and no, that’s not a misspelling; British MEP Daniel Hannan definitely broke out the rhetorical cannons for this one, and his aim was unerring. The Aged P called this a “very polite and beautifully enunciated assassination,” and he’s right; to his description I would only add “devastating,” because it’s that, too. Here in the U.S., Republicans like Aaron Schock ought to be taking notes, because most of what MEP Hannan said to PM Gordon Brown could be said with equal point to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Harry Reid, and others in the Obama/Pelosi administration.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
We should have seen Sarah Palin coming
When I started this blog, I lived in a small town in the Colorado Rockies—and when I say “small,” I mean it; to give you an idea, there are more students in my oldest daughter’s new elementary school than there are people living in Grand Lake. (Full-time, anyway.) If you’ve never lived in a small town in the mountains, you need to understand that it’s a different world up there. You might have the idea that mountain towns are full of colorful characters, and it’s true; they also tend to be fiercely independent, even more fiercely stubborn, and not always so good at compromising and playing nice with others. As I’ve written before, the downside of that is that you tend to get communities that range from mildly dysfunctional to complete trainwreck towns like Leadville was (and maybe still is, for all I know).I’m not just going on my own experience in saying this, either; during my five years up there, I compared notes fairly frequently with other mountain pastors, because we were all dealing with similar issues that our flatlander colleagues just didn’t understand. All our communities were different, to be sure, but we shared common root issues and struggles. Our town made the headlines twice during my five years there: once when one of our residents sought redress for his grievances against the county’s commercial hub in the cockpit of the 60-ton Komatsu D355 bulldozer that he’d turned into a 75-ton tank, and once when our church’s oldest and most-beloved member died of an unprovoked attack by a rogue bull moose, something which really isn’t normal moose behavior. None of my colleagues had anything quite that out of the ordinary happen, but they all had some pretty strange stories of their own; that’s just how it is in the mountains. Or as my organist from Colorado would say, that’s life in a tomato can.All of this is the reason why I found myself starting to write in an e-mail yesterday, “If there’s a Patrick Henry left in this country, he lives somewhere in the Rockies”; but as I wrote that, I suddenly remembered how many of our most characteristic people—the sort of folks who were still climbing fourteeners in their eighties and musing that when they died, they’d have their bodies autoclaved and set out to fertilize the roses—spent significant time in Alaska every year, and/or had lived there in the past and loved it. It occurred to me that outside of Anchorage and Juneau, the spirit of our little mountain towns, which is the spirit of the old frontier folks who just had to get out from under the conformity of society, is also very much alive and well in Alaska. (Maybe even in Anchorage and Juneau to some degree.)That having occurred to me, I suddenly realized that that said something very important about Gov. Palin. Her emergence was a complete shock to most of the Washington elite—of both parties, which is why she took some heavy hits from many who should have had her back—but it shouldn’t have been; the fact that it was says a lot more about them than it does about her. I don’t say that we should have expected someone as purely gifted as Sarah Palin to appear on the scene, because she’s a once-in-a-generation political talent (yes, I think she’s a level beyond Barack Obama in that respect, for all his evident gifts as a campaigner), but in a more general way, we really should have seen her coming. In particular, the very elites who were so scandalized by her arrival on the landscape should have seen her coming, if they were actually doing their jobs.Why? Well, what is the Republican base looking for? Another Reagan—and by that I don’t just mean a “real conservative.” Newt Gingrich was more conservative than Reagan, and I don’t believe we’re looking for another Newt (or even the return of the first one, though many folks would accept that in a pinch). No, the base is looking for a common-sense, common-folks, common-touch