1. Celebrating the Servant-Savior
The Gospel of Isaiah
Jason S. DeRouchie, PhD
Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Theology
Bethlehem College & Seminary
Bethlehem Baptist Church, spring 2018

2. ISAIAH 52:1–12: Participate in the 2nd Exodus
I. The corporate response to God’s reign and salvation (52:1–6)
A. The call for Jerusalem to wake up, strengthen herself, and dress like a priest (5:1)
B. The call for Jerusalem to remove her fetters (5:2–6)
II. The personal response to God’s reign and salvation (52:7–12)
A. The messenger’s good news of God’s reign and salvation (5:7)
B. The watchmen’s call to respond to God’s reign and salvation (5:8–12)

3. A call for Jerusalem to wake up, strengthen herself, and dress like priests (52:1)
The call itself (52:1a–d)
The ideal––a royal priestly people:
Exod 19:5–6. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
The failure:
Hos 4:6.  My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.

4. The hope––“Put on beautiful garments … holy city”:
Exod 28:2. And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.
Zech 3:1–4. Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. 2 And the LORD said to Satan, “The LORD rebuke you, O Satan! The LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is not this a brand plucked from the fire?” 3 Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments. 4 And the angel said to those who were standing before him, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” And to him he said, “Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.”

5. The reason for the call: God has forever removed Jerusalem’s uncleanness (52:1e)
Uncleanness overran the 1st Jerusalem
The new Jerusalem is now ready for a 2nd exodus:
Exod 12:43–44. This is the statute of the Passover: no foreigner shall eat of it, 44 but every slave that is bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised him.
Heb 12:22–24. But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, 23 and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, 24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

6. Rev 21:27. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

7. A call for Jerusalem to remove her fetters (52:2–10)
The call itself (52:2)
In 49:1–55:13 the focus shifts from God’s deliverance of Israel from Babylon to the Servant-Savior’s deliverance of the world from sin.
Isa 49:6. It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

8. The reason for the call: God has made a way for his people to know him (52:3–6)
Sold for nothing (52:3):
Judg 2:14. So the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies. Cf. 3:8; 4:2.
Redeemed for something other than money (52:3):
Cf. 52:9; 54:5–6, which frame 52:13–53:12
1 Pet 1:18–19. You were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

9. The people have misrepresented God’s “name” (52:5).
Rom 2:23–24. You who boast in the law dishonor God by breaking the law. 24 For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”
Isa 37:23. Whom have you mocked and reviled [O, Sennacherib, king of Assyria]? … Against the Holy One of Israel!
Ezek 36:20. But when they came to the nations, wherever they came, they profaned my holy name, in that people said of them, “These are the people of the LORD, and yet they had to go out of his land.”

10. Therefore, God will work on behalf of his name, speaking in a way that makes others know him (52:6).
Ezek 36:23. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Lord GOD, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes.
Exod 34:6–7.  The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.