PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

Babylon seems to take the attention of the prophet in the majority of these chapters.  Isaiah describes the choseness of Israel in the first chapter that we read.  We then transition to a description of the gods of Babylon and their inertness and their powerlessness.  We also see the fall of Babylon that is going to take place in a prophecy that describes Babylon as a fallen daughter and all that comes with that metaphor.  

In Matthew we find a few parables dealing with the agricultural venue in which Jesus’ teachings were set.  The parable of the sower is one that is actually explained by Jesus after he tells it.  That is pretty rare.  Normally in the parables Jesus leaves them as they are and allows them to speak for themselves.  But here the disciples ask him why he speaks in parables and so as  result he feels compelled to explain to them the meaning of the parable of the sower.  

Isaiah 40 is one of the more famous chapters in all of Isaiah.  You have the quote that Scripture tells us about John the Baptist where it describes one calling out in the wilderness.  But it doesn’t end there.  You also have the well known verses that end the chapter from vs.28-31 which I use just about every funeral service that I do which describes a God that we serve who gives strength to the powerless.  

Chapter 42 describes the servant of the Lord in one of the many servant songs.  This chapter is meant to prophesy the coming of Jesus who was indeed one who: “will not cry out or raise his voice in the streets…he establishes justice on earth.”  

In the Gospel we find Jesus calling his 12 disciples and sending them out to do his work of healing and driving out demons.  He then speaks about John the Baptist and the role that he played in preparing the way for Jesus to come and be recognized as the Messiah.  

We have in Isaiah a retelling of a number of events in the life of the king of Judah, Hezekiah.  He is threatened by the Assyrian king and allies himself to the king of Egypt and at the end we see him allying himself with the king of Babylon, which will come to bite him later on.  But we begin with Senaccherib, king of Assyria, threatening to overtake Jerusalem, Hezekiah prays to God and beseeches deliverance and it is provided.  I loved seeing how God provided deliverance.  He went into the Assyrian camp and killed 185,000 men in the evening and when Senaccherib woke up he saw the slaughter before him and decided to pack up and go home.  

Hezekiah is about to die and God tells him to put his affairs in order, but Hezekiah asks God to spare him.  God does, for another 15 years, so he had that going for him.  Then we have this strange account of the envoys from Babylon coming in and Hezekiah opening the doors and showing them everything that he has.  When God tells him that one day he will have children born in Babylon he thinks this is a promise of peace and detente with Babylon.  I’m thinking it means that Babylon is going to invade and take the people into exile, but let’s see.

The Matthew Scripture has a lot of healings which is a standard for Jesus in this Gospel.  We also have the calling of the disciple Matthew, the tax collector, which is interesting since it is thought that the Gospel was written by this very same Matthew as we see in the next chapter where we find the list of disciples in Matthew 10:3.  

As we continue our journey through Isaiah we find ourselves pretty much in the middle of the prophet’s message.  Chapter 33 is a cry for help from the author for God to intervene as his people find themselves in a position where deliverance can only come from the Lord.  Jerusalem continues to be the center of deliverance and the Lord is portrayed as one coming to provide that deliverance.  Chapter 34 speaks of judgment that the Lord will bring because “he is angry with all nations.”  

We then suffer a bit of Scripture whiplash as chapter 35 speaks for the joy of the redeemed as they make their way out of bondage and into freedom back into their homes and territories from which they had been taken.  If you look at vs.8 we see a highway that is built so that the redeemed can make their way back to Jerusalem and enter Zion with singing and that eventually: “sorry and sighing will flee away.”

When we transition to Matthew we find Jesus go up a mountainside as he gives the people who are gathered the sermon on the mount.  It is impossible to read the sermon on the mount and not be convicted in some way.  We have taken these teachings and watered them down substantially.  We don’t really preach and teach and live according to loving our enemies.  We have caveats if it is in the best interest geopolitically then we don’t really have to apply it.  If we can as individuals, great, but as a nation state surely Jesus wasn’t intending us to lay down in front of an aggressor.  I’m not sure why we would make that distinction when it is clear that Jesus never makes that distinction.

