YHWH Is Salvation
The Prophet Whose Name Was the Name. Whose Words Were His Words.
Whose Vision Was His Glory.
Part 4 of 14
The Name
His name was Yeshayahu (Isaiah).
It means: YHWH is salvation.
This is not a similar meaning to the name Yeshua (Jesus). It is the same meaning. Yeshua means YHWH saves, the active, completed form. Yeshayahu means YHWH is salvation, the declaration of divine identity. Both names say the same thing in two grammatical forms. The prophet and the one he prophesied about shared the same divine declaration in their names.
This is not coincidence in the Hebrew framework. When the presence chose to manifest through a prophet whose name declared YHWH is salvation, and then arrived in full as the one whose name declared YHWH saves, the name was the continuity. The same declaration carried across centuries in two vessels, one partial, one complete.
Yeshayahu wrote more about the work and nature of Yeshua than any other prophet. He saw the birth. He saw the servant. He saw the suffering. He saw the glory. He saw the new creation. And he saw the one seated on the throne. The prophet whose name meant YHWH is salvation spent his entire prophetic life describing YHWH saving, because he was in contact with the one whose presence was in him, whose name he carried, whose work he was declaring.
The prophet’s name was YHWH is salvation. The one he described was YHWH saves.
Two names. One declaration. One presence across two moments.
The Throne Room
Yochanan’s Confirmation
This is where the document must begin, because it is where Yeshua’s own witness, through the writing of Yochanan (John), makes the identification absolute.
In the sixth chapter of Yeshayahu’s book, the prophet records his commissioning vision. He saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim, each with six wings. And they called to one another: Holy, holy, holy is YHWH of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.
The posts of the door shook at the voice. The house was filled with smoke.
And Yeshayahu cried: Woe is me, for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, for my eyes have seen the King, YHWH of hosts.
A seraph flew to him with a live coal from the altar, touched his mouth, and said: Your iniquity is taken away. Your sin is purged.
Then the voice of the Lord said: Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?
And Yeshayahu said: Here am I. Send me.
That is the commissioning. That is the throne. That is the one who sent Yeshayahu. Now go to the gospel of Yochanan (John), chapter 12, verses 39 through 41.
Yochanan has just quoted from Yeshayahu 53, Lord, who has believed our report, and from Yeshayahu 6, he has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts.
Then he writes: Yeshayahu said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.
His glory. Not YHWH’s glory in the abstract. Not the glory of God in a general theological sense. The pronoun is specific. Yochanan is saying that the glory Yeshayahu saw in Isaiah 6, the one seated on the throne, the one the seraphim were crying holy to, the one who commissioned the prophet, was the glory of Yeshua.
Yeshayahu did not see a vision of the divine throne that would eventually be occupied by the Messiah. He saw the Messiah seated on the throne. He was commissioned by the one whose name he bore. The prophet of YHWH is salvation received his calling from YHWH saves himself.
Yochanan writes it without qualification: Yeshayahu saw his glory. The one on the throne in Isaiah 6 was Yeshua.
The prophet was commissioned by the presence whose name he carried.
The Scroll Yeshua Claimed as His Own
In Luke 4, Yeshua went to the synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath, as was his custom. He stood up to read. The scroll of Yeshayahu (Isaiah) was handed to him.
He unrolled it and found the place, not randomly, with specific intention, where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
He rolled up the scroll. Handed it back to the attendant. Sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him.
And he said: Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
He did not say: this scripture speaks of something I will accomplish.
He did not say: this prophecy is now being fulfilled through my ministry.
He said today. Present tense. This moment. In your hearing.
He read Yeshayahu 61 as his own words. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Not upon the one Yeshayahu was describing. Upon me. He claimed the first person singular of the prophet’s text as his own first person singular. Because they were the same person. The presence that had spoken these words through Yeshayahu was now speaking them directly, without a vessel, from his own mouth, in a synagogue in Nazareth, on a Sabbath morning.
Today this scripture is fulfilled. Not someday. Not in the future. Today. The partial manifestation that had spoken through Yeshayahu’s mouth had arrived fully. The same words. The same declaration. The same anointing. Now without the vessel. In person.
The Servant Songs
First Person Throughout
The most concentrated prophetic material in all of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the work of Yeshua is found in the four servant songs of Yeshayahu, chapters 42, 49, 50, and 52 through 53. What is rarely observed is that three of the four songs are written in the first person. The servant himself is speaking.
Yeshayahu 49:1: Listen to me, O coastlands, and give attention, you peoples from afar. YHWH called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.
Yeshayahu 50:4-5: The Lord YHWH has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him who is weary. Morning by morning he awakens; he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord YHWH has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious.
Yeshayahu 50:6: I gave my back to those who strike, and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard. I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting.
These are not Yeshayahu describing someone else in the future. These are the words of the one whose presence was in Yeshayahu, speaking through him, describing his own experience, the calling from the womb, the awakened ear, the obedience, the suffering, the back given to those who strike, the face not hidden from shame.
