ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 7 · Isaiah 6; Isaiah 53; 2 Kings 23:21-27
Isaiah sees the King high and lifted up and is sent to a people who will not hear. Josiah's reform is the best in Judah's history, and the exile comes anyway.
Judah outlived the northern kingdom by well over a century, and some of its kings in those years sought the LORD. Isaiah dates his call by a royal funeral: In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple (Isaiah 6:1). Uzziah had reigned fifty-two years. The year he died, Isaiah saw who had been reigning all along.
The seraphim cry holy, holy, holy, and Isaiah can only cry out himself: Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5). A seraph takes a live coal from the altar and touches his mouth with it, and his sin is purged. When God asks whom he shall send, Isaiah answers, Here am I; send me. Then he is told what the job is: to preach to a people who will hear and not understand, until the cities lie waste and the land is empty.
John says the glory Isaiah saw that day was the glory of Christ (John 12:41). The King on the throne in Isaiah 6 is the Son.
Hezekiah tore down the high places and broke in pieces the bronze serpent Moses had made, because Israel was burning incense to it. In 701 BC the Assyrian army that had taken Samaria came down on Judah, and Hezekiah held Jerusalem and trusted the LORD. Sennacherib's own annals boast that he shut Hezekiah up in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage, and list the tribute Hezekiah paid and forty-six walled towns of Judah taken. They do not say that Jerusalem fell. 2 Kings 19:35 says why: the angel of the LORD went through the Assyrian camp in a night, and Sennacherib went home to Nineveh.
Hezekiah did not finish as well as he began. He showed the Temple treasury to envoys from Babylon, and Isaiah told him that everything in it would one day be carried there (Isaiah 39:6).
Between Isaiah's warnings and his promises stands a portrait of a servant who suffers in the place of others: But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5). The Great Isaiah Scroll from the caves at Qumran, copied more than a century before Christ, has the chapter intact, so no one can say it was written after the event to fit him.
When the Ethiopian official read it in his chariot he asked Philip the right question, of whom speaketh the prophet this? Philip began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus (Acts 8:35).
Hezekiah's son Manasseh reigned fifty-five years and undid his father's work, and filled Jerusalem with innocent blood. Manasseh's grandson Josiah came to the throne at eight years old. In the eighteenth year of his reign, while the Temple was being repaired, Hilkiah the high priest found the book of the law, and when Shaphan read it aloud to the king, Josiah tore his clothes.
The reform that followed went deeper than any before it. Josiah read the whole covenant aloud to the people, burned the vessels of Baal, defiled the high places, put away the mediums and wizards, and kept a Passover like none since the days of the judges. Scripture's verdict on him stands alone: like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the LORD with all his heart (2 Kings 23:25).
The next verse begins, Notwithstanding the LORD turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath (2 Kings 23:26). Josiah was killed at Megiddo at thirty-nine. Twenty-three years later Jerusalem was ash.
Josiah's reform did not save Judah, and God had not said it would. Huldah the prophetess told him plainly that the judgment would come, only not in his days (2 Kings 22:20). He went ahead anyway, and Scripture honors him for it. The outcome was God's to settle. The obedience was Josiah's to give, and he gave it.
Isaiah saw the King high and lifted up, and he saw the same person wounded for our transgressions. Christ gave the obedience Josiah gave, and more, without one failure in it, and he bore the wrath that no reform of Josiah's could turn away. Whoever is in him will not face that wrath.