(Isaiah 6:8-13, Isaiah 43:1-21; Matthew 13:10-17)

I said last week that in Isaiah 40-55, we see God’s plan for the world shifting into a new phase, away from his servant Israel and toward a new Servant who will be faithful to carry out God’s mission for the world—a Servant whom we will ultimately see as the suffering Servant, a role Israel had refused to play. I noted that a lot of people miss this because of the way modern scholarship has taught us to read this section of Isaiah—they read it as disconnected from the rest of the book, and so they fail to note the fact that this shift isn’t a new or surprising thing. In fact, it’s something which God told Isaiah was going to happen all the way back at the beginning of his ministry, when God first called him as a prophet. God brings Isaiah into the throne room of heaven and says, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Isaiah answers the call, and God gives him his message and his marching orders—and is it a message of hope and redemption? Is it the mission to go out and bring Israel back to the Lord?

No; in fact, it’s anything but. God tells Isaiah, “Go tell this people, ‘Keep listening, but never understand what you’re hearing; keep looking, but never make any sense of what you’re seeing.’” Then he says, “Make the heart of this people fat”; the NIV translates that “calloused,” which isn’t bad, but isn’t quite right, either, because it’s not really that the people of Israel are hard-hearted, but that they’re sluggish and self-indulgent. The Old Testament scholar John Oswalt puts it well when he says, “A ‘fat heart’ speaks of a slow, languid, self-oriented set of responses, incapable of decisive, self-sacrificial action.” So far from being roused from their complacency and self-satisfied self-centeredness, Israel will only sink further into it. God continues, “Stop their ears and shut their eyes; otherwise they might see, hear, and understand, and they might turn and be healed.”

In short, Isaiah has been told to tell Israel, “Don’t listen to me, because God wants to destroy you.” Now, does that sound like God? Does that sound like the God who was so determined to bring the people of Nineveh to repentance that he sent a fish after Jonah? Does that sound like the God who sent his Son to earth to live and die and rise again that we might be saved? No, it doesn’t. It’s easy to understand why the people of God have struggled with this passage from earliest times, and have often chosen to turn the commands into mere predictions. The key is, though, is that God isn’t really sending Isaiah out because he wants the people of Judah to reject his message; his command to his prophet is ironic. Indeed, irony will prove an appropriate response to Isaiah’s situation, and will mark much of his preaching. God sends him out to preach both warning and promise, both judgment and salvation, knowing that the effect of Isaiah’s preaching will not be to lead Israel back to their Lord, but only to drive them further away, toward judgment. And so for Isaiah, this isn’t a statement of purpose, but a warning as to what he will actually accomplish in the ministry God has given him.

This, I think, is why he responds as he does. He doesn’t ask why he has to do such a thing, or how he’s supposed to do it, because he understands what God is saying; instead, he asks, “How long?” If judgment is coming, how long will it last, and how bad will it be? The answer is harsh: God’s people will be almost completely destroyed—but only almost. A few will survive the devastation, and they will be burned again, but yet, they will not be dead; they will be a stump capable of putting out new growth. There will yet be a holy seed, a remnant that will rise again.

Now, the interesting thing about Jesus citing this passage is that there are a number of parallels between Isaiah’s situation and his own. In both cases, we have people seeing God; just as Isaiah has a vision of God on the throne, surrounded by the host of heaven, and he responds with awe and obedience, so the disciples see God in the flesh, in the person of Jesus Christ, and they too respond with awe and obedience (and also love). Remember what we said last week about blindness and sight; the disciples, like Isaiah, see God and know him for who he is, and respond accordingly. In that, they stand in the sharpest of contrasts to unbelieving Israel, which hears but won’t listen, which sees but will not understand.

Both Isaiah and those who followed Jesus found themselves in a small group set apart from their surrounding culture, at odds with the leaders of their nation; Isaiah’s preaching made him some disciples, but more enemies, especially among the powerful, and the same was true of Jesus. This might seem strange to us; both, certainly, preached judgment, which is never a popular message, but both also proclaimed the grace of God. The truth is, however, that the message of grace doesn’t always soften hearts; sometimes it hardens them. In some cases, I think people steel themselves against it, out of fear or pride, while in others, the only response is contempt; but just as the sun of God’s love melts the ice in some hearts, in others, it only hardens the clay.

Despite that, God doesn’t stop reaching out; he simply shifts his method. That, as Jesus explains to his disciples, is why he teaches in parables. There’s an interesting thing here in the way in which the gospels report this. Matthew, which we read this morning, follows the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Old Testament, and understands Jesus to say, “I speak to them in parables because ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen or understand’”; if you flip over to Luke 8, though, it reads, “To others I speak in parables so that ‘though seeing they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand.’” This might seem contradictory—did Jesus teach in parables because the crowds wouldn’t understand, or so that they wouldn’t understand?—but in truth it isn’t; it’s two sides of the same coin.

Many in Jesus’ audience weren’t receptive to the gospel; he preached to them knowing that the only possible effect, and thus the only possible purpose, of his work would be to reinforce their unwillingness to receive him and his message. Since that was the situation, he chose to teach in a manner appropriate to their fatness of heart, just as Isaiah did—but he continued to teach and to do the work of the kingdom of God, so that those who knew their blindness could receive sight, and those who knew they could not hear might have their ears opened, and thus would come to understand and be healed.

