WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?*
Isaiah 46:1-2 allows us to imagine the back gates of an ancient city being swung open and under cover of darkness out comes a long line of huge wagons with giant wheels pulled by straining oxen and donkeys. There are strong men as well, pushing and shoving with all their might, giving the straining animals all the help they can give them while the huge wheels creak and the beds of the wagons groan in protest under the massive loads.
And what is this? It's a rescue attempt! The grunting, sweating and straining animals and men are trying to keep the gigantic idol gods from falling into the hands of the enemy (and see Isaiah 21:9).
The historical referent is just prior to 539 BC when the Persians took the city of Babylon and the leaders are sneaking the gods out the back doors to keep them from being taken into captivity where they would be set up in a public show—to demonstrate how powerful the conquerors were.
The idols are the visible representation of the powerful gods the Babylonians thought existed and weary animals (46:1) had to carry them. The gods can't even give strength to the burden bearers much less deliver the burdensome idols from captivity (46:2) and so all that's involved in the picture (gods, the burdensome idols and the burden bearers) goes into captivity.
What's wrong with this picture? Should a god not carry his worshippers? Does it make sense to worship as a deliverer what exists only because we ourselves made it and sustain it? There is nothing behind the idols, said the prophets, and even if there were gods, what use are they? They can't rescue their own idol images and they can't give strength to the people who are trying to rescue the images. What a rip-off!
The prophet knows the history of sinful Israel but he still insists on speaking the word of the Lord who has nurtured and carried Israel since her beginning (46:3-4). Ancient Babylon and we very modern moderns might worry about the failure of our gods because in fact we are the ones who must sustain them but Israel had no grounds for such concern. "Quick, quick, get the Lord out the side gate because the enemy is coming!" None of that's needed! "Hurry, hurry, stifle that talk and silence that argument for God is in danger." None of that's needed. "Wring your hands and pace the floor in anxiety for the whole Western world and its governments have risen up against God and his people." "Oh dear, Professor X and a famous celebrity openly said they didn't believe in God." And on the other hand there's the (almost) relief when some athlete or movie star expresses faith in God. "We're not alone. One of the major players has come over on to our side." That eases our anxiety and gives God a direly needed helping hand.
Prophetic confidence was in God, in no one and nothing else! These men had their own moments of dismay and even the gang-busting Elijah had his experience with depression. But it's still true that they stood for what was best in Israel's faith and called the people back to God, insisting that in him and in him alone there was hope of redemption from sin and loss.
Isaiah 43 is one long insistence that God alone cares for Israel and that he alone is her Saviour. A slow thoughtful reading of the entire chapter is an education and a lift to the heart because so many relationships between God and Israel are expressed and implied in it. He created them, chose them, named them, ransomed them, revealed himself to them, honoured and loved them.
It's hard to say who the speaker is in Isaiah 33 but it's probably the prophet. He speaks of Israel's terrible need in time of siege and horror and confesses the judgement of God against his sinning people. But he's sure that the judgement is not meant to be utter abandonment but God's redeeming work for he speaks of the future with sure hope (33:17-21). And what is it he rests in? It certainly isn't the coming of foreign allies to break the siege or the ability of Judean ambassadors to talk their way out of trouble (compare 36:5-7 and 11-12). No, he speaks with assurance for the future (33:22), "For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; it is he who will save us." In light of Israel's sin we might have expected the prophet to say, "He is our Judge, our Lawgiver and our King therefore he will destroy us" but that's not what he says. That's not even close to what he says! If we are to be judged this God will judge us and if we're to be saved this God will save us because there is no other.
One day, weary with all our trying, worn out with all our schemes and self-generated attempts to make things right in our lives and in our world we'll turn to God in the desperation of faith and we'll be saved. "Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn, my mouth has uttered in all integrity a word that will not be revoked." (Isaiah 45:22-23)
I'm not saying that people should do nothing, pretending that God will transform the world with a wave of a wand—no! We're to engage with life in the world but we're to do it in the light of and with trust in the Lord God. To exclude God from human life is to transform the entire enterprise. It becomes what atheist Blackham described it as: pointless, too bad to be true.
Poor human race! Poor pathetic, blind and deaf human race. We can't cure ourselves, can't guide ourselves, can't control ourselves or save ourselves. We manufacture gods out of everything we can think of and then fall down before them and say to them, "Deliver us". We make them out of metal and stone and plastic and computer chips, out of intellectual power and emotional drives. We make them in the shape of tanks and smart and dirty bombs, college buildings and scientific laboratories. We make them march and kill, burn and destroy, weep and die. We build shrines and we become shrines; we sweat and toil, give up in despair and sleep only to waken to more of the same.
The prophet (Isaiah 44) can hardly believe the ignorance of idolaters. In God's name he says (44:9), "All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless. Those who would speak up for them are blind; they are ignorant, to their own shame." He says that defending idolatry is crass and shameful ignorance. Can you imagine the effect on those worshipers when he said something like that? Well, go tell the social reformers, the military men and educators, the politicians and scientists that the works of their hands can't save! And tell them that to say they can means they're ignorant of their shame. Watch the response.
It's at this point I should be qualifying my remarks, making it clear that schools and medicine, statesmen and judges, scientific advances and more insightful sociological studies are profoundly important. I believe they are! They are but that's only true because these things are in the hands of God and are the gifts of God. To jettison God and see them as our creation is to make them into something they are not, so that even the gifts of God are perverted as they leave his hand. Isaiah (44:20) insists that people who depend on the works of their hands feed "on ashes, a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, 'Is not this thing in my hand a lie?'" They were blind! We are blind!
