The book of Isaiah tells a dramatic story about Israel’s sin, judgment, exile, and restoration. It casts a vision for a people of God who are not defined by ethnicity but by faithfulness to God.
The fact the New Testament refers to Isaiah more than any other Old Testament book, other than the Psalms, bears witness to the ongoing relevance of this message for the church.
Flow of Isaiah
Understanding the general flow of the book is a helpful place to begin as we think about preaching and teaching Isaiah well. It falls into three big sections:
Chapters 1–39 primarily address those who lived in the southern kingdom of Judah before the Babylonians conquered them in 587 B.C. When Isaiah began his ministry around 742 B.C., the northern kingdom of Israel was still in existence and posed a threat to Judah.
Just a few decades later, however, Assyria conquered Israel (721 B.C.). Through all this turmoil, the people of Judah thought they were invincible because God had given them a city, a king, and a temple.
Their misplaced confidence led them into social, economic, and theological abuses and injustices for which God called them to repent.
Chapters 40–55 jump forward to address the Jewish exiles in Babylon struggling to understand how God was working in the midst of such trauma and what God’s plans for them might be (587–539 B.C.).
This section of the book is less about condemnations and calls to repent and more about the assurance of God’s love and good purposes. One of the major recurring images in this part of Isaiah is God’s “servant,” whom God empowered to serve, suffer, and ultimately prevail.
Chapters 56–66 jump forward again to address God’s people after they have returned home to Jerusalem (after 539 B.C.). The way God was fulfilling old promises was different than what they expected, and God wanted them to understand what it really means to be the people of God and what true restoration looks like.
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This final part of Isaiah picks up on numerous images and themes from earlier in the book, tying the whole thing together.
Bible scholars have lots of different ideas about how exactly these three sections relate to each other. For example, did the prophet Isaiah write all of them, or did his disciples write some of it?
You will see these conversations referenced in almost every commentary, but don’t let the debate distract you from the beautiful message God has spoken to us in and through this book.
Westminster Bible Commentary: Isaiah 1–39 and Isaiah 40–66 by Walter Brueggemann
My first “go-to” commentary on Isaiah is Brueggemann’s two-volume commentary in the Westminster Bible Commentary series. It’s written for Christian laypeople and has a real focus on the theological message and practical implications of Isaiah.
Brueggemann does not hesitate to bring Jesus into the conversation. At the same time, he does a wonderful job painting a picture of the ancient world, so we can understand the people to whom Isaiah first preached, the fears and struggles with which they dealt, and the ways God’s promises of deliverance and commissioning would have resonated in the centuries before Christ.
Brueggemann understands the main theme of the book of Isaiah to be the faithful character of Yahweh. So, he always brings his discussion of the political and social contexts back around to what they reveal about the God who is holy, holy, holy and whose glory fills the whole earth.
The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction and Commentary by J. Alec Motyer
Isaiah is such a massive book covering so much ground historically and theologically that it can be very helpful to identify a few key themes to help get our minds and hearts around it.
When we taught a Doctor of Ministry seminar on preaching Isaiah together, Dennis Wiles, pastor of First Baptist Church in Arlington, drew my attention to Alec Motyer’s commentary on Isaiah as being an excellent resource to this end.
Like Brueggemann, Motyer tracks the theme of God’s holiness, and he adds to this theme the motifs of God’s city and of messianic hope.
Motyer also lays out another way to understand the structure of the book of Isaiah, namely, as a portrait of Messiah as King (Chapters 1–37), as Servant (Chapters 38–55), and as Conqueror (Chapters 56–66). These themes and Motyer’s discussion of them make a solid foundation for a sermon or Bible study series on the book of Isaiah.
Old Testament Prophets for Today by Carolyn J. Sharp
Because of Isaiah’s length, the resources we buy to study it can also get long and expensive. If you are looking for something that will give you a good overview of Isaiah’s structure, context, and theological message—and, as a bonus, the other prophetic books in the Old Testament—Carolyn Sharp’s book is a great resource.
In just over 100 pages, she provides an introduction to prophecy, to the prophets whose stories appear in the historical books of the Old Testament, and to the prophetic books, with dedicated chapters on Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other Minor Prophets, alongside her chapter on Isaiah.
Each chapter ends with discussion questions, which means this book could double as a Sunday school or small group resource.
In her chapter on Isaiah, Sharp gives a quick overview of the historical context of Isaiah, its structure, and its theology. She picks three themes to discuss in more depth: God’s holiness, God’s sovereignty over history, and God’s preservation of a people he is calling to serve the world.
If you want more
If you are interested in more in-depth, Hebrew-language based commentaries, John Oswalt’s two-volume commentary in the New International Commentary on the Old Testament series is a good option from a decidedly evangelical perspective.
John Watts’s two-volume commentary in the Word Biblical Commentary series is a little dated now (it first came out in the 1980s), but he takes the whole text of Isaiah and reads it as a drama, even laying it out like a script with different “voices” labelled, a great way to think about approaching this very dramatic book.
You can also find more focused or thematic studies of Isaiah. John Goldingay’s The Theology of the Book of Isaiah helpfully tracks first the dominant theologies of the three major sections of Isaiah and then the theological perspectives that emerge from the book as a whole.
For a deep dive on a single chapter of Isaiah—but with implications for how we read so much else in the Old Testament in ways faithful to their original meanings and to their meaning within the larger Christian canon—you can check out Gordon McConville’s The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 for the Life of the Church.
When Jesus began his ministry, Luke’s Gospel tells us he used Isaiah to explain his mission (Luke 4:16–21, quoting from Isaiah 58 and 61). The book of Isaiah is a long and complex one, but if the biblical witness is to be believed, it’s one with which we should spend lots of time. In it, God continues to speak to us about who he is and who we are to be.
Rebecca Poe Hays is associate professor of Christian Scriptures (Hebrew Bible/Old Testament) at Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary. An ordained Baptist minister, she has served congregations in Tennessee, Alabama and Texas. She is married to Joshua Hays, who serves as associate pastor of First Baptist Church in Waco, and is the mother of two young children. The views expressed in this resource article are those of the author.
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