We see this same determination at work in Isaiah 43. Last week’s passage ends on a fairly grim note—“Who handed Jacob over to become loot, and Israel to the plunderers? Was it not the Lord, against whom we have sinned? For they would not follow his ways; they did not obey his law. So he poured out in them his burning anger, the violence of war. It enveloped them in flames, yet they did not understand; it consumed them, but they did not take it to heart.” And this is after the introduction of the Servant; this is, I think, a prophecy that was ultimately fulfilled in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. And yet, how does chapter 43 begin? “But now, this is what the Lord says—he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: ‘Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”

It’s a powerful and majestic promise—delivered to people whom God has just declared deaf, blind, and utterly intransigent. Indeed, after declaring the ransom he will pay to buy his people back and his intention to gather them to himself from every direction and the farthest corners of the earth, we get this: “Lead out those who have eyes but are blind, who have ears but are deaf.” Israel is summoned into the court together with the nations—because remember, they’re all blind and deaf together now, due to their idolatry—and once again, God makes his case: “Who has predicted this? Who but me saw it coming? Can any of your gods make such a claim? If so, bring in your witnesses to support it—even one. No, only I have any witnesses—my people, you are my witnesses; you can testify to all that I’ve done for you, and all the promises I’ve fulfilled.” And note what God says about why he chose them: “so that you may know and believe me.” Not so that others might know; that was indeed part of the idea, but it was necessary first that they would know God, and come to trust him—and they’d never really gotten to that point themselves. No wonder they had so little effect on the nations around them.

We see here God calling out to his blind, deaf, fat-hearted people, summoning them to bear witness to all the ways in which he had blessed them—and in so doing, perhaps to see that themselves for the first time, and actually begin to understand themselves as the people of God. The problem doesn’t appear to be that they’ve forgotten that God did all these things—they can bear witness to that easily enough—but rather that they’ve lost any sense that that means anything to them; they don’t see it as connected to their lives. They don’t understand that it means that God is their deliverer, their savior, and the only savior there is or ever can be, even though their very existence and the history of their people is the evidence for that truth. Time after time, God has made promises to his people and then fulfilled them, and used those fulfilled promises as the basis for new promises, which he has then fulfilled in turn; time after time, he has delivered his people, and time after time, he has pronounced judgment which has then come to pass. Israel has seen it all—and yet they have seen nothing.

Even so, God says, they will be his witnesses yet again, as he does it yet again; the one who led his people out of their exile in Egypt by the way through the sea, drowning the pursuing armies of the Pharaoh behind them, will bring his people out of their exile in Babylon as well, and back once more to the land he promised their ancestors. God will be faithful to his people even though they have not been faithful to him; in John Oswalt’s term, his “passionate grace” toward his people will not permit him to do otherwise. But look: having just reminded them of the Exodus, having just used that to identify himself as the one who delivered and will deliver them, having just summoned them to bear witness to all the things he has done for them, what does God now say to his people? “Forget the former things—don’t dwell on the past. See, I’m doing a new thing!”

Why does he say that? Obviously, it’s not a command to collective amnesia. Rather, I think, Isaiah is using hyperbole to startle his audience into opening their eyes and ears and actually hearing him, and seeing what God is doing. God is not only present and active in the past, but also in the present—theirs and ours—and they had no sense of that. They had no concept of what God was doing in their own time, or what he might be calling them to do; they knew all about the Exodus, they’d heard about it a million times before, and they would no doubt have told you they believed God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt. What they didn’t believe was that that had anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believed God had saved, but not that he would save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.

And so too often, we as Christians in this country are like those Jews in captivity in Babylon—we have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. He wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”

(Isaiah 42:10-25; John 9:39-41)

As many of you know, Isaiah is one of those books of the Bible that liberal biblical scholarship believes should be cut into pieces. The mainstream view among liberal academics divides it into three parts. The first is chapters 1-39, which is generally attributed to the historical eighth-century BC prophet Isaiah and his disciples; the section we’re looking at, chapters 40-55, is credited to a person or persons unknown in exile in Babylon during the sixth century BC, shortly before the Persian conquest under Cyrus; chapters 56-66 are usually supposed to have been written by yet another person or group of people some time after the people of Israel returned to their homeland.

Now, for various reasons, some of which I talked about in the opening sermon of this series, I think this view is a bunch of malarkey which has been cooked up by people who don’t believe in prophecy, and thus have to come up with some alternative explanation for, in particular, the prediction of the coming of Cyrus. If you start with the assumption that Isaiah could not have had knowledge of the future, then obviously he couldn’t have known about Cyrus, and therefore someone else has to be responsible for that part. This is, I think, a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but perhaps the most important one—and certainly the most serious for our efforts to understand what the prophet is on about—is that this view of the book introduces assumptions which badly skew our reading of the text.

The most significant of those bad assumptions, I believe, comes into play for the first time here. You see, in order to read Isaiah 40-55 as disconnected from the rest of the book, you have to see it as separate from the book’s storyline, if you will. Instead, these chapters become just one long word of encouragement to the exiles—granted there are some complaints from God mixed in, but those are just side notes; the overall theme is that God is going to deliver his people and everything is going back to the way it should be. But if you clear those assumptions out of the way and read the text carefully, you see something rather different; what you see, as I argued a few weeks ago, is God’s plan for the world shifting into a new phase. You see the servant Isaiah’s been talking about for the first 39 chapters—the people of Israel—fading from view, and a new Servant—Jesus Christ—rising to prominence to carry on the mission they have rejected.

That shift begins with the introduction of the Servant, whom God will raise up to carry out the mission that should have been performed by his people; here in this passage, we start to see that play out. The prophet calls the nations to sing a new song to the Lord for the new thing he has declared, and then we get this image of the Lord as the divine warrior going forth to battle—though who the enemies are in this context, we aren’t told; the focus is on the Lord, who has been silent, but now is going to raise his voice and shout like a warrior in battle, or a woman in labor. No longer will he hold himself back; instead, he’s going to do extraordinary things, both in judgment and in blessing.

