Isaiah Day 56 - Unconventional but...

Isaiah Day 56 - Unconventional but...

18:1 Woe to the land shadowed with buzzing wings,

Which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia,

2 

Which sends ambassadors by sea,

Even in vessels of reed on the waters, saying,

“Go, swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth of skin,

To a people terrible from their beginning onward,

A nation powerful and treading down,

Whose land the rivers divide.”

3 

All inhabitants of the world and dwellers on the earth:

When he lifts up a banner on the mountains, you see it;

And when he blows a trumpet, you hear it.

4 

For so the Lord said to me,

“I will take My rest,

And I will look from My dwelling place

Like clear heat in sunshine,

Like a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.”

5 

For before the harvest, when the bud is perfect

And the sour grape is ripening in the flower,

He will both cut off the sprigs with pruning hooks

And take away and cut down the branches.

6 

They will be left together for the mountain birds of prey

And for the beasts of the earth;

The birds of prey will summer on them,

And all the beasts of the earth will winter on them.

7 

In that time a present will be brought to the Lord of hosts

From a people tall and smooth of skin,

And from a people terrible from their beginning onward,

A nation powerful and treading down,

Whose land the rivers divide—

To the place of the name of the Lord of hosts,

To Mount Zion.

So I kept looking through commentaries etc… and found nothing. What that means is I'm either way off or I have seen something not commonly seen or at least published.

I will tell you what(who) I found and let you be the judge. 

Jesus stated quite bluntly and boldly that the Old Testament is all about Him. The trouble is that it's not obvious. His name doesn't get repeated over and over. The authors knew someone was coming but they weren't sure about much beyond that. As a result the Old Testament references to Jesus are prolific but subtle. When we get to the New Testament we find Matthew and Peter and many others suddenly seeing Him in places they never saw before, like the example we already passed by in chapter 7 where a young maiden would give birth and now we know it was a hidden prophecy of the birth of Jesus. In English class they would have called this foreshadowing. It's when you are given clues ahead of time as to what is coming without anything over being said.

Take Hosea 11:1 for example. It says: "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son."

                    

This was true of Jacob. God told his mother Rebekah that his future was extraordinary before he was ever born. It was a rough road but in time Jacob figured out his life was in God's hands not his own and God changed his name to Israel. Here's where it gets interesting. Jacob was born in Canaan. He moved to Egypt late in life to escape the famine and be with Joseph. He died in Egypt. So what did Hosea mean when he wrote "and out of Egypt I called my son"? Well Matthew tells us it was a reference to Jesus. Matthew says Jesus was taken to Egypt by His parents as a young child to escape the murderous plot of king Herod and then returned from Egypt as a fulfillment of Hosea's prophecy. 

Are you seeing what I am seeing yet in Isaiah 18?

The land beyond Ethiopia (it should say Cush) is Egypt. The land that the rivers divide is Egypt. The land that was bad from the start was Egypt. Now look at verse 7 again. A gift comes from Egypt to Mount Zion. I only know of one gift that came from Egypt to Zion (Jerusalem). His name is Jesus.

Am I crazy. For sure I am but it was Jesus Himself who said the Book is about Him. :)