conservative, someone who’s conservative not merely pragmatically or even philosophically but out of an honest respect for and empathy with the “ordinary barbarians” of this nation; we’re looking for someone who understands why Russell Kirk, the great philosopher of American conservatism, lived his entire adult life not in one of the media or academic centers of this country, but in rural Mecosta County, Michigan (the next county south of where my in-laws live)—and who understands that that fact has everything to do with his conservatism. We’re looking for someone whose conservative principles are anchored in the bedrock of this nation, and who understands our conservatism not merely as an intellectual exercise, but out of shared life experience and a common worldview.That, I think, is why George W. Bush won the GOP nomination in 2000, because he projected that—and indeed, he has many of those qualities; he just wasn’t all that conservative, and so he disappointed many. For all the Texas in him, he still had too much of Harvard and D.C. in him, too, and so was too prone to play by the rules of the political elite. It’s telling that the great success of his second term (the surge) came from standing up, not to the mandarins of his own party—some of them, yes, but they were balanced somewhat by John McCain, who’d been arguing for the surge for years—but to the senior leaders of the U.S. military, whom he could approach on very different terms. He could tell the Joint Chiefs to shut up and soldier; he doesn’t seem to have had it in him to do so to the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the White House correspondents, and in that lay much of the malformation of his presidency.The problem is that the qualities the GOP base is seeking aren’t qualities which are rewarded by the political process in most places; in most of this country, to achieve the kind of prominence and to compile the kind of record that are necessary to justify a run for the White House, it’s necessary to compromise those qualities. To get to Washington, you must increasingly become like Washington—that’s just how the political process works across most of this country.The exception to that—the only great exception I can think of—is the remaining frontier communities in the American West; and of those, it may well be that the only one that’s really large enough for anyone to rise to political prominence without extensive exposure to the elite political culture in America is Alaska. I don’t hold our mountain communities up as any sort of ideal—I know well from experience that they’re no Shangri-La—and I’m not going to try to do so for Alaska, either; but if anyone in this society was ever going to rise to political prominence as a true champion of conservative ideals, of the spirit of us “ordinary barbarians,” without being co-opted and corrupted by the spirit and outlook of the political elite, it was going to have to be from someplace like Alaska. We aren’t going to get another Reagan from Massachusetts, or Minnesota, or Arkansas, or Florida; from Alaska, we have a chance. The fact that few in the elite would be likely to take such a person seriously is actually part of the point, since they didn’t take Reagan seriously either; the revolt against elite opinion (which is not, mind you, the same thing as populism, for all that many in the MSM confuse the two) is part of what the base wants, and someone willing to lead it and stick to it is one of the qualifications.All of which is to say, we might not have predicted specifically the remarkable and gifted woman who is governor of Alaska, or that she would arrive on the scene exactly when she did (though as bizarre as the 2008 presidential election was, when would have been a likelier time?), but we should have expected someone to come out of Alaska, and probably fairly soon. The “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” sort of incredulous reaction that we got from so many in the punditocracy was not only unjustified, it was a clear sign of their myopia, that they’re so burrowed in to being insiders that they’re largely incapable of looking out the window to see what’s going on outside. The GOP base wants another Reagan, and won’t be truly happy until it has one; and where else could such a figure come from?Update: Welcome to all of you coming over from C4P and HillBuzz—it’s good to have you drop by. The moose stew should be ready in a bit. If you want to check out a few more of my posts on Gov. Palin, the links post is here.
