Year 2, Day 353: Isaiah 3

The Why

Isaiah 3 continues in its dark comments against the people of Israel.  Before we get into what the Lord will do – and there is plenty to get into – we are going to look at why the Lord is going to bring about judgment.  In simple terms: everything that the people are doing is against their covenant with God.  The people have abandoned their side of the terms regarding their relationship with God.

God had made a covenant with these people through Abraham.  God had reinforced that covenant through the Law given to Moses.  God had continued to work on the people’s understanding of the covenant through the judges and even the early kings.  But the people didn’t care.  They didn’t even really want to understand.  They offered up the sacrifices that they had to offer up just so God would be appeased.  They did what they had to.  For most of the people, faith and religion wasn’t about relationship with God.  Religion was about appeasing God so that they could get what they want.  The people weren’t interested in living their life the way God wanted them to live it.  They were interested in doing whatever was necessary to appease God so that God would let them have enough time on their own to accomplish their own agenda and not draw His ire.

This is still a large problem in our culture today.  So often we hear of people trying to appease God.  They wonder if they’ve put in enough time to alleviate His watchful eyes so that they can go back to what they’d really rather be doing.  That isn’t how real relationships are made.  That is how ancient people treated their gods.  That is how the people in the dark ages treated their lords.  And quite frankly, it is how many modern people treat their bosses.  But it isn’t any way to establish a relationship.  God does not desire to be appeased.  He desires to be in relationship.

So, as verse 9 tells us, they brought evil onto themselves.  Their path of life had brought evil into their midst.  Isaiah’s warning is that they had abandoned the covenant enough that God was going to let them wallow in their evil for a while, too.  Sure, God could have snapped His fingers and it would have all gone away.  But what purpose would it serve to have God simply “save them?”  Wouldn’t they just go back to wallowing in their sinfulness?  No, God would let the evil that they had brought into their own midst run amuck with their lives.

After all, the Lord is judge over them.  The Lord is the one who can see into their hearts.  The Lord is the one that can truly know their ways.  He can truly understand their desires.  He cannot be fooled.  The Lord knows their secrets and their longings.

The Lord also knows the hurt from how many of them do not long after Him.  He knows the pain from watching them intentionally choose sin over Him.  God knows the distress that comes from watching them intentionally choose to destroy one another.  God is judge.  He’s the only one that can be, really. 

The How

So how exactly will God judge?  His pronouncements over the people are actually quite fair – and disturbing.  God will take away their supply (bread and water, primarily).  God is taking away their military strength.  God is going to take away their judges and prophets and other so-called wise men.  The experts and the counselors are going to be taken away.  How does God exercise judgment over us?  He removes the support that He thinks is best for us and lets us choose for ourselves what we want.  In other words, He punishes us by letting us have our way.

So what is the result of us getting our own way?  That part is pretty easy, too.  This chapter in Isaiah talks about people willing to set up any fool as their leader.  Isaiah hints that the qualification for being a leader will be someone who simply has a cloak!  That’s kind of sad – but it is also reasonably profound, too.  What good are we as human beings at truly determining who a good and a bad leader is?  Can we know the future?  Can we tell how a person is absolutely going to react in certain situations?  No, the best that we can do is to look into a person’s past and assume that past behavior indicates future potential.  Sometimes we get that right.  But sometimes we get that wrong, too.  Only God can genuinely know what is best for our future because only God can genuinely know what the future holds.

Reading books like Isaiah are sometimes scary to me because I honestly have to come face to face with how much I really don’t know.  I have to realize how much more I should be trusting and following God than I am.  Reading books like Isaiah make me realize how perilously close I – and the culture in which I live – happen to be to bringing destruction upon myself.  It is God in whom I should trust more, not myself.

<><