The servant songs are not prophecy in the conventional sense. They are the pre-incarnate voice of Yeshua speaking through the prophet who bore his name, describing in the first person what the full appearing would undergo. He was not predicting his own future experience. He was describing it through the vessel of the prophet whose name declared what he was.
I gave my back to those who strike. I hid not my face from shame. These were not Yeshayahu’s words about someone else. They were the voice of the one who would stand before Pilate, speaking through his own prophet, centuries before the appearance was complete.
Isaiah 53
The Most Quoted Chapter in the New Testament
The fifty-third chapter of Yeshayahu is the most quoted Hebrew scripture passage in the entire New Testament. The suffering servant, despised and rejected, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, led as a sheep to the slaughter, making his soul an offering for sin.
Christianity has treated this chapter as prophecy. A prediction made seven centuries before the cross, fulfilled at the cross. The conventional reading is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.
If Yochanan is right that Yeshayahu saw the glory of Yeshua and spoke of him, if the commissioning in Isaiah 6 was a commissioning by Yeshua himself, then Isaiah 53 is not merely a prediction. It is the one who would undergo the suffering describing it through the prophet, before the full appearing, in language so precise that every detail of the passion narrative finds its anchor here.
He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement that brought us peace was upon him. By his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. YHWH has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter. He was cut off from the land of the living. He made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death. He shall see the travail of his soul and be satisfied. He shall bear their iniquities.
Every line is exact. The silence before Pilate. The grave with the wicked and with a rich man, crucified between criminals, buried in the tomb of Yosef (Joseph) of Arimathea. The bearing of iniquity. The seeing and being satisfied, which is the resurrection, the one who went through death seeing its completion and being satisfied that it was finished.
This was not a distant prophet making educated guesses about a future event. This was the presence itself, speaking through the vessel that bore its name, describing with absolute precision what the full appearing would undergo. The same voice. The same person. Two moments separated by seven centuries of covenant history.
The New Creation
What the Reign Accomplished
The book of Yeshayahu does not end at the suffering servant. It ends at the new creation. Chapters 60 through 66 describe what the completed work of YHWH produces, a world in which the presence of YHWH fills everything, where the former things are not remembered, where the wolf and the lamb lie down together, where there is no more weeping or crying, where the earth is filled with the knowledge of YHWH as the waters cover the sea.
This is not the description of a future age that has not yet arrived. In the framework of this series, the new creation was inaugurated at the resurrection. The reign that Psalm 110 described, the reign that operated through named vessels across the thousand years, was completed when the last enemy was defeated at the empty tomb. What Yeshayahu saw at the end of his book was the outcome of the completed reign. God all in all. The presence everywhere. The former things, including sin, including judgment, including the management of a people through covenant law, passed away.
Yeshayahu saw it from within the reign, through the partial manifestation of the presence that was in him. He described it with accuracy because the one whose presence was in him had already determined its completion from before the foundation of the world. The prophet of YHWH is salvation saw to the end of what YHWH saves would accomplish. And what he saw was total. Universal. Irreversible.
What Yeshua Said in the Nazareth Synagogue
Return to Luke 4. When Yeshua sat down after reading from Yeshayahu and said today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing, he was making the most direct self-identification recorded in the synoptic gospels.
He was not saying: I am the fulfillment of a prediction.
He was saying: I am the one who spoke through Yeshayahu. The words are mine. The anointing is mine. The Spirit upon me is the same Spirit that was upon the prophet who bore my name. Today, not someday, not eventually, not when the right conditions are met — today. In your hearing. Present. Complete. Here.
The congregation’s response confirms the weight of what he said. At first they spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words coming from his mouth. But when he pressed the point, when he said YHWH had sent Eliyahu to a widow in Sidon, not to Israel, and had healed Naaman the Syrian, not an Israelite, they were filled with rage. They drove him out of the city. They tried to throw him off a cliff.
They understood what he was claiming. He was not claiming to be a teacher who had studied Yeshayahu carefully. He was claiming to be the one who had spoken through Yeshayahu. The one whose name Yeshayahu bore. The one who had been manifesting through vessels across the entire reign and was now present in full.
That claim was worth trying to kill him over. Which means they heard it correctly.
Yeshayahu (Isaiah). YHWH is salvation. A manifestation of the divine presence through a named vessel, commissioned in the throne room by the one whose glory he was seeing, bearing the prophet’s name that matched the Messiah’s name, speaking in the first person the words that the full appearing would later claim as his own, describing the suffering servant from the inside because the voice was the servant’s own voice, and seeing to the end of the new creation that the completed reign would produce.
Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Not then. Not later. Today. The presence that had spoken through Yeshayahu was standing in the synagogue, scroll in hand, announcing that the partial manifestation had given way to the full appearing.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams