More of Handel’s Messiah comes from Isaiah than from any other book — and the passages chosen are not the ones a musician would pick. They are the ones a theologian would.
A study in Isaiah · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read
Table of Contents
What Messiah Actually Is
One fact about Messiah is worth having before anything else, because most people who love it do not know it: every word of it is Scripture. There is no paraphrase, no invented dialogue, no poet’s expansion. That is not how oratorios were written. It is not how Handel’s other oratorios were written.
The words were selected by Charles Jennens, a devout Anglican layman, who assembled the libretto from the King James Bible and the Coverdale Psalter of the Prayer Book and sent it to Handel. Handel set the whole of it to music in about three weeks in the late summer of 1741.
So what an audience hears is not a composer’s meditation on Scripture. It is Scripture, arranged — a chain of passages from across both Testaments, laid end to end so that they tell one story. And the man doing the arranging was making a theological argument, not a musical one.
Whether the hand of God was on that selection is a judgment each reader will make. What can be shown, and is worth showing, is which passages were chosen — because the choice is remarkable.
How Much Of It Is Isaiah
Isaiah supplies more of Messiah than any other book of the Bible, and it carries the opening of the work almost single-handed:
- Isaiah 40:1-5 — Comfort ye my people; Every valley shall be exalted; And the glory of the LORD
- Isaiah 7:14 — Behold, a virgin shall conceive
- Isaiah 40:9 and 60:1-3 — O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion; For behold, darkness shall cover the earth
- Isaiah 9:2, 9:6 — The people that walked in darkness; For unto us a Child is born
- Isaiah 35:5-6 — Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened
- Isaiah 40:11 — He shall feed His flock like a shepherd
- Isaiah 53:3 with 50:6 — He was despised
- Isaiah 53:4-6, 53:8 — Surely He hath borne our griefs; And with His stripes we are healed; All we like sheep; He was cut off
Seven chapters — 7, 9, 35, 40, 50, 53 and 60 — and between them they give the oratorio its beginning, its Christmas, and the whole of its passion.
Part One: Comfort, And A Child
Notice where the work begins. Not at Bethlehem. Not at creation. At a word spoken to exiles:
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.”
Isaiah 40:1, 2
The first thing the audience hears is not a demand or a warning. It is pardon announced as an accomplished fact — the warfare finished, the iniquity already dealt with — spoken to people still sitting in the consequences of their sin.
Then the road is leveled for a coming King, and the reason given is startling: and the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. Not the glory of Israel. Not a national restoration. The glory of God, seen by everyone at once.
And then the child, with the four names that have kept theologians busy for two thousand years:
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
Isaiah 9:6
The mighty God. Sung, every December, in churches and concert halls that would struggle to say it in a sermon. Handel’s setting throws that phrase into the loudest place in the chorus, and a hall full of people declares the full divinity of the child in the manger without anyone announcing that a doctrine has just been asserted.
That is worth pausing on, because it is precisely the point that a good part of nineteenth-century Adventism had to recover the hard way — a Saviour who is God by nature and not by appointment. Isaiah said it in one line, seven hundred years early, and Jennens put it where nobody could miss it.
Part Two: The Price
Part Two opens with John’s Behold the Lamb of God and then hands the story straight back to Isaiah for the whole of the passion. There is no Gospel narrative of the crucifixion in Messiah at all. No trial, no nails, no darkness at noon, no words from the cross.
The crucifixion is told entirely through a prophecy written centuries before it happened.
“Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.”
Isaiah 53:4, 5
That is not a description of a death. It is an explanation of one — and every clause is substitutionary. Our griefs, borne by Him. Our transgressions, the cause of His wounds. The chastisement that produces our peace, laid on Him. The stripes are His and the healing is ours.
And then the verse that puts the hearer inside the sentence:
“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Isaiah 53:6
Handel sets the first half of that verse as a scamper — voices running off in every direction, each going its own way, and the effect is almost comic until the music stops dead and the last clause lands in slow, heavy chords. And the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. The joke ends. Somebody pays.
Whatever one concludes about how the libretto was assembled, the theology of that sequence is exact, and it is Isaiah’s, not Jennens’s.
Does It Carry Our Distinctive Truths?
Here an honest answer has to be given carefully, because it is easy to claim too much for a work one loves.
Messiah is not a catalogue of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine, and it was never meant to be. It is sung by Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Anglicans and unbelievers, and one reason it can be is that most of what it contains is ground the whole Christian world holds in common: the incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection of Christ, His ascension and His return.
But there is one place where it plants its flag on ground much of Christendom has quietly left, and it happens to be the moment everyone remembers.
The Trumpet, And Where Our Hope Is Placed
“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
1 Corinthians 15:52
Part Three is built on that verse, and on the one before it — since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead — and it ends in O death, where is thy sting?
Ask the obvious question. If the righteous dead are already awake and rejoicing in glory, what is the trumpet for? What is raised, and why would it be described as the moment of victory over death, if death had already been comprehensively defeated at every believer’s bedside?
The whole architecture of Part Three puts the believer’s hope at the resurrection, not at the moment of dying. The dead are dead; the trumpet sounds; the dead are raised; then death is swallowed up. That is the sequence Paul gives and the sequence Jennens set, and it is the sequence a great many hymns and funeral sermons now quietly reverse.
So the instinct that Messiah stands with us on something real is right — and this is the something. Not because the work argues for a doctrine, but because it takes the apostle’s language at face value and lets the shape of it stand.
What Is Not There
Fairness requires the other half of the ledger, and it is the more interesting half.
Messiah contains nothing on the Sabbath. Nothing on the sanctuary or the work of our High Priest within it. Nothing on the judgment hour, nothing on the three angels’ messages, nothing on the health message. Those are the doctrines that actually distinguish this movement, and Jennens did not select a line of them.
That is not a criticism of the work. It is a caution against overclaiming for it — and it opens onto something better.
The Sabbath is not missing from Isaiah. It is only missing from Handel.
“If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable … Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD.”
Isaiah 58:13, 14
The same prophet who gave the oratorio its comfort, its Christmas and its cross also wrote that — and chapters 56 and 58 carry it further than most of Scripture does. A selection made for an English concert hall in 1741 was never going to include it. The book itself does.
Why This Matters For Reading Isaiah
Sixty-six chapters is a great deal of prophet, and most readers who begin at chapter 1 do not arrive at chapter 66. Messiah is a way in, because it has already done the hardest part of the work: it shows that these passages belong together, and that the one they are about is Christ.
Three things to carry into the rest of the book.
- Isaiah is a gospel, not only a warning. The oratorio opens at chapter 40 with pardon already accomplished, and that is the book’s own center of gravity as much as the judgment oracles are.
- The Servant is a person, and He is God. The mighty God in chapter 9 and the one wounded for our transgressions in chapter 53 are the same figure. Any reading that separates them has lost the book.
- What Handel left out is where Isaiah gets distinctive. The Sabbath, the new heavens and new earth, the judgment on the nations — the chapters no concert hall sings are the chapters that most reward the reading.
And if you have ever stood for the Hallelujah chorus without knowing why people stand, the words are worth reading rather than hearing: the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. It is not a Christmas sentiment. It is the seventh trumpet of Revelation, and it has not sounded yet.
