Greetings, fellow Bible readers!
We have now experienced our third week of our special Bible study that eventually will get us through the whole Bible. This will take 3 years. The journey will be life-changing.
There will be many weeks when we reach sections of the Bible, like Isaiah chapters 13-18, that are hard to understand and difficult to read. I encourage you to work VERY hard to slow your brain down and read every word of the chapters, whether you understand or not. We need this kind of discipline as disciples of Jesus.
So often we read the Bible, and if it’s not exciting to us, we either skim through what we are reading, or we simply stop reading passages that we don’t understand. Often these passages are found in the Old Testament. I have completed this study two times in my Christian walk. This is my third time through the Bible. The first two times I read through the Bible in this fashion, I was surprised how often I ended up loving the Old Testament books better than the New Testament books. There is much depth, wisdom, and life-changing messages in the Old Testament. Isaiah is one of my favorite books in the Bible. This is why we need to read every word, knowing that sometimes we are reading to improve our discipline. I promise you that Isaiah will change your life as we continue through the book.
Even though I didn’t receive any great revelations from this week’s reading, I do want to give a brief overview of what is going on in the chapters that we have read. It’s likely that Isaiah wrote these chapters, as well as chapters 19-23, while Hezekiah was King of Judah.
Hezekiah was a good King, and he usually did what was right in the eyes of God. In these chapters, we read about messages from Isaiah to countries that surrounded Judah, countries like Babylon, Moab, Philistia, Damascus, Israel, Ethiopia, and Assyria.
These chapters are prophetic words about and to these countries. Hezekiah, fearing the Assyrian army that was the fiercest army in the world at this time, tried to form an alliance with some of these nations to go to war against Assyria. Isaiah didn’t think God wanted this alliance. What makes these chapters interesting to me is how they fit in with the nature of what prophecy is. Prophecy is what God is saying, and prophecy is often about what will happen in the future. Many of these hard-to-read messages to these nations happened in the future. Some of the prophecies didn’t even happen in Isaiah’s lifetime.
I do want to point out the passage found in Isaiah 14:12-14. Many Christians that grew up in the Charismatic Movement, which began in the late 1960’s, believe that these verses refer to Satan falling from heaven (by the way, our church was formed in the Charismatic Movement). However, most commentaries say this passage is about King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Sometimes this study will give some ambitious readers the chance to get some extra credit by doing your own research and writing about your beliefs about this passage.
I look forward to connecting over this week’s reading as well. Stay engaged! Stay persistent! Keep your spiritual eyes and ears wide open!
Brian Kamstra