Thought on worship
I’ve been trying to work this thought into a fully-developed (and fully-coherent) post for several days now, and for one reason and another just haven’t managed it; I still want to do more with it, but for now, I think I’ll just put this out there as best I can at the moment. There is the assumption in most churches, I think—even in many that would deny it consciously, I think it’s still there, unexpressed, at the level of subconscious expectation—that the pastor’s/worship leader’s job is to give people what they want in worship. All our thinking is organized around that, and much of the language we use in describing our worship supports and contributes to that assumption. I think the reason for that is that in the attractional paradigm for church growth, the “worship experience” is the core of the “attractional” part. It seems to me that whatever the message the preacher is selling, be it self-help or social justice or self-realization or what have you, the worship—by which is usually meant the music part of the service—is the bait on the hook. It’s the free weekend in Vegas to get you to come and listen to the pitch for the time-share (if they’re still doing that in the current economy; I’ve had people try to get me to take one of those trips more than once, but never wanted to): the worship is the fun time, and then the preacher gives you the pitch. If the music’s good enough and you like what he’s selling, you come back; but the emotional experience of the worship is definitely the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.This has taught us in the American church to see worship in this way, as what we get out of church in exchange for whatever we’re asked to put in. Even in liturgical churches, people evaluate it that way—does the liturgy comfort me, do I like doing the same thing every week, do I not like doing the same thing every week, does the form help me do x, does the routine bore me, and so on. What we miss is that liturgy is a discipline—and it’s a discipline because worship is a discipline. It’s not about what the liturgy does for us, because it’s not about what worship does for us: it’s about what the liturgy invites us, leads us, calls us, instructs us to do.It’s the discipline of recognizing that we don’t come to worship on our own initiative, but only in response to God’s call; of recognizing, as we praise God for his glory and holiness, that in comparison to him, we don’t look that great, and that no matter how wonderful we may think we are, we are in fact broken messed-up sinners just like everyone else—and need to humbly confess that fact to him, to each other, together. It’s about the discipline of sitting ourselves down in his presence to receive his Word with open ears, open minds, open hearts—not to use it to get what we want, but to accept it and let him tell us what we need. It’s about disciplining our hearts to receive his sacraments in that spirit, and to respond to Word and sacrament by affirming our faith, standing together to pledge our allegiance as a people to the King and Kingdom of Heaven, than which we owe no greater allegiance. It’s about the discipline of intercessory prayer, which is our confession that we aren’t strong enough and great enough to make it all work on our own, and of the offering, which is our confession that we owe God everything, not least gratitude for all that he’s given us. Even receiving the charge and benediction is a discipline: it’s the acceptance of the fact that we are not our own and our lives are not our own, and that what we do and hear and say on Sunday mornings ought to form the lines of everything we do and say and think across the other six and a half days.As we look at the form and content of our worship services, “Is this what I want?” really ought to be the last question on our minds; what we need to ask is, “What is this asking me to do? How is this forming me as a disciple of Christ?” To mangle a line, ask not what your worship service can do for you; ask what you can do for God through your worship service.
Candidate Obama vs. President Obama
C4P calls this NRSC ad “devastating.” They’re right. Barack Obama stands condemned out of his own mouth.
What has Christ to do with politics?
What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians?
—Tertullian, The Prescription Against Heretics, 7
This famous rhetorical question of Tertullian’s has been used in many ways—including, by many skeptics, as a tool with which to bash him in particular and Christians in general as arrogant know-nothings who prefer to stay ignorant. In context, that’s not exactly fair, given the nature of the philosophy he’s rejecting, and the sort of disputations it produced; but the fact remains that most people aren’t satisfied just to wave away all skeptical inquiries and challenges as Tertullian did, declaring,
With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides.
I don’t think we should be satisfied thus. For all that he meant it as a rhetorical question, if we truly believe that all truth is God’s truth and that his common grace is available to all people—which, if we follow Scripture, I think we should—then his question needs to be taken seriously as a question, and addressed accordingly.
The same, I believe, must be said of the relationship between faith and politics. Consider Tertullian’s description of the philosophical art of his day as
the art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh, in its arguments, so productive of contentions—embarrassing even to itself, retracting everything, and really treating of nothing!
That’s as vivid a description of academic disputation now as it ever was—but at least as much, if not more, it’s also a vivid description of our political scene. Looking out at a political landscape in which people do things like try to bankrupt their political opponents with an unending stream of frivolous complaints, Tertullian might well have asked, “What has Calvary to do with D.C.?” And again, though he would undoubtedly have answered “Nothing,” and moved on, we need to stop and consider the question carefully and thoughtfully. What is the proper connection between these two very different things, the life of faith and the life of politics?
