The Captive Daughter and the Suffering Servant: how you are both and what to do now (Isaiah 50-57)

Kerry Muhlestein (0:09)

Hello, and welcome to The Scriptures Are Real podcast. We are so excited to be jumping into Isaiah with you and to be covering some of the most important chapters. Now, I'm just going to give a little disclaimer here right at the beginning that we've had a big old wooden deck outside the back of our house for a long time, that I've been like propping up literally with posts underneath it to try and keep it going. But it's just gotten too dangerous, parts of it broke off. I decided we needed to rip it down. We're trying to get it fixed a little bit.

We haven't yet figured out how we're paying for that, but we're trying to get it fixed. And so there's some noises that happen every now and then. I'll try and pause, but if I'm a little slow, sorry for the background noises. In any case, I'm so glad you're joining us. And we're going to start out today with Isaiah 52 And we're going to have a couple of different takes on it. And then we're going to have a rabbi who will help us with Isaiah 53

And then John Howell is going to help us with Isaiah 54 So that's going to be our focus for this week. I'm going to talk to you about Isaiah 52 and why it's so important before I introduce what we're going to do with it. All right? So let me just tell you, Isaiah chapter 52 is one of the most important chapters in Scripture. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not. So just to give you an idea, John the Revelator quotes from Isaiah 52, Paul quotes from Isaiah 52 We have Nephi who uses it, and in some ways it launches him into some of the things that he's going to teach. We have Jacob who uses it. The wicked priest of King Noah have a back and forth with Abinadi, and Abinadi is going to talk quite a bit about it.

It launches some of the most profound teachings we have in Book of Mormon between Nephi, Jacob, and Abinadi. But we also have the Savior using it.

When the Savior comes, he refers to these passages in 3rd Nephi 16, 3rd Nephi 20, and he provides interpretation in 3rd Nephi 21 and 23

He quotes it, then he quotes it again. He rearranges some of the chapters, and he intermixes it with other chapters. There's really fascinating stuff that he does with it. His interpretation is largely, and this can be taken in a number of ways, and we usually focus on how it's fulfilled in the Savior, but the Savior himself uses it to emphasize the gathering of Israel. So we certainly need to pay attention to that. The gathering of Israel has to be one of our main interpretive lenses. When you read Isaiah 52, I think you need to take that into account. Then we're going to have Moroni quoting it as the first few verses, the first few verses of it in his last plea to our day, right at the end of the Book of Mormon, chapter 10, verse 31

He uses it as part of his exhortation to come into Christ, and he equates it as part of the description of ways we can be edified, and perfected, and exalted in Christ. Really, really important chapter. I want to make sure you catch that and that as you study it, you use lots of interpretive lenses, including the one where Christ teaches us about the gathering of Israel. So what we're going to do, I'm going to give you just a really brief take on this. And then, because it's so important, and there's so many different ways you can look at it, we're going to have a couple of other ways we're going to look at it. We're going to have Dr. Daniel Belnap go through it with us, and he's going to help us look at it in one way. And then Dr. Paul Hoskisson is going to help us look at it in a different way. So you'll get three of us talking about some different ways of taking chapter 52

And then, as I said, we'll have Rabbi Grover talk to us about 53 and John Howell talk to us about 54 So Isaiah 52, we're only going to refer to this briefly. I'm going to suggest you go and kind of puzzle it through yourself. I'll touch on it a bit more in our Patreon discussion. But you won't understand chapter or the first few verses very well if you don't remember chapter 47 Chapter 47 is where he tells the Babylonians who had taken Israel captive and put them through all the things that a slave has to go through. Now the Babylonians are being captive and they're going through those same things. And in 52 is the reversal of it for the Israelites where he tells them to undo the things that the Babylonians are currently going through and leave their slavery behind. So I want you to have that in mind as you read chapter 52