![]() ![]() Remember what happened to the northern kingdom in 722 B.C.E.? Samaria, under corrupt kings ruling in the spirit of Ahab’s ways, was hauled off into exile by the Assyrians. This is a difficult message for the people to hear. Let’s first explore the exile and then the hope we find in Isaiah. From the very first chapter of the book, this hope shines bright, and it comes right on the heels of the most devastating moment in Israelite history. Isaiah’s entire focus is hope on the other side of the exile. That is why the book of Isaiah plays such a key role in the Old Testament, especially given its placement in the ordering of the Hebrew Bible (it’s situated after 1 and 2 Kings instead of after Songs). You can understand how it may be hard to find hope in such a situation. Read the book of Lamentations if you want some somber reflection on what it felt like to live through the tragedy of Jerusalem’s destruction and the people’s enslavement under Babylonian rule. This was their Day of the Lord, and it left them absolutely devastated. This event fulfilled centuries of prophetic warnings, as hundreds of years of tradition, culture, and history was destroyed in just one year. The entire national structure of the kingdom, which was thought to be ordained by God himself, came crashing down. Everything else orbits around the gravity of this faith-shaking moment. For the Israelites, the exile was the watershed moment of their history through which the entire Bible gains its significance. This event left its mark on Israelite history in an unparalleled manner and played a key role in the formation of the Bible itself. One of the most important events in Jesus’ Bible, which also changed Jewish history forever, is the Babylonian exile. Jesus saw himself fulfilling a larger storyline that was told in His Bible, the Hebrew Bible, or as most Christians refer to it, the Old Testament. But these events didn’t occur in a vacuum. It’s the central event which generated the entire Christian story and the New Testament. For followers of Jesus, the story of his life, death, and resurrection is the absolute center of our practice, belief, and worldview.
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