Israel’s Coming Age – It’s Characters & Context

Pastor Bill Farrow

Isaiah 2:1-2a

1   The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2   Now it shall come to pass in the latter days…

Isaiah 2:1 – The Characters

The word - This indicates that this is the commencement of a new prophecy. It has no immediate connection with the preceding, though certain there may be thematic or contextual connection in the material that he presents. It was delivered doubtless at a different time, and with reference to a different class of events. In the previous chapter the term “vision” is used Isa. 2:1, but the meaning is substantially the same. The term “word” denotes a “command, a promise, a doctrine, an oracle, a revelation, a message, a thing,” etc. It means here, that Isaiah foresaw certain “future events” or “things” that would happen in regard to Judah and Jerusalem. Isaiah’s words in this vision particularly refer to Jerusalem and Judah, the national entities.  God concerns himself with His people primarily.  The extended passages in the Old and New Testaments that have to do with God’s concerns all speak, largely, to His concerns for His people and for their godliness and blessing.  It is not that He does not care about the rest of humanity; but that He cares more and especially for His own people, believers.  This is no different (though more profoundly so) than the father who cares more for his own family than for those not a part of that family.  It is not that He hates, or even that he is disinterested in the rest of humanity, not at all.  It is, rather, that He loves his own with a special and unique love that is not shared by all the rest of the creation.  And this is how it ought to be!  It is how it is designed to be!

Judah … - see the notes at Isa. 1:1.

Isaiah 2:2a – The Context – The Last Days

In the last days - In the “after” days; in the “futurity” of days; that is, in the time to come. This is an expression that often occurs in the Old Testament. It does not of itself refer to any “particular” period, in that it is a general reference to the time of the end, not to a particular day. Isaiah ahs in view here a time future to his own experience of the vision, and he understood that this would the time of the end, or the bringing of all things to fruit in the plan of God.  It is not meant to be a reference to the end of the world (necessarily).  The expression properly denotes “only future time” in general. But the prophets were accustomed to concentrate all their hopes on the coming of the Messiah. They saw his advent as giving character, and sublimity, and happiness to all coming times. Hence, the expression came to denote, by way of eminence, the times of the Messiah, and is frequently used in the New Testament, as well as the Old, to designate those times; (see Acts 2:17; compare Joel 2:28; Heb. 1:2; 1 Pet. 1:5, 20; 1 John 2:18; Gen. 49:1; Mic. 4:1; Deut. 4:30; Jer. 48:47; Dan. 11:28). We need to exercise care in asserting that this is a reference exclusively to the times that are yet future to us as we read, for this is not the intent of the writer.  Much as we would like to call this conclusive evidence, it is can not be so, and we must not make it so.

The expressions which follow are almost surely largely figurative, and cannot easily be interpreted as relating to any other events than the times of the Messiah. They refer to that future period, then remote, which would constitute the “last” dispensation of things in this world - the “last” time - the period, however long it might be, in which the affairs of the world would be closed. The patriarchal times had passed away; the dispensation under the Mosaic economy would pass away; the times of the Messiah would be the “last” times, or the last dispensation, under which the affairs of the world would be consummated. Thus the phrase is evidently used in the New Testament, as denoting the “last” time, though without implying that that time would be short. It might be longer than “all” the previous periods put together, but it would be the “last” economy, and under that economy, or “in” that time, the world would be destroyed, Christ would come to judgment, the dead would be raised, and the affairs of the world would be wound up. The apostles, by the use of this phrase, never intimate that the time would be short, or that the day of judgment was near, but only that “in” that time the great events of the world’s history would be consummated and closed; (compare 2 Thess. 2:1-5).