Isaiah taught philosophy. He was also a prophet of God who spoke to Judah, God’s people, once upon a time. In chapter 29 Isaiah is speaking to Judah about fifteen years or so after their brothers, the ten tribes of Israel, have been wiped off the map.
This now is the Word of God:
Too bad for you, “people of God,” “city of God,” (I said)—choice location, David slept—here (and all that) Go ahead! keep on counting last year, this year, next year, another year beginning…Let your convocations, feast days, holidays go on and on, round and round—[then the Word of God is directly quoted] I am going to put the squeeze on the “city of God” so that there come weeping and deep grief till it finally shapes up for me like a “Godcenter” for once…I have already surrounded you and laid siege, tightened the net of infiltrator posts closing in on you, thrown up fortified trenches against your (“God-city”). Knocked down you will have to speak up from the ground; Your talk will sound smothered through the dust; Your voice (will quirk) like a ghost’s stuck in the earth; Your stream of words will be a whispery chirp in the dirt.
But then all of a sudden it happens:
The tumultuous horde of those threatening you will be dispersed like a cloud of fine dust, and the mass of violent men crowding you in will be like chaff (blowing in the wind).
With thunder and cracking earthquake, overpowering noise,
With whirlwind and hurricane, an advancing wave of glutting fire direct from Yahweh, Lord God of the angels, you get…what is coming to you!
like a dream—the horde of all those armed people advancing against the “city of God,” all those warring against God’s people, fighting its strongest points, the antagonists out to get the “people of God” it will all have been like a nightmare.
That’s the way it will be for the noisy horde too, all those antagonistic people who are set to storm the mountain called Zion:
like somebody dreaming, somebody who is hungry, and there he is, eating, licking his chops! but waking up—he has eaten nothing, famished—
the enemies of God’s people too will be like someone dying of thirst who dreams, yes! he is drinking! hut roused from sleep—oh no! exhausted, consternatedly parched!
Boggle your goggle-eyes! Blink your eyes shut and be blind! Act drunk, but not from wine! Stagger and shake, but not from hard liquor!
Yahweh, the Lord God, has poured out over you the spirit of a kind of narcotic sleep! The prophets, who were to be your eyes, He has closed tight!
The visionary seers, who were to be your leaders, He has put under wraps!
The whole striking vision (I have just proclaimed) will be for you like words of something written that is sealed which, when you give it to a man who knows how to read and say “Read it out loud, will you, please?” he has to say, “I can’t do that, because the writing is sealed”—
Or
like when you have given the script to a man who does not know how to read and say, “Read it out loud, please, won’t you?” and he has to say, “I don’t know how to read”…
My God says this (to you all): Because this people sidled up (to me) really only with its mouth, paid me honor only with its lips, and kept its heart far away from me—
Because their fear of me is only put on, simply learned according to the prescription of people—paid me honor only with its lips, and kept its heart far away from me—
Because their fear of me is only put on, simply learned according to the prescription of people Look out!—
I am going to handle further this people (of mine) extraordinarily, do terrible, incredible things! so that the wisdom of its wisemen disintegrates, and the insight of its intuitively sensible ones also gets obscured—
Too bad for those who try so thoroughly to conceal their carefully laid plans from the Lord God Yahweh, who do their deeds in the dark and say, “Who sees us? Who knows what we arc doing?”
—you and your perverted stupidity! as if you can regard the potter like (his) clay so that what’s made dare say to its maker “He didn’t make me!” and art work say to its artistic former, “What does he know?”
But wait a minute, is it not only a very little while before (even) the mountain ranges of Lebanon shall he turned again into such luscious gardens that a regular orchard will be considered just a wild thicket?
Why, on that day the stone deaf shall hear words of Scripture! and freed out of gloomy sockets and darkness, eyes, blind eyes shall see!—they shall see! and buckled over people shall start having that laughing cheerfulness in Yahweh again! am I the poor, the wasting needy of mankind shall smile, even dance, jubilant about the Holy One of Israel!
Because gone! finished! are those who force men with brutality!
Wiped out are loose-talking scoffers! Gone are all those on the lookout for sins, who brand a man “sinful” by talk, who set tricky traps for the one offering just counsel in the city gate, who mislead someone on the right track by a trifle—they are utterly exterminated!
