What if the most compelling evidence for Yeshua being the foreseen Messiah wasn’t written in the New Testament, but rather in the Old Testament, long before He was born?…
In today’s discussion we will meet Isaiah, a Hebrew prophet writing in Jerusalem during one of the darkest seasons in Israel’s history. His words would eventually become one of the most quoted books in the scriptures of the New Testament. He wrote seven hundred years before Yeshua was born, and yet, he described Him and what He would do exactly…
Who was Isaiah?
In Hebrew, his name is Yeshayahu (ישעיהו) — meaning “The Lord is my Salvation”. His name was not just a title, it was the exact message he would spend his entire life proclaiming.
Isaiah, the son of Amoz, was a Hebrew prophet in Jerusalem with an aristocratic background and direct access to the royal court. He ministered under four kings of Judah during a time of national crisis and collapse. He is referred to as the “Prince of Prophets” and the “Evangelical Prophet” — and for good reason. His story begins with a vision unlike any other in all of Scripture. In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw the Lord enthroned in the Temple, high and lifted up. Seraphim cried out around Him, the doorposts shook, and the Temple filled with smoke.
Then I heard the voice of ADONAI saying: “Whom should I send, and who will go for Us?” So I said, “Hineni. Send me.”
Isaiah 6:8 TLV
He was undone by the holiness of God — and then commissioned. A seraphim touched burning coal to his lips announcing that his sin had been atoned for, and when Adonai asked who He should send, Isaiah did not hesitate to step forward. Throughout his life, Isaiah painted the portrait of Yeshua in detail so precisely that when He arrived, the only question left was whether Israel would recognize the face of its Savior. For us as Messianic Jewish believers, Isaiah is not simply an ancient prophet, he is our strongest witness that Yeshua is our Messiah!
When Everything Changed
The Sign of Immanuel – He will come
King Ahaz is terrified, with two enemy nations bearing down on Jerusalem, so God calls Isaiah to go to the King and offer him words of encouragement. While in Ahaz’s presence, Isaiah gives an important prophecy:
“Therefore Adonai Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will conceive. When she is giving birth to a son, she will call his name Immanuel.”
Isaiah 7:14 TLV
The name in this passage — Immanuel — is not sentiment, it is theology. The One coming will not merely be sent by God, instead He will be God with us! Matthew 1:22–23 quotes this passage directly as the announcement of Yeshua’s birth, but even before Matthew wrote a word, the Jewish prophetic tradition had already pointed there. If Isaiah tells us nothing else, he tells us this: the Messiah will not be an ordinary man.
The Suffering Servant – This is how He will come
Almost no passage in all of the Tanakh has generated more conversation or more conviction than this one. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah describes a figure whose suffering carries the weight of others:
“But he was pierced because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities. The chastisement for our shalom was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.”
Isaiah 53:5 TLV
Isaiah describes this servant as silent before his accusers, led like a lamb to slaughter, buried with the rich in his death, and raised and exalted afterward. One individual, dying for the sins of many. There is a moment in the book of Acts (chapter 8) where an Ethiopian official is sitting in his chariot, reading from Isaiah. He is confused. He does not know who the prophet is describing, and then Philip, a follower of Yeshua, runs up alongside him. “—Beginning with this Scripture he proclaimed the Good News about Yeshua.” (Acts 8:35 TLV)
Philip didn’t begin with anything new, he simply opened the scroll the man already had in his hands and explained how this very book written so long ago prophesied Yeshua the Messiah who had come. How the passage describes one person, dying for the sins of many, raised and exalted afterward; just as Yeshua had done. While Isaiah 7 tells us who the Messiah will be, Isaiah 53 tells us why He came. This prophecy described His coming sacrifice with more clarity than some of the accounts written after it.
The Year of the Lord’s Favor – He has come — in His own words
The first two passages we’ve discussed show us who the Messiah will be and why He will come, but the third passage does something even more remarkable — it lets Him speak for Himself. In Isaiah 61, the prophet describes a Spirit-anointed servant with a very specific mission and centuries later, one person would stand up in a synagogue and claim this prophecy as His own…
“The Ruach ADONAI Elohim is on me, because ADONAI has anointed me to proclaim Good News to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the year of ADONAI’s favor and the day of our God’s vengeance, to comfort all who mourn.”
