Old Testament # 37
Thou Hast Done Wonderful Things
Isaiah 22; 24–26; 28–32
Introduction
Isaiah 9:6 says that His name shall be called Wonderful. Well first off how can you read that without Handel’s Messiah ringing in your ears? And by the way, did you try reading Isaiah while listening to Wagner. Here’s another Prelude, this time from Tristan and Isolde.
I’ve left the links from last week at the end of this blogpost because there is a lot of visual symbolism in this week’s readings and it might help to have them explained. So we will come to this lesson after General Conference and, as I am writing this, I have no idea how I or even my world will have changed as a result of this Conference.
This blog post is going to be a little different since I don’t want to take away from anything Kara has to say to us, so I am not going to follow the manual outline.
I talked last week about the manual being written quite a few years ago, and how things were so much more applicable now. And it’s hard to reconcile really archaic language written in Hebrew some 2700 years ago and translated into English some 400 years ago with what is happening here and now. Isaiah predated Lehi by quite a bit. Before I joined the Church or even really thought deeply about religion, I assumed that what I was taught in school about Darwinian evolution was correct and that somehow the Bible was, I don’t know, purely symbolic, a parallel universe? (I was into Asimov at a very early age). But I know through revelation that our minds have by and large the same capacity as Adam’s and Eve’s. That Abraham wasn’t less evolved than we are, that if we put our minds to it, we can, with the Spirit, fully understand what Isaiah has to say to each one of us personally.
Isaiah 22 has, seemingly, a lot to do with the temple. Isaiah foretells the physical destruction of Jerusalem, but toward the end of this chapter we have some very interesting allusions to the crucifixion and to “the key of the house of David.” I take this to mean the temple. Why do I say that when David was not able to build the temple himself? Well the Savior came through David’s lineage and the temple, all temples are dedicated to Him. Eliakim, here is symbolic of the Messiah. This is from Rasmussen’s commentary:
“The key of the house of David” (Isaiah 22:22) symbolizes the right to rule, which can be obtained only through the holy priesthood of God. The power of the priesthood is centered on the Lord Jesus Christ, who has the power to “shut” and to “open” [Isaiah 22:22]—to bind and to loose—and no one can override that power. Isaiah made a symbol of Shebna’s replacement, Eliakim. His name means ‘God shall cause to arise,’ anticipating the Savior, who holds the ‘key of the house of David’ but was fastened ‘as a nail in a sure place’ until the burden of the Atonement was complete. Upon Him rests ‘all the glory of his father’s house.’ Isaiah recommended depending on Him for everlasting security [Isaiah 22:20–25]” (Ellis T. Rasmussen, A Latter-day Saint Commentary on the Old Testament[1993], 517–18).[1]
Well I guess I am following the manual in a way because I cannot let Isaiah 24 go without some mention of spirit prison. In verses 22–24, Isaiah, now talking about the last days, mentions kings and the “high people” who will face judgment and they appear to be likened to the treacherous people in verse 16. So they will be put in spirit prison until their judgment. The manual points out that spirit prison, “is the place where the spirits of somedeceased mortals go while awaiting the Resurrection.” And D&C 138:32 qualifies: “Thus was the gospel preached to those who had died in their sins, without a knowledge of the truth, or in transgression, having rejected the prophets.” I mention this because when my mother died (my mother was Jewish and then converted to the Church of England), I was told that she was in spirit prison, and I had a hard time accepting that my mother had deserved any kind of prison. Section 138 is such a balm for those of us who have loved ones, not members of the Church, beyond the veil.
And in that vein, we have the beautiful poetry of Isaiah 25:4–9 which, to my mind, spans the ages, reflecting the original tabernacle in the desert right up to our own “mountain of the Lord’s House” in downtown Provo. We need to remember that we can find shelter in His care.
We are so limited by our own understanding of the world around us. Indeed we can see things that Isaiah could only imagine. His physical world was bound by how far he could walk. We can open Google Earth and walk down streets in Australia, England, Croatia, and Hong Kong. We can even see what the surface of some planets look like. But we know nothing really.
I went to a show at the Planetarium in Salt Lake that tried to depict how our galaxy was created. I was overawed, but I am sure it was a poor representation of the reality. I think it was Matt Grow during the Face to Face who quoted Joseph Smith as saying something like “words are a miserable small room” meaning totally inadequate in describing the things of the Lord. Isaiah does his best, knowing that he was talking not only to his own people, but to those who lived while the Savior was on the earth, to us, and to those living during the Millennium.
The Lord has truly done wonderful things for us.
Additional Material
The Institute Manual has an enrichment section on Isaiah, here
BYU Professor Don Parry put out a book called Visualizing Isaiahwhich you can read here
