Isaiah 65 is a problematic passage for many and yet their
struggles with it are actually rooted in fundamental misunderstandings of how
prophecy is to be read. For chiliasts of both the pre- and post-millennial variety
the 'New Heavens and New Earth' passage necessarily refers to age longevity in
that 'the child shall die an hundred years old' suggesting a lifespan far in
excess of our present 70-80 years.
Amillennialists point out that New Testament references of
the 'New Heavens and New Earth' which are found in 2 Peter 3 and Revelation 21
clearly refer not to a chiliastic intermediate manifestation of the Kingdom,
defined in a political and cultural sense but the final eschatological Kingdom,
heaven itself.
At this point literalists will cry out that people don't die
in heaven as the Isaiah passage seems to suggest and of course they're right
but this is where we must rely on the New Testament to understand and decipher
the way in which the prophets spoke. Their prophecies find literal fulfillment
but they do not speak in a hyper-literal, categorical or technical fashion.
Their words often defy exact and meticulous scrutiny and attempts to read the
prophets as one would a code or scientific manual is a mistake.
The New Testament makes this clear as it references the Old
Testament. Acts 15's use of Amos 9 is my favourite example of this principle
and one of the most poignant. When Amos 9 is read in light of how James uses
it, one's understanding of Old Testament prophecy is transformed. An Old
Testament prophetic passage which seems to reference Jewish Israel's dealings
with the nations in light of captivity is instead applied to the Church and in
James usage the land, temple and even eschatological expectation are
transformed in light of Christ and His Body, the Church.
The Old is filled with prophecies but they are often
contained in layered metaphor, hyperbole and masked in poetic language that
defies narrow and unequivocal readings and certainly the stringent
hermeneutical literalism that chiliasts seem to rely on.
This upsets some because it seems to hint of sloppiness, ambiguity,
and subjectivity and for some such a way of reading seems caught in a
trajectory that can only end in theological liberalism. Their concerns are well
meant but misguided as this way of reading the Old Testament was in fact
employed by Christ and the Apostles. Once this is grasped the New Testament
expositor is able to reflect the Christocentric and Redemptive-Historical way
of reading the prophecies of the Old Testament focusing on often layered themes,
development and symbols as opposed to those who get bogged down in what can
only be described as hyper-systematics concerned more with the technicalities of
etymology, denotative grammar, syntax, ordered logic and other philosophical
concerns. Words are of course central to how Scripture is given and doctrine is
framed and understood and yet the Scriptures tend to focus on themes, imagery
of type and fulfillment, and transcendent concepts that often defy our
technical dissections but instead must be grasped by placing them in a larger
context, a Christocentric one at that.
The prophets employ idiom, speaking of the Kingdom in terms
their audience will understand and relate to and yet at the same time their
physical and temporal descriptions (as it were) are blended with the prose of
eternity, the language, diction and concepts of the Kingdom.
They also employ prophetic perspective, a way of conflating
and compressing chronology in which events are combined and fulfilled in
seemingly multiple stages. And yet in reality the New Testament teaches us that
all the promises point to Christ and so the 'fulfillments' that occur prior to
His Coming are in fact typological, imperfect and symbolic fulfillments (in-part)
that actually point to the larger (ultimate) realisation. All the prophecies of
the Old Testament find their fulfillment in Christ. He is the centre of the
entire Scriptures, something many will intuitively acknowledge but then in
practice deny.
This seems confusing to some and they're left with a lack of
clarity. This prophetic perspective almost seems to distort and obscure God's
plan for the ages. That may be and in fact there are reasons to argue this is
somewhat deliberate on God's part. Christ's teaching regarding the parables and
the Kingdom come to mind. And yet, the real problem is when the exegete gets
bogged down in dates, narrow definitions and tight philosophically coherent
reasoning when in fact the prophets don't speak or function that way. They point
to Christ and the road to Him is layered, impossibly complex, riddled with
symbols, types and images. The New Testament has all the answers and only in
its light can we return to the passages in Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah
and elsewhere and develop a clear understanding of what is being said.