That is why this is what the Lord God Yahweh has said to the house of Jacob, He who saved, set Abraham free once upon a time:
From now on Jacob shall not be shamed anymore. No more shall the face of my people blush and pale; for when they and their children see the doings of my hands right among themselves, they shall surely keep my name holy:
Holy! holy! they shall declare the Holy One of Jacob! and tremble in genuine awe before the God in Israel!
Those who are mixed up and troubled in their minds shall come to their senses; those who find fault and always agitate shall grow up to understanding…
History-Making Context
Assyria was the political bear of the Near East during Isaiah’s day when good king Hezekiah ruled at Jerusalem. It was the Assyrian Sargon the Great who had taken Samaria captive in 722 B.C. who continued to range far and wide with punitive expeditions to keep tribute paying kingdoms in line. In 720 he defeated Egypt in the Gaza strip, that was always coaxing insurrections against Assyria. In 711 he plundered Philistia, on (he Mediterranean coast next to Judah, and deported them wholesale. In 710–709 he squelched Merodach-Baladan’s Babylon that was continually rebelling, and kept his Persian Gulf seaports.
Just before his subjection Merodach-Baladan had sent envoys to Judah with a get-well gift for Hezekiah. He heard, says the Bible succinctly, king Hezekiah had been rather sick. While the envoys were there, of course, they talked politics; and king Hezekiah, who now had fifteen more years to live. grandly showed the Babylonian ambassadors everything: the treasury was full of gold, silver and gems; the armories were stockpiled with the latest and best weapons; the spring waters of Gihon had been diverted through an underground aqueduct inside the city wall so Jerusalem would have a source of fresh water—we are all set if Assyria comes our way, said Hezekiah; and his advisers winked, let’s you and we and Moab and Edam and Philistia and Egypt keep in touch. You are a good man, Hezekiah, said the prophet lsaiah, but God promises to punish the national pride and trust in politicking you have showed at this critical juncture. What Assyria may not do to stockpiled Jerusalem in your lifetime, your friendly goodwill ambassadors from Babylon, who have just seen every secret of the city of God, they will do: your sons shall be castrated eunuchs in the heathen palace of a Babylonian Nehuchadnezzar (II Kings 20:12-20; II Chronicles 32:27–31).v
This little Babylonian visit took place only a couple years before Assyria overran next door Philistia and then Babylon itself, and it characterizes the court intrigue of the day, also fascinating Judah, and shows the overriding concern of the government—Assyria stalks the land and exacts tribute; is there any help to be gotten from Egypt! or some alliance?—although Hezekiah had officially come out earlier for Yahweh—repaired and restored temple worship, keeping the passover again, hacking down idols in unholy groves. smashing the bronze serpent Moses had constructed once for healing in the wilderness, that had been turned into a relic and was being worshipped with incense, smashed it to bits (II Chronicles 29–31; II Kings 18:4). Hezekiah himself was trying to obey the Lord and show leadership. But the people of the land?
What got Isaiah so angry was that the people of Judah and Jerusalem went right on living as if there wasn’t a war on. And they saw nothing wrong in combining temple worship, passover observance, sacrifices to Yahweh, and a little pagan cult life on the side they had learned from Hezekiah’s father, king Ahaz. The men of Judah lived by camouflage, conspiring with Egyptians as friends; they were hard drinkers, issued crooked judgments, threw out misleading ideas, pampered themselves with luxuries. Everything that had ruined Samaria and the ten tribes of Israel, which Amos prophesied against, is present right here now in Jerusalem, said Isaiah (28:7, 14–22). And you don’t care!
The celebrations go on and on: new years. thanksgiving days, convocations and feasts at the beginning of things, blast after blast—Is this the “city of God”? the place where God drops in? tabernacles? Gossip, preening self-righteous deeds cloaked in the muted tones of civic service, the official headquarters for “religious activity”!—But your daily deeds, beloved soul music and bedtime reading do not square with this being a “God-center,” you fakes! So the Lord Yahweh is going to choke you to within an inch of your life. Assyria, as an agent of God! is going to knock you to the ground so hard your breath will be gone; prone in the dust, your talk-talk-talk will sound like beeps and cheeps of a disembodied spook. You are going to be hurt, not so that you just cry, but hurt till you weep in deep grief, till you call out for me, your God, and maybe learn that I want to be in the thick of whatever you are doing, whether it be happy or sad.
