Month: February 2019

Wow, just wow.  I went from one place to another as I was reading this chapter.  When I read vs.1-2 the only thing I could think was: America.  “I said ‘Here I am, here I am’ to a nation that did not call on my name.”  You know me well enough by now to know that this is not a call or a supplication to place God back in the schools or back in the country.  This is a cry out to those who would say that we need to keep God in America and yet they overlook the poor and the powerless and those who do not have a home and those whom Isaiah would have identified as the people that we need to serve the most.  When we say that we are Christian and our  Christianity is limited to being fired up about keeping prayer in school or or not taking it out of the pledge of allegiance I would classify that as “a people who provoke me to my face continually.”  

The power of this passage is then magnified starting at vs.17 and following which should bring to our mind Revelation 21 where we read about a new heaven and a new earth, where we read about there being no more weeping or crying.  The prophet goes even further and says that there will be no infant death, there will be no ending of life until well after we are in our 100s.  These promises from Isaiah make me happy because they are so well rounded.  

We see the promise of God being by our side but also a promise of a reality where the wolf and the lamb will feed together and not on each other.  In order for that to happen, if you look at vs.25, the lion needs to change its eating habits and the serpent the same.  But the result of these changes in our outlook on life will produce a life where there is no destruction and no one is hurt.  I think it is worth becoming a vegetarian for that, at least if I were a lion or a snake.

You can’t read this chapter without thinking about Lent, especially when we look at vs.6 and following.  This verse is used to underscore that we are all unclean, read sinners, and that our deeds are like a filthy cloth.  What happens when you try to clean something up with a filthy cloth?  It just spreads and becomes worse.  What happens when we live our lives trying to do good deeds in order to become justified before the Lord?  Believe it or not but our deeds do nothing to improve our relationship with the Lord.  They are like filthy rags that when we do something in order to gain points before God, then we actually do them in a way that just makes things worse.  

As you follow along you then get to vs.8 and 9 which are other Lenten verses.   We are reminded  that we are the clay and He is the potter.  We are all the work of the hand of God.  We then move  to 9 where we are beseeching the Lord to not consider our iniquity because, in case you forgot, we are your people.  We are all your people.  What a great thing to remember as we begin to make our journey to Lent in this ordinary time, we are the people of God.

I have to stop for a while at vs.1, the end of it where it reads: “It is I, announcing vindication, mighty to save.” 

If you keep reading in the chapter you know that the salvation that is described is not a spiritual one.  It is a salvation at the right arm of almighty God as He lifted it with his sword to physically defeat His adversaries.  You read a lot about garments trampled in blood.  If you read vs.6 you don’t get an image of a loving God.  It is actually quite gruesome.  

But Isaiah rebounds from vs.6 with a very powerful vs.7 where he recounts the blessings of the Lord.  It is almost as if all the warring and madness from the previous verses didn’t exist.  Vs. 7 is really one of the most powerful that we have read in the entire book of Isaiah.  

If you then go from vs.10 on you see another reversal where the disobedience of the people of God is recounted.  There are so many twists and turns in this chapter that it is hard to keep it straight.

Here is another description of the glories of the days to come.  This entire chapter is framed in the future as a foil for what is currently happening now in Israel with its captivity and its inability to claim its own land, well, as its own.  This is what the prophet Isaiah was experiencing.  If you look at vs.11 you will see the climax of this prophecy.  Salvation is coming and this salvation is found in the  Lord being able to call His people: “Holy people, The Redeemed of the Lord.”  This is juxtaposed with what they want to be called which is: “Sought out, a city not forsaken.”  

So much of the identity of the people of Israel is tied in to the land and the region where they are living.  This is in part due to the fact that there is the belief that God resides on Mount Zion, or Jerusalem.  It may sound nonsensical that a belief system is built up around geography, but that is the case.  This could explain why there is so much tension and anger and war that takes place in that region of the world.  

This is the Scripture that Jesus reads when he is in his home synagogue in Nazareth.  You can read that in Luke 4:16 and following.  Read the whole thing through because what we find is that once Jesus reads this Isaiah Scripture we see that Jesus is run out of the synagogue and taken up to a hill where they were going to cast him over it, but he disappeared among them.  Wait, why did this happen?  If you follow along you will see that he speaks directly to the love of God who does not only love the chosen ones of Israel but even the foreign widow in Sidon and the foreign Syrian leper who was healed.  This was a radical concept for those who were there because this meant that the doors of salvation were open to all, and well, they didn’t want that.  This God is only for us.

Below you will find a picture that  shows supposedly the hill where they took Jesus and Nazareth is in the background.  Kind of cool to be able to go there and see these places.  

Some of my favorite verses are also seen in vs.10 and following as we read that we are to rejoice because has clothed us with salvation.  That is pretty special.  Here is a promise  that we can count on in vs.11: The Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

I can’t help but think of this hymn when I read the beginning words of this chapter.  Actually, this is not the hymn, but I keep finding this one when I google the one that I want.

This is actually the one that I want.

The words that go to it correspond to Isaiah 60:1.  It is a song that is pretty much focused on the justice that the Lord will be bringing when he comes back again to take us.  This chapter is a chapter that focuses on the Lord coming back again, but that when he does it will be one of judgment that we do not expect.  