Both Pre-millennial Dispensationalism and Postmillennialism
despite their claims to literalism and Biblical fidelity are in fact guilty of
Judaizing inversion, flipping the Bible on its head, in using the Old Testament
to define and even restrict the New Testament. In doing so they fall into a
series of pitfalls and traps and in the end are hopelessly lost and completely
misread and misunderstand the New Testament's teaching regarding not only the 'end
times' but the whole of its eschatological-kingdom structure.
What does all that mean? It's this. The New Testament teaches
us how to read the Old. The prophets spoke of Christ and He is the key to all
the prophecies. Paul says this explicitly in 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20. All
secondary fulfillments, whether referencing land promises, earthly temples,
military victory or political dominion are all but shadows and symbols pointing
to Christ's ultimate victory, through His Body the Church and the consummated
Kingdom that is heaven itself.
So then what about Isaiah 65? The passage is about heaven.
That's what the New Testament teaches. Is there death in heaven? Not at all.
Doesn't that make Isaiah a liar? No. The problem is Isaiah is being read
wrongly. He's employing idiom. He's trying to convey something of the wonder
and awe of eternity. Time is perhaps endless or it might be understood as
something utterly transcendent, a type of timelessness in which minutes and
seconds won't even have relevance anymore. Even if eternity is described as
endless time, clearly the complete change in scale and scope will render our
familiar time markers and sense of 'passing' in a quite different way. While a
hundred years seems very long to our present paradigm of existence, a scenario
in which we live thousands and millions of years will render millennia as but a
moment. Again it's quite possible that concepts such as hours, days and years
will be all but meaningless in the context of eternity.
That's what Isaiah is trying to convey. Heaven is like
this.... imagine this.... it's as if.....
He's not presenting a passage that's meant to be technically
dissected in which we can form mathematical ratios and argue that if a child
lives to be 100, then it follows that adults will live to be 1,000 and the
like. The passage points to a reality that comes to pass in history but it is
not couched in a way that will accommodate a Baconian scientific method of
reading the text.
Just because he references sinners does not mean that it
cannot be heaven (or eternity) and must therefore refer to a temporal
pre-eschaton Golden Age in which sinners and righteous mingle.
The passage is about heaven and eternity but describes them
in idiomatic, metaphorical and hyperbolic terms, something quite common in the
prophets. The passage is fulfilled by Christ's Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven.
All too often the advocates of hyper-literalism in order to avoid pitting
Isaiah against the Apostles find a solution in multiplying the category and
creating 'another' New Heavens and Earth. This saves their system but also
generates yet another layer of confusion. The Eschatology of Scripture is
complex on certain levels but in terms of a basic scheme and chronology, it's
pretty straightforward.
Isaiah 65 is not fulfilled in Jewish Israel which was but a
shadow and type, a flawed proto-type of the ultimate Kingdom. Earthly Israel was
itself a tutorial and didactic symbol fulfilled in Christ... who is the
embodiment of heaven itself.
Likewise in Isaiah 66 we find references to the Sabbath and
yet the Sabbath is of course fulfilled in Christ and is also an expression of
heaven itself as Hebrews 4 makes clear. The land of Old Testament Israel was
but a picture of the heavenly Sabbath rest and was fulfilled and as a promise
abrogated with the coming of the Messiah. And yet Isaiah is speaking to his 8th
century BC audience in the context of the Old Covenant. Referring to heaven as
like the Sabbath is something they would have understood. Telling them that the
seventh day Sabbath will in the future be eliminated would have generated
confusion and for some distress. The language of the prophecy points to heaven
but speaks of it in terms that mankind can understand and relate to. This does
not mean it's not real, nor does it imply a principle of doctrinal accommodation
in our own day. By no means, but at the same time the concepts are limited by
the context of the hearers. They were still in the Old Testament. We are able
to understand a lot more on this side of the cross.
But such language and conceptualisations are also limited by
our finite understanding, something Paul hints at in 1 Corinthians 2.9, a
passage which suggests that we are not fully able to comprehend what heaven
will be like. It defies our empirical and conceptual categories, a concept very
important to understanding human cognitive limitation and the boundaries of exegetical
and theological inquiry.