And with that Isaiah brilliantly sketches the coming invasion of the invincible Sennacherib, son of the great Sargon, who utterly ruined Babylon in 703 and then came southwest in 701 to mop up Phoenecia, Philistia, and Judah. Sennaeherib took forty-seven fortified cities and Judean towns around Jerusalem, deported more than 200.000 people captive, spoiled the countryside; for the promise to leave extracted a mint of silver and gold from Hezekiah (he had to chisel the temple doors and pillars to get enough) only to double cross and say, capitulate anyhow. But when Hezekiah, backed by Isaiah, let Yahweh read Sennacherib’s letter in the temple saying, “Is Yahweh any better than the city-gods I have already massacred?”: that very night the Angel of the Lord massacred 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. sending Sennaecherib back to Nineveh where he stayed put (II Kings 18:1316ss., 19:10–19,35–37).
Isaiah smashes this foretelling upon the startled Jerusalem people enjoying their official state-religious banquet—Hordes of enemy soldiers closing in! Lightning strike by Yahweh—poor! all gone—They were stupified! This crazy Isaiah prophet! who walked around Jerusalem for three years with no sandals on, barefoot, no clothes on, only a loin cloth in the blistering heat and gray cold (lsaiah 20)—audio-visual aid, so to speak, dramatizing his preaching what the captivity that is coming means for those who forsake the God of Abraham, Moses and David (the miniskirts go up above the privy parts and you are bare to the buttocks, men are stark naked, and it’s not so much fun anymore, chained in the streets…). They couldn’t imagine what they were hearing! It is like my telling you dressed lip people the North Vietnamese or Chinese Communists are an agent of God to run proud, materialistic, in-god-we-trust U.S.A. into the ground: the communists are an agent of God to ruin us who do not repent, and they are coming!—you couldn’t believe that, could you?
Isaiah’s listeners were blank, and he mocks their stupefaction: Boggle your goggle-eyes! blink them shut and be blind, go ahead! What’s the matter, are you doped? can’t you understand what I have been saying?
You honor me only with your yakkety-yak lips, for the show, but t he heart of you is closed to me like steel.
I am going to make you stupid, unable to handle what comes your way, till your great society disintegrates.
Plainer than that God cannot be, says Isaiah.
Prophetic Reach of the Word
You wonder why, if it is so plain, why God’s people always seem to go to pot.
The New Testament church gets idealized if you think Ananius and Sapphira were an exception for long; Corinth, Ephesus and other early “churches of God” in Asia Minor went bad, soon had elements as rotten as the original, Pharisee-ridden “city of God,” Jerusalem. Gradually the “God-center” of Rome took as accomplice a pseudo-holy Roman empire; not till the Reformation drove people back to God in Western; Europe did the brilliant degeneracy of the Renaissance papacy get shook up. Later on industrious Christians conceived the Industrial Revolution and brutalized the poor with a secular work-righteousness that was a shame! until Marx and communizing revolutions called the bluff of their monied hypocrisy and broke God’s people into powerless pieces. Today the church is largely allied with the established status quo, fleeing to the suburbs of neatly trimmed yards, taking refuge in rural areas where public godlessness is confined to TV sets and sin goes on behind closed doors; they talk to themselves on Sunday and are indistinguishable from my fellow Americans timing the week, utterly devoid of the world shaking power Paul and Silas knew how to bring to bear upon their age. Again and again in history God’s people have gotten soft in the bellies, gone soft in the head, paunchy, a little too comfortable and apparently righteous, with affected manners, impotent.
Whenever God’s people have not realized there was a war on in the world or did not know historically who the enemy is, they have slowly forfeited their right of existence. When the people of God have unbelievably forgotten they belong in their daily life to the jealous God of Abraham, Moses, David, Amos, Isaiah and John: when God’s collected people have not responded wholly to their calling of living singly out of the biblically revealed a priori but have made deals with their surrounding unbelieving cultures, they have gone under. God knocked them to the ground and cursed them with Pharisee and Sadducee leaders, empty of prophetic insight.
