Isaiah [Part 20] - Jerusalem's Final Prophecy

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

Shalom. This is going to be the last lesson that I'm going to teach this year from Isaiah, and it's going to be the last chapter of Isaiah: Chapter 66.

When I learned to read books as a young child, my mother told me - first of all, I was forced to read. I didn't like reading, but I was forced to read - I either had to be in bed after school and after lunch for an hour or read for an hour. I chose to read for an hour. And my mother told me that the most important part of every book is the beginning and its end. So we did many lessons on Isaiah. We obviously couldn't cover every single chapter of Isaiah. 66 chapters. Isaiah is one of the longest books in the Bible, beside the Book of Psalms, which has 150 Psalms. Isaiah has 66 chapters, and the chapters are actually more voluminous than most of the Psalms.

So we are going to end the study of Isaiah today with Chapter 66. As my mother said, the most important things are written in the beginning of a book and at the end of the book. We're at the end of Isaiah in a very, very important chapter. I would say programmatic chapter. When we start reading Isaiah 66, it sounds very similar to First Kings Chapter 8. I'm going to read the first verses:

Oh, wow! Truth! I got goosebumps when I read the text, even this time. First of all, it's very similar to First Kings 8:27, Solomon's Prayer in the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem that he built. At the end of the building, Chapter 8 of First Kings, Solomon prays and actually says something very similar. I'm going to translate it from the Hebrew in a kind of a loose translation, but in order to get the point:

What is this? The dedication of the Temple. Every pagan temple of every nation in the world and in the Middle East, in the days of Solomon, was called the house of God. In every one of these pagan temples, they had the holy of holies, which contained the statue, the figure of their god. Whether it's Ba'al, Ashera or Tammuz, they had the statue there, it was the house of God, God dwelt in that house. And here we are, Solomon, at the very dedication of the temple in Chapter 8 of First Kings, says, "No, don't think that God is going to dwell in this house. This house is not going to be the house of God because God, even the heavens of the heavens of the heavens, cannot contain him, much less this house." Isaiah repeats the same thought, the same idea, in Chapter 66, the last chapter of his prophecies.

You didn't do anything for me. Building the Temple. I've created the whole earth, the whole world. I am not going to dwell in this small, tiny house when the earth is my footstool. I'm not going to look at this house." Isaiah says, "What am I going to look at?

Look, dear brothers and sisters, religion— all religion, Judaism, Christianity, and every other religion in the world—has taken God, or the God that they think that they own, that they think that he owns them, like a tuna out of the sea. In the sea, the tuna swims, and it's beautiful and quick and alive, and they put Him in a tuna can— Starkist tuna can. That's what religion does. The word religion doesn't even exist in the Hebrew Bible. There's no such word. It's a pagan concept. We have faith. Faith is alive. Faith is dynamic. Faith is powerful. We have love, one of the major powers of the world that makes the world go round, and we have hope. All these things are living powers. They're dynamite. They change us, change the world. But we want a canned tuna. We want control over God and His things.

God says, "No, what I really want is people who are humble, with a contrite spirit, and people who tremble at my word." Look, Yeshua, Jesus the Messiah, gave us wonderful commands, all based on the Law of Moses, on the Torah. But most of the churches that I know— Evangelical, born-again, Spirit-filled churches—ignore every command that Jesus commanded. There is not one command that Jesus or the apostles commanded the church that we pay attention to. And God says here, in Isaiah Chapter 66, verse 2, "What I want is people that are humble and of a contrite spirit, and who fear my word." The word here is the living word, which is Yeshua himself. But the word is also the Bible, the word of God, the revelation of God for humanity. We don't fear God's word.

First of all, we don't study it enough. I could tell you right now, having traveled around the world many, many times in over 50 countries and taught in all these 50 countries, that the preacher and what he says is more important than what God, the Holy Spirit, wrote. The preaching is two or three verses, half a chapter at the most, sometimes, and then the rest of the time is the preacher expounding and using the text to reach his goal, to whatever the goal of his preaching is. And God continues in verse 3 of Isaiah 66, and he says, 'Listen: You take your sacrifice; you kill the bull. It's as if you've killed the man.'

This is the word of Isaiah to the people of Jerusalem, to the people of Israel, and to us as the disciples of Yeshua. Dear brothers, we've got to take it seriously. We need not a reformation; we need a restoration. We've got to start teaching the people in our congregations to start reading the word of God, not a little here, a little there, but from Genesis chapter after chapter, all the way to the Book of Revelation. Because a book has a beginning and it has an end, and the message of the book is from the beginning to the end. So when we don't study the book in order, we miss a lot because then we have detached pieces, like a big, big puzzle that you've made from cardboard that you buy— a thousand, six thousand, eight thousand, ten thousand pieces— and we don't know how to put the pieces back together to see the full picture. Only when you read the Bible from beginning to end, several times in a lifetime, do you begin to see the picture. Isaiah Chapter 66 is the end of Isaiah, and it's a kind of summary of a lot of the principles that Isaiah taught in Jerusalem.