We make advances and think they are our achievements and make idols of them and gods of ourselves. God's tree in Isaiah 44:13-19 becomes our god for having shaped it we bow down to it and worship ourselves in it (44:18-19).
Yes, but surely idols and a sound political program are completely different? On the surface it would appear so but on closer inspection when God is excluded one is simply a more polished and grand idol than the other one. Once in a while it occurs to us that the gods we make rather than being our saviors are our burdens but it would appear that it's only in truly desperate times that we see the truth of this with clarity and conviction. You might have heard how optimistic we were in the mid 1800's when "every day and in every way things are getting better and better." Then as one of the few serious atheists or more precisely, a Joban figure, Friedrich Nietzsche, warned ahead of time (he died in 1900), that we were entering the classical age of war. All our education and newly found intellectual power that took us beyond the need of gods or serious religion ran up against two world wars. We should have known that we might make good servants but we make lousy gods. We can't save ourselves (Isaiah 44:20) and we can't save our gods.
We don't triumph over evil, personal and cosmic, because we're against it. We don't triumph over entrenched evil in the corridors of power because we have vowed to bring it down. We don't gain victory over the destructive forces that torture, humiliate and damn people because there are moments when we scarcely want to live in such a wicked world. No, we conquer these because he is against them! It's because of him we refuse to see personal defeats as ultimate; it's because of him we rise from specific defeats with unbowed heads; it's because of him we speak our prayers in a world that sneers at prayer and we continue to dream our dreams even in our dismay. It's because the sun rises every day and beams out God's faithfulness that we're sure of the future. It's because the sun shines and the water refracts that light and gives us the rainbow that we're sure of this: he is against the evil and he is in favor of the good and therefore goodness prevails eternally. Corruption and lies don't live forever!
It's because of him we won't allow popularity polls to sway us. It's because of him we refuse to let church growth numbers matter to any appreciable degree. It's because of him no President, Prime Minister or any other powerbroker whether at home or abroad, wise or foolish, tyrannical or beneficent can make us afraid—or at least paralyze us with fear for though they may be able to disrupt countries and bury nations they are nothing new. God has met them and pronounced their doom when in their sin they ceased to serve his redeeming and gracious purposes.
We, we would worry about God? If we the church don't succeed with our programs and protests God will go under? Say such things in the presence of a prophet and he'd judge us to be idolaters. The God the prophets knew wasn't the kind whose health you worried about and every exhibition of power in the world they ascribed to him. Worry about a God like that? That he might not be able to take care of himself and of his people? That he might not be able to fulfill his overarching purpose in the creation of which he was the Agent?
The prophet David (Acts 2:30) pictures a heavenly scene in which God, praised by angelic hosts, is the center and the focus (Psalm 29:1-2). That same God who is the worshipful center of the mighty hosts of heaven shows himself on earth in the lightning storms. The psalm follows the course of a stupendous electrical storm that begins in the Mediterranean Sea (29:3) and thunders its way inland and turns south from Mount Hermon (29:5-6). Such is its fury that Hermon quakes and the cedar forests are splintered and the deer in the lower forests are frightened into giving birth (29:7-9 and following The KJV and other versions that stay with the Massoretic text). Moving south it sets the whole wilderness shaking while in heaven the watchers in awe cry out, "Glory!"
Some storm! But in 29:10 we're assured that God sat enthroned at "the flood". Throughout the Old Testament the word is used only of Noah's flood and this storm may have produced enough rain to make people think of such a time. But whatever happened in Noah's day it vastly outranked even this blinding storm that David might have seen in his shepherding days. The fountains of the deep broke open and came back up over the land while the waters that were above the earth came down on the earth. There is reason to believe that in such a time there were volcanoes erupting under water, the movements of earth's plates and the lifting up of mountains. Seas were hurried back in some areas and in others they rushed to carry away all before them. There were tidal waves that would beggar description and continent sized land masses first thrust up and then dropped on top of teeming millions of animals. [See Velikovsky's, Earth In Upheaval for proofs of the planet's agonized past. Ignore the critics who steal his work even while they sneer at him.]
And while the earth was popping at the seams, while mountain ranges were rising and others were falling, while tidal waves swept the earth and electrical storms the like of which had never been seen and will not be seen again—while all this was happening where was God? He was reigning in and over it all (29:10).
If ever there was a time of complete "creation anarchy," if ever there was a time when humans would have known that no one was in control, that surely would have been the time. But there is no such time! The terrific storm David saw pales before the flood in Noah's day so when he concludes with, "The Lord reigned at the flood," he was rising to a climax.
And if the flood was an expression of his sovereignty (Genesis 6—8), if he was enthroned at the flood, does that not put wars and natural disasters into perspective? If Noah's flood was the work of God reigning in and through it all should we then be unhinged if nations clash and areas of the world are in an uproar like waves that crash against each other (see Isaiah 17:12-13)? If he was reigning then he's reigning now! And since he orchestrated the flood to redeem the world and give us another chance should we not live in assurance during anxious times? I'm not saying it's easy! We're humans, for pity's sake! Still, the redeeming God was reigning then and reigns now!
After the flood there was the rainbow! The prophet knew a God who was powerful beyond imagining (Ezekiel 1:1-28, especially 28); a God committed to humanity and to creation with a commitment from which there was no turning back (Isaiah 54:9-10). That God and he alone was the ground of prophetic confidence.
(I borrowed much of this from THE GOD WHO COMMANDS THE IMPOSSIBLE. In the USA, toll free 877-792-6408 or BJPAINE@aol.com)
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.
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