In particular, look at verse 16: “I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, and I will guide them along unfamiliar paths; I will turn their darkness into light, and the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, and I will not leave them undone.” Now, what does this mean? Look back a minute to verses 6-7, which we read last week: “I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.” That’s the promise and the instruction which God gives to his Servant. So we have the ministry of the Servant to bring Israel and the nations back to the proper worship of God, represented as giving sight to the blind and freeing those who are prisoners; and that language of blindness is picked up here, as God states that he himself will lead the blind and make a way for them. 

And then look at verse 17: “But those who trust in idols, who say to images, ‘You are our gods,’ will be turned back in utter shame.” That might seem like a complete left turn to you—maybe you’re starting to think that Isaiah has idolatry on the brain—but actually, it’s the connection that tells us what Isaiah’s on about. You see, there’s a biblical trope here, a standard biblical way of speaking that’s in play in this text—it’s the association of blindness (and also deafness) with idolatry. It isn’t literal physical blindness that’s primarily in view—that’s just a metaphor and a symptom; rather, what Isaiah has in mind is the spiritual blindness that comes along with worshiping idols. You see, God can see and hear—indeed, he sees and hears everything, because he’s the creator of all that is—but idols can’t; they’re just lumps of wood and stone, and so they’re as deaf and blind as the materials from which they’re made and the tools with which they’re shaped. Thus, those who worship the living God can see and hear, because they worship the one who gave them eyes and ears, but those who worship idols soon become as deaf and blind as the false gods before whom they bow.

This is the tragedy of verses 18-25. God had formed himself a nation, his people Israel, to be his servant to lead the nations out of their blindness—but instead, they wandered away from him to worship idols themselves; instead of delivering the peoples of the world from their bondage to idolatry, they ended up in need of deliverance right along with them. That’s why God has to raise up another Servant, because his people have done their best to render themselves no different than the world around them. Indeed, they may well be worse off—thus God asks, “Who is blind but my servant, and deaf like the messenger I send?”—because unlike the nations, they ought to know better. They ought to know better, and have deliberately chosen not to. They have seen many things, but have paid no attention, and though their ears are open, they hear nothing.

This is why Jesus says in John 9, “I have come into this world for judgment, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Why judgment? Look at Isaiah 42:17: “Those who trust in idols will be turned back in utter shame.” Those are people who have been offered the gift of verse 16 and refused it—they hold fast to their idols, preferring gods of their own invention, that they can control. And who are those people? They’re the ones who think they already see just fine, thank you—as the Pharisees did—and thus refuse to believe that they need Jesus; in so doing, their darkness, their true blindness, is revealed and confirmed. It’s not that Jesus wants this to happen, that he desires to judge them; but he knew that in his coming, they would judge themselves, and that that judgment on them was thus an inevitable part of his coming. Just as he came, as Isaiah had promised, to bring sight to the blind, so would he also come to reveal the blindness of those who loudly proclaimed their ability to see.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that the Pharisees weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t. They knew this passage from Isaiah as well as Jesus did, and they understood the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could; they no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of blind and deaf Israel, because they saw their mission as one of preparing the way for the coming of the Servant of God. So why does Jesus make the same charge against them that Isaiah made against the people of his own day?

There are two reasons. First off, they had made an idol of their own religion. Their focus had slipped—as it’s all too prone to do—from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves. That’s why, as Jesus charges elsewhere, they’ve begun to use the law of God for their own purposes, figuring out ways to use legal technicalities to avoid meeting some of the law’s more inconvenient expectations, like giving to those in need. This is also why, second, they had committed their own version of blind Israel’s other biggest sin: just as Israel had looked down on the nations as enemies, rather than seeing them as their mission field, so the Pharisees looked down on non-Pharisees as inferiors, people to avoid rather than people to bless. One of the things they objected to about Jesus, remember, was that he hung out with lowlifes and sinners, whom they themselves despised and hated. In this, too, their essential blindness was revealed, because it showed that their true focus wasn’t on God; they couldn’t see that the “people of the land” whom they loathed, the nations whom they regarded as enemies, were the people God loved and wanted to redeem, just as much as he loved and wanted to redeem them. They were, ultimately, all about themselves, and that’s not what God is on about, or wants us to be on about.

The reason, I think, is that the Pharisees had lost sight of the fact that their relationship with God was all about grace, not about their own effort—and make no mistake, they should have known that; we often miss it, too, but the Old Testament really is just as much about the grace of God as the New Testament. That’s why Jesus is the fulfillment of the law, not its replacement. They had lost sight of the fact that even for all the work they put in, they didn’t deserve God’s favor any more than the tax collectors, prostitutes, and foreigners they held in such contempt, and so they failed to understand that their proper response to God and his grace was not to keep it to themselves but to share it. They failed to understand that God calls his people to mission—to the mission of the Servant, to be agents of grace for the world. May we not make the same mistake.

(Isaiah 41:21-42:9, Matthew 12:15-21)

I said last week that Isaiah liked court scenes, and here we have another one—but this one has a different tone, and a different purpose. God called the nations before him in the beginning of chapter 41 for them to hear his case, offering them the blessings of his kingdom, but they ran from him, fleeing to their idols; and so now, after a word of encouragement to his people Israel, God returns to the courtroom to put the idols on trial. You can just imagine the scene, as the bailiff rises in the court:

Hear ye, hear ye! This court is now in session. The God of Israel is accusing the defendants, the gods of the nations, of deceptive advertising practices and numerous anti-trust violations, on the grounds that they claim to be gods but in fact are not, and thus are claiming rights and privileges which they do not in fact deserve. Will the prosecutor, the prophet Isaiah, please call his first witness?