Isaiah 61:1–2 TLV
Hundreds of years later, Yeshua is in Nazareth, and on Shabbat He enters the synagogue. He is handed the scroll of Isaiah from which He reads aloud the assigned Haftarah portion from Isaiah 61. Following this reading He sits down with every eye in the synagogue fixed on Him; and to them He says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21 TLV)
On that day, Yeshua made the connection for us — that He was indeed the prophesied One from Isaiah’s prophesies. We need not hypothesize the connection because He made it one-hundred percent clear for us. It is important for us to note that in His re-reading of Isaiah’s prophecy, Yeshua paused before Isaiah 61:2 which continues with “and the day of vengeance of our God.” He read the first half and sat down…deliberately…Yeshua’s first coming fulfilled the proclamation of favor — the healing, the liberty, the good news, but the later part of Isaiah’s prophecy, the day of vengeance, awaits His return. Now, we can clearly see that Isaiah wrote one sentence describing two different comings…
What Isaiah’s Story Teaches Us
The portrait of the coming Messiah was painted long before He was born. These three passages have three distinct moments — birth, suffering, ministry. All written by one man, years before it would come to pass…
This is a Jewish story. Isaiah was a Hebrew prophet writing for a Hebrew audience in a Hebrew city under siege. The Messianic prophecies did not originate in the Church, but rather in the Tanakh. Believing in Yeshua as the Messiah requires our understanding that the Old Testament and the Hebrew prophets play an ever-so-important role in our faith.
The God of Israel keeps His word. He promised a Messiah, worked through Isaiah to describe Him in detail, and then He delivered. For us as Messianic believers, this is the foundation we stand on because the God who kept His word in these prophecies keeps His word to us!
One Central Message
Isaiah was a man standing in a city under siege, watching the world he knew come apart, and speaking words into what must have felt like silence. He had no way of knowing that his scroll would be unrolled in a Nazareth synagogue centuries later. He could not have seen the Ethiopian official reading his words in a chariot on a desert road. He did not know that the passage he wrote about a suffering servant would be the one Philip used to explain the Good News of Yeshua to a man who had never heard it before. He simply said yes to God and wrote the message that he was given.
And what he was given was a portrait — precise, detailed, and unmistakable. A virgin birth, a suffering servant pierced for our transgressions, a Spirit-anointed messenger proclaiming freedom to the captive. Isaiah didn’t write a prediction, he wrote of a promise. And the God of Israel never breaks His promises!
Living This Truth Today
When someone asks why you believe that Yeshua is the Messiah — open the scroll of Isaiah. The answer was written before the question was asked. When faith feels like swimming upstream — remember that the evidence for Yeshua was embedded in the Tanakh long before any church existed. Belief in Yeshua is not a departure from Jewish identity. It is a completion of it. Isaiah was a Hebrew prophet, and he saw this coming.
Conclusion
A Hebrew prophet, writing in a city under siege, described the birth, the suffering, and the ministry of our Messiah with a precision that even centuries could not blur. And then Yeshua stood up in a synagogue, unrolled that prophet’s scroll, and said: this has been fulfilled today.
Isaiah was undone before the throne of God, touched by a coal, and sent with a message he would carry through siege and exile and persecution. He said yes without knowing the full weight of what his words would carry across the centuries. He could not have seen you reading them now, but the God who commissioned him could.
The same God who asked Isaiah ‘whom shall I send?’ is the God who is present with us today. The same faithfulness that moved through Isaiah’s pen is what we, as believers in Yeshua, stand on this very day. His story asks us, personally and practically, to consider where we are standing right now…
Are you looking for evidence that the God of Israel keeps His word? Read Isaiah. The portrait was finished long before the Messiah arrived.
Are you being asked to say yes to something that feels too big, too costly, or too uncertain? Remember the man who stood in the smoke-filled Temple, with the doorposts shaking around him, and said — here am I. Send me. That has always been enough.
God is asking us, “Whom shall I send?” Will we say? — “Here am I!”
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