The Kingdom of our God

Jenni Williams

Description

Engaging with critical scholarship but designed to be accessible for those beginning formal theological study or Christians who want to go deeper in their understanding of the book, The Kingdom of Our God demonstrates that the words of the prophets can still speak to us today.

Sujets

• Biblical Studies
• Philosophie et théologie
• Exegesis
• Hermeneutics
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334059677
• Langue: English

Extrait

For the staff and students of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and the congregations of St Peter Wootton, and St Matthew and St Luke Oxford with affection and gratitude.
Contents
Title
Dedication
Preface
Introduction

First Isaiah
The State of the Nation (1.1—5.30)
Seeing the Signs (6.1—9.21)
Hope in Dangerous Times (10.1—12.12)
Judgement (13.1—23.18)
Apocalypse (24.1—27.13)
True Wisdom (28.1—32.30)
The L ORD Arises (33.1—35.10)
Isaiah and Hezekiah (36.1—39.8)

Second Isaiah
Comfort (40.1—43.28)
The Incomparable L ORD (44.1—46.13)
Realities in Babylon (47.1—48.22)
The Servant of the L ORD (49.1—53.12)
Sing! (54.1—55.13)

Third Isaiah
An Extraordinary Hope and its Frustration (56.1—59.21)
Hope for Jerusalem (60.1—62.12)
Our Father (63.1–19)
Here I Am (64.1—65.25)
Glory (66.1–24)

