Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I know that some of you do not like American football or care about American football or understand the rules of American football, but I'm still going to talk about American football for a minute. There's this quarterback that's the guy who throws the ball in American football named Tony Romo. He played for America's team, the Dallas Cowboys, and he is a pretty good, he's a decent quarterback, I guess, by all accounts. But then he retired and he became an announcer, went up in the booth and described to the audience what was going on in the game. And he did something that I don't think anybody had ever done, and it was really fun. He predicted plays like a profit. He was, you know, a pretty smart, pretty cerebral player, and he was fresh out of the league. So nothing had really changed about offenses and defenses from a year earlier when Romo was still playing. So he goes up into the booth and he would just look at the formation of the defense, look at the formation of the offense, and he'd be like, oh, uh, got an eye formation here and uh number 84 at tight end. He's gonna chip there on the right side of the line. And as soon as he's off that block, he's going to catch a screen and uh it'll go for eight yards and a first down. And then like exactly that thing would happen. He felt like he could see the future. Now it's pattern recognition for him, but it was still pretty cool. That first year was Tony Romo calling stuff, it was magical. Well, guess what, podcast listeners? Do you know who else is pretty good at predicting the future? That's right. The prophet Isaiah. Except for him, it was real. I don't think with the prophet Isaiah it was uh pattern recognition. I think with the prophet Isaiah, it was, you know, the miraculous work of God, because God is the master of time and history, and you can see into the future, and God never learned anything and he's unsurprised by things. And I also know that whenever we talk about prophecy, for some of you, that's a hang up. That's difficult. Some of you would say, I'm a Christian and I don't know what to do with uh the prophecy stuff, predicting things in the future with great specificity and accuracy. And it's just like that level of supernaturalism, it just challenges all your assumptions about the world. Cool, I get it, makes sense. We don't have to have this one completely solved, and we don't have to all be totally on the same page in order to move forward. I know there are others of you who are like, I'm really interested in God and church, but most of the things, like the miraculous, the all of it, like that's my hurdle to belief in general, to really committing to this and being a Christian. And I get it, we're very used to the natural world. We're very not used to the idea of a being who has power beyond the natural world. So, so what do we do with this? Well, I today I want to go and look at a bunch of stuff from the prophet Isaiah, who predicted a whole bunch of things, not through pattern recognition, but by the power of God. And I think a good way to approach it for everybody is if you don't know what to do with it, that's all right. No rush. Let's just take the text for what it is. And also let's remember that the original audience, they believed that God prophetically revealed things and they had a bunch of stuff they could point to where they were like, well, you know, we don't just believe it for no reason. God predicted this stuff and then this stuff happened. And both parties in the conversation we're looking at here in John chapter one, both parties agree. They both believe that God prophetically reveals things, including specific predictions about the future. So here in John 1, starting in verse 19, you've got the religious leaders, the priests and the Levites. They've come out to talk to John the Baptist, and they believe that God has set in motion a bunch of stuff that has to be fulfilled. They're characters who are going to play certain roles, and they think John the Baptist has some of the whiff on him of a prophecy fulfiller. And so they come out and they want to know if he's the Messiah. And in verse 20 it says, He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely. I am not the Christ. They asked him, then who are you? Are you Elijah? He said, I am not. Are you the prophet? And he answered, No. Finally, they said, Well, who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, I am the voice of one calling in the desert. Make straight the way for the Lord. So he basically, as we talked about yesterday, says, I'm nobody. I'm just a voice, practically a disembodied voice. Doesn't matter for your purposes who I'm related to. For your purposes, my personal identity is a moot point. What I'm saying, empowered by God, is the point. Now he didn't say all that stuff about him. He just quoted Isaiah, and these guys knew Isaiah because Isaiah was the big prophet. He's the important one that everybody knows. And by invoking Isaiah, John the Baptist was basically sending these religious leaders down the rabbit trail of go think about what you know from Isaiah. Now, I mentioned yesterday that I didn't think Isaiah came up a lot more in the Gospel of John, even though prophecy from Isaiah comes up a lot in the other three Gospels. I went and dug into that, and it looks like Isaiah gets mentioned three times in rapid succession in chapter 12. And maybe I'll discover some more places where Isaiah comes up. But those, those are the immediate, that's this is the big Isaiah section in John. And the three references go like this Jesus does a bunch of miraculous signs, and people still won't believe. For this reason they couldn't believe, because as Isaiah says elsewhere, this is the second reference to Isaiah here, quote, He has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes nor understand with their hearts, nor turn, and I would heal them. So there's this motif that runs through the Bible of people willfully rejecting God and wanting blindness and shutting their metaphorical eyes and plugging their metaphorical ears and metaphorically yelling because they they're that resistant to the things of God. And there's this recurring theme throughout the Bible of God being like, All right, at some point I'll give you over to that. In verse 41, it goes on, Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him. Now that's what I was really driving toward here is that verse. Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him. Now you'll remember, you know, a couple times now we've gone and looked up stuff about Moses and looked at how overtly the Gospel of John in the New Testament says Moses predicted Jesus. This is who Moses was writing about. You're supposed to listen to him. Well, now we're getting the same thing about Isaiah. This says Isaiah saw Jesus' glory and spoke about him. Well, where did that happen? Well, I mean, we have time. I have a Bible right here. I guess we can just go back and look it up. I happened to do a small amount of preparation before we got together, so I even know where to turn. It's Isaiah 6, starting in verse 1. It goes like this. Now, just so you know, a point of context, John is writing about stuff mostly that happens right around 30 AD. Isaiah is a massive book covering a massive amount of time. And he's writing hundreds of years before the time of Jesus, probably in the late 700s and into the early 600s BC. So if we just compress that, we're talking about like 700-ish years before Jesus. And, well, here's what it says. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. I here is the prophet Isaiah. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings, with two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying, and they were calling to one another. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory. At the sound of their voices, the doorposts and thresholds shook, and the temple was filled with smoke. Woe to me, I cried. I'm ruined, for I'm a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty. Remember how we've talked about that theme of the glory of God and how you can't really approach it. You don't want to get too close to it. His glory and his holiness is too much for people to sustain. And then verse six it says, Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he'd taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, See, this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? Note the us. And I said, Here am I, send me. Of course, as usual, I set out to do all of this in one day. We're gonna walk through all the Isaiah stuff today. I get it all set up. Well, yeah, but then I want to read it all to you, and I don't want to skip any of it. So I guess we're gonna do another day of going through Isaiah and all the prophecies that point to Jesus therein. There'll be no messing around tomorrow. We'll just pick up right where we left off and keep cruising through the messianic prophecies of Isaiah. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.