Today two short parts of Isaiah that I find very personal and very, very challenging indeed…
Last time we embarked on a section of Isaiah about the `great powers`: one that shows how ultimately our God reigns!, not any of these (and what reassurance this is for us each His beloved children, just when these powers cannot do more than mitigate a global disaster!); one that shows too how, yes, every ungodly culture will in time face God’s real judgment, and yet God has a glorious, loving purpose even for the most appalling of nations. So, the nations; but are there things in these chapters for us personally?
There are; very challenging ones indeed. The first comes in chapter 22. Background: the (godly!) king Hezekiah sees that Jerusalem will be besieged by the horrendously brutal Assyrians, with its valleys full of enemy chariots and enemy horsemen at its gates. So he plans ahead, and very shrewdly (see 2 Chronicles 32:1-5); he’s a competent leader. But prophet Isaiah sees that, although Hezekiah’s a godly man (32:8), there’s a problem here far more serious even than planning the city’s defence. These verses spoke so forcibly to me:
`You looked in that day
to the weapons in the Palace of the Forest.
You saw that the walls of the City of David
were broken through in many places;
you stored up water in the Lower Pool.
You counted the buildings in Jerusalem,
and tore down houses to strengthen the wall.
You built a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the Old Pool;
But…….. you did not look to the One who made it,
or have regard for the One who planned it long ago!` (Isa 22:8-11, NIV)
And the results are clearly serious indeed. It’s great that Hezekiah is practical, as well as being a man of faith – but this can, and does, lead him to disaster. (It leads in 2 Chronicles 32 to v25 [= Isaiah 39], from which there was no recovery.) This spoke so powerfully to me as I’ve read it recently, because I guess I tend to think of myself as a planner; and it feels especially relevant right now when we’re thinking how to handle the many things arising from some huge events in our family. Just writing this now I feel the need to somehow stop and try to absorb it. Am I falling into this trap, this self-sufficiency of the planner and the strategist, while in practice disastrously ignoring God? Even ignoring His calls to repent (v13)? Am I?
So there’s the first. Like I say, it challenges me very forcefully. May God be merciful and help us see if this is us – me – at this time!
But while we’re here I want to include chapter 20, which is even more challenging. (Feel free to skip it and join me again next week.) When hard things happen around us, God’s normal word (and people seemed to be sensing its relevance as covid hit) is as per Isaiah 26:20: `Go, My people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until His wrath has passed by.` God is our enormously loving Father, and at times of crisis we can confidently `hide ourselves` under His protection: `For in the day of trouble He will keep me safe in His dwelling; He will hide me in the shelter of His sacred tent, and set me high upon a rock` (Psalm 27:5). `Blessed is he… whose hope is in the Lord his God, who is faithful for ever!` (Psalm 146).
But there’s something in Isaiah 20 to put alongside that:
`In the year that the supreme commander, sent by Sargon king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and attacked and captured it` [this is BC 711] – ` at that time the LORD spoke through Isaiah son of Amoz. He said to him, “Take off the sackcloth from your body and the sandals from your feet.”
`And he did so, going around stripped, and barefoot.
`Then the LORD said, “Just as my servant Isaiah has gone stripped, and barefoot, for three years, as a sign and portent against Egypt and Cush, so the king of Assyria will lead away stripped and barefoot the Egyptian captives and Cushite exiles, young and old, with buttocks bared – to Egypt’s shame. Those [ie in Israel] who trusted in Cush and boasted in Egypt will be dismayed and put to shame` (NIV).
Wow. What can one say. Isaiah did this utterly embarrassing thing, living `with buttocks bared`, being a lived-out sign of judgment, in obedience to God. And it seems he obeyed for three years, did this horrible thing for full three years, before God explained why. Three years!
What can we say? What’s the lesson? Evidently being a prophet, carrying a warning of God’s judgment to our culture, can have a personal cost. Of course it’s an extreme example: we’re watching what God did with the old testament’s greatest prophet, the one with greatest impact for 2700 years to come. (Though there’s an even more extreme case in Ezekiel 24:15ff.) But clearly (and we learn this from what happened to Jesus; eg Matt 8:19-20), prophesying judgment isn’t something we do from an armchair, from uninvolved, detached ease and comfort. It lacks all integrity unless there is some deep identification with those being judged. (`My heart cries out over Moab… The Moabites wail, they wail together… I weep, as Jazer weeps… My heart laments for Moab`, Isaiah 15,16).
I don’t know what more to say here, except: it may explain certain things that happen to us. We’re in this for the millions of years of eternity, not just for good times now. We may read this and feel, well, God in 1 Corinthians 14 tells us to desire especially the role of the prophet, but perhaps I’ll sit this one out. Yet if it’s our calling, we’ll know we can’t. It’s like James 3: `Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.` And if we have the calling of a teacher, we’ll read that and decide, Well, I’m in the hands of God, I’ll just trust His love and His wisdom and press on.
Not an easy one, but that’s what it says. Like I say, this is the norm: `Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until His wrath has passed by.` And so it will be! But if – if the hiding hasn’t worked out, for us, quite as we expected – maybe from Isaiah 20 God is saying to you that it means He is, or has been, or will be, using you significantly, in a really seriously prophetic way…
But still, in this, don’t forget chapter 22. You did this, and did that, you planned, and you thought ahead, and you stored up – but, you did not look to the One who made it all, to the One who foresaw and planned it all, long, long ago……