Conclusion
Further Reading
Index of Bible References
Index of Names and Subjects
Copyright
Preface
Reading the book of Isaiah is an extraordinary experience. Seared with the love of God and his prophets for his people, passionate declarations of the L ORD’S unfailing love and his certain judgement on sin, it tells a story of triumph and despair, of times of peace and times of disaster, of hope and fear, of being lost and being found. This commentary will begin to explore the richness and the depth of what the book of Isaiah offers to its readers.
It is a huge task to write a commentary about the book of Isaiah as a whole. The sheer amount of material. The complexities of its compilation. The interweaving of voices. The breadth of the historical period it covers. The depth of its perspectives. Yet to write about the whole book is to consider something quite unique. The book, as we now have it, has within it three stories in three time periods: the end of Judah, the crisis of exile, the difficulties of rebuilding. All these stories are separately interesting. But together they form a fascinating and powerful narrative about God’s love and judgement, his purposes in the world and how these purposes were experienced as lived-out realities. This makes the whole more than simply the sum of the parts. To speak only of disaster is to miss the message of the L ORD’S grace in despair. To begin with comfort is to jump over the need to understand the past and distort the comfort into a generalized ease or a cheap grace. To look at future promises as they are re-contextualized needs understanding of the words spoken before.
There are lots of excellent commentaries on the book of Isaiah that engage with the many complexities of the textual transmission and other technical issues. I have listed the ones I have found most helpful in the Further Reading section at the end of the book. In this commentary I have engaged with such issues only as they have impacted on exploring the message at a theological level. The translation I have worked with is the NRSV. Where the Hebrew text has different verse numbers from the English, I have followed the verse numbers from the English text for convenience.
Introduction
The ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ is a beloved part of many Christians’ mental furniture, and rightly so. As the triumphant acclamation in the chorus moves into a quieter place, the words are sung about the inclusion of the world in the L ORD’S kingship and that of Christ. A wonderful vision and a beautiful hope in one sentence. And yet, the world in which we live does not always, does not often, feel like this.
There is a theological term for this experience of the world as it is and that coming of the kingdom for which we long: inaugurated eschatology. This is how we describe the reality of the world that Jesus came to redeem and is redeeming: the reality of the world as it is. For many Christians, this is the obvious experience of our own everyday life, between the people we wish we were (and the Church we hope our church could be!) and the people we are. But we become suspicious and defensive when we contemplate how we might bring this understanding of a transformed reality to bear on the structures of our society, the world around us and, in particular, the political realm, which we may regard as ‘secular’ and hence not part of God’s plan. Or we may espouse one particular political system as the one best equipped to bring in the kingdom and then cannot understand how others could vote differently. How do we avoid reacting with either detachment or over-commitment to the reality of the world in which we live? How do we engage with society’s structures truly to participate in the bringing-in of the kingdom of God?
This commentary looks at a book that tells the story of a complex and demanding period in the life of biblical Israel: from a settled, monarchical society through disaster, exile and loss to a new existence amid the rubble and rebuilding of Jerusalem. In all these episodes the book of Isaiah engages with questions of how religion and politics intersect and what kind of society the L ORD is calling people to be. It is a story of people who put too much faith in political alliances and not enough in the L ORD , who failed to understand and critique their own power and responsibility, who found themselves lost and desperate, and to whom the L ORD offers a rediscovery of hope and a new way to live in a wider world.
What this commentary is hoping to do
The commentary begins with the idea that watching how a prophet’s message engages with the society of its time can help us as Christians engage better with our own. First a warning, however: such an aim cannot be about simply transferring an action or idea. This is to ignore the fact that prophecies exist in historical and literary contexts and speak in time-conditioned ways. Yet learning and hearing how God engages with his world and the challenges he gives to his people to be a part of his kingdom is a vital and valuable exercise.
Throughout the commentary there are reflections on how the New Testament and Christians have used the book of Isaiah to understand better the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth and his calling to his Church. There is always a risk for Christians that, because we read the Old Testament in the light of Christ, we may only focus on this level of significance. The voice of the Old Testament for its own time can be lost. Yet this level of meaning, the meaning for its time, is the vital bedrock on which all other significances are built. Therefore this commentary focuses predominantly on the meaning for its time. There is a longer discussion on the Servant of the L ORD and Jesus which explores the interpretative issues in more depth at the end of the comment on chapter 53.
The historical background
The book of Isaiah bears witness to a long and tumultuous period of history. For the reader interested in understanding the story in more depth there are recommended books on the history of Israel in the Further Reading section. However, a brief summary will be useful here.
First Isaiah
This section of the book (chapters 1—39) contains within it material from the time of the Israelite monarchy, in the eighth century BC . Some time before this context, the book of Samuel describes how the kingdom of Israel, established by Saul, David and Solomon, had split into two. Since the schism, the northern kingdom (confusingly called Israel after the split) and the southern kingdom of Judah had been friends, enemies and everything in between. During the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem, for whom the book is named, the northern kingdom was destroyed by Assyria (in 722 BC ) and ceased to exist as a political entity. Isaiah 1—39 concerns itself primarily with the southern kingdom of Judah. Although it talks about other kingdoms too, they are usually referred to by virtue of their relationship, positive or negative, to Judah. Within this section of the book, there is also material from later times, as we shall see below. Isaiah of Jerusalem, or Isaiah ben Amoz, is thought to have exercised his prophetic ministry from about 740 to 701 BC . We have some detail about certain parts of his life. Tradition suggests he was a relative of the ruling house of Judah and it is clear that he had easy access to the kings (see especially chapters 7, 36 — 39). However, this is equally true of other prophets and might simply be the case by virtue of the prophetic ministry. Again, there is no biblical record of how or when he died but tradition holds that he was martyred under the apostate king Manasseh in 698 BC .
The life and times of Isaiah of Jerusalem saw both an inheritance of stability from the long reign of King Uzziah and great uncertainty for the future. Trade and therefore cultural exchange with other nations had been increasing for some time. How to engage with the rising power of the Assyrian Empire was a pressing problem. In Isaiah’s time, Ahaz of Judah offered Judah as a subject nation to Assyria, Hezekiah rebelled against the empire (in about 701 BC ) and then reverted to subject nation status. The shape of society within Judah was itself in a long process of change. The people of Judah were no longer the Hebrew farmers and wanderers who came out of the desert of Sinai. There was a developing urban culture, especially in Jerusalem, and a growing class of wealthy people. There was a corresponding class of powerless poor, as shown by Isaiah’s criticism of those who oppress them. In this kind of societal organization, which is without structural welfare and where everything depe