From Jim McGuiggan... NO WORD FROM GOD?

NO WORD FROM GOD?

His father Amaziah had turned from God and was assassinated and the Judeans made the sixteen year-old boy king in his place—so Uzziah/Azariah was now on the throne. A prophet called Zechariah took the kid under his wing and taught him about God and about the meaning of his two names (something like, Yahweh helps and Yahweh is my strength). 2 Chronicles 26 tells us how true to life his names were of the young king, who was truly multi-talented. God helped him and was his strength and the king prospered in everything he put his hand to. No Judean king since David and Solomon (not even Jehoshaphat) was as successful as this king. No wonder the prophet Isaiah came to revere and trust him so. 

But even great men and women can commit grievous wrongs (do you need a list?) and Uzziah, now old enough and experienced enough to know better, was no longer content with being blessed and successful and a blessing to God's People—he wanted more and ended up with less—much less. 

He pushed his way into a role he had no right to take, raged against those who objected and after something like forty-two years of honorable royalty he got ten years of leprosy and isolation. (Think of Robert the Bruce's father in the movie Braveheart. Though the leprosy part is fiction.) 

Still, he would have remained a force behind the throne his son, Jotham, sat on as co-regent for those ten years. Now, with even more fervor than before, Uzziah would be able to urge his son to abide by the will of God--ten years behind closed doors, cut off from the temple also (2 Chronicles 26:21). 

A series of warrior-kings from Assyria were making Isaiah's entire world shake violently (Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon and Sennacherib) and wasn't the prophet glad that Uzziah, his boyhood hero and manhood assurance was still around to keep the nation from destruction or slavery! 

Then in the midst of all this political and military bedlam Uzziah died and the prophet, like the rest of his people, goes into panic and that's when God showed himself to the prophet. So says the text (Isaiah 6:1-6). 

What the text doesn't say and yet it is written all over the section (Isaiah 6—9) is this.

Isaiah was out for a walk, worried sick, thinking of the conspiracy that was afoot--a conspiracy promoted by two fear-smitten kings further north (Rezin of Damascus and Pekah of Samaria) who want Judean forces to ally with them against Assyria. They would replace a Davidic king with a puppet king of their own. The fear was so thick you could call it dread; every conversation on every corner had the word "conspiracy" in it and how many in the Judean corridors of power were in on it was the question, and might it not be a good thing to form such an alliance was being debated. The prophet comes across God sitting on a big rock (a rock you could hide behind for refuge in a storm or a rock you could run into in a panic and be smashed up--Isaiah 8:14): 

What's your name?

Isaiah, my Lord.

What's your name?

Isaiah, my Lord.

What..is..your..name?

Yahweh is salvation.

Say it correctly.

Yahweh is salvation.

Say it correctly!

Yahweh is salvation!

And that's why we have: "Woe is me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." 

G.A. Smith was right. In that hour hero worship died and faith was born.

The prophet has met the King! The death of Uzziah didn’t leave the throne empty! He’s convicted and aghast and confesses that he has been following the path of the people in general; he too had been taken by trustless fear and had been relying on a powerful king and military strength and military success (see Isaiah 8:11-14). 

Opinions were everywhere! It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last time. Some favored alliance with Rezin and Pekah, some favored tribute with Assyria, some said Egypt should be called in and others said since the gods of Assyria were obviously powerful they should be worshiped. Some said this, some said that and some said something else. 

As Brueggemann has pointed out in commenting on Jeremiah 2, in the midst of political, social, economic and national crisis the people said many things—things like, “It’s hopeless,” “We are not defiled,” “We will not serve,” “We are innocent; we have not sinned.” These and other things they said but:

“They did not say, ‘Where is the Lord who brought us up out of the land of Egypt?’”
        (2:6)

“The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’” (2:8).

Isaiah and the people around him, in one form or another, did not say, “Where is the Lord?” The prophet would have groaned, “Where is Uzziah?” Others would have said, “Call on Egypt.” Others would have moaned, “Make the alliance,” and others would have said,
"It’s hopeless, pay tribute and worship Assyria’s gods.” All these they were saying but they did not say, “Where is the Lord who brought us up out of Egypt and through a howling wilderness?” 

It’s a pity this history, these texts, this Message of Isaiah—it’s a pity it has nothing to say to us in the 21^st century. In particular, it’s a pity it has nothing to say to the People of God. 

In a world where China is setting up weapons on islands in the South China Sea, where Putin and his hard-liners, say some, is wanting to re-establish a USSR, where Syria is what other places are only worse at present, where Darfur goes on and on without ceasing, where Islam, as characterized by its extremists, purposes to take over the planet; in a world where Texans are now permitted to go around with holstered guns, in a world where economic ruin is facing the European banking structures and so will affect global economy—in a world like that it’s too bad that the NT People of God have no word from God.

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.