(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.