Hank Smith: 00:06 Hello, my friends. Welcome to followHIM Favorites. If you’ve been following us this year, you know that we take a specific question from each week’s lesson, and do a little five to 10 minute discussion on it. This week’s lesson is Isaiah 1-12. And I can just picture some of our listeners going, “Isaiah. Oh, no, not Isaiah.” So John, the question for this week is, who is Isaiah, and why is he so important that we’re always talking about him?

John Bytheway: 00:39 Oh, how do we answer that one in just a few minutes? Isaiah, one of the greatest Old Testament prophets. But he was such a poet and a scholar and an advisor to kings. He was great because of where the Lord put him and when the Lord put him. But he also wrote in such a beautiful way. But it takes a little bit of effort.

John Bytheway: 00:59 And like most things in life, you put in some effort, he will become one of your favorites. I like to use the analogy of, Hank, if I had to do a Sudoku puzzle book that I bought at Dollar Tree, and all of the puzzles were filled in, you would throw it away. But when the puzzles are empty and you think, “There’s an answer.”

Hank Smith: 01:19 There’s something here. Yeah.

John Bytheway: 01:20 I think Jesus’ parables help us do that too, “Wait, what does that mean?” And we read and say, “What in the world, what does he mean there?” And the reward of studying Isaiah is when you start to fill in those puzzles and go, “Oh, well, now I get that.” And it becomes one of your favorites. But where I like to start is the name Isaiah. If you look it up in the Bible dictionary it means… You know when you hear iah at the end of a proper name, what is it, Hank?

Hank Smith: 01:48 Yeah, it’s Jehovah.

John Bytheway: 01:50 So there’s a lot of names like that, and it’s kind of fun to look at them like those names that have the name of God in them. And they liked to do that, they liked to put the name of God in their name or acknowledge God in their names. Isaiah means Jehovah is salvation. Or if we were to put that in bumper sticker language, “Jesus saves.”

John Bytheway: 02:09 What I love about that is, especially in the Book of Mormon, when Abinadi shows up before King Noah and the Wicked Priests, which sounds like a rock band from the ’50s. King Noah and the Wicked Priests. But he asks them, “What are you teaching?” And they said, “The Law of Moses.” And Abinadi says, “Well, why don’t you keep it?”

John Bytheway: 02:29 And then he quotes a bunch of the commandments, and then he says, “Keep the Law of Moses because you were asked to. But salvation comes in Christ.” What’s Isaiah’s name again? Jehovah is salvation. And then he quotes Isaiah 53, which in the Book of Mormon is known as Mosiah 14, and tells them, “Jesus is salvation. Jesus saves.” And that’s why I love Isaiah because he reveals the Savior.

Hank Smith: 02:56 740 years before Jesus.

John Bytheway: 02:58 And yet he gives us such detail about Christ so that we would recognize him when he came. So that’s one of the reasons I get excited about Isaiah.

Hank Smith: 03:08 That’s fantastic. I read out of the Bible dictionary, I usually show my students, if you read Isaiah in the Bible dictionary, go to the last paragraph, it says, “As one understands these works better, he will understand Isaiah better.” Talking about the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. As one understands Isaiah better, he more fully comprehends the mission of the Savior and the meaning of the covenant that was placed upon Abraham.

Hank Smith: 03:34 So if you are one of those people that says, “Man, I want to get in line with President Nelson. I’d like to understand the Abraham Covenant. I’d like to understand the Savior more.” Isaiah is the key. Isaiah is where you have to go. So what’s the big deal with Isaiah? Isaiah is dealing with things from the past, but a lot of the stuff Isaiah deals with is stuff that we see fulfilled in our day, especially the gathering of Israel. One of his major topics is the gathering of Israel.

Hank Smith: 04:04 So one of the reasons this book can be so fun is you can find yourself in the book, especially if you plan on serving a mission, or if you really like to share the gospel with people. Wow, you are in the Book of Isaiah, he is seeing you and your work happening on the earth, you’re part of this… What did President Nelson call it, John?

John Bytheway: 04:25 The greatest work you could ever be involved in is the gathering of Israel. And Heavenly Father sent you to earth at this time, that is not an accident. There’s a reason for that. And Isaiah talks about what we all have to do. When I wrote my little Isaiah for Airheads book, I talked about current events and coming events.

John Bytheway: 04:45 One of the things that you can stumble over, there are 108 different place names in Isaiah. And if I were to say to you Hank, Springville, Provo, Lehi, Pleasant Grove, you know where they are. But if I start saying all these names like Anathoth, and Migron, and Carchemish. Well, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

John Bytheway: 05:05 And this is why it’s so nice to live in the latter days, you can find a map. You can listen to followHIM. You can get out your Come Follow Me manual and you can start to put those puzzle pieces together and finish that Sudoku puzzle. And then you go, “Look, I did that. I now love Isaiah 53 because I can see Christ in there.” He was despised, he was rejected of men. We hid our faces from him. But when his soul is an offering for sin, he will see his seed and we start to put it all together. And it gets exciting to us and becomes one of our favorites.

Hank Smith: 05:39 Yeah. That’s fantastic. I’ve heard it said that Isaiah is one of the best writers in the history of the world if not the best writer in the history of the world. So good that Jesus himself said, “A commandment, I give unto you, that you search Isaiah diligently.” As we study Isaiah, please join us on our full podcast.

Hank Smith: 06:00 We’re going to take apart as much of Isaiah as we can. The podcast is called, followHIM. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. We’re going to have multiple biblical scholars with us to help us take this apart, a piece at a time. Who knows? Maybe you’ll walk away going, “You know what? I feel like I understand it just a little bit better.” And then join us next week for another followHIM Favorites.