Isaiah Quotes

“But if we make God’s presence and his character primary, then comfort, pleasure, and security will fall on us all unawares. But they will be when and where God chooses, and that will be enough because we know he is all we need and that all those other things may come and go as they will. We can live that way because we know that he has no desire to deprive us but seeks, even in the fire, to do us good.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“All of this means that it is foolish to be seduced by the glory of the nations into rebelling against God. Rather, God’s servants are meant to submit to him trustfully and declare the glory of the only God to the nations.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“True trust always involves an element of waiting. It means believing in results that we cannot see. A determination to have the results I want now is a major sign of an inability to trust.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“God's presence is the one inescapable fact of human life. We will encounter him in one way or another. Those who make a place for him find him to be the glue that holds everything together. Those who ignore him find their lives to be askew and cannot understand why. They have left out the most crucial factor in the equation of their lives, so that everything will always be unbalanced. The Lord God is either a sanctuary to dwell in or a stone to stumble over.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“Is God really with us? The answer to the question is "yes." God has come to take up residence with us as one of us. How has that fact been accomplished? By giving him a human mother but no human father.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“Such a being cannot be manipulated by means of any created thing; to even think of it is laughable. So how do we acquire his power so that we can meet our needs? That is just it: We cannot. We must entrust the satisfaction of our needs into his hands, believing that he really is true and good and that we are precious to him.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“Thus the only hope was to avoid judgment. To all of this Isaiah said a resounding no. The promises of God would only be realized through fire. Just as the unclean lips of the man Isaiah could only be used to proclaim the holiness of God to his people after they had been purged with fire (Isa. 6), so the unclean lips of the nation were going to have to be purged with the cleansing fires of judgment if the nation could ever proclaim those promises of God to the nations of the world.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“The book claims to have come through one human mind, that of Isaiah ben Amoz, who lived in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. and was gifted by God to see the future in such a way that it would forever demonstrate that Yahweh of Israel was not one of the gods. Yahweh’s ability to tell the future in detail was the ultimate evidence that he was not a personification of the forces of creation but was the Creator of creation, the One who made it, continued to direct it, and would eventually redeem it.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“Rather, they are interwoven in artful ways that suggest the symphonic art that appeared in musical style two millennia after Isaiah. Motifs appear, disappear, and reappear in ways that keep the thoughtful reader involved in an active dialogue with the writer.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“The fact is, God is not too concerned whether we are happy or not. But he is very concerned over whether we are holy.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“God never intends for our lives to be shaped by conformity to a list of abstract rules. Rather, he intends for them to be shaped by a joyous pursuit of greater and greater likeness to the character of our covenant Lord, our Father.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“The great danger of maturation is calcification.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah

“People who have made God in their own image are in the darkness, and they desperately need the light that streams from the Cross and the empty tomb.”
― John N. Oswalt, Isaiah