(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.