What is the Book of Isaiah All About?

The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety. 

"In my experience, most Christians approach to the Prophets as if there's sort of bowls of judgment spaghetti with a Messianic meatball thrown in here or there, and we don't have much of a sense, usually, I think, of the structure of the Prophets. They're not like a bowl of spaghetti, though. The Prophets are highly structured. They're really more like a sword than they are a bowl of spaghetti. They have a point, they have an edge. They have a weight and a feel and they're doing something. 

'Well, the Book of Isaiah is the same way. It has a wonderful structure to it that I think breaks down, really, into three different parts. And the main structure of the book is that Isaiah is prophesying the coming of what you think, in the beginning, are three different people. First of all, he prophesying the coming of a king, who will set everything right in the world. That's where you get verses like, 'Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given and the government will rest on his shoulders.' He's foretelling a king.

In the second third of the book, Isaiah is prophesying a coming servant. And you begin to get pictures of this servant. What he's like, what he's gonna do, and Isaiah 53, the famous passage that we know is fulfilled in the crucifixion as one of these servant songs, where Isaiah is saying, "There is coming someone who will bear the sins of the people of God for them and die in their place." The third part of the book is prophesying the coming of what you might call an anointed conqueror. Someone who is going to set the world to right and who is gonna rule over it and who is gonna destroy God's enemies and vindicate God's people.

And the extraordinary thing about the book, though, is that as you study it, you first begin to think that that's three different people. The King, and a Servant, and a Conqueror. But as you look at it and you see how Isaiah talks about it, all of the sudden, you start to realize that no, no, no. The King and the Servant and the Conqueror, they're all the same person. And Jesus is the one who fulfills, in various ways in the New Testament, all three of those prophets. He is the king who rules over the world and who will set the world to right and get rid of oppression and injustice. He is the servant who dies in the place of God's people for their sins. And he is the anointed conqueror whom God has determined is gonna rule to world and bring it all to rights. So the whole book points forward to Jesus as the fulfillment of all three of those persons."