Pharisees always try to fortify God’s people in wallcd cities against blatant lawlessness outside and seek to keep God at bay by an unimpeachable concern for morality, propriety and devotional exercises. The Pharisaic orthodox mentality always tends to turn the city of God into a city of pious people, secured by doctrine and rituals, which God then has to wreak havoc on! because they cast him in the heavy role of repressive Kill-joy and frustrate his believing little ones with these constant exhortations to be good that have only the prick of an ingrown toenail, never the horizons and life of God’s moving Word that makes a man pick lip his sins, throw them away, and walk gladly before the face of the Lord.
The Sadducee pose of honest, liberal fresh leadership on the scene has always been just as fake. They encourage believers in God to practice what is literalistically prescribed but think God is not so clear on many, many of our problems—there you are at liberty to decide yourself what you may and may not do, think or may not think. And Sadducaic leaders know the soft spots in Christ’s body and finger, mock the blemishes of God’s people ever so deftly. A permissiveness for private decision and critique without biblically driving leadership: it kills beginners in the faith, breaks down what obedience builds up, balances tweddle-de-dum off against tweedle-dum-dee, and leaves God’s people at loose ends, without focus and the committed direction of being a holy people in every thing.
That is why the city of God crumbles, why churches become whitened sepulchres behind their brick facade, why Christian colleges become a farce, “Christian” only in their promotional literature: because God’s people do not have the guts to trust only His Word, give themselves only to the radical formation of Scripturally directed living, act out only a witness to his jealous, holy lordship. God wants everything! Otherwise you can keep it and go to hell.—That’s not me talking: that is what the Lord says through the prophet Isaiah. The people of God will be struck down to the ground, lose their senses, be without understanding, walk around in circles behind false, blind leaders, if their communal heart is not solidly, entirely open to seeking out the Lord’s will in creational revelation with the key of Scripture, expecting his Word to enlighten our minds, lead us into all truth (John 16:13–15). H you prefer to have your God and skip him too at times, supplement him with your own historically conditioned “common sense,” then you have missed what the true war is, misidentified the enemy and lost the source of peace.
The war in the world, as a matter of fact, is God’s people against the powers of darkness; and the enemy is not some just Judge or a separatistic people but the forces, human and devilish, which tempt us, who profess Christ, to hedge on living us a holy people, set-apart by God, peculiar for him, enacting his divisive rule in the world (Matthew 10:32–34). All of us covertly ache to be one of the boys. But if God’s children come to act like all-American boys and girls they will be ruined. Plainer than that God cannot be, says Isaiah. He forgives sin, but the Lord will not bless with fruit the deeds of those who follow him with restrictions, use his Name opportunistically (in vain!). Whether well-meant or sham, God cannot stand such double-mindedness and punishes a community characterized by it with stupidity, an inability to handle its problems, till it becomes indistinguishable from its surroundings, virtually extinct.
There is unutterable comfort given, though, in the final judgment Isaiah pronounces, for those who have been kept as a faithful remnant, a little body of obedient fools for Christ’s sake, those people of God who were dispossessed, out-maneuvered, shamed by the subterfuge and darts of evil ones yet clung to their positive calling: YOUR SHAME SHALL BE NO MORE! Those who tormented you will be gone! Those who misled others shall themselves be confounded, who succeeded by hook and crook shall fail ; those who hindered your building sacrifices in the name of the Lord, caviling with but’s and why’s, shall be rid of forever! What is false will be out! What is fake, indecisive, coming out of both sides of a mouth will not last—you can count on it!
Good God! what a great Day it will be, says Isaiah, when your own sins will not be there to get in the way. Those who were sleepy among the saints shall be prophesying even out in the streets, like at Pentecost! People who could not read the Bible shall be doing it like kids rapt in a book! Those who were crushed by malignant disease, incessant pain or emotional brokenness and loneliness shall be laughing happily.—The Holy One of Israel is glad to have his adopted kids among the children of men smile, laugh, even dance for joy at the gifts of his Grace.