This is a problematic question, and while it has ever been thus—this relationship has never been as clear and easy to understand as many people have assumed—the current polarized state of American politics causes us to feel the problem quite keenly. The negativity and the fearmongering are corrosive to the spirit, and the vehemence with which people disagree is wearying. To be sure, neither the nature nor the degree of this problem are unique in American history (just think of the 1860s, when the political divisions in this country were so deep, we wound up going to war over them); what is new, however, is the particular role of religion in our political disputes. In the Civil War, as Lincoln noted, it was true that
both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other
(while in the background echoed St. James’ anguished cry, “This should not be!”). In contemporary America, the situation is very different. In our day, by and large, churchgoers tend to side with one party, while those who have no use for church vote for the other—and in popular perception, the gap is nearly total (to the frustrated fury of liberal Christians, who understandably don’t like being overlooked).
In light of this, many would say that the problem is that religion is mixed up with politics when it shouldn’t be. In this view, religion only serves to exacerbate our differences and drive the wedges between us deeper, and the only solution is for religious folk to keep their faith in their churches and out of the voting booth. There’s a certain superficial appeal to this suggestion, but a little more thought shows it for the discriminatory idea it really is. Why, after all, should non-religious people be permitted to vote on the basis of their deepest convictions, but religious people be forbidden to do the same? Any attempt to make religion the problem is ultimately an attempt to privilege one mode of thought (the secular) over others, and thus is essentially antithetical to the nature and purpose of the American experiment.
Our current situation is complex, and there is no one step we can take that will make it better; everyone involved in our political system contributes in some way to its problems, and it will take efforts from all sides to improve America’s political health. Those who are Christians need to address the ways in which overtly faith-based political involvement has often been unhelpful; to do this, it will be necessary for us to do a much better job of integrating our theology with our politics.
That might seem counterintuitive to many, who would point to the great many references to the Bible and Christian faith which we already hear from our politicians (and not just Republican politicians, either), but it’s the truth. The problem is that as frequent as such statements may be, most of them aren’t good political theology; while there may be an effort to relate Christian faith to politics, the effort is made in the wrong way and thus does not bear good fruit. Rather than true political theology, what we get instead is mere theologized politics; we get faith used as a tool to advance a political agenda, rather than free to critique and correct that agenda. This is the point at which things go awry.
Another shameless plug
I’ve been working for a while now on a new website for our church, and now we’re all set up and going. I’m sure I’ll be tweaking things for a while, and that others here will be doing so as well, but as a beginning, I’m happy with it. Wander over and check it out, if you would, and if you have any suggestions for improvement, leave a comment on this post—I’m always glad for a good idea or two. And if you happen to be in the area of a Sunday morning, drop in and say hi—we’d love to have you join us.
Joe Biden, Comedian-in-Chief
For all the flap about President Obama stiffing the Gridiron Club and sending Vice President Biden in his stead, I have to think that from an entertainment perspective, Joe Biden was a better choice; it certainly sounds like he put on a good show. Here’s a partial transcript of his remarks, courtesy of the “Playbook” at Politico:
Axelrod really wanted me to do this on teleprompter—but I told him I’m much better when I wing it. . . . I know these evenings run long, so I’m going to be brief. Talk about the audacity of hope. . . . President Obama does send his greetings, though. He can’t be here tonight—because he’s busy getting ready for Easter. [Whisper] He thinks it’s about him. . . .I know that no president has missed his first Gridiron since Grover Cleveland. Of course, President Cleveland really did have better things to do on a Saturday night. When he was in the White House—he was married to a 21 year old woman. . . . I understand these are dark days for the newspaper business, but I hate it when people say that newspapers are obsolete. That’s totally untrue. I know from firsthand experience. I recently got a puppy, and you can’t housebreak a puppy on the Internet.Now let’s see: we have a Republican speaker who was born in Austria, and tonight’s Democratic speaker was born in Canada. Folks, this is Lou Dobbs’ worst nightmare. . . We are now two months into the Obama-Biden administration and the President and I have become extremely close. To give you an idea of how close we are, he told me that next year—maybe, just maybe—he’s going to give me his Blackberry e-mail address. . . . But the Obama Administration really is a good team. I am the experienced veteran. Rahm can be an enforcer. And Tim Geithner is always there when you need to borrow money, no questions asked.You know, I never realized just how much power Dick Cheney had until my first day on the job. I walked into my office, and you know how the outgoing president always leaves the incoming president a note in his desk? I opened my drawer and Dick Cheney had left me Barack Obama’s birth certificate. . . . I now realize that we have to be extra careful when we annunciate new policy ideas to make sure they don’t look like they’re personally motivated. For example, the other day there were a whole bunch of stories about the President’s hair going gray; the next day there’s a story about a Vice President who’s trying to grow new hair, and then the day after that, the two of us come out in favor of stem cell research. That looked bad.I’d like to address some of the things I said: Like when I said that “JOBS” is a three-letter word. I did say that. But I didn’t mean it literally. It’s like how, right now, most people think AIG is a four-letter word. . . . Or when I announced our stimulus package website, I was asked how you get to it: All I said was I didn’t know the website number. What I really meant to say was, “Ted Stevens didn’t tell me what tube the website is in.”
