When I noticed Isa 49:7 was not listed in this brother’s fine work charting Messiah’s rejection, particularly by His own nation (see 1st link above), I immediately suspected that it has suffered the same fate in translation as Isa 49:5. I knew it would only take a slight pluralizing of the singular, or some such adroit, ever so slight (perhaps even technically permissible) alteration, to obscure entirely the import and implication, so not surprised…

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Love believes and hopes all things. I sometimes think that the best tact to take is to present our case, not with caustic or strident tones of dogmatism, but a kind of, “what would you have me do with this evidence from the scripture?” “How would you better harmonize these texts?” In the end, there is only one finally decisive question; it is, “What saith the Scripture?” To quote a dear friend, “What does the text SAYYYY?!” By the way, that friend, whom you may know, Paul Volk, has very recently written the best little booklet on this subject that I have personally ever seen. It is titled, “What Do You Mean By That?: A Brief Guide to Interpreting Scripture.” I wish it had been the first book on that subject that I read after my salvation. It would have saved me a lot of grief. […]

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[…] I would like to commend to you the somewhat less famed, but equally valuable devotional by C.H. Spurgeon, “Morning and Evening,” as also his magisterial “The Treasury of David,” a devotional commentary on the Psalms.

Chambers was saved under Spurgeon’s preaching. For years, I used to tell Art, “Chambers ought ye to have done, but not to leave Spurgeon undone.” When once he was introduced to Spurgeon’s writings, it was love at first bite. After that, at many a morning prayer time, something from Spurgeon had stirred a new exhortation. He used to always speak of his envy of Spurgeon’s unique grasp and ability to communicate the “sweetness” of Jesus. […]

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