He clearly speaks about prayer and how to do it and the formulaic nature of prayer in the Lord’s prayer which he gave to us as well.  We are told that if we judge others then we will be judged in the same way.  It is not a ban on judging, but rather a realization that if and when we make judgment calls then we ought to be ready to be judged in the same way that we are judging others.  That is very different from saying “don’t judge.”  

It is from the sermon on the mount where we ought to get our ethics and our way of living.  We really don’t have to make too much up in order to understand how Jesus wants us to live.

There is no secret in being able to understand better the words of Isaiah as we make our way through this book of the Bible directed to a divided kingdom of the people of God who are disobedient and have sold themselves out to other nations and to the gods of other nations.  While chapter 29 has a warning for Jerusalem, it also speaks of a time when the city, and the nation, will rebound and be protected by God.  Notice that Jerusalem is called Ariel which means literally: lion of God, since the tribe of Judah, which was David’s lineage, has as its symbol the lion.

There are a number of warnings against nations that would strike out against the people of Israel, including some warnings on the people of Israel aligning themselves too closely to either Egypt or other nations for refuge or deliverance.  Chapter 32 provides some insight into what the kingdom of God might look like.  It is not a place where fools are suffered lightly.

Matthew 4 gives us the tempation of Christ in the desert with his corresponding responses to Satan all from the Bible.  We see that Capernaum becomes the city of Jesus which is where he goes to live for a period of time.  

We continue in our journey through Isaiah and in these three chapters we find ourselves in a place where the prophet sings his praises to the presence and the protection of God for the nation of Israel.  That may seem a bit strange in the midst of other prophecies which saw the downfall and the exportation of the people of Israel, but this is a bit of a reprieve.  Chapter 26 is described as a song of praise sung in the land of Judah: “in that day”.  

Again, chapter 27 describes deliverance for Israel “in that day”.  We find that phrase again repeated in vs.12 where it describes that the Lord will gather all of the Israelites together, including, and especially those who were part of the diaspora that were scattered all across from Assyria to Egypt.  But then we pick up where we left off in chapter 28 with a warning against Ephraim.  Keep in mind, Ephraim is another name for the northern kingdom, or the Israelites who were north of Jerusalem and used Samaria as their religious base. 

This reading takes us into the Gospel of Matthew.  It is no small thing that it begins with a geneology.  Read through the names and don’t lose track of what the author is telling us as we find Jesus described from the very beginnin in vs.17 as the Messiah.  We know from the very beginning of the Gospel of Matthew that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah.  We then have the story of the birth of Jesus through the perspective of Moses who is visited by the angel and then the presence of John the Baptist who prepares the way.  

There is much of the same in this Scripture, but then there is something completely different.  We begin in the same vein that we started with prophecies against Babylon and Edom and Arabia which sound similar to the others.  In the days to come you will face destruction.  There is also a warning to Jerusalem about what is to come.  Isaiah lets them know that captivity is on its way and that God will: “roll you up tightly like a ball and throw you into a large country.”  That large country would be Babylon and that did take place.  In Jerusalem a puppet ruler would be set up, and this would be Eliakim.  This would take place at a later time by the Egyptians, but it did take place just as Isaiah said it would.  

We continue to hear the prophecies against foreign lands including Tyre which houses the famous Tarshish which is to where Jonah tried to flee.  We then hear a much more general warning against the entire earth and what is to come.  This is then immediately followed by a call to praise the Lord.  This chapter seems very much out of place but it does remind us of the importance of knowing that even in the midst of the mess and disaster which we face, God is able.  We see in this chapter the precursor for what we find in Revelation 21.  Compare Isaiah 25:7-8 with Revelation 21:4.  There are unmistakable similarities.

Psalm 142 was written within the context of David in the cave when he is fleeing from Saul, we have a few of those.  It is similar to what we find in Isaiah 24:18 where you see this succession of terror leads to falling into a pit which leads into being caught in a snare.  But once again we find a good ending when David is able to say: “Then the righteous will gather about me because of your goodness to me.”  What a great way to deal with the tragedy that inevitably overtakes our lives at one time or another.

Once again the prophet is given the words to speak against the nations that are surrounding Israel and Judah.  We pick up in the middle of a prophecy against Moab and then transition to one against Damascus.  From there we hear a prophecy against Cush, whose people are described as tall, smooth skinned, and an aggressive nation of strange speech.  Keep in mind that these prophecies are meant to interpret a future that would see Israel free and its enemies destroyed.  That is not the current state in which Isaiah is writing.  In fact, Israel and Judah are both captives and are struggling to survive and maintain their national and religious identity.  But Isaiah speaks of a future where God will reign.  That was not the case in the present, but Isaiah encourages the people to expect it to happen.

You see a similar approach in the gospel songs that were sung by the slaves as they pined for a Beulah land which was not reflected at all in their current reality.  Any people that finds itself under slavery, or under oppression will see God liberating them at one time or another and the ones who are doing the enslaving or the oppressing find themselves under the heel of God who punishes them.  This is Isaiah’s approach in these chapters, except in 19:18-25 where we read about a détente between Egypt and Assyrian, both countries that had oppressed Israel terribly.  We even see a picture of a highway between the two nations as a description of a future peace that was to come.  It is almost as if God has expanded his favored nation status from just Israel to now Egypt and Assyrian.

Psalm 144 contains the words that we should have heard at one time or another in vs. 3-4 where we see that humanity remains a creation of God and yet at the same time is as fleeting as the breath of God.  We know from creation that it was the breath of God that gave life to humanity, and we are reminded of the real precariousness of our lives which happen to be in the hands of God.

While we  begin with some familiar verses in chapter 11, we end with chapters that seem a little confusing and out of place.  Let me try to put some perspective on these chapters because they are important to the rest of Isaiah.  So 11 gives us those wonderful verses in vss.6-9 where we see this idyllic pastoral scene with all of the most ferocious animals hanging out and playing with the most docile of animals while a child leads them.  This is a depiction of the kingdom of God that will be installed by the Messiah, the one who comes from the branch of Jesse. Remember who Jesse was?  He was the father of David and so it is from here that we know that the Messiah will come from King David’s lineage.  This is no small thing.  In both of Jesus’ genealogies we see that he descends from David and this is not by chance.

So with the promise of the kingdom established coming through the house of David we then transition to what Israel was currently facing in the time of Isaiah.  They had been taken into exile by both the Babylonians and the Assyrians.  Now, just to be clear, the Babylonian exile was first and it happened in the same time that Isaiah was prophesying.  So while he speaks out against the Assyrians in these verses, they are not pointing to the Assyrian exile, but rather to the Babylonian exile.  

We begin chapter 13 with words against Babylon which culminates in vs.16 with a picture of the children of Babylon being dashed against the rocks.  Isaiah is probably describing a tit-for-tat scenario where he had witnesses the Hebrew children being dashed against the rocks.  You see this echoed in Psalm 137:9 which is a lament while they were in the hands of Babylon.  This Psalm speaks specifically of “happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us – he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”  Yeah, pretty intense, but that is what captivity leads to, your children being dashed against the rocks.

We then get whiplash and read Psalm 145 which is quite the praise Psalm and one that we should know from a common song that was pretty popular.  

These chapters in Isaiah contains some of the most used Scriptures related to Christmas in the Old Testament that we have.  Before we get there, we have Isaiah’s commissioning in chapter 6 which kicks us off.  Notice that Isaiah was originally somewhat reticent to step forward as the one that God had chosen to give a message that was inherently not going to produce warm and fuzzy feelings.  If you look at vs.5 Isaiah objects to his status because he is a man of unclean lips, but nothing like a burning hot coal to remedy that situation.  He is made clean by God, that is our status as well.  On our own we can do nothing on God’s behalf, only by the grace and favor of God can we do anything.  It is also from here that we get one of our favorite hymns:  

Now to the Christmas references.  We find beginning in chapter 7 the sign of a young woman who is to give birth.  The NIV states “virgin” but in the Hebrew it is almah which means simply a young woman, who probably was a virgin.  Matthew’s story of the visit of the angel Gabriel to Mary definitely defines her as a virgin.  But it is from here that the conception of Jesus through the Holy Spirit to the virgin Mary originates.  

Then in chapter 9 we have Handel’s Messiah spelled out, especially my favorite part of the Messiah which is seen in vs.6 of chapter 9.  I have to include it because it is my favorite part of the Messiah.  

That’s probably enough videos for today.  But what a great section of Scripture.  So many wonderful references to Christmas.