OLD TESTAMENT

– A narrative on Isaiah 6:9-13

Isaiah (and other prophets) were given impossible jobs; to deliver a message which God knows will be rejected.

This passage, which was quoted by Jesus in Matthew 13, does not imply that God is vindictively hardening people so that they cannot turn to him. Rather, this is a description of what is inevitable, not what is determined, apart from, or against, people’s own will. The people are so blind and prejudiced that they can’t receive the truth when it is set before them.

Isaiah’s clear message (people even despised it as simplistic, 28:9,10), hardened their hearts further because they had already decided to ignore it or reject it. They were not prepared to listen, so they were unable to “hear”.

That was the fate of many prophets. People despised the message so they shot the messenger; but they could not accuse God of not having warned them of the coming tragedy that the prophets foresaw.

Christians face a similar scenario. Their message is not one which all people want to hear. But the task is to explain it clearly and faithfully and with as much cultural relevance as possible (Ezekiel used visual aids to enforce his message!). Some people will respond. There will be a harvest, and we should look for it. But we should not be surprised if some reject it scornfully and forcefully.

Enlarge your vision and grow

Isaiah 54,55

Pioneer missionary William Carey used 54:2 as the text for a sermon in which his famous dictum was first used. “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” Isaiah’s vision is expansionist, as he sees the exile coming to an end and the Jews getting ready for a restoration to the Promised Land.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, many had been predicting a period of church expansion if not revival. The growing interest of ordinary people in the broadly spiritual dimension to life, the sense of lostness and purposelessness, which grips many and stimulates an ultimately unsatisfying race for possessions and experiences, fuelled that idea.

The growth movement has devised any number of potential strategies for taking advantage of this situation. Growth was never intended in the New Testament to be a private spiritual matter; it was intended to be numerical as the disciples took the gospel into all the world and many were added to their number.

However, as many of its exponents would admit, this passage from Isaiah provides us with the only starting point for growth. Before anything can happen, even if revival and growth are promised in writing across the sky, God’s people must first turn back to him and continue to depend on him.

In 55:1-7, the prophet describes first a necessary thirst for God himself, not just for what God can do or give. He is the source of all spiritual life (the waters). With that thirst comes an acknowledgement of our own spiritual brokenness in the call to “seek him while he may be found”.

And following that, our dependence on him and not on our techniques and accumulated expertise, is to be absolute, for his ways are beyond our understanding and his strategies will not always follow our neat formulae (55:8,9).

Love and serve the LORD

OLD TESTAMENT

ISAIAH: AN OVERVIEW

PEOPLE who wait on the LORD shall “soar on wings like eagles”, Isaiah declares (40:31). His book does just that. In the second half especially, the poetry and thought rises above the petty concerns and trivial harassments of human life and transports us gracefully into the presence of God.

Isaiah looks down from a great height on Judah, Israel, and the surrounding nations, and sees them all from God’s vantage point. Then he looks upwards in paeans of praise and adoration that surpass even the best of the psalms.

Yet the book has been the subject of some of the bitterest wrangles among scholars. Although regarded by the Jewish community and the New Testament writers as a unity, Isaiah’s authorship of chapters 40-66 has been doubted consistently over the past 150 years.

Although such questions are important for our understanding of Scripture as a whole, they have only a mild influence on our interpretation. “Second Isaiah” clearly relates to a specific historical situation (which, despite the often-timeless character of its poetry, should inform the way we use its message), whether it was written in advance by Isaiah or closer to the time by someone else, prolonging the whole wide range of Isaiah’s emphases.

Among Isaiah’s great themes are the promises of God’s refreshment and restoration after a time of trial, discipline, and correction. Isaiah never minces his words, but he is a prophet of hope even when he roundly condemns social injustice and religious apostasy.

He is at his greatest when he contrasts the power and resourcefulness of Israel’s holy God with the poverty and impotence of idols which people create from what they can touch and see to give meaning and purpose to their lives. Our idols are different from those of his day, but they are aggressively marketed by image-makers in advertising and public relations agencies.

Music lovers will hear in the call to prepare the way (ch 40) and the catalogue of the servant’s suffering in chapter 53 words immortalised in Handel’s Messiah: readers familiar with the New Testament will recognise them as being fulfilled by John the Baptist and then Jesus’ crucifixion.

If you come to the Old Testament with doubt and suspicion as to its relevance for today, and you want to retain your doubts and suspicions, it is may be best that you avoid Isaiah.

The Book of Isaiah contains majestic poems of God’s greatness and supremacy, as we witness in Isaiah 40:25,26

“‘To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal?’ says the Holy One. Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.”

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SOCIETY DRIFTING WITHOUT A LEADER

– A narrative on Isaiah 3

THE philosophy of leadership changed in the latter half of the twentieth century from “command and control” to “team building”. People who can inspire others are more likely to gain respect than those who shout orders, give few reasons, and expect to be obeyed.

We need leaders at every level of society to hold the structure together. But sometimes people aspire to leadership simply to feed their own emotional or power-hungry needs. And the wrong people may be given leadership roles because other people can’t be bothered to do the job.

The picture in this chapter is of a leadership society, drifting like a rudderless ship. Instead of having mature, wise leaders with a steady hand on the tiller, Jerusalem is being piloted by inexperienced “boys” prone to naïve mistakes and laddish excesses.

It is a form of judgment on a degenerate society to have the leaders it deserves. As society drifts from God, it loses its bearings. When people start to pull in different directions fellowship and outreach break up on the reefs of schism. Lack of leadership in such situations compound the misery of what is going on.

So, we hear calls for “strong leadership” to tug society or the Church back to its moorings. But that sounds like a return to the command and control of a military dictatorship. Modern leadership theory is much more in line with Jesus’ teaching. He said that leaders were to act as servants and lead by example (Matthew 20:24-28). When we feel ourselves to be drifting towards the rocks, don’t pray for a tugboat; pray for a helmsman.