Page 15 - Isaiah Student Worktext
P. 15

Another prophet, Ezekiel, was inspired to write a pair of verses that mean a great deal to my family.  In
               Ezekiel 36: 26-27, he writes that God will give us a new heart, that He will remove our defective heart of
               stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.

               We close with more consequences.

               V. 24-25 God will destroy a disobedient nation.  His anger is aroused against disobedience.  The streets
               will be filled with the carcasses of those who have ignored Him.  Still, His anger is not turned away.

               It’s hard to imagine that we haven’t already experienced this.  To turn the idea of ‘what more could He
               have done?’ around, how much worse could we be?

               Does God send hurricanes, volcanoes, wildfires, droughts etc. to punish us?  We know that He has done
               that in the past, but does He now?  We can’t be certain, we do know that He protects us from them, if
               we are in His will.  Perhaps all the things we keep reading about and seeing on the news is God’s
               warning to us.

               V. 26-30 tell us that God will raise up an opponent, that He will ‘whistle to them’ from the end of the
               earth.  That’s an unusual picture…  He will strengthen the adversary, their arrows will be sharp, their
               horses will be strong.  It will bring darkness and sorrow.


                                       Isaiah 6  Main Idea: God reveals Christ to Isaiah, convicts him of sin,
                                       purifies him and calls him to preach.

                                       There is so much correlation between what the Holy Spirit inspired Isaiah to
                                       write and what is written in the New Testament.  In Revelation 4: 1-2, John
               was invited to come up and see, through the Spirit, Heaven.  He saw a throne, and someone seated on
               it.  Of course, it is God, and it is from that throne that He created the universe and rules over it even
               today.

               Isaiah had a similar vision at the very beginning of his calling as a prophet.

               V. 1-2 When great people, whether spiritually great or worldly great, the world takes notice.

               King Uzziah was not perfect, but he was a good and popular king.  He had reigned for 52 years, which
               would be like us having the same President since 1966…almost as long as Zambia has been independent.
               Even if he had been a bad king, there would have been some anxiety at just wondering what the next
               one would be like.

               In Old Testament times, there were no calendars marked ‘750 BC’.  People marked time by designating
               events in the lives of their rulers.  ‘In the 14  year of King So and So’s reign’.  It would be like us referring
                                                      th
               to 2019 as ‘the 3  year of Donald Trump’.  Although most cultures had calendars to lay out months,
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               weeks and days, successive years was still a future concept, and really didn’t become popular until ‘AD’
               times, and even then, not until about 525 AD.  It didn’t become widely used until about 800.



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