Isaiah 2 Bible study: The LORD alone will be exalted

The book has already opened with a heading: "The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem" (1:1). Chapter 2 begins with another: "This is what Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem" (2:1). In Hebrew This is what is haddavar asher, the word that, and saw is chazah; Strong's gives 1:1's vision, chazon, as "from 2372", this verb. So the heading speaks of a word that Isaiah saw. The introduction to Isaiah takes 2:1 as the start of the book's second part, which runs to the end of chapter 5, and here is what almost everyone misses: the heading is followed at once not by judgment but by a picture of what "shall happen in the latter days" (2:2) (tap latter days).

Isaiah 2:19→leads to2 Thessalonians 1:7-9

Three times the chapter speaks of going into the rocks "from before the terror of the LORD, and from the glory of his majesty" (Isaiah 2:10, 2:19, 2:21), and twice it adds, "when he arises to shake the earth mightily" (Isaiah 2:19). Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy (2 Thessalonians 1:1) write of the time "when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire" (2 Thessalonians 1:7), and speak of "eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might" (2 Thessalonians 1:9). The letter doesn't name Isaiah, so setting the two side by side is a reading, and nothing is claimed about the Greek. It rests on a shared subject: the glory of the Lord on his day, and the judgment that day brings. One reading hears in the letter's words the day of Isaiah 2:10-21, spoken of there as the day the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven. Another reads Isaiah 2:10-21 of the LORD's day against "all that is proud and arrogant" (Isaiah 2:12), with nothing said of Jesus, and reads the letter's words on their own. This line names no one, then or now, among the proud of Isaiah 2 or those the letter speaks of.

שָׂגַבsagavsay sa-GAV

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "be (inaccessibly) high", and among the senses of the form used here, "be exalted". Strong's: "to be (causatively, make) lofty, especially inaccessible; by implication, safe, strong". "and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day" (2:11), and nearly the same again, "and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that day" (2:17). Will be exalted is nisgav, and alone is levaddo. The Hebrew Bible has those two words together in one other verse: "Let them praise the LORD’s name, for his name alone is exalted" (Psalm 148:13), as Psalm 148's study of the word shows. The day of the LORD is for all that is proud and lifted up, cedars and oaks, mountains and hills, towers and walls, ships and pleasant imagery (2:12-16), and the one who is exalted is the LORD, alone.