Question: Does Isaiah 20 mean the Lord’s end-time servant will preach to the USA for three years before the great destruction?
Answer: Egypt’s function as a codename of America in the Book of Isaiah, and Isaiah’s typifying the servant, suggest that he will indeed give three years’ warning before three years of God’s judgments upon this nation.
Question: Is the servant’s first name literally David, or could that be a symbolic name?
Answer: Scriptural patterns of messianic persons who were named before they came to earth—Moses, David, Jesus, and Joseph Smith—affirm that the latter-day David will be so named from birth. Prophets’ predictions of the Lord’s servant thus consistently name him David (Isaiah 55:3–5; Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23–24; 37:24–25; Hosea 3:5; TPJS 339).
Question: Will the servant come through the ranks of the Quorum of the Twelve?
Answer: Scriptural patterns—see their importance “that ye may not be deceived” (Doctrine & Covenants 52:14)—suggest that the servant’s appearance will in many respects resemble the coming of former messianic persons: Moses, David, Jesus, and Joseph Smith.
Question: What is the ethnicity of the servant? Could he be a Jew or Lamanite?
Answer: A revelation given through the prophet Joseph Smith—in which the name “Jesse” appears to function as a codename of Christ—suggests that the servant is a literal descendant of Christ, as are many latter-day prophets: “What is the root of Jesse spoken of in the 10th verse of the 11th chapter? Behold, thus saith the Lord, it is a descendant of Jesse, as well as of Joseph, unto whom rightly belongs the priesthood, and the keys of the kingdom, for an ensign, and for the gathering of my people in the last days” (Doctrine & Covenants 113:5–6; cf. Isaiah 11:1–16; 49:22–23). The descendants of Jesus’ known assimilation into the Gentiles, including the royal lines of European monarchs, precludes the possibility of the servant being a Jew or Lamanite, though ancestral representation from both houses of Israel—as in the prophet Joseph Smith’s case (Doctrine & Covenants 113:3–4)—seems called for.
