Holy Seed

1) Why did Isaiah say he was “ruined”? (verse 5)
Isaiah was the same man, who had done the same things both before His encounter with the glory of the Lord as he was in the moment of the vision. Yet, seeing the Lord’s glory, just the hem of His robe filling the temple, was like looking into a mirror where Isaiah saw the inky, sickening blackness of his own soul. In the presence of pure holiness, Isaiah’s sinful humanity became palpable to him and he cried out, very truly, “I am ruined!” As the psalmist rightly says, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Psalm 130:3) Even one sin separates us eternally as we are less than perfectly holy, let alone sins as countless as the sand on the seashore. Isaiah knew he was not blameless, and he knew he didn’t need to go farther than his lips to point to see his sinfulness. A harsh word, a little lie, speech that tears down, not to mention gossip, or deception, or mockery, or hatred.

 2) Why does God tell Isaiah to “deafen their ears and blind their eyes”? (verse 10)
To understand this verse, we need to understand the context, not just this chapter, but the history of the Jewish nation as a whole. To sum up, the Lord pursues and pursues them over generations and generations. They turn back to Him for in short spurts, but the majority of the time, they rebel and turn against the Lord with ever increasing intensity. They reject Him in small amounts at first, like when they told the prophet Samuel they didn’t want to be a theocracy (ruled by God) anymore, but they’d rather have a human king “like all the other nations” instead. (1 Samuel 8:19-20) They more they turned away from God, the greater their degree of total rejection of Him became. The prophet Hosea (a contemporary of Isaiah) was the last prophet to prophesy to the Northern Kingdom before they fell under Assyrian rule, and he described God’s people as “whores” who had forsaken Him to play the adulteress to pagan gods. (Hosea 1:5-6) In verse 9, the Lord instructs Isaiah to keep prophesying, even though they are a people who clearly do not understand the hope God is offering them. Isaiah is to prophesy, despite the fact that they are “looking” at Isaiah and his demonstrative life, but they are not perceiving what God is communicating. The natural result of hearts that persistently turn away from truth is spiritual deafness and blindness. A spiritual “numbing” happens the more one rejects truth again and again and again. God was not blinding eyes that wanted to see Him, He was grieved over their own choice to perpetually choose not to see what He wanted them so desperately to see, that He held their hope!

 3) What is meant by “the holy seed is the stump”? (verse 13)
You’ve probably seen an old tree stump cut down, yet a new green shoot poking out despite the dead exterior. This is the imagery God is giving to Isaiah in this prophecy. God spent several verses painting an exceedingly bleak picture of the Jewish nation. Though Isaiah would preach hope, they would spurn it. Though Isaiah was being sent with an invitation to repent, the Jews would reject it. As a result, God’s righteous consequence would come upon them and they would be decimated and removed. Even So, God would leave a tenth (not necessarily meant to be a specific number, but rather to indicate a very small percentage of the whole) of the Jewish nation, but even those would reject Him as well. Even so again, “Like the terebinth or the oak that leaves a stump when felled, the holy seed is the stump.” (verse 13) The Holy Seed is the Lord Jesus Christ who would one day come, born a Jew to save the Jews as their Promised Messiah. Jesus is the Promised Hope, even in the midst of rejection.