No. 2. >> Good morning, Professor Lessing. Nick was right. All four of us are very excited to be back in your virtual classroom, this time to study the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. I have the sense that Isaiah is an extremely large figure in the picture of salvation. How is Christ related to Isaiah? >> That's a great question. And we touched on it a little bit already. But let's look at that in a deeper sense. The name Isaiah itself in Hebrew is Yesha yahu. Yesha yahu is a derivative of actually two Hebrew words. The first being Yesha. Yesha means to save, salvation, deliverance, rescue. And the last part of the name Yesha yahu, yahu means Yahweh. Yahu, he is my salvation. So the very name of Isaiah means that Yahweh, the Lord God of Israel, brings, delivers, yesha, salvation, for his people. Well, our Lord's name is Yeshua, Jesus. So just by the very nature of the two names of the people we're discussing, Isaiah and Jesus, there's a close connecting link. Isaiah announces proclaims Yesha, salvation, Jesus is salvation. He is in many ways the very narrow, the sum and substance, the alpha and the omega of the prophet Isaiah's writings. Second of all, Jesus is related to Isaiah just by means of his dependence upon and love for the prophetic book called Isaiah. For example, in Luke Chapter 4 Verses 18 and 19, Jesus gets up and proclaims his first sermon in the hometown synagogue in Nazareth. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was there. And having read from that, specifically reads from Isaiah Chapter 61 Verses 1 to 2 A, Jesus says: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. And he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. To proclaim liberty to the captives. To bind up the broken hearted. And then Jesus says in Luke Chapter 4: Today the Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. We understand from it our Lord's first sermon in Nazareth that Isaiah, the prophet in his scroll, was certainly a delightful part of the Old Testament for Christ. And Jesus would continue to quote from Isaiah and fulfill what Isaiah speaks of in terms of a messianic, Davidic king, who was also coming as a servant to save people from their sins. We will also, as I already mentioned in passing in the first question, take a real good look at messianic prophesies in Isaiah. And again, by means of this slide, let's just look at this in a little deeper fashion in terms of how Christ is related to the prophet Isaiah. On the slide the picture at the top simply represents God. The circle there represents his everlasting qualities. He has no beginning, no end. He's eternal. And the four arrows indicate that this God, the God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is the God who is always reaching out and extending himself to save and renew broken, fallen, sinful people. So we then have arrows that are going from God to this spirit, the dove, on our slide. And as mentioned earlier, we understand that Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit. And then born of a Virgin Mary. That's the second part of our Lord's humiliation. Well, again, both of those ideas are prominent in the book of Isaiah. We will see where the Holy Spirit, especially in Isaiah Chapter 11, plays a prominent role. And the Spirit works in Isaiah to bring about restoration for Israel and for the world. Certainly the idea of a virgin conceiving and bearing a son, we've mentioned already from Isaiah 7:14 fulfilled in Matthew 1 Verse 23. As we follow the slide, the next step down would be a scourge that the Roman soldiers would use at a place called Gabbatha. Stone pavement is what that Aramaic term means. On Good Friday. And Isaiah speaks already in Chapters 1 to 39 that this king, who is coming as a humble king, and he is a suffering king, we will see that specifically again in our study of Chapter 11 of Isaiah. How the Spirit's role in this Davidic Messiah is also pointing us to his humble role as simply coming from the shoot and the stump of Jesse. Certainly Isaiah has much to say about our Lord's death. That's the next point of the humiliation as we work our way down on this slide. Isaiah is front and central about the crucifixion of Christ. And the fruits that that death brings for the baptized. The last point of our Lord's humiliation is his burial. Then we move upward in his exaltation to defeating Satan in death. As we look at Isaiah Chapter 14, for example, we will make connecting links to the death of Sargon II, the Assyrian king. And his role in being a shadow or a type of Satan himself. And we will see how Christ has come to defeat and crush the enemy, including death itself. We will also see by means of Isaiah in a sermon study in Chapter 25 of the book how death has been swallowed up in victory. So as we move up on the slide in front of you, we will gain a deeper appreciation of Christ's defeat of Satan and death. His resurrection on the third day. This God that we're looking at in Isaiah 1 to 39 is the God of life. There's nothing dead about him. He's come to bring life to Israel, to Judah and the whole world. Fulfilled certainly when Jesus says in John 11 Verse 25: I am the resurrection and the life. Sitting at the Father's right hand, that's the next picture on our slide. And then coming again to separate the sheep from the goats. We will see consistently as we look at Isaiah's prophesies that they finally find their consummation, their ultimate fulfillment, in Christ's second coming. So that may be a long answer to the second part of our second question. But this slide will demonstrate for us again and again the centrality of Christ in the Old Testament. So I believe by means of the name Yesha yahu and Yeshua, by means of our Lord's love and commitment to Isaiah vis-a-vis his first sermon in Nazareth and the slide that we just looked at, we will gain a deeper and more fulfilling understanding of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the one promised by Isaiah, the one who is there in Christ even as we await the consummation of this age. And all of the Isaianic prophesies being completely fulfilled when Christ comes again to separate the sheep from the goats.