Isaiah class 4

Thoughts from the fourth of ten classes, Thursday, October 29, 2009

The most important lesson I took from this evening's class with Avraham Gileadi was that we have to fit all scriptures together, not just focus on one passage in isolation. Otherwise we will get into trouble and wander off course. We have to connect all the dots, put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and rely on the safety that comes from the scriptures' own internal checks and balances.

Among all holy writ, the book of Isaiah is remarkable in its exquisite use of literary devices and structure to ensure that every truth is presented in more than one way in more than one place, often in multiple ways, to keep us from getting off base. There is hardly a thing in Isaiah that does not repeat itself somewhere else. The book has its own internal checks and balances.

The scriptures all cohere. There are not contradictions. Apparent contradictions are there to weed out the insincere or lazy who really don't want to invest the effort, time, and energy to ferret out the truth. (He didn't say this, but I suppose there could be contradictions resulting from faulty transmission of the original text.)