Question: What does Isaiah teach about how to live through the time when his prophecies are starting to be fulfilled, especially as it concerns members of the church?
Answer: While the words of Isaiah spell out ahead of time how the end of the world is going to unfold, they indeed also reveal what pulls church members through that time into the earth’s glorious millennial age—what enables them to wade through a civilization disintegrating into chaos, through the collapse of the world’s superpower, the rise of a tyrannical conqueror of the world, a Sodom and Gomorrah type of destruction, and a world war to end all wars.
What Isaiah teaches about how God’s covenant people will live through these times has to do with the very thing that distinguishes them from all other people and that is to assume their role of saviors to the house of Israel. As the key to their own and Israel’s end-time survival, should not preparing to spiritually and physically gather Israel be a chief preoccupation? By what other means has God ordained that the “restitution of all things” should be accomplished?
In other words, if church members, who have been blessed more than any other people on earth, fulfill their end-time ministry as saviors to the Jews, Lamanites, and Ten Tribes in restoring them to God’s covenants, he will deliver both them and those to whom they minister through these times. Failure to fulfill this ministry, on the other hand, will result in their being “trodden underfoot” during the coming calamities (Isaiah 10:6; 28:3; Doctrine & Covenants 103:10).
Israel’s restoration commences in earnest with the Lord’s raising up his end-time servant—his “hand” and “ensign”—who prepares the way before the Lord’s coming to reign on the earth: “Thus says my Lord Jehovah: I will lift up my hand to the Gentiles, raise my ensign to the peoples; and they will bring your sons in their bosoms and carry your daughters on their shoulders. Kings shall be your foster fathers, queens yournursing mothers” (Isaiah 49:22–23).
Although these spiritual kings and queens attain the level of seraphs or translated beings—the highest possible level for mortals—yet they don’t consider themselves the greatest in the kingdom of God. Said Jesus, “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:11). Assuming the role of “servants”—of proxy saviors under the terms of the Davidic Covenant—they bring to pass Israel’s marvelous end-time redemption (cf. Isaiah 65:89).
