There’s been 187 General Conferences. Latter Day Saints are always eager to receive guidance and encouragement from Church leaders at this time. We were interested in the frequency of Isaiah references throughout the history of General Conference. Can you guess the top referenced Isaiah verses? Here’s a rundown of what we found:
Top 3 Quoted Isaiah Verses
Top 10 Quoted Isaiah Verses
Are you surprised by the results? Do you have a favorite Isaiah verse that has been quoted in conference?
The writings of Isaiah are quoted extensively in other scripture more often than any other prophet. There are sixty-six chapters in the book of Isaiah, making a total of 1,292 verses. The prophets in the Book of Mormon quoted 414 of those verses (32 percent of the book of Isaiah). They paraphrased at least another 34 verses (3 percent). The Nephite prophets considered Isaiah’s writings to be of such great worth that they put approximately 35 percent of the book of Isaiah in the valuable space they had on the plates. The writers of the New Testament had a similar respect for Isaiah’s teachings and prophecies. In the New Testament, Isaiah is quoted at least fifty-seven times.
In latter-day revelation, there is a similar emphasis on the words of Isaiah. The Doctrine and Covenants makes approximately one hundred references to Isaiah’s writings by quoting, paraphrasing, or interpreting his teachings
Isaiah was married and had at least two sons (see Isaiah 7:3; 8:1–3). In Isaiah 8:3 he refers to his wife as “the prophetess.” The expression “prophetess” is used here only to designate the prophet’s wife, not a prophetic office or gift (see Young, Book of Isaiah, 1:303).
Isaiah; name means “the Lord is salvation” and this idea is reflected in his writings. His sons were both given prophetic names to dramatize Isaiah’s message. His first son, Shear-jashub (Isaiah 7:3), name means “the remnant shall return” (Isaiah 7:3a) and the second, Maher-shalal-hash-baz, name means “to speed to the spoil, he hasteneth the prey.” (Isaiah 8:1). All three names convey a message to the people in Judah so that whenever anyone saw or heard Isaiah and his sons, they were given a message through those names, as a sign or witness against the people.
Shear-jashub accompanied his father in visiting the king.
Visualizing Isaiah is a full-color book, the kind you keep on a coffee table to interest your guests. Anyone who picks it up will enjoy browsing the pages, but if someone is serious and pauses on a page, they will see Parry has offered “explanations that shed light on the sometimes complex, always powerful words of Isaiah.”
The author, Donald W. Parry, is an expert on Isaiah and Old Testament texts. Naturally, his knowledge of ancient scriptures complements the book’s gorgeous photographs, good maps, and charts that help illustrate many verses from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament.
GoodReads offers this description: “The book of Isaiah is filled with rich symbolism. Isaiah drew on life around him to illustrate with words the mission of Jesus Christ, the restoration of the gospel, the rewards of the righteous, the fate of the wicked, and prophecies for both modern and ancient times. Readers better grasp this prophet’s writings by understanding and visualizing the symbols he used.
“The book’s pictures capture familiar phrases: a woman weaves scarlet wool, and eagle mounts up and soars through the sky, a tender plant grows out of dry ground. These well-known passages are infused with life through stunning images and enlightening commentary.”
My copy is right here on my desk waiting for my next visitor. Drop by and take a look if you like.
Kelsey Wilding: Today, we get to spend some time with David Ridges, and we get to talk a little bit about Isaiah. Hi David, welcome. David Ridges: How are you, Kelsey? Kelsey Wilding: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? David Ridges: Well, I’m Dave Ridges. I grew up in Southern Nevada.We moved to North Salt Lake when I was in fifth grade. I built my first little motorized car when I was in sixth grade. My Dad helped me, I loved mechanical things. From North Salt Lake, I left on my mission to Austria, went to the Swiss Austrian mission for two and a half years. They
allowed time to learn languages, at that time. Kelsey Wilding: What language did you speak? David Ridges: I spoke German, and loved it, returned home, continued at the University of Utah, met my wife-to- be when I was running a printing press, for the bureau of business and economic research. The secretary set it up and I loved it, so I met her, and we were married in the Salt Lake Temple. I continued my education, I worked as a lumberjack for two seasons in Wyoming. We loved it. We took our little family of two little, cute little kids up there, and was hired in East Carbon to teach seminary in East Carbon, where the previous seminary teacher had basically been run out of town and that was really a sad situation, but I just came down from the level and left my chainsaw idling. We really had a good time with the kids. One of the big guys cracked one of my ribs and he felt so bad that he was my protector from that time on, and we had a very good experience teaching there in East Carbon. And then, moved up to Springville to work on my master’s degree at BYU. Since then I taught seminary and Institute for thirty-five years. I wrote the curriculum for other seminaries in institutes and also for the Sunday School in the Church. And tell me what else do you want to know?
