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I am here, Jesus:
These great lines of the Third Isaiah had tremendous importance for those who heard his discourse. It meant that this New Isaiah had obtained his voice directly from God, and that an entirely new dispensation was at hand. The old defeats, the frustrations, the proneness to sin, was being washed away in God's waters of oblivion. It was a discourse, meant in the physical sense: The people were to be free, prideful in the assumption of their heritage on earth, the land of Israel, to be followed by miracles of binding up physical wounds as well as moral smarting. The mourning and the ashes of death and destruction, resulting from the loss of the Temple, would disappear before the glorious rebirth of God's House on Mount Moriah, and the joys and exultation which worship here would give to His people.
When I spoke to my people in Nazareth, I used the opening lines of the Third Isaiah's magnificent poetry to also indicate a new dispensation -- not in the physical sense, but in the soul sense: the Father's Love available to all those who should seek it in prayer would break the chains and overcome the misery of the Roman occupation. The sight restored to the blind and the liberty recovered by the captives, in the face of the subjugation of our land by these cruel pagans, could not mean the same thing for the people who heard me and the populace, 600 years before, who heard the words of the Third Isaiah.
The Jews of Babylonia were settled in the homeland of their conquerors, treated tolerably to remain where they could make their livelihood; the Jews of Israel of my time, under the lash of the Roman, was extremely sensitive, perhaps taut to the breaking point, over anything that infringed the sovereignty of the Jewish homeland, promised to them again by God through the Third Isaiah.
The Jews who heard my words of Love were dedicated more to the expulsion of the Romans than to the proposition of overcoming through Love. In the light of their grim experiences with the Roman overlords, they could not understand my message.
As a matter of fact the remainder of the sermons of the Third Isaiah, 64 - 66, deals very much with the New Jerusalem, the elect of the Jews and the glory of the land which God has given unto His people. It emphasizes the forgiveness of God towards His erring people, and the command to go forth and inhabit the land of Israel, the joys of the redeemed who go there, the promise of prosperity and happiness and the peace of the land.
In chapter 66, God asks: Where is the House that ye build unto Me? (1) And later Isaiah declares "A voice of noise from the city, a voice from the Temple, a voice of the Lord that rendereth recompense to His enemies." When the Third Isaiah stops, something in the way of a beginning was astir to restore the Temple, and some effort on the part of pioneers had started to create housing on the demolished city of Jerusalem. The mood was one of rebuilding, restoration, a faith in the promise of God that His city and House would be erected solidly, and under His loving protection. This indeed, was to come to pass -- and the efforts towards righteous living for centuries under the Second Temple.
Jesus of the Bible
and
Master of the Celestial Heavens