Your Honor, I would like to call all the defendants to the stand as a group. Let the people of all nations carry their gods into this honorable court, for the LORD, the King of Israel, challenges these gods to prove themselves. Yes, if you claim to be gods, prove it! Tell us what will happen in the future! If you are truly gods, then you must have some sort of control over what will happen next; tell us your plans, and how you are going to bring them about! Marduk—you’re a big one on military power, and certainly your Babylonians have built up quite the empire; but it’s starting to fall apart now, the army isn’t doing so well, and what are you going to do about it? How about you, Ishtar? Your Assyrians played that game pretty well, too, until Babylon ground them into hamburger. What’s left of you? Do you know what will happen in the future?

. . . Your Honor, I don’t think the defendants can answer the question. It doesn’t matter, though—I have another one for them. Tell me, can you explain the past? Can you tell us why everything happened the way it did, and help us to understand the world we live in now? In particular, can you tell us how the world came to be, and why? My God has done all these things for his people; if you are truly gods, you should be able to do the same, because you should remember the making of the world, and you should understand why everything has happened and what it means. If you are truly worthy of the worship you claim, you should be able to help your followers make sense of the world.

. . . Still no answer? How about this: if you can’t tell us where we’ve been, can you tell us where we’re going? How will the world end? What will come after it? If you can’t explain the past or make sense of the present, can you at least tell us what to expect in the days to come? Will the struggles and pains of the past be redeemed at all in the future? Will the injustices of the present ever be made right? Will any good ever come of the bad things that have happened to us? Do our lives mean anything? Or is all of life just one great big joke with a really bad punch line?

. . . Your Honor, the defendants just sit there. Whether they cannot answer, or simply will not, I don’t know, but I don’t think instructing them that they must answer will accomplish anything. Come now, you great blocks of wood, at least do something! No, don’t tell me that you made the sun come up this morning or the rain fall yesterday—the sun’s been coming up every morning since the beginning of time, and the rain falls every year; how do we know you did that? You could just be taking credit for someone else’s work. No, do something new and different—good or evil, it doesn’t matter, just something surprising, something that will amaze and terrify us—something to prove you’re a god, not merely a fraud.

. . . No? If you can’t answer so simple a challenge, how can you claim to be able to do anything at all? Your Honor, I submit that we have proven our case against the defendants: they are nothing and less than nothing, their work is nothing, they are frauds. Whatever they may be, if they exist at all, they’re only part of the system. They weren’t around when the world was created, they’re as much a part of it as any other rock or stick, and they can’t make anything themselves. They don’t understand anything that has happened and they have no clue what’s going to happen tomorrow, except to guess that it will be the same thing that happened yesterday; they have no understanding of the beginning of things, because they weren’t there, and they can’t conceive of the world ending because they can’t imagine what the alternative might be. All they can do is take credit for the work that the God of Israel does, and draw people away from worshiping him to worship them instead. They are detestable, and they defile those who worship them.

. . . Yes, Your Honor, I realize that isn’t enough. But unlike these pathetic pieces of wood and stone, I have a case. Hear what the LORD says: I stirred up a conqueror in the east, one who will strike from the north; he will trample other rulers underfoot as easily as the potter steps into the vat to mix the water and clay with his feet. I called him, and I predicted his coming far in advance, well before anyone else had ever heard of him. Which of these so-called gods can make such a claim? For all the messages they give their followers, did any of them give any warning at all that my conqueror was coming? No! There was no one who declared it; there was no one who proclaimed it; in fact, no one heard them say anything about the subject at all. Only I, says the LORD, only I announced his coming. I prepared him to deliver my people, and I promised them that he was coming, while none of these other so-called gods said or did anything about him at all. None of them can answer my questions, none of them can explain what I am doing or why, declares the LORD. They are nothing, mere delusion and wind.

. . . Well, as trials go, that one’s pretty much a slam dunk. Of course, it’s easy to say that, since no one has worshiped Bel, Nebo, Marduk, or most of the other gods Isaiah was addressing in a very long time. (Oddly enough, though Babylonian religion is long gone, the religion of their Persian conquerors, Zoroastrianism, is still around; in fact, I went to college with a practicing Zoroastrian.) That doesn’t really make any difference, though; the same questions aimed at our own culture would produce the same results. 

Take a look, not at people’s formal religious affiliations, but at where they put their money, their time, and their trust, and what do you see? You see entertainment; you see possessions; you see, perhaps, investments; with some people, you see their ambitions, whether social, political, or economic; you see relationships, certainly; and you see a lot of people who put most if not all of their money, time, and trust, quite frankly, in themselves. Now, some of these are purely good things—for example, if I didn’t spend money and time on my wife and kids, I’d get a lot of questions, not least from them—and none of them are evil; but the pattern is another matter. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart,” and it’s even truer that where your trust is, there is your heart; we might say, going further, that where your trust and treasure are together, there is your true worship, and the true focus of your attention.

The problem, in other words, is that so many people turn to things, or to themselves, rather than God to find security and peace and to fill the holes in their lives. Most of these things, to be sure, are good in and of themselves, if we keep them in their proper place—and God deeply loves and values every person he has made, whether they return his love or not—but they cannot meet the challenge God offers; they aren’t as important as we often try to make them, and they can’t bear the significance we try to put on them. Just as with the old gods of Assyria and Babylon, when God turns to them and says, “I can do this. Can you do this?” they are silent.

