Question: I’ve encountered a lot of division on the topic of Isaiah. How do you account for that?
Answer: Isaiah’s words are themselves divisive as they predict a great division among God’s people prior to Jehovah’s coming to reign on the earth. Isaiah uses different kinds of imagery to describe this, such as a Covenant of Life and a Covenant with Death, the Virgin Zion and the Harlot Babylon, a City of Wickedness and a City of Righteousness, each of which is comprised of God’s people who divide as well as of others. It seems that those who assume we are on a good path, or who don’t want to put forth the effort to understand Isaiah seek to cover a sense of guilt arising from their inattention to what the scriptures are really saying about the times in which we live by a certain passive aggressiveness.
Others gravitate to Isaiah’s words with such zeal that it compares with conversion to the gospel but on a different level. Some say they are led by the Spirit specifically to my books and find answers to many questions they had harbored previously; or a confirmation of what they had already felt in their hearts. They feel that understanding Isaiah has opened up all other scriptures to them in ways they hadn’t supposed. I don’t doubt the division we are already beginning to experience in people’s responses to the scriptures has something to do with many being called and not all being chosen because of their distraction with the things of this world, and that the division on the topic of Isaiah is part of a larger picture.