The Not-So-Great Communicator
You know you’re not having a good week when you build your reputation on your speaking ability and then you start getting headlines like this:Obama struggles as communicatorThe Note, 3/20/2009: So Special—Obama loses a week, as a great communicator doesn’t communicateBarack Obama Is a Terrible BoreBut that was the week that was, for President Obama—the week in which he took a pounding for closing a press award ceremony to the press. I think Ed Morissey’s crack on his Special Olympics gaffe captures the spirit of his week as well as anything can:
You know how you can tell when a President has a bad day? When his comparison of an American corporation to terrorists is the second-stupidest thing he said.
He’ll bounce back, I’m sure; every scorer has games where they just can’t put the ball in the hole. But no question, the president was in a real shooting slump this week, and the shine is starting to wear off with the press—they’re actually starting to notice these things. He’d best get back on his game in a hurry, or it’ll hurt him.
The Servant for the World
(Isaiah 49:1-13; Romans 11:11-21)
Isaiah 48 ends in a difficult place, with a real conundrum. God is not abandoning his plan for the world, nor is he willing to turn away from his people; but they’ve rejected the part he had prepared for them, and he’s conceding their refusal to change, and to play that part. He’ll still deliver them from Babylon and return them to Jerusalem, but he will no longer depend on them, or entrust his mission to the nations to them. Chapter 48 brings their corporate part in that mission to a close. Which raises the question: if Plan A is dead, then what’s Plan B? What does God do now?
The answer to that question begins in chapter 49 with the reintroduction of the Servant of the LORD. We’ve seen the Servant just once so far, in chapter 42, where he was already associated with God’s mission to the Gentiles, but not in a way that ruled out Israel’s involvement in that mission. Here, however, things have shifted, and the Servant has clearly replaced Israel; God’s promises to his people will still be fulfilled, but they will be fulfilled in a different way than they might have been.
Some things, however, haven’t shifted at all. One is that God still has no intention of reaching the nations by force of conquest. Thus the Servant says of himself, “The LORD . . . made my mouth like a sharp sword.” Now, it’s true that anyone who says “The pen is mightier than the sword” has probably never been stabbed with either, but words do have power, and the word of God most of all; God himself promises in Isaiah 55:11, which we’ll read in a few weeks, that “my word . . . will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” The Servant would speak that word which pierces until it divides soul from spirit and joints from marrow—which, in other words, is so sharp it can separate even the inseparable—and which judges our innermost thoughts and intentions, and that would be all he needed to carry out God’s mission; but bear in mind that the power of words is not a power which protects those who wield it. That’s why the First Amendment enshrines freedom of speech and freedom of the press, because those who stab with the pen tend to end up skewered by the sword. Such people also often don’t see the fruit of their labor, which is left to later generations to pick and enjoy.
Clearly this is the case for the Servant. God says to him, “You are my servant—you are the ideal Israel—in you I will glorify myself”; but the Servant looks around and thinks, “That’s not what I’m seeing.” He sees no result from anything he has done, except that he has become “deeply despised and abhorred by the nation”; all his efforts have brought him no reward, only suffering. In a world that measures us by our success, he is a clear failure, and so he says to himself, “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing.”
