King Jotham was a pretty good king but the people still continued with their corruption......sometimes the king doesn't lead the people into sin...they do it themselves.
In Isaiah 9, Zebulun and Naphtali (which original tribe is this territory from?) is the Northern kingdom as a whole...this is where Jesus grew up and this is why they would see "a great light"....Serious prophecy going on! It is and will be a time of great darkness...keep in mind that they people were pampered and prideful and complacent and they had not seen the darkness yet....they ignored Isaiah.
All the gospels will quote the following scripture:
For to us a child is born
to us a son is given
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this.
Because the people are complacent and there is no repentance, Isaiah says the Lord is angry at Israel and will judge Israel with Assyria....they (Israel) will be conquered and scattered.....Assyria will also be judged, because they thought they were conquering under their own power, not having any idea that God was using them as an instrument of judgement. They were far too cruel to Israel, so God will judge them severely. There will be a remnant of people that will repent, and that remnant will be the result of the promise of God to have a king of David's house on the throne forever. Out of that remnant comes the promised Messiah prophesied above. This is the Branch from Jesse......Judah is cut off to a stump and the shoot will come from that...
Look what comes up from the depths of the sea.
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So is this when the people start to know that Jesus is coming? Confused but I did not think they know at this point......Does God start to tell the prophets now to begin to let the people know? Also, did you notice I found the scripture for the painting? lol
ReplyDeleteThat is a really good question! I do think that God wanted to start revealing his plan. He tells prophets to "write it down", so that eventually it can be seen as fulfilled scripture. In Isaiah's and Micah's day, the scriptures that they were exposed to were the first 5 books of the Bible, Moses' law. The people Isaiah spoke to were under the law, and this (the prophecy he was telling to the people) was foreshadowing of the new covenant...Isaiah probably had no idea, or Micah, how some of this would come to pass, they just trusted in faith that it would. Kind of hard for us to envision on this side of the cross...everything then pointed to Jesus; for us, Jesus was the final fulfillment and was the new covenant that did away with the penalty of the law. However, the scriptures were continually read to the people, and by Jesus' day,many young women hoped and prayed that they would be picked as the mother of the Messiah....so they were taught about the Messiah. Then (Jesus' day), the Bible still wasn't one book. There were separate scrolls by each prophet that were read in the temple. There was simply more scripture, which eventually became the entire Old Testament, because the prophets had their prophecy transcribed to a scroll by then....
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