This trial sequence leaves a problem, however: the nations beyond Israel are worshiping things which are no gods, which are in fact nothing at all. They are empty; they have no guidance from God, no source of wisdom and no one to lead them according to his justice. Israel was given that job, but they’ve largely refused to do it. To address that problem, God raises up his Servant—and you’ll note that here, the first time he is mentioned, the focus is on his work as a light to the nations. In Isaiah 49, the second Servant Song, which we’ll consider in a few weeks, the Servant begins by talking about his mission to the Jews before moving to consider his mission to the Gentile world, but here the main concern is for Gentile need. God says of this one “in whom [his] soul delights,” “I have put my Spirit upon him”—which was a major statement in those days; back then, only those whom God had specially chosen for a particular work, like prophets, or the artists who decorated the tabernacle, received his Spirit. But he says of the Servant, “I have put my Spirit upon him, and he will bring forth justice to the nations.”

Now, this word “justice” is that word mishpat again, that we talked about last week; it’s worth repeating here, I think, that this is a concept of justice which isn’t merely punitive, but is restorative. As we said last Sunday, mishpat is all about the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when “everything was right, just, whole, in accordance with God’s perfect will.” As such, justice as we know it is obviously a key part of this idea, but so is peace, because they’re both facets of that same fundamental divine order. The false gods of the nations lead people away from that order and toward chaos—moral and social chaos, yes, but the chaos doesn’t stop there; it always spreads into the physical world. Thus, for instance, treating the world God made with disrespect is morally disordered, but it also disrupts the proper physical order of the world. The work of God’s Servant is to take God’s mishpat, his justice, which he has already revealed to his people through the giving of the law, and bring it to the world.

Note how he’s going to do it. This is not a conqueror, someone who will establish justice through military might or political power; nor is it someone who will call attention to himself and shout down those who oppose him. No, the Servant will come quietly, unthreateningly, with no aggression and no self-promotion. Unlike the demagogue, he will not seek to whip people into an emotional frenzy; unlike the dictator, he will not crush his opponents, nor will he seek to tear down in order that he may rebuild things his own way. Indeed, he won’t even crush the weak, the dying, and the seemingly useless, something powerful people tend to do without even trying; instead, a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not put out. As Old Testament scholar John Oswalt put it, “God’s answer to the oppressors . . . is not more oppression, nor is his answer to arrogance more arrogance; rather, in quietness, humility, and simplicity, he will take all of the evil into himself and return only grace. That is power.”

Now, some will look at him and see that he doesn’t crush the weak, and they will conclude that he is weak himself; but far from it. Verse 4 begins with a bit of wordplay that doesn’t come through in the NIV: the words translated here as “falter” and “be discouraged” are forms of the same words used to describe the wick and the reed. The point, I think, is that the Servant himself will not be a smoldering wick or a bruised reed, but rather a man of great strength of character and will; the attacks and the pressures which weaken and defeat others won’t deter him or slow him down until he has accomplished his purpose of establishing justice in the earth. This is a good thing, for his ministry, both his teaching and his actions, is the only hope for justice the world has.

In verses 5-9 we have, you might say, God’s initial marching orders to his Servant; and notice how he begins: “Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it.” This might seem an odd digression, but in fact it’s nothing of the sort. The Servant’s rule will not be some new imposition on the nations of the world; rather, it will be the continuation and renewal of the plan of the one who created them. It is God who created everything and who keeps it going every minute by his will; it is God who created us and gave us life and identity and awareness; and it is God who sends the Servant to carry on and intensify his sustaining work.

In verse 6 God sets out the overall mission statement for the Servant: “I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations.” His mission begins with his own people, with the nation of Israel. Though God’s people had broken his covenant with them beyond repair, he refused to give up on it or them, and so he would send his Servant to fulfill and restore it; though the Jews had every reason to believe that their relationship with God was hopelessly broken, he came to proclaim to them that God’s covenant love had never and would never let them go. It is also in this that he is the light to the nations; for the darkness of the dungeon and the blindness to which verse 7 refers are the darkness and blindness into which idolatry plunges us, because idolatry exiles us from the source of all light and all good things. But into this darkness shines the light of the relentless love of God, which will not let us go.

It is only God who can do this, for it is only he who is not bound to and by the cycles of the world; for all others, what goes up must come down, but not for him. Thus he says, “See, the former things [which I predicted] have taken place, and new things I now declare.” Idols can’t declare new things, because they can’t do new things; but God can, and does, in the world and in our lives. We aren’t trapped by what has gone before; we aren’t limited by what we can imagine. We are limited by who God is, because he isn’t going to do a new thing that contradicts his character and his will—but anything that God desires to do, he can do. No one expected Jesus, no one of his time ever saw him coming; even to his own people, he was unimaginable, inconceivable—but not to God. God isn’t restricted to doing only what he’s done before, the same way he’s always done it—and therefore, neither are we. 

As we work to develop a new vision for ministry, a new plan and a new approach, it’s easy to doubt that there’s any point—and certainly, we need to learn the cautionary lessons of the past, not just the encouraging ones. We do need to take counsel of what has been tried that hasn’t worked, even if only to remind us that just because we do a new thing, it doesn’t mean we’ll find success. That’s why the important thing is not to come up with our good ideas—even our best ideas—and draw from the best of the conventional wisdom to produce the best plan we can, and then ask God in on it; rather, we need to seek his will, to find out what new thing he’s preparing to do, so that we can get in on that. In Christ, we aren’t locked in by the past, because in him, God has done a new thing, and we have been set free for his future.

(Isaiah 41:1-20, Matthew 5:13-16)

Having made his case to his people in the passage we read last week, God now turns through his prophet to address the peoples of the world; and he does so with a trope that Isaiah seems to have been quite fond of—the court scene. We’ll see it more than once during this series. We have the summons in the first verse—the NIV doesn’t quite get the full import here: “Come before me in silence, you islands! Let the peoples renew their strength!” “Islands” here represents the peoples at the farthest edges of the known world—one of many indications, by the way, that this prophecy was given through a prophet who lived in Israel, not in Babylon; this is the language of a coastal people. “Come, all you peoples, even the most distant, and let me renew your strength.” God is offering the same gift to all the nations that he has offered to his chosen people, if they will only accept it, and so he summons them to come to him for mishpat.

