Sex and sensuality.

Could be just me, but I think Isaiah's song in Isaiah 5 is about sex and sensuality. At least at first.

Isaiah 5:1 Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.

Could just be reading stuff in. I have less than 24 hours to make up my mind before releasing my thoughts onto the hapless five o'clockers at St Paul's Carlingford. Thoughts welcome.

Reading big bits of Bible

Yes, I finished Isaiah while watching the Tour de France time trials.

dark knight commented:

So did you accomplish the feat?

It wasn't that hard, and I don't say this because I consider myself to be a great reader. The secret for me is to let your eye run over the text fast, and every page or so stop and ask 'do I remember anything at all from the last five minutes of my existence?'

But I realize not everyone is like me. After I suggested this idea at church, 2 people separately came up and told me that they listened to Isaiah on mp3, whether walking, or sitting in a car and driving, or something else. Which is fantastic. There is a snobbishness associated with literacy that Christians mustn't buy into.

oh—not suggesting the people who spoke to me were illiterate! But the fact that I feel I need to say that says something about how highly we prize literacy.

The original hearers of the prophecies were most likely illiterate (the ones that weren't royalty), and I love it that technology has given us the means of coping with that in a way that not only isn't embarrassing, but even brings us closer to the experience of the original hearers.

Although I will keep reading, because I'm impatient and because it is faster and more precise if you have a memory as dodgy as mine.

dark knight also said

One of the best tips for exegesis I ever picked up was to read a whole work through in one go. I once read Luke-Acts that way, it was great. I suspect Luke churned out more words than all of the Isaiahs put together.

Yes, isn't this a brilliant idea. It is a way of letting ourselves be captivated by the text, as Harry Potter readers know.

By the way have you read Robert Tannehill on Luke-Acts? Spellbinding.

Isaiah and Harry Potter

Tomorrow I'm preaching an overview of Isaiah, shamelessly pilfered from Barry Webb's commentary in the BST series. I don't mind stealing ideas, as every single thought that I've ever had comes from someone else and if it didn't, I would be forced to stop thinking. I don't do 'original'.

But I do feel vaguely embarrassed about doing an overview of Isaiah without having read it in recent times. And if Fifi can read the whole of Harry Plotter tonight, then I can manage Isaiah. Isaiah has 66 chapters and in my Bible only goes for 76 pages, a lot of which is poetry. Which I reckon is just a way of fooling people into thinking that you have a fatter book than you actually do.

So ask me tomorrow if I managed. Tour de France will be on the telly in the background.

Isaiah

Isaiah has two beginnings—chapter 1 and chapter 6. Why?

Foolishness

In another place recently I managed to annoy a dapper but blackhearted man, let’s call him Tennessee, sufficiently to incite him to the point of using his not inconsiderable powers of irony upon me. He compared me to an Old Testament prophet in a drawing room—a polite environment where questions of ethics normally are kept deeply buried (not just swept) under the most tasteful of carpets. The Archbishop of Canterbury would understand and approve the analogy, though he might speak instead of a Nigerian at Lambeth Palace.

Whether either the label or the irony was misplaced in my case, I’m in no position to judge. But in the providence of God I stumbled upon this wonderful passage in Barry G. Webb’s commentary on Isaiah. I quote at length:

Through all this Isaiah clung to the truth that had been etched into his consciousness by his call. In the year that king Uzziah died he had seen the King, high and exalted, and the whole earth full of his glory. So when Senaccherib’s men stood at the gates and proclaimed, in the name of ‘the great king, the king of Assyria’, that Jerusalem was utterly at his mercy, then Isaiah knew it was a lie. The truth behind appearances was that the Lord himself was the supreme ruler, and would determine the fate of Assyria and Judah alike. Isaiah lived by the old creed. Ahaz and Hezekiah found it hard to translate into practical politics, the common people gave it only lip-service, and Senaccherib mocked it as madness, but Isaiah charted his course by it.

The meagre biographical details we have indicate how completely Isaiah’s mission dominated and consumed him. Jerusalem, which featured so much in his preaching, was his home city. His ready access to the king suggested that he was high born and moved in the most elite circles. Yet there was nothing effete or fawning about him. His presence was a constant reminder that royal power was not absolute, and privilege entailed heavy responsibility. His tense confrontation with Ahaz in chapter 7, for example, speaks volumes for his courage and unswerving commitment and to his high calling, qualities that were eventually to cost him his life. His wife is called ‘the prophetess’ in 8:3, suggesting that she, too, prophesied. Certainly she did so indirectly, for she bore sons to Isaiah whose symbolic names expressed key aspects of his message. Beyond this, we know nothing of his family life, what solace he drew from it, or what strains it suffered. All we know is that he was not a divided person; his call impacted and shaped his home life as it did every sphere he moved in. We catch a glimpse in 8:16-18 of a small band of disciples gathering around him, with a strong suggestion that it included his sons. That, at least, must have been a tremendous comfort to him and a most fitting reward for his faithfulness.

Barry Webb, The Message of Isaiah (Leicester: IVP, 1996), pp. 24-25

It is a great commentary, and has to be one of the first you go to once you've struggled with Isaiah for a while. And Isaiah, too, was a very great prophet.