In this message we will consider chapters thirty-two through thirty-five. Before we come to these chapters, I would like to say a word concerning the main thought of the book of Isaiah.
The divine revelation in Isaiah concerns God's economy, to have Christ as the centrality and universality of God's great move. God's great move is a great wheel, having a hub, a rim, and spokes between the two. Christ is the centrality—the hub—and the universality—the rim with all the spokes. Christ is everything in God's move. This is the main thought of this book.
To understand the book of Isaiah, we need to have the view from the entire sixty-six books of the Bible. Isaiah is of two portions. The first portion includes chapters one through thirty-nine, and the second portion includes chapters forty through sixty-six. The first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah correspond to the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament. The last twenty-seven chapters correspond to the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. The New Testament begins with John the Baptist (Mark 1:1-3), and Isaiah 40 also begins with John the Baptist (v. 3).
The first part of Isaiah concerns the chastisement of God's dear people and the punishment of the nations to bring in a turn among God's people. To have a turn to fulfill God's purpose, we need to realize that we have been discharged, "fired," by God. Today, our practical God, our God in our daily living, is Christ. As descendants of Adam, as those created by God, we want to know God, worship Him, do His will, please Him, and fulfill the desire of His heart. This is right, for God wants us to be a good human being and one who fulfills His purpose. But God never planned or arranged in His eternal economy that we should do this by ourselves. He wants us to do it by Him. He wants us to let Him do it in us, by us, and through us. For example, as one who has been loving the Lord for many years, I can testify that the hardest thing for us Christians to overcome is our temper. God, however, does not want us to overcome our temper. We should neither lose our temper nor try to overcome it. Instead, we need to resign, give up, have a turn from trying to overcome our temper, and let Christ come in to be the temper- overcomer. The real spiritual turn is to resign from the position of one who is trying to be a proper human being. We need to resign from what we want to do. This is Isaiah's thought and logic.
Let us now go on to see that, according to chapters thirty-two through thirty-five, Jehovah's destruction of the nations is for Christ to be the King to bring in the restoration for Israel.