Now, mishpat is the word the NIV translates “judgment” here, and that’s not really a very good translation; when we hear that, we think of passing sentence, and that’s not what this word is on about. Mishpat is another one of those loaded Old Testament words; it’s the word we usually translate “justice,” but even that doesn’t go far enough to help us understand the concept here. This isn’t just about punishing those who do wrong, or giving people what they deserve, which is what we tend to think of when we think of justice; it’s much larger than that. The Old Testament scholar Paul Hanson, who has studied the word closely, defines it as “the order of compassionate justice that God has created and upon which the wholeness of the universe depends.” It’s not just concerned with one country, or a set of laws, or even just with human beings, but with the whole world. This is because “the chaos or harmony that results from disobedience or obedience affects the entire universe . . . human history and natural phenomena alike.” Mishpat, God’s justice, is the restoration of the original created order of the universe, when “everything was right, just, whole, in accordance with God’s perfect will.”

The problem is, the nations do not have mishpat—which is both to say that they don’t act with justice, in accordance with God’s perfect will, and that they don’t have the blessing of God’s justice, they don’t experience the rightness of God’s just order, and the peace that goes with it. Thus God extends an invitation to them: if they will come to him and accept his authority, taking their proper place in the ordering of creation, bowing their heads to his justice, they will experience the blessing of that justice in the peace of God and the renewal of their strength. As Sara noted, what we’re seeing here is the same thing we see in John 3:17: God acts in the world—through Israel, through his prophets, ultimately in Jesus Christ, and then through us—not because he wants to condemn the world, but because he wants to redeem and restore it.

Of course, if he’s going to convince the nations of the reality of his offer, God must naturally prove his case; he must demonstrate to the peoples of the world as he has demonstrated to Israel and Judah that he has the power to do what he promises to do. Enter, then, for the first time, the great Persian conqueror Cyrus—still unnamed, as yet; as yet, we have only the sound of his approach. “Who has stirred up one from the east,” he asks, “whom Righteousness calls to his service? He hands nations over to him and makes him dominate kings.” We get a picture of the unstoppable swiftness of Cyrus’ conquest, which we can see more clearly if we drop the “before” from verse 3: Cyrus’ armies blow through the armies of his enemies with such force that they remain unscathed, moving so swiftly that it’s as if their feet never even touch the ground. And who has made this happen? “I have,” says the Lord, “I who am the first and the last.”

In the face of this magnificent invitation, how do the nations respond? They run—not to God, but away from him, and to their idols. They see the conqueror’s approach, but instead of casting in their lot with the God who summoned him, they turn to their own gods to resist him; and so we have this picture of them encouraging each other and telling each other, “You’re doing a great job building that idol.” Once again, Isaiah makes the point that these people have to nail their idols down so that they won’t fall over, highlighting their utter powerlessness in the face of the living God.

Here, Isaiah also seems to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making an idol, both the heavy, rough work of molding and welding the thing and of forging the nails to hold it in place, and the delicate, skill-intensive work of plating it with gold; wouldn’t it be easier just to trust in God than to go to all that effort to avoid him? And if your gods are that dependent on their people for their very existence, are they really all that likely to do you any good? Consider this: where the God of Israel pronounces comfort and gives his people words of hope and assurance, the idols of the nations say nothing at all; their people are left to comfort themselves.

But though the nations fear the Lord and the approach of his conqueror, he makes it clear to his people that they have nothing to fear. “You are my servant,” he declares. “Don’t fear, for I am with you; don’t be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you—I will uphold you with my right hand. All those who oppose you will perish; though you are feeble, I will make you capable of overcoming any obstacle.” Human power failed the people of Israel and Judah time after time, because they were not a strong nation; and if we look at the history of the church, we can see that even when the church has been rich and powerful, human power has rarely done it any good, either. When the people of God act just like the world, we usually wind up getting whupped in the end (one way or another), because quite frankly, the world outguns us; but when we’re faithful to live as God wants us to live and to do what he calls us to do, it’s a very different story. For all this world’s power and all its accomplishments, as we saw last week, are utterly insignificant compared to God.

As are all the challenges with which it presents us. The picture shifts in verse 17 from weakness in the face of opposition to one of weakness in the face of adverse circumstances: the poor and helpless lost in the desert, searching desperately for water. God says, “I will cause rivers to flow where there is no water, and then springs to burst forth, until the barren desert is well-watered ground; and then out of the barren, hard-baked soil, I will raise trees for shade.” Water and shade—the two great needs for survival of anyone traveling in the desert; in the face of the adversities of life, God will provide what is necessary to deal with them, and to continue on the journey. Why? “So that they may know that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has made it happen.” So that people will understand who is the redeemer, and who is able to provide for our needs.

And what is the point of all this? What is God’s agenda? It’s to reach the nations. It’s the purpose for which he chose Israel as his servant to begin with, that they might draw the nations to him, and it’s the broader purpose behind his deliverance of his people from exile. Yes, he’s doing it for their sake, but he’s also doing it to demonstrate his power to the nations. This is why he announces the coming of Cyrus the conqueror, and part of the reason he proclaims that Israel will return to their land—something which just didn’t happen; peoples who were conquered and dragged away disappeared from history. The fact that Israel reappeared on the world scene in a meaningful way was an unusual event, to say the least. These promises God is making to his people, when they are fulfilled, are in part to give support to their assertion that their God is not as the gods of the nations, but that they alone worship the Lord and Creator of the Universe; for who else could possibly have the power to do such things? Certainly not Marduk of the Babylonians, or Ishtar of the Assyrians, both of which disappeared from history when the empires who worshiped them fell to the armies of the conqueror. Only the one true God can do what Isaiah here promises he will do.