After seeing our billboards, you probably have some questions.
Like, who are these people? What are they trying to do? Why are they launching a billboard campaign on September 23rd along I-15 in Salt Lake and Utah County? How do they hope to accomplish their purpose? And most important, so what?
Who is SearchIsaiah.org?
Like you, we also have a lot of questions. We are a group of writers, artists, videographers, social media marketers, and entrepreneurs with the vision to help members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints search the book of Isaiah.
But it’s not about us. It’s about all of us. It’s honestly about Isaiah; probably the hardest book to understand in all of scripture.
None of us are scholars with any real background in academics, but we deeply value learning. We are reaching out for help from those who have invested their life in studying this complex book. We are looking for truth, and we don’t have a lot of time. None of us do, we are all busy.
We aren’t selling anything, at least nothing yet. But we do hope a lot of books from these authors and scholars get sold. (We hope to help this along a bit.) We aren’t in this for money, in fact, any profits from our work will go right back into this cause, and others.
One of the first questions we asked was, is it just us, or are there a lot of natural disasters and crazy things happening lately? And sorry to tell you, we aren’t evangelicals calling the LDS people to repentance, or doomsday people out on the fringe, far from it. We are probably on the edge though, after all, look at the lengths we went just to start this conversation with you. We are normal folks from here or right around here. You will laugh when you finally figure out who we are.
The most important who is you. We want feedback, questions, and ideas.
What is SearchIsaiah.org?
We hope the name of the website explains it best. We want you to join us as we search Isaiah for answers together.
Let’s mention some ground rules. We need to be civil and unified as we search for truth. That may be wishful thinking. The trolls and lurkers may swarm us, that’s ok. But here’s the deal, you need to come out from under your bridge and be who you are. Identify yourself in the light of day. Engage in real conversation. Be thoughtful. Let us all try to be our better selves.
We hope to see into the future, decipher what’s happening today, and understand the past.
In fact, that’s probably the first key to Isaiah.
He seemed to have an amazing knack for choosing types and shadows from his day, to prophecy about our day. The assumption is what happened back then is a pattern of what happens now, to us. Now that’s compelling.
What if the whole book of Isaiah is written just for us? What if it was coded and hidden in a way to survive for thousands of years, perfectly intact, for this exact time, this very day.
When is SearchIsaiah.org launching?
So why launch on September 23rd?
Have you googled it? It’s all over the web… how the constellation Virgo is going through labor pains to deliver a man-child, and then some crazy things start happening. This same configuration amongst the stars hasn’t happened for thousands of years.
Many on the web say it aligns exactly with Revelations 12, verses 1 and 2. Joseph Smith upped the ante, even changed the order a bit, moved verse 5 up to verse 3 and combined some things. But, you say, that’s Revelation, we are talking Isaiah. We thought so too.
Does God speak to us through the alignment and rotation of planets and stars put in place millions or thousands of years ago? The odds of that thought are so enormous it blows circuits in our brain. But if there’s a God… it’s easy. It’s what He does. If there isn’t a God, it’s crazy even to think.
Why SearchIsaiah.org?
In 2 Nephi Chapter 14, Nephi says he saw our day, the last days, just like John the Revelator saw. He seemed almost desperate to tell us everything he could as plain as he could… to warn us. But he was forbidden to tell us more.
So what did he do?
He quoted Isaiah. Tons of Isaiah. And so did his brother Jacob.
But do you want to know the real reason we are doing this?
Christ himself said that we ought to search these things. In fact, he said in 3 Nephi 23:1, that it is a commandment for us to search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah.
We can’t find that about any other book… anywhere. It must be important.
Full Disclosure: If it isn’t obvious, Jesus Christ matters to us. What He says matters to us.
Next question.
How are we promoting SearchIsaiah.org?
We didn’t want to be hypocrites, so we have been searching pretty diligently ourselves.
And we tested what to put on our billboards. Marketers do that. How? With Facebook. We tested what we said, what colors to use, what fonts… you get the picture. Results went up 400%.
We tested humor; jokes about Isaiah. Surprisingly, they didn’t work so well. We quickly figured out Isaiah isn’t very funny… or fun. We hope to change that.
Does Isaiah have answers that matter? We sure think so. Join us and let’s find out together.
Naturally, there are many resources out there to help us study, but I have chosen to start simple this year with the “Introduction to Isaiah,”Old Testament Study Guide for Home-Study Seminary Students lesson plans. However, I will add some things from the Old Testament Seminary Teacher Manual too, and of course, other discoveries from the commentaries I have been reading.
What this means, is that in the next 13 weeks you can read and study Isaiah with me, but studying it diligently like the Lord commanded, is up to you. Naturally, if you missed the January start date, you could start this anytime and be though Isaiah in just 90 days, or at least that is our goal; five or so chapters a week for the next three months.