And the promise of that great Day can he partly claimed even now, says the Lord Cod Yahweh. The condition is that you open your eyes to see my Great Deeds being done right among yourselves … how I forgive sin….bring abandon to life through the law of holiness…rest your troubles with patience and hope—Great Deeds! to the eye of faith, and sound relief to the men of faith who see the Almighty Holy One doing such work in their lives. Then begins the contentment in men that reaches out happily and patiently for the jubilant completion coming when nobody’s life shall be mixed up anymore…
God’s Proclamation
What does that mean for a college freshman? You mean Trinity is supposed to be a city of God!? And the question is one of whether it goes the way of all human flesh, to impersonal, godless pieces? or whether there shall be no shame anymore? where Trinity becomes a communal rallying for genuine reformation of human life that will make people elsewhere jealous?
The fact that Judah was taken captive like Israel, that “Christian” Rome fell to the Visigoths, that Protestant and Roman catholic Europe was occupied by barbaric, mythologizing Nazism all seems so far away from entering a college of three hundred students. So distant from being Canadian and born in the U.S.A.
What happened in history will never touch us. Our land will never be occupied! God bless America, we almost always win the Olympics…
But why should the Lord of heaven and earth not scatter us all to the winds? We begin our national political conventions with prayer and close them wishing “may the good Lord bless us all,” but there is not a hair of him in the National Security Council meetings or our foreign policy, is there?
The fact that God has always ruined or blessed those who confess his Name according to their historical response to his loving Word, does that register with us in our nylon stockings and white shirts? Can you think about your daily life, your job, your local church—would you say there is a famine there? the judgment Amos prophesied would come—“not a hunger for bread, not a thirst for water, but starvation from not hearing Words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). How can we church people put on our Silent Night recordings and listen calmly to the Seven o’clock news? What do you have coming to you as “people of God” when that is your response to the Lord?
The catharsis of critique is cheap, I know, if it is only picking fleas out of Christ’s body. Reform and a hand to the plow that costs time and your life blood: only this is what he blesses. One may only criticize the people of God when you are crying; otherwise it is pure hypocrisy.
But what do you think we are doing here this evening? a group of high school graduates and some college teachers, who have been around sinning somewhat longer than the rest of you?
It is bigger than going to a college.
We are facing the living Word of God, making our vows together.
To teach and study, recruit and administer affairs at Trinity Christian College is to declare with the mouth that we want to after Christ our study and sport, offer it only to Christ—who enjoys bull sessions and moonlighted kisses between his creatures as much as a reading report—give him whatever gets done on Trinity grounds.
To enroll, to teach, to retreat at this college is to profess with the mouth that it is not “our” college, but a college for God, a college of God; and we want to belong to that body: so much we mouth simply by being here tonight. Whether you came from out of state for reformational studies, just to get away from home, or whether you were sent here like drafted to the army—by being here tonight we have started to become a part of what makes Trinity special: facing God as an academic community.
But the shame of it all is that our heart and hands do not consistently back up our mouth.
If you look through all the high school records in the college flies, or were to scrutinize the lives of us faculty members, it is not a pretty picture. It is a mess God’s people are in.
No wonder those who feel threatened by the existence of us as a Christian college: no wonder such enemies find it easy to coo-coo-cachoo what goes on in the dormitories, ridicule the jargon of philosophy reports that want so hard to be Christian, and pick apart our pretenses. Our sins and troubles will always find us out. Even if we have cried like Psalm 51, wept bitterly at examples of our foolish pride, or even been changed like Zacchaeus so that Christ’s forgiveness is sure and the guilt of our sin is gone; still, the evil a student or teacher does runs its course, like the ripples of a pebble dropped in a pool, and the shame can be made public and uncontrolled.
Lord God, take away our shame…
But thanks be to the Cod of Isaiah! We do not have to fight the enemies of God (or wrestle with those provoked by Trinity) if we repent and act like his body. (Repentance means a new kind of deed.) For then the Lord is at hand! He will do the judging. Our relief and protection is the blessing of God.
It is not so that we have to build up a little city-of-God in Palos Heights or declare Trinity to be one. We must just realize that that is the calling laid upon us tonight by the Word of Cod found in Isaiah.