The circumstances have changed, but God’s purpose has not: he still seeks to draw all the nations to himself, and he still seeks to use his people to do so; which means that this mission is, in part, ours. When Israel would not be a light to the nations, he sent his Son to be the light of the world, and his Son called us in turn to be the lamp to hold his light—so that when the world looks at us, they would see him shining through us. He made us the salt of the earth—and remember what we said about salt a few weeks ago: it’s always active, affecting anything it touches, purifying, preserving, flavoring—melting ice—and, yes, sometimes irritating. He has sent us out to be carriers of his grace and truth and love, to bring those into contact with everyone we meet, by the things we say and the way we say them and how we live our lives. And if we will go out as he sends us, though we will know difficulties, we will see God’s victory in the end.

(Isaiah 40; Colossians 1:15-20)

Isaiah is the most theological book of the Old Testament. In the breadth of the prophet’s teaching, the depths of his themes, and the subtle ways in which those themes are woven together throughout the book, it is unmatched in the Hebrew Scriptures; not for nothing has it been called the Romans of the Old Testament. The driving concern all through the book is the contrast between what Israel is called to be—namely, God’s servant among the nations, through whom he will draw all the nations to himself—and what Israel actually is—their idolatry, their injustice, their refusal to trust God, and their insistence on putting their trust instead in themselves and their military power (such as it was).

The first five chapters set out the broad themes of the book, and then in chapter 6 we have the story of God calling Isaiah as a prophet. Chapters 7-39 are the first main section of the book, showing us Isaiah’s prophetic ministry in Judah, which was the southern kingdom—when the northern ten tribes seceded from the kingdom of David and Solomon, they took the name “Israel” with them; the south became known as “Judah” after its dominant tribe. When Isaiah begins his ministry, during the reign of King Ahaz, the main threats to Judah are Israel and Syria. Isaiah goes to Ahaz and tells him, “This is what God says: Israel and Syria are plotting to invade you, but just trust me—they won’t do it, because I’m going to stop them. Ask me for a sign—anything—and I’ll give it to you to confirm this.” But Ahaz refuses, because he already has his own plan: he’s going to ally himself with the Assyrian empire and use them to take care of Syria and Israel.

In consequence, God, through the prophet Isaiah, responds with anger and frustration, telling Ahaz that because of his refusal to trust in God, Assyria is going to come down hard on Judah; the Assyrians won’t quite conquer Judah, but they’ll do everything but. Over the course of time, Assyrian power rises, and their threat to Judah rises—though Isaiah tells the people several times along the way that the real threat is the one coming along behind them, the Babylonians—culminating in the Assyrian invasion, which comes in chapter 36, as the Assyrian armies take all the cities of Judah except for the capital city of Jerusalem. This time, however, Hezekiah is king; unlike his father Ahaz, he puts his trust in God, and God delivers the nation. But then, in chapter 39, he makes a critical mistake: when envoys come from the king of Babylon—Babylon about whom Isaiah has been warning his people all these years—Hezekiah does everything he can to make an ally of them, putting his trust in them rather than in the God who has already delivered his nation once from the power of Assyria. He makes essentially the same mistake Ahaz made, and the word comes in response: Babylon will conquer Judah, and your people and treasures will be carried off into exile.

As we noted a few weeks ago, though, that could not be the last word; the story of the people of God could not end that way, or it would invalidate everything God had ever said about himself. Thus begins the second great section of the book, Isaiah 40-55, which answers the question, “What now?” God will bring his people back from exile, that has to be established—and it is, in the first 11 verses of this chapter, the immediate response to the word of judgment pronounced in chapter 39—but on what basis? What will God do with this people who refuse to be the servant people he called and created them to be? Will they respond to their exile by repenting and changing their ways, or will God’s work have to go forward some other way? Will he ultimately have to set his people aside?

The answers to those questions will be worked out over the course of chapters 40-55, which we’ll be studying over the next number of weeks; right from the beginning, though, even in the great word of comfort and hope that opens this section, we have hints that God’s people will not respond as they should. It’s my contention that we see two primary things happen in these chapters; the first is widely agreed on, while the second is not so much. First, in what are known as the “Servant Songs,” we see the focus shift from the nation as God’s servant to God raising up a particular servant, one human being, through whom he will accomplish his purpose—and these prophecies are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Thus we’ll spend some time during this series in the gospels, and in other passages that point explicitly to Christ, as our passage from Colossians does this morning. Second, I believe we see in these chapters a shift away from Israel to the nations—since Israel would not take up the mission to the nations, the Servant will begin that mission himself; the salvation of Israel will have to come through the nations, instead of the other way around. This engages with Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11, in which he wrestles with this issue, and so we’ll spend some time reading there as well.

The argument begins here in chapter 40, though, with the announcement of deliverance; and that announcement is founded in the assertion that God, and only God, is capable of delivering his people. We see the first statement of that in verse 10: “See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power, and his arm rules for him”; and then in verse 12, Isaiah begins to argue this out in detail. The central question of this section comes in verse 18: “To whom will you compare God?” The answer is clear: nobody. Verse 12 asks, who can compare with God’s power in creation? The imagery here is remarkable—for all the vastness of the heavens, God measured them with a span, which is the distance from here [tip of thumb] to here [tip of spread pinky]. That’s how big the universe is compared to God. Verses 13 and 14 ask, who can compare with God’s wisdom and knowledge—who was even in a position to offer him advice? Clearly, no one.

