Hello my friends welcome to another episode of Follow Him. My name's Hank Smith. I'm here with my Isaiah loving co-host. John by. John, I've heard it around that you love Isaiah, is that true?

I do love Isaiah Hank and maybe it's because I've had to put some time into it when I had the

opportunity to teach the two most frightening things were

the Isaiah chapters and the war chapters but with some time yeah I feel better about it

same way with me John it took some time. But as I worked through it, verse by verse,

eventually a light came on and it became beautiful to me.

Speaking of Isaiah expertise, John, We are joined by a Bible scholar. His name is

Dr. Sean Hopkins. He's a good friend of ours. Sean, what are we looking forward to

today?

As we all know, Nephi quotes a large chunk of Isaiah.

Many feel, oh, we are to the Isaiah chapters,

I will slog my way through.

And I actually think people tend to get, I know the one verse that makes sense to me and I can find that

verse in the chapter but let me sort of muddle my way through and they get really

excited about that one verse and then muddle my way through again until the next

verse and one of the things I like to say to my students is Isaiah does not

reward lazy reading and it doesn't reward listening to the scriptures at two or three times speed.

It's not narrative this is prophetic poetry and for those of you who never liked poetry

you're gonna have to learn to love

digging into symbolism, digging into beautiful language, and it will reward you over and over and over again if you can take some time.

You're not just gonna zoom your way through it.

There's beauty, throughout enough beauty for an entire lifetime and beyond in Isaiah.

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