Remember this study outline is taken from the Old Testament Study Guide for Home-Study Seminary Students, but my findings from studying this will show up in my Discover Isaiah column of this blog, just not in the Isaiah Studies section.
Swords into ploughshares. Spears into pruning hooks. Three thousand-odd years ago, when civilization was rough and passions raw, an extraordinary visionary saw peace dawning. His words, recorded in the Biblical book of Isaiah, transcend religious denomination and national affiliation. They belong to all mankind: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift sword against nation. … The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”
If prophecy implies prediction, Isaiah’s has fared badly. The swords are sharper than ever. In March, as nations struggled to negotiate a global treaty to ban the deadliest of them, Nikki Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, snapped, “Is there anyone who thinks that North Korea would ban nuclear weapons?”
Probably there is no one who thinks that. Still, the treaty was negotiated and adopted in July. In October, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a coalition of nongovernmental organizations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
…Onstage in Oslo with Beatrice Fihn was ICAN activist and Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow. She shared harrowing memories: “Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people, they were bleeding, burned, blackened and swollen. … Some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their intestines hanging out.”
Of nuclear weapons, she said, “These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.” Of the adoption of the treaty banning them, she said, “Having witnessed humanity at its worst, I witnessed, that day (on which the treaty was adopted) humanity at its best.”
Swords into ploughshares. Would a nuclear-free world be a peaceful world? One would have to ignore a vast, deadly, global, non-nuclear arsenal to presume it would.
Author: Michael Hoffman is a fiction and nonfiction writer who has lived in Hokkaido by the sea almost as long as he can remember. He has been contributing regularly to The Japan Times for 10 years. His latest novel is “The Naked Ear” (VBW/Blackcover Books, 2012).
This morning Daniel Peterson posted this in part in the Deseret News Faith Section:
“Early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were saturated with the whole Bible, not merely the New Testament, which is why Utah is studded with place names like Zion, Moab, Enoch, Eden, Ephraim, Salem and Mount Nebo. Early Mormon history cannot be fully understood apart from the Old Testament — nor even, specifically, apart from the book of Isaiah, which is cited throughout the Doctrine and Covenants.
“Nor can the Book of Mormon be understood without the Hebrew Bible. When Lehi sent his sons to fetch the brass plates of Laban, putting their lives at risk in doing so, he was essentially in quest of a text of the Old Testament (see 1 Nephi 3-5). This was the only scripture known to the first Nephites. Isaiah is the prophet whom they quote the most in their own writings.
“The Hebrew Bible was the only scripture of the first Old World Christians, too. The Psalms were their first hymnal. The New Testament cites Isaiah many times, and Matthew’s gospel repeatedly seeks to show how Jesus — a descendant of David — fulfills the predictions of Israel’s prophets. When Jesus comments of his critics that they study the scriptures diligently because, in them, they think they have eternal life (John 5:39), he is plainly referring to the Old Testament. The scriptures he says, ‘are they which testify of me.’”
David J. Ridges, a returned missionary from the Swiss/Austrian mission, had not planned to work for the Church Education System (CES), he was going to teach German.
Early in life he was very busy, what with working at a printing press, completing his degree in German and minor in physics at the University of Utah, taking care of a young family, and planning his German student-teaching classes at Kearns High School. That summer to make ends meet, he took his family to Wyoming, where he was a lumberjack.
Just before the school year started, CES offered him a concurrent student-teaching job at Kearns High School along with his one teaching German. But it was in the seminary classroom he fell in love with “teaching kids and helping them with ah-ha moments in the scriptures.” However, he reminded us that every teacher has at least one disruptive student.
In David’s case, he challenged the rowdy teen to best of ten games in ping-pong. David said that 49 games later he might have won one game of the fifty they played. Even so, this forged a relationship with that boy. It helped him to understand his home life and challenges. And, it was in that seminary classroom he learned early how to relate to kids and touch souls.
That next year, of 21 CES applicants, he was one of three chosen to work for the Church, but not before another year of lumberjacking. Little did he know that that job would make him “cool” to the kids in East Carbon, his first seminary assignment.
With just 54 students, CES could barely justify a teacher and he was about to discover that the students had “run off” the previous two teachers in short order. His troublemaker there was a big guy who had broken two front teeth in a challenge to walk through the drywall in a motel’s walls; he missed and hit a stud. For this kid, chess won him over to David, but not without a few losses again.
Their bond, however, was forged roughhousing, which led to David breaking a rib. After that, the student was his vigilant protector. The inverse was true too as David discovered the teen’s problems were centered in his inability to read and write. “The kid was smart at chess and memorized all the right answers from Church history, but could not read test papers!” David took the time to give him tests orally and the youth earned his first A ever, in fact, David said, “It was an A+. Not only did he know the answers, but he knew all the details of Chruch History too.” So began his 35-year career with CES.