And yet . . . and yet. The Servant knows God is with him, and he knows that God’s word carries with it his power. He knows that the Lord will always accomplish his purpose, and that he takes care of those who follow him, and so the Servant says, “But—the justice due me is with the LORD, and my reward is with my God.” I may be done wrong now, I may have to suffer injustice—but the justice due me is with the LORD, and this injustice won’t stand. I may suffer now for speaking the word of God and doing what he calls me to do—but the justice due me is with the LORD, and all will be made right in the end. I may be attacked and persecuted for the sake of the truth, but my reward is with my God, and in the end this will seem a small price to pay. My faithful service may go ignored and unappreciated in this life, but my reward is with my God, and he doesn’t miss a thing. All my efforts may seem to get me nowhere, but if I speak his word, whether I see any results or not, that is enough, because his word carries his power and it never fails of its purpose. Regardless of what I see around me today, the justice due me is with the LORD, and my reward is with my God—and he never fails to accomplish what he sets out to do.
That is the Servant’s consolation in the face of his apparent failure; and after all, isn’t it backed up by his own life and ministry? God established Israel for a purpose, to be his faithful servant to be his salvation to the whole earth, but Israel was a faithless servant and failed in that purpose; now, not only has God’s plan not been carried out, but Israel itself has gone so far off the rails that it has been carried off into exile. God’s people have become part of the problem, not part of the solution. But even if Israel has derailed itself, that doesn’t mean God’s plan has been derailed; rather, he has raised up a new, ideal Israel, a new Servant who will be faithful to follow God’s will, and the plan goes forward. God always accomplishes his purposes.
But does this mean that God is settling for second-best? Is the Servant merely Plan B? Did Israel’s disobedience force God to come up with a backup plan?
Yes and no; but mostly no. There’s something very interesting going on in verses 5 and 6, but our English translations treat it as a mistake that must be corrected; that’s the reason the NIV’s translation of verse 5 is so choppy. You see, what we have in verse 5 isn’t the Hebrew text as it stands—it’s an amended version. A straightforward reading of verses 5 and 6 runs like this:
Now the LORD, the one who made me from the womb
to serve him,
resolved to turn Jacob to him,
but Israel would not be gathered;
yet I am honored in the eyes of the Lord,
for my God has been my strength.
He said, “It is too small that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will make you a light to the nations,
to be my salvation to the end of the earth.”
In other words, the Servant sees himself as a failure, because he’s been sent to turn the hearts of the Israelites back to God, and they’ve rejected him—they’ve refused to be gathered; and God says in response, “It’s OK—that’s too small a task for you anyway. We’ll move on with the mission: I will make you my light to the nations and my salvation to all the world.”
Now, later generations of Jewish scholars really didn’t like that, and so they looked for ways to amend it. They came up with a couple that are pretty iffy by normal standards, but when the alternative is unacceptable, you take the best you can get—and so they did. They decided that the word meaning “not”—in the Hebrew, it’s “lo”—should be read as another “lo” (which is actually spelled differently), which means “to him.” Reading the text that way requires making a preposition or two behave in an unusual fashion, and it gives you a passage that doesn’t really fit together very well—but it makes the meaning of the text much more palatable, and so they went with it, leaving a note in the margin to indicate that this is how this verse should be understood. Our English translations follow that note, and so we end up with the reading we have.
If you don’t follow that note, however, if you don’t try to explain away the Hebrew text but take it straightforwardly as written, this passage makes perfect sense; it fits better with the rest of what’s going on in this part of Isaiah, and it helps us to see connections to other parts of Scripture. In particular, it reveals a link between this passage and Romans 11. In Romans 9-11, Paul deals with the question of the future of the Jews in God’s plan; he struggles with the fact that so many of his own people had hardened their hearts and refused to accept the Messiah, and builds an argument that in the end, Israel will be redeemed. In our passage this morning, he argues that even the Jewish rejection of Jesus served a purpose, because it provided an opportunity for Gentiles to come into the people of God. Though Paul doesn’t base his argument on Isaiah 49, it seems that Isaiah was looking forward to that same point: Israel’s refusal to be gathered back to God created the opportunity for the Servant to be the light to the nations.
