Isaiah is prolific in his writings about the Messiah. However, his prophecies are often misunderstood because he does not always clarify the time period when the prophecy will be fulfilled. In this verse we see a classic example. The phrases “unto us a son is given” and “the government shall be upon his shoulder” are juxtaposed as if they were temporally related. In reality, the Savior was not to control the government of the earth or his people until the Second Coming. That is not made clear in Isaiah’s prophecies. No wonder all the Jews of Christ’s day expected him to free them from Roman authority. What else were they to think given Isaiah’s writings?
Isaiah would have been more plain and simple with the Jews if they were righteous enough to deserve such plainness. Instead they sought for things which are hard to understand. Isaiah accommodated them. ’But behold, the Jews were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand’ (Jacob 4:14).
That Jesus Christ will indeed rule both spiritually and politically is without question. This political authority is his right by birth. He descended from the royal line of David. But he did not seek political reign during his mortal ministry, ’My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence’ (Jn 18:36). Although he prayed that his father’s kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven, that prayer will only be answered when he comes on earth to reign during the Millenium.
’And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.’ (Dan 7:14)
’The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.’ (Rev 11:15)
’For the Lord shall be in their midst, and his glory shall be upon them, and he will be their king and their lawgiver.’ (DC 45:59)
“The fact that the government would eventually be upon his shoulders affirms what all the world will one day acknowledge—that he is Lord of lords and King of kings and will one day rule over the earth and his Church in person….All can take comfort from the fact that because the government—and the burdens thereof—will be upon his shoulders, they will be lifted in great measure from our own. This is yet another reference in Isaiah to the Atonement, the bearing away of our sins (or at very least in this reference, our temporal burdens) on the shoulders of Christ.” (Christ and the New Covenant, 80-81 as taken from Commentaries on Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, ed. by K. Douglas Bassett, [American Fork, UT: Covenant Publishing Co., 2003], 150)