From East Carbon to Seminary Principal Price, and to BYU for three years to earn a master’s degree. As a Masters, his career took a sharp turn writing curriculum for the Church in Seminary and Sunday School, all the wondering about Isaiah.
3 Nephi 23:1 1AND now, behold, I say unto you, that ye ought to search these things. Yea, a commandment I give unto you that ye search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah.
“Knowing what Isaiah can do for us is one thing, but for many members of the Church, understanding the writings of Isaiah is quite another thing. Many years ago when I first remember reading 3 Nephi 23:1, I thought to myself, ‘If the Savior says that the words of Isaiah are great, then there must be something wrong with me because I don’t understand most of them. Perhaps I am not spiritual enough, or the Holy Ghost can’t work with me, or whatever.’ At any rate, it was a concern to me that I found Isaiah so difficult to understand.
Searching Isaiah
“Several years later, I attended a summer class for seminary and institute of religion teachers that was being taught by Brother Ellis Rasmussen of the BYU religion department. With Brother Rasmussen’s first words, Isaiah came alive for me. As I recall, he quoted the first line of Isaiah 53:1 where Isaiah says, ‘Who hath believed our report?’ And then he explained that it is just another way of saying, ‘Who believes us prophets anyway?’ Just like that, the key for understanding Isaiah was turned for me. It was possible to understand it! I listened with rapt attention and made many tiny, short notes in my scriptures during Brother Rasmussen’s classes.”
That was the beginning of ten-year effort on his part to “search Isaiah diligently” using Great are the Words of Isaiah by Monte Nyman and Victor Ludlow’s Isaiah Prophet, Seer, and Poet. Soon he was teaching Isaiah at BYU’s education week and in Institute classes.
In one of those honors Institue classes students, were encouraged to “micro scrunch” their notes, as he described it, into their scriptures. They took great pride in those notes, however, when they had to miss a class there was a gap in those notes. This bothered the students enough, they prevailed on him to post his notes online so those absent could “make-up” their notes. Little did he know, that was the birth of what would become the first of his 33 publications.
Here is an example of his notes from Isaiah 1:3
3 he ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib [manger]: but Israel doth not know [know God], my people doth not consider [think seriously, Israel—animals are wiser than you are!].
A friend saw his typed up pages for missing students and prevailed on him to write Isaiah Made Easier. That friend even financed the first printing, but it was not long before Cedar Fort Publishing printed a second release of, Isaiah Made Easier. At 62 he retired from CES and began publishing his other class notes, which became the 33 books mentioned above; lucky for him, his wife enjoys his writing and editing it.
In addition to writing books, he has written curriculum for Sunday School and served a second mission for CES senior missionary assignments.
Isaiah Scholar Skim
Education
Bachelor in German / minor physics from BYU, but most undergradute work was at the U of U.
Masters from Brigham Young University in educational psychology with a minor in Church history.
60 hours post masters work
Sparked focus on Isaiah
I knew the basics but wanted to be more confident to teach seminary. That summer class for seminary and institute of religion teachers, taught by Brother Ellis Rasmussen. This is where Isaiah came alive for me. His quote of Isaiah 53:1 was the key for me understanding Isaiah; I knew it was possible to understand it!
Isaiah in one sentence
Most people have a cultural aversion to Isaiah after coming to it in 1 Nephi, but we are commanded to read it.
Memorable Teaching Experiences
I love helping students have an ah-ha moment when I can open a concept for them. Things like though your sins are scarlet and colorfast, they can be white as snow through the atonement of Jesus Christ; though wool from a sheep is dirty, with repeated washing, combing and working into yarn, a beautiful white garment will result, that’s how repentance works, it takes work but can make you clean.
Today, in their regular column, Central NY Living, posted this:
Rev. Brian E. Konkol, Ph. D.
“The role of a prophet is to speak honestly and openly about the probable consequences of contemporary actions. Whether it involves personal behaviors or public priorities, embracing a prophetic witness allows us to engage with the world as it is and collectively seek what it ought to be. Along these lines, the 58th chapter of the Book of Isaiah reminds us that if we “satisfy the needs of the oppressed,” then “light will rise in the darkness”.
“Religious faith is indeed personal, but it is by no means private, as it has a public bearing surrounding our pursuit of common ground for the sake of a common good. And so, in the response to the vast opportunities we each receive, we have a responsibility to serve as present-day prophets, so that our communities of faith are not only concerned with life after death, but also life after birth.
The Rev. Brian E. Konkol, Ph.D., serves as Dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University, where he guides, nurtures and enhances religious, spiritual, and ethical life.
This morning Daniel Peterson posted this in part in the Deseret News Faith Section:
