can condemn me when the Lord is my helper? That's what he's saying.

Strong, strong, strong words of the prophet to the crowd that is listening to him, to the people who are reading this even more than 2,800 years later, like I am reading it now. Being a prophet was never simple. I realize today it's in fashion in the Evangelical camp to have apostles, prophets, people prophesying. I've been around the world a few times. Most of those that claim—no, I'm not going to say most—all of those that claim to be apostles and all of those who claim to be prophets I have examined the best I could do as objectively as possible under the tools that the word of God gives me. All of them were false. Not one of them came out as a true prophet of God. Maybe one, maybe one. Maybe David Wilkerson was an exception. Yeah, maybe. So the prophet is laying down his pain, his challenge of speaking the word of God to a generation that doesn't want to hear, a generation that prefers the globalization of idolatry rather than the voice of the Creator, our Abba, our Father.

Chapter 50 is an important chapter for the understanding of the prophet and the challenges of being a prophet—not only in the land of Israel. I believe that it's for always, everywhere, in all the generations. To be a true prophet of God is a very, very big challenge and a very big, unpopular job. Because what do you have to tell the people? "Let's go to Disney World"? No, sir. You have to tell the people, "If you don't change, God, your Father, is going to make sure to put you away from your land, away from your home, away from your national identity." Yes, he's a merciful God, and he will bring your descendants back. The dry bones are going to come together; the dead will arise nationally and individually when the Mashiach returns. That's chapter 50.

And now we're in another very, very important chapter: chapter 51. We're entering into areas that are not so well understood by most of the people that believe in God and believe in the Bible.

Talking about Abraham: The souls which Abraham made in Haran came with him—hundreds of men, and probably they were married already and had children. To make souls in the Hebrew language is to evangelize. And Jacob, on his deathbed, says that Abraham and Isaac fished for men or they multiplied like fish. Chapter 48, I think it's verse 16 of the Book of Genesis. In the Hebrew—you have to read it in Hebrew—that's where the word fish is used in the text. So the prophet is now inviting the people that are listening to him, or people like us who are reading his texts. And he says: "Here is Abraham your father, the father of the nation, the father of the Jewish people, and the father also of the Arabs because he is also the father of Ishmael and later on Esau is from decent of Abraham in Isaac."

And he says to the people of Israel, identifies himself, and also in verse 3 says this wonderful text:

Notice here, not a light for my people, for Israel, but a light for the peoples, for the nations.

These things that the prophet is talking about here have both a judgmental aspect and blessing and hope and a bright future for the people of Israel and for the nation of Israel and for the world as a whole, in fact. Because the nations will see his glory. The nations will understand God's deliverance and the light that he shared with the nations. And there is a prediction of the end of the world built into this, which makes this an eschatological text.

This is important, dear brothers and sisters in Korea and everywhere else around the world. It's not a myth that this world was created. It had a beginning, and it will have an end. Bigger stars, whole universes in the vast space are born and die. Several years ago, when I read Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, I was shocked. The man that claims that he didn't believe in God but believed that the world was created. There was a time in which this globe, this Earth, didn't exist. He believed that there was a time in which our galaxy, the Sun, the moon, and the planets running around our Sun, didn't exist. It came into being; it came into existence. And he also believes it's going to have an end. And this is the story of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation—the birth of this Earth in Genesis, the end of this Earth as we know it in Revelation. But even Isaiah knows that it's going to happen, but

So in these few verses in chapter 50 of Isaiah, we've got these elements: the reprimand, the anger of the Lord expressed, the restoration, the rebirth of the light of the Lord over the nation of Israel and the world and all the nations in the world, and then the eschaton, the end time predicted in just a few words in poetry.

We've got in a few verses, actually, the whole gospel.

God bless you.