What about the nations? The kings of Judah, as we’ve seen, spent much of their time focused on the threat from this nation or that nation, and hoping to use this other powerful nation over here as an ally to deal with the perceived threat; and if they could have, they no doubt would have been looking for nations which they could invade and conquer in turn. What about these powers? The kings of Judah didn’t trust God to deal with them, preferring their military efforts and diplomatic intrigues; were they justified? Are the nations too great for God to handle? No, says Isaiah, of course not. All their power and glory are nothing, just the speck of dust that settles on the scale—completely inconsequential. Not only is their power no rival to that of God, the very idea is utterly ludicrous, totally absurd. They’re not “worthless”—that’s not a good word choice by the NIV; it’s not as if God doesn’t value them, because he clearly does. The point is, rather, that as God measures power, they don’t even register.

Ah, but some might say, that’s comparing apples to dragons. The nations are certainly far greater and more powerful than Israel, so surely their gods must be greater and more powerful than Israel’s God, right? That would have seemed obvious to most people; but to Isaiah, it’s the most ridiculous idea yet. In verses 19-20, we get the first of several polemics against idols that we’ll see in this section—this one’s brief, but when Isaiah returns to this theme and these images later on, he’ll do so at greater length. Are the gods of the nations powerful? No, they’re nothing at all. People make them out of stuff. Sure, it’s valuable stuff—that “poor man” is a mistranslation, because in that part of the world, wood that wouldn’t rot was actually very expensive, and it required a skilled craftsman to shape it—but it’s just stuff, made by people, set up by people, protected by people. It can’t even stand up by itself—it has to be secured with chains or fastened down in some other way to keep it from falling over. And this is supposed to rival the God who made the whole universe (including that stuff that people bow down and worship) out of nothing, not even needing anyone to advise him? Not likely.

Just to make sure you got the point, Isaiah goes back over all of it. Creation, kings, nations—don’t you get it? he asks; are you really that dense? All these things are God’s creation, and he does with them as he will; even the sun, moon, and stars, which the peoples of the ancient world thought governed their lives, are his creation and his servants. In his power, in his character, in all of who he is, God is so far above anything we human beings can imagine as to be completely incomparable, completely beyond our ability to describe; as such, he’s also completely beyond our ability, or the ability of our enemies, to baffle, thwart, or evade. He raises up the powers of the earth, and then he brings them to nothing, as he will; no opposition to him will be allowed to endure.

From Israel’s perspective, though, what really mattered was their own circumstances, and when things weren’t going the way they wanted, they were inclined to distrust God; and so here we get the first appearance of their grumbling skepticism. “God isn’t helping us; he can’t see what’s happening to us, and he doesn’t care that we aren’t getting the justice we deserve.” To that, Isaiah says once again, “Don’t you get it?” God has all power over creation, and he knows everything that happens; and no, he’s not too tired to help his people, either, because he never gets tired. God intends to deliver his people, and he has the ability to do so any time and in any way he chooses. What is needed is for his people—for them; for us—to trust him.

Our own strength is limited; even the best of us wear out and falter. That second word translated “young men” means “chosen ones”—the elite, the hand-picked, like our own Olympic athletes. Even a guy like Michael Phelps can only keep going for so long before he drops from exhaustion. But God says that if we will trust him, wait for him, depend on him, rather than putting our trust in our own strength and our own plans, that he will give us the strength and the endurance we need to do what he calls us to do. We will be able to fly as eagles fly—not by working hard flapping their wings, but by stretching out their wings and letting the wind carry them; we will be able to keep going through the weary times, because when our strength runs out, he will renew us, if we wait on him.

This is important for us to remember as a nation, as we enter a new year in very uncertain circumstances; as we consider Iran, and terrorists, and the global economic situation, we need to remember what Isaiah tells us: surely all these problems compared to God are like the bead of condensation that slides down your can of soda, or the bit of dust that settles on the scale when you’re weighing the produce. Yes, economic trends could make our lives much less comfortable than we’ve been used to, and yes, al’Qaeda could hurt our country badly; but though God may permit bad things to happen to us, they will only happen when he permits them, and he will continue to work through them just as he works through the good things we see in life. In all things, well and ill, God is in control and at work to accomplish his purposes.

This is also important for us to remember as a church. We know we have some challenges; we know that given the size and age of our congregation, the giving level we’ve seen, and the size of our budget, our current situation is not sustainable. Change will come, one way or another, that’s inevitable—the only question is whether we will be proactive in creating change, or just let change happen to us (in which case it will almost certainly be bad). What we need to bear in mind is that we must not make the same mistake King Ahaz made, in choosing to put his trust in his own wits and schemes and plans—a mistake that came because he focused too much on the problems he could see, and lost sight of the fact that God is much bigger than all those problems. As the Session gathers next Sunday to begin to develop a vision and a plan for this body, as we bring our work to the congregation at the annual meeting next month, as we work over the course of this coming year to get everyone committed to going forward together in ministry in a new way, we need to remember whose wisdom we need to seek, and whose will we need to follow, and whose strength and whose power will make it all happen—namely, God. Our incomparable God who made all that is and who dwarfs every challenge we face has a part for us in his plan, and he desires to bless us as a part of that; we just need to follow.

This means that while our own efforts are important—God doesn’t call us to passivity—the most important thing we can do is pray. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, if you’re a part of this community of faith, your first responsibility before all others is to be in prayer for the church; if you didn’t get the sheet I put together suggesting ways to be praying for this body, let me know and I’ll run you off a copy. In particular, and especially this year, we as the Session need your prayers, as we seek to discern where God is leading us.