Isaiah 62:10-12. (original) (raw)

I have long thought that it is the Second Isaiah who holds the key to our understanding of the Old Testament. So much is crammed into these chapters, so many layers are apparent, so many images fused and refused that the mind behind them must have been a religious genius. Margaret Barker, The Older Testament, p. 161. Professor Barker isn't always so much the master of the obvious, nevertheless, the statement above is almost a criminal understatement. Barker goes on in the same stream of thought to say: "Unfortunately, such genius is as disturbing as it is liberating, and the needs of ordinary mortals, and of the religious institutions which offer them order and security, can only be met by less exotic stuff." Isaiah's commission to Israel is explicitly to present his stuff in exotic, oracular, parable, so that the reader "Be ever hearing but never understanding" (6:9); at least, that is, until the last days, when all that's shut up in exotic prose will suddenly be opened. Parallelophobiacs will no doubt arise to call sound exegesis of Isaiah's exotic stuff "parallelomania." Nevertheless, one of the exegetical premises used here to unveil Isaiah's oracle is the understanding that there are parallels between all religious thought and that all religious thought parallels all non-religious thought. The key is not putting up borderlines, so to say, between religion, and thought in general, but finding the binding that unifies them in order to release the spirit of truth living in the prophet and his prophetic utterance. The recent exegesis of Isaiah 63:16 noted the peculiar cry of a unique people claiming that though they're part and parcel of the Abrahamic-covenant, Abraham isn't their father (God is), and that their mother, Israel, rejects wholesale, their claim to even being part of the Abrahamic-covenant. An orthodox Jew might be forgiven for not appreciating how close the cry in Isaiah 63:16 is to the frustration registered by a unique group of first century Jews who claimed to have been "born-again" (with God as their father) into a formerly unknown element of the Abrahamic-covenant. These Jewish heretics (as they're known by orthodox Judaism), in their theological, retroactive, re-rendition of the Tanakh, appear to unleash, or release, a parallelomaniacal meaning of many of Isaiah's parabolic nuances that is at the very least disturbing to, and of, the orthodox reading of the prophet's prose. Reading Isaiah 62:10-12 within a dispensational framework, by linking the speakers in Isaiah 63:16 with the Jews in the first century who reckoned themselves members of the Abrahamic-covenant who were refused entry into that covenant by Abraham and Israel, their adoptive grandfather and their mother, can easily cause Isaiah 62:10-12 to be read as, god-forbid, a pre-New Testament glimpse of the so-called "rapture" (or resurrection) of the ecclesia, or assembly of Gentile nations, otherwise known as the "church." New Testament dispensational scholars claim Revelation chapter four represents the rapture or resurrection of the church. Although the church is the subject of the first three chapters of the book of Revelation, the church isn't mentioned directly again after Revelation 4:1: