Isaiah 48:16-17
16 "Come near to Me, hear this: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; From the time that it was, I was there. And now the Lord GOD and His Spirit Have sent Me."
17 Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, The Holy One of Israel: "I am the LORD your God,
Amen Jesus! You are my God.
Isaiah 48:16
Is. 48:16 - Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now
the Lord G
OD [Jehovah], and his spirit, hath sent
me. -
KJV.
Commenting on this scripture some trinitarians will say: “The speaker of Is. 48:16 is Jehovah as identified by context in the first part of the verse and as shown by his identification in verse 17 where he continues to speak. But notice that Jehovah, who is speaking, says: ‘The Lord G
OD [Jehovah] ... hath sent
me.’ Therefore there must be at least two persons who are Jehovah!”
The answer to such “proof” is obvious: “speaker confusion.” Isaiah, like most other Bible writers, often interspersed the conversation of one person with statements by others and often doesn’t identify the new speakers. Very often they appear to be comments by Isaiah himself.
That this is very likely the case here is shown, not only by context, but by these modern trinitarian Bible translations: The
RSV and the
NIV Bibles show by quotation marks and indenting that
Isaiah himself said all the words (or the final comment) in Is. 48:16.
Quotation marks in
NLT, ESV, WEB; TEV, Holman Christian Standard Bible, New Century Version, and
THE MESSAGE also show the last part of Is. 48:16 to be a new speaker.
The
NAB also indicates a new speaker there, and, in the St. Joseph edition of the
NAB, a footnote for Is. 48:16 tells us that the final statement was made by
Cyrus! And the very trinitarian
Holy Bible:
Easy-
to-
Read Version, World Bible Translation Center, 1992, comes right out and says at Is. 48:16,
“ ‘Come here and listen to me! ... from the beginning, I spoke clearly, so that people could know what I said.’ Then
Isaiah said, ‘Now the Lord [Jehovah] my master sends me and his Spirit to tell you these things.’ ”
The New English Bible (
NEB),
The Revised English Bible (
REB), and the Bible translation by Dr. James Moffatt (
Mo) consider the last statement of Is. 48:16 to be spurious and leave it out of their translations entirely.
Certainly these trinitarian translations would have rendered this scripture (and punctuated it accordingly) to show a
two-Jehovah meaning (or given such an alternate rendering in the footnotes)
if their trinitarian translators had thought there was even the slightest justification for such an interpretation! (Also analyze Jer. 51:19 -
Jacob is the former of all things - Jehovah of hosts is his name, according to this trinitarian-type "speaker confusion" reasoning!)
Some notes by trinitarians on this scripture:
"The
prophet himself, as a type of the great prophet, asserts his own commission to deliver this message: Now the Lord God (the same that spoke from the beginning and did not speak in secret) has by his Spirit sent me, v. 16." -
Matthew Henry Complete Commentary on the Whole Bible, Isaiah Chapter 48 verse 16.
.............................................
"And, like almost every other prophecy of Christ in the Old Testament, it is subject to
all kinds of interpretations. Calvin and many other scholars have seen it as a prophecy of the
sending of Isaiah. Barnes agreed with this, stating that, 'The scope of the passage demands, it seems to me, that it should be referred to the prophet
Isaiah.'
….
"Jamieson, noting that
Isaiah, not Christ, is the author of the passage, stated that
, 'Isaiah here speaks not in his own person so much as in that of the Messiah, to whom alone, in the fullest sense, the words apply.'" -
Coffman Commentaries on the Old and New Testament, Is. 48:16.