'I don't like what they do.' Look, Isaiah preached in the 8th century. He prophesied what is going to happen before the exile, during the exile, and after the exile. Prophetically speaking, I know the scholars think that there are two Isaiahs, four Isaiahs. I believe in one Isaiah, but I believe that God's revelation touched these periods. After he says these things and minimizes the importance of the temple and the sacrificial cult, which he already did in Chapter 1, he said, "Who asked you to come to my courts, to trample my courts? Who asked you to keep the Sabbath? Who asked you to observe the holidays? Who asked you to bring gifts to me? All these things are abominations for me because you don't have the faith; you don't have the heart. You're doing it from your mouth outward. Don't do it."

Now there is a switch. Isaiah switches a topic. In the earlier verse, he says, "You don't tremble at my word. You don't really care what I say." That's what he says in verse 2. In verse 5, he returns to the same theme:

In other words, there is a division inside the people of Israel. Some people tremble at God's word, fear God, and want to do his will, and others joke and make fun of those who fear God.

He's talking about Jerusalem. It's all about the temple in Jerusalem. And who is this male child? The prophet turns to the crowd and asks them kind of a riddle:

We don't know exactly yet what the prophet is talking about, but it's going to become clear in the next few verses.

Mother of the faithful, Jerusalem. Jerusalem, the mother of the faithful. That's what Isaiah is talking about in the last chapter. And she's going to give birth to a child, a male child, and that child will be delivered by God. Jerusalem will rejoice and be glad. The joy of Jerusalem will refresh, will bring joy to all those who mourn for Jerusalem. When I grew up in Jerusalem in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I grew up in one of the best neighborhoods in Jerusalem, one of the richest neighborhoods. We didn't buy the house; we entered in there. Yes, and I grew up there, but it was one house here and a few hundred meters away another house, fields with thorns and thistles and snakes and rats—house between house. Yes, the abundance of glory will be restored, God says.

There will be consolation because kings and rulers, nations will drink milk from the breast, the bosom of Jerusalem. It's a very interesting picture because if you visit pagan temples in Egypt from the time of Moses and before Moses, or in Babylon, which have been destroyed in the last few years by ISIS, you see the kings sitting on the lap of the goddesses and drinking milk from their breasts. That gave them the authority. The kings were considered the children of the gods, the sons of the gods. Isaiah is playing on that motif. And then he turns with this wonderful prophecy about Jerusalem.

The nations will be dandled on the knees of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the mother of all the believers. Not Rome. Augustine, called saint by those who didn't know him very well, wrote "The City of God." He referred to it not to Jerusalem but to Rome. But Rome is not the city of God; it's the city of idols. Jerusalem is the mother of all believers as the geographical focal point. The picture is that the nations will be sitting on the knees of Jerusalem and be drinking milk from her breast. Verse 13:

Oh, brother, oh, brother, oh, brother. Wow, wow, wow. If my Christian brothers around the world understand this text, receive the word of the Lord, the word of the Holy Spirit for our time, for the end time. Jerusalem, the mother of all believers, from every nation coming here. Zechariah says that representatives of every nation will have to come to Jerusalem during the Feast of Sukkot in Chapter 14 of Zechariah. Isaiah ends his prophecies, the book of his prophecy, where Jerusalem is the comfort of all the nations.

And Verse 14, wow, it's something that touches me so deeply. The first time I went to the Wailing Wall in 1967, just a couple of days after the war ended, there was a courthouse there in front of the Wailing Wall, built on a mound of Earth and rocks. And right above the courthouse, there was an inscription in Hebrew written sometimes after Isaiah, probably during the destruction of Jerusalem, or just before the destruction of Jerusalem. And that inscription was Verse 14 of Isaiah 66:

Talking about goosebumps, I've got it.

The Judgment Day is talking about.

Because of time, I'm going to summarize. From Verse 18 to the end of the chapter, there is not much. The Lord is saying through the mouth of Isaiah, through the pen of Isaiah, that the nations that will come to Jerusalem will have priests in the divine temple in the New Jerusalem, that Revelation, John's Revelation, is talking about in Chapters 21 and 22 of Revelation. The end of the book of Revelation. The nations will be participating as priests, serving in the new Temple of the Lord in the heavenly Jerusalem, in the New Jerusalem, together with Israel. And they will observe the Sabbath and the new moon, and they will say to the Lord: "His name and His glory and His mercy shall be exalted in that New Jerusalem." Jews and Gentiles, Arabs and Israelis, all believers from every race, from every continent, will be descending on Jerusalem and praising God in the new heavens and the new Earth.

That concept is taken from this chapter, Isaiah 66:22. Yes, my dear brothers and sisters, we're ending the book of Isaiah in this crescendo, in this high note. And I still urge you: Go back to the beginning and read the book of Isaiah. A chapter a day, two chapters a day, 10-15 minutes a day. Read the book of Isaiah. Refresh your mind and pray to God to refresh your life and your spirit according to the vision and prophetic utterances, predictions of Isaiah the prophet. God bless you all. Shalom from Netivyah and from Jerusalem.