The real war, worse than Vietnam and Biafra, which will be fought on campus beginning Monday is the one to be faithful to this calling: to not put God first and yourself second, but to keep God first, God second, God third, fourth, fifth and last, so that Trinity be thoroughly and genuinely blessed as a city of God. Then comes his peace (Shalom) and our freedom from shame, because the Lord God looks after what belongs to him. And Trinity deeply needs looking after, curricularly, devotionally, financially, all kinds of ways.
At few places in God’s world will you 6nd a faculty as close as the one here tonight, and a student body as few as you are here tonight, with the Word of God in front of us all, saying:
from now on, your shame shall be no more.
From now on? You mean tonight is not just another night in the round of annual retreats, before the usual series of disillusioning, humdrum, uphill experiences?
From now on, those who arc mixed up by their family background, by their history of sins and troubled in their minds, from now on they shall come to their senses? Those who find fault and always agitate because they do not know how to love somebody, from now on they shall grow up to understanding?
That is the promise of the Lord through Isaiah 29 to all those with ears that can hear. All we need to do is take hold of God with this Word and pull hard.
Dr. Calvin Seerveld is professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Palos Heights, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Christian Art.
This now is the Word of God:
Too bad for you, “people of God,” “city of God,” (I said)—choice location, David slept—here (and all that) Go ahead! keep on counting last year, this year, next year, another year beginning…Let your convocations, feast days, holidays go on and on, round and round—[then the Word of God is directly quoted] I am going to put the squeeze on the “city of God” so that there come weeping and deep grief till it finally shapes up for me like a “Godcenter” for once…I have already surrounded you and laid siege, tightened the net of infiltrator posts closing in on you, thrown up fortified trenches against your (“God-city”). Knocked down you will have to speak up from the ground; Your talk will sound smothered through the dust; Your voice (will quirk) like a ghost’s stuck in the earth; Your stream of words will be a whispery chirp in the dirt.
But then all of a sudden it happens:
The tumultuous horde of those threatening you will be dispersed like a cloud of fine dust, and the mass of violent men crowding you in will be like chaff (blowing in the wind).
With thunder and cracking earthquake, overpowering noise,
With whirlwind and hurricane, an advancing wave of glutting fire direct from Yahweh, Lord God of the angels, you get…what is coming to you!
like a dream—the horde of all those armed people advancing against the “city of God,” all those warring against God’s people, fighting its strongest points, the antagonists out to get the “people of God” it will all have been like a nightmare.
That’s the way it will be for the noisy horde too, all those antagonistic people who are set to storm the mountain called Zion:
like somebody dreaming, somebody who is hungry, and there he is, eating, licking his chops! but waking up—he has eaten nothing, famished—
the enemies of God’s people too will be like someone dying of thirst who dreams, yes! he is drinking! hut roused from sleep—oh no! exhausted, consternatedly parched!
Boggle your goggle-eyes! Blink your eyes shut and be blind! Act drunk, but not from wine! Stagger and shake, but not from hard liquor!
Yahweh, the Lord God, has poured out over you the spirit of a kind of narcotic sleep! The prophets, who were to be your eyes, He has closed tight!
The visionary seers, who were to be your leaders, He has put under wraps!
The whole striking vision (I have just proclaimed) will be for you like words of something written that is sealed which, when you give it to a man who knows how to read and say “Read it out loud, will you, please?” he has to say, “I can’t do that, because the writing is sealed”—
Or
like when you have given the script to a man who does not know how to read and say, “Read it out loud, please, won’t you?” and he has to say, “I don’t know how to read”…
My God says this (to you all): Because this people sidled up (to me) really only with its mouth, paid me honor only with its lips, and kept its heart far away from me—
Because their fear of me is only put on, simply learned according to the prescription of people—paid me honor only with its lips, and kept its heart far away from me—
Because their fear of me is only put on, simply learned according to the prescription of people Look out!—
I am going to handle further this people (of mine) extraordinarily, do terrible, incredible things! so that the wisdom of its wisemen disintegrates, and the insight of its intuitively sensible ones also gets obscured—
Too bad for those who try so thoroughly to conceal their carefully laid plans from the Lord God Yahweh, who do their deeds in the dark and say, “Who sees us? Who knows what we arc doing?”
