(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.