This is not, of course, to say that all Israel rejected God, which is clearly not the case; nor is it to say that God has rejected Israel—an idea which Paul refutes at length in Romans 11, finally making the statement in 11:26 that “all Israel will be saved.” It is, however, to say that even when the Jewish leaders and people failed to turn as a whole and accept Jesus as the Messiah, God had included that refusal in his plan and made it an occasion of blessing for the Gentiles—for us. Israel’s earlier disobedience, refusing to be a faithful servant, Israel’s later rejection of the Messiah—these may appear to have forced God to Plan B; but in truth, God already knew they were coming. That’s not what he wanted to happen, but he knew they would, and he allowed for it in his plan.
This is an important point: God’s sovereignty is such that we can’t prevent him from accomplishing his purposes. He allows us freedom to choose, and he uses whatever we do, whether we choose to obey him or not. When we disobey him, obviously that’s not part of his perfect will and plan for us, but it doesn’t disrupt what he’s doing or force him to change plans, because he knew what we would do before we did; and though it isn’t best, he’ll use it for good. There is no failure he cannot redeem, no sinner he cannot restore, because in everything and everyone, he is still Lord, and he is the God who grows white flowers from even the blackest roots. He will work through our obedience or through our disobedience; if we obey, that’s better for us and for all concerned, but whether we do or don’t, none of it catches him off guard. Even his Plan B is Plan A.
And in this case, his plan was to bring his people back to himself—not just Jews, but people from all the nations. Thus God’s word to the Servant in verse 6, which the NIV mistranslates a little: “I will make you a light for the Gentiles, to be my salvation to the ends of the earth.” The Servant will not be merely the messenger announcing God’s salvation, he will be the one in and through whom God will extend his salvation to all people everywhere. Thus he says in verse 8—and don’t be misled by the NIV’s heading there, this section is addressed to the Servant, and talking about more than just the exiles in Babylon—“I will give you as a covenant to the people.” God’s people had broken his covenant with them in pretty much every way imaginable, but he wasn’t willing to give up on it, and so he would offer it in a new form—the form of his Servant. Only this time, the covenant would extend beyond the descendants of Abraham; it would involve the re-turn of the Jews, yes, but it would also draw people from every point of the compass. Look at verse 12—“from afar” denotes the east, then around the compass—from the north, from the west (literally “the sea,” the Mediterranean), and from the south—“Sinim,” at the southern edge of Egypt, the southern border of the known civilized world.
From every direction, God promises his Servant, from every tribe, nation and language of the earth, people will come home to me because of what you have done. My mountains will become a highway for them, and my blessing will be so abundant that even the barren places will provide them enough food to keep going; they will have food and water, and they will be protected from the heat of the desert. This is the imagery and the promise of Isaiah 40, now opened to all nations, including us, by the work of the Servant, Jesus the Messiah; Jesus, whom he gave to us to be his salvation for the whole world. By the power of his word, through his faithfulness, through his suffering, Jesus became the salvation of God for us and the covenant of God with us, so that we too might be called children of God.
President Bush is a class act
This from Andrew Malcolm, in the Los Angeles Times’ “Top of the Ticket” blog:
Tuesday in Calgary, the 43rd president gave the first of about a dozen paid speeches arranged so far by the Washington Speakers Bureau on his 2009 schedule. And here’s what Bush told about 2,000 business persons about his successor, the 44th president:”There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.”Bush said something else too:”I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I think it is essential that he be helped in office.” . . .Bush also said if the new president wanted his help, “he’s welcome to call me.”
Apparently, Dick Cheney’s not very happy with him, but I think this is both gracious and wise of our most recent ex-president. Good for him.