—you and your perverted stupidity! as if you can regard the potter like (his) clay so that what’s made dare say to its maker “He didn’t make me!” and art work say to its artistic former, “What does he know?”
But wait a minute, is it not only a very little while before (even) the mountain ranges of Lebanon shall he turned again into such luscious gardens that a regular orchard will be considered just a wild thicket?
Why, on that day the stone deaf shall hear words of Scripture! and freed out of gloomy sockets and darkness, eyes, blind eyes shall see!—they shall see! and buckled over people shall start having that laughing cheerfulness in Yahweh again! am I the poor, the wasting needy of mankind shall smile, even dance, jubilant about the Holy One of Israel!
Because gone! finished! are those who force men with brutality!
Wiped out are loose-talking scoffers! Gone are all those on the lookout for sins, who brand a man “sinful” by talk, who set tricky traps for the one offering just counsel in the city gate, who mislead someone on the right track by a trifle—they are utterly exterminated!
That is why this is what the Lord God Yahweh has said to the house of Jacob, He who saved, set Abraham free once upon a time:
From now on Jacob shall not be shamed anymore. No more shall the face of my people blush and pale; for when they and their children see the doings of my hands right among themselves, they shall surely keep my name holy:
Holy! holy! they shall declare the Holy One of Jacob! and tremble in genuine awe before the God in Israel!
Those who are mixed up and troubled in their minds shall come to their senses; those who find fault and always agitate shall grow up to understanding…
History-Making Context
Assyria was the political bear of the Near East during Isaiah’s day when good king Hezekiah ruled at Jerusalem. It was the Assyrian Sargon the Great who had taken Samaria captive in 722 B.C. who continued to range far and wide with punitive expeditions to keep tribute paying kingdoms in line. In 720 he defeated Egypt in the Gaza strip, that was always coaxing insurrections against Assyria. In 711 he plundered Philistia, on (he Mediterranean coast next to Judah, and deported them wholesale. In 710–709 he squelched Merodach-Baladan’s Babylon that was continually rebelling, and kept his Persian Gulf seaports.
Just before his subjection Merodach-Baladan had sent envoys to Judah with a get-well gift for Hezekiah. He heard, says the Bible succinctly, king Hezekiah had been rather sick. While the envoys were there, of course, they talked politics; and king Hezekiah, who now had fifteen more years to live. grandly showed the Babylonian ambassadors everything: the treasury was full of gold, silver and gems; the armories were stockpiled with the latest and best weapons; the spring waters of Gihon had been diverted through an underground aqueduct inside the city wall so Jerusalem would have a source of fresh water—we are all set if Assyria comes our way, said Hezekiah; and his advisers winked, let’s you and we and Moab and Edam and Philistia and Egypt keep in touch. You are a good man, Hezekiah, said the prophet lsaiah, but God promises to punish the national pride and trust in politicking you have showed at this critical juncture. What Assyria may not do to stockpiled Jerusalem in your lifetime, your friendly goodwill ambassadors from Babylon, who have just seen every secret of the city of God, they will do: your sons shall be castrated eunuchs in the heathen palace of a Babylonian Nehuchadnezzar (II Kings 20:12-20; II Chronicles 32:27–31).v
This little Babylonian visit took place only a couple years before Assyria overran next door Philistia and then Babylon itself, and it characterizes the court intrigue of the day, also fascinating Judah, and shows the overriding concern of the government—Assyria stalks the land and exacts tribute; is there any help to be gotten from Egypt! or some alliance?—although Hezekiah had officially come out earlier for Yahweh—repaired and restored temple worship, keeping the passover again, hacking down idols in unholy groves. smashing the bronze serpent Moses had constructed once for healing in the wilderness, that had been turned into a relic and was being worshipped with incense, smashed it to bits (II Chronicles 29–31; II Kings 18:4). Hezekiah himself was trying to obey the Lord and show leadership. But the people of the land?
What got Isaiah so angry was that the people of Judah and Jerusalem went right on living as if there wasn’t a war on. And they saw nothing wrong in combining temple worship, passover observance, sacrifices to Yahweh, and a little pagan cult life on the side they had learned from Hezekiah’s father, king Ahaz. The men of Judah lived