Isaiah, The Gospel Prophet

Let’s begin with Isaiah’s call.
He sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” The heavenly beings cry, “Holy, holy, holy.” Isaiah doesn't say, “Finally, God has found the right man.”
He says, “Woe is me! for I am undone.”

Only after his guilt is dealt with does God ask, “Whom shall I send?”
Isaiah answers, “Here am I; send me.”
That gives us our first lesson:
Before God commissions the messenger, He confronts the messenger.

But we sometimes talk about prophets as though they were spiritually superior people.

And Isaiah destroys that picture. He begins by discovering his own need for grace.
Then comes Isaiah 53.

That's the part that amazes me. Seven hundred years before Jesus, Isaiah describes a Servant who would be rejected, wounded for our sins, silent before His accusers, and bear the sins of others.
How could he know that?

That's why Isaiah is called the Gospel Prophet.

But how do we know Isaiah 53 wasn't written after Jesus and then attributed to Isaiah?

We have the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a complete Isaiah scroll that predates Jesus by more than a century. So Isaiah 53 was already there before Christianity.
That doesn't force belief in prophecy, but it makes the claim that Christians invented Isaiah 53 after Jesus much harder to sustain.

I have a harder question.
Isaiah 53:10 says, “It was the Lord's will to crush him.”
If God is love, why would the Father want His Son to suffer?

That's one of the deepest tensions in the passage.
The Cross isn't God enjoying suffering. It is God dealing with the terrible reality of human sin through the Servant who bears it.
The Gospel says God was “in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.”
The Cross wasn't God's emergency plan after Eden.

So Isaiah isn't only predicting Christ. He's exposing us.

Exactly.
Isaiah says, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way.”
That's sin.
Not merely breaking rules.
Choosing my way over God's way.
And that's where prophecy becomes uncomfortable.

Because prophets don't just tell us what will happen. They tell us what's wrong.

Yes. Isaiah confronted a people who had become capable of calling evil good and good evil. Imagine Isaiah walking into our church today. Would we welcome him because he carries God's message—or become defensive when his message challenges something we cherish?

Maybe we really want prophecy.
Maybe we only want prophecy when it agrees with us.

That's the danger.
It's easy to accept God's truth when it exposes someone else's sin.
The real test comes when it exposes mine—my habits, my assumptions, my theology, even something about my church.

So the problem may not be that God has stopped speaking.
Maybe we've become selective listeners.

And Isaiah doesn't leave us condemned.
He points us to Christ:
“He was wounded for our transgressions.”
“The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
“By his stripes we are healed.”
Isaiah exposes the disease—but then points to the One who bears it.

So perhaps the question is this:
“When God's truth confronts something I don't want to surrender, am I willing to listen?”
Rather than: “Do I believe in prophecy?”
Because Isaiah wasn't sent to tell Israel what it wanted to hear.
He was sent to tell them what they needed to hear.
And perhaps that is still the test of whether we are really listening to God.