Thus says the Lord God:
“Behold, I will lift up my hand to the nations,
and raise my signal to the peoples;
and they shall bring your sons in their bosom,
and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
and their queens your nursing mothers.
With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you,
and lick the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the Lord;
those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.”—Isaiah 49:22-23 (ESV)The Jews get a lot of flak from many Christians for their failure to understand what God was trying to do and thus to fulfill the part in his plan. Now, obviously someone who believes as I do that Jesus is the promised Messiah is going to have a different take on that than someone who doesn’t; but without getting into comparative theology, I think it needs to be said that we should all be a lot humbler about such arguments. Many of us (perhaps most of us) have an unfortunate tendency to present our positions as if their truth is obvious, and should be obvious to those who disagree with us—meaning, of course, that we’re the noble ones who have the truth, and our opponents must be arguing for ignoble reasons. This is not only wrongheaded, it’s wrong-spirited.What’s more, in some cases, it’s also evidence of our own lack of self-knowledge and self-awareness; and this would be one of those. Consider this section of Isaiah (which is representative of other passages in the prophets): God is proposing to bless his people by bringing in the nations to join them. In order to accept this blessing, they need to do two things: one, they have to give up their national self-understanding—what we might, by analogy to the present day, call “Israelite exceptionalism”—and two, they have to welcome the other peoples of the world in.Now, to be sure, God isn’t asking Israel to take a secondary place; quite the contrary, the nations will honor them and bow before them in recognition of how much they owe the people of Israel. That said, remember, the nations are outsiders, and some of them are bitter enemies; he’s asking them to welcome strangers, rivals, and people who have hurt them badly into their land and into their people. He’s asking them not only to forgive their enemies, but to adopt their enemies, to welcome former enemies into their home, to love them, and to trust them as family.That’s a challenge, if we’re honest. If we really put ourselves into the story, it’s not necessarily all that obvious that it really qualifies as a blessing. After all, we’re used to thinking of blessings as being for us, while the blessing Isaiah promises here is as much for the nations as it is for Israel; God blesses Israel in part so that they may bless the nations. To recognize this as a real blessing, we need to understand that this is what the blessings of God look like—they really never are just for us. We aren’t merely recipients of his blessings, we’re conduits. That’s just how God works.God’s blessings often aren’t easy to receive. Grace isn’t easy. Love isn’t easy. They come with challenges, asking us to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do. I would venture to say that anyone who takes them lightly, who isn’t made at least a little uncomfortable by the blessings of God, doesn’t understand them as well as they should. I’m certainly not saying that we should encourage anyone not to accept the grace of God; but if we find anyone reluctant to do so, we should understand that their reluctance is not altogether unreasonable. God’s blessings are always best for us . . . but they’re often not what we think is best for us, and so we have to give up our own ideas of what’s best in order to accept them. Doing so is itself a blessing—but we should never make the mistake of thinking that it’s an easy and obvious step.