The prophet predicts a day that will come where all the nations will come our way in order to worship the true King.  At that day the Lord will be the everlasting light.  I find it amusing that God says: “In its time I will accomplish it quickly.”   I don’t think I can remember a time  when I felt as if God had done it quickly, but I’m sure there is a time when that was true.  

We have a picture here of the Lord going into battle against those who would withdraw justice from those who are in the most need.  You see a description of those who are evil as spiders who weave their web in such a way that iniquity is sure to follow.  It is very descriptive and not very flattering to those that it describes.  But who are “they” that the Lord is describing here?  We would never assume that the description matches our actions or our thoughts and are probably pretty quick to point out certain people that it describes who just might be people that we are not all that crazy about.  But notice that the prophet describes the people as “we”.  If you look at vs.9 and following you will see that description as we grope and wander around as those without sight and those without a rudder or a compass.  

In vs. 15 we read that the Lord sees our actions and that the Lord is fundamentally displeased.  We will be repaid according to our deeds.  Wait, I mean, we are saved by grace through faith.  The former is the Prophet Isaiah, the latter is the Apostle Paul.  I’ll take the latter.

Then we finish this section off with vs.21 where we read that the covenant of the Lord is upon us and that the Spirit of the Lord is upon us.  The words of the Lord which have been put on our mouths will not depart from either us or our children.  Wouldn’t that be awesome if we could implant the Words of the Lord upon our children?  That would be amazing if we could find a gene that matched the teachings of God and make sure that our children had that as part of their DNA.  Yeah, that isn’t going to happen, so the next best thing is to rely upon this promise in Isaiah that the Lord has promised good to us and that His Word will be a part of our makeup.  

This is one of the most powerful chapters in all of Isaiah, I would even say in all of Scripture.  The prophet removes from us any notion that all God wants is a personal relationship with him and that our relationship to our neighbor doesn’t really matter.  There is so much more to a full Christian life than just a quiet time and a pietistic approach to faith.  The fast that God chooses for us is not to skip meat during Lent.  The fast that God chooses for us is to loose the bonds of injustice.  What does that mean?  Where in our legal system is there a clear injustice?  What about the percentage of those who are of color who are in our criminal justice system?  That counts.

What is the fast that the Lord chooses?  What about undoing the thongs of the yoke.  What is it that keeps people locked into their lot in life?  It is in our culture and our society a system that is rigged to benefit those who are in power giving them the ability to stay in power.  I know this all sounds political, but it is really just the prophet Isaiah speaking.  It continues: let the oppressed go free, break every yoke, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see the naked cover them.  

This is the relationship that God wants us to have with Him and with each other.  This is a Matthew 25 church that wants to fast in a way that God wants us to fast by reaching out to  those in need.  This is acceptable to the Lord.

There is so much in this chapter.  We can’t overlook vs.12 and the words which speak about our role being the repairers of the breach in society and culture.  Where is the a breach, where has the fabric of society been rent?  That is where we need to step in to help healing and to knit things back together again.  No one likes the one who tries to knit things back together again, but that is okay, it is our job.  

This is a little more normal as far as the Lord speaking about the positive things and the negative things.  We hear the prophet calling those who are not following God’s way “children of a sorceress” and “offspring of an adulterer and a whore.”  Not really the most diplomatic speech, and not something that we would necessarily read in church as an edifying Scripture to get us motivated to do God’s work.

Starting at vs.14 we see that God has plans to build up, to rebuild the city, and to remove any obstacle that is in the way of the people to inhabit God’s city again.  But He insists on pointing out all the faults that the people have, and they are many.  But I am grateful that we get a promise in vs.19.  “Peace, peace, to the far and the near.”  We need that peace because it feels as if we are right in the middle of the tossing sea.  “There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.”  

The prophet speaks about foreigners who are living in the land and who have given of themselves to the Lord.  Do you ever find yourself thinking…American?  Let me explain.  I’ll never forget when I was a first year seminary student and I spend the entire summer in Prague, what was then Czechoslovakia, helping organize an ecumenical conference.  I was surrounded by people from all over the world who were my age.  I remember thinking that the Beatles were somehow American music.  But no, they are European.  I remember thinking that certain things like the telephone were American by nature, but actually before Bell there was an Italian who had pulled off what Bell did years later.  The list continued where things in my customary ordinary life I assumed had been American all along, but they were not.  

Did you know that the majority of Christians, by a long shot, live outside of the US?  Did you know that Palestinian Christians were worshiping Jesus 1,500 years before we were?  Did you know  that they have had church for over a thousand more  years than we have?  So much of who we are is defined by where we live and our American way of doing things.  But in this Scripture Isaiah reminds us that those foreigners who were living in Israel but still loved God were welcome in the family.

By the way, the foreigners that the prophet Isaiah is referencing are us.  We are the ones who came into the Christian life in a very circuitous way.  We were not Jewish by background, and we were not Christian by way of an apostle who spoke the Gospel to us.  We are Christian by thousands of years removed, most of us at some time had the church in Rome as part of our heritage, and then as Protestants we came along much, much later.  It should be sobering to place ourselves on the bottom of the totem pole in regards to being foreigners who were embraced in Jesus’ family even if some wanted us to be kept out.  Nice to be a foreigner who is allowed in.  That is our current status.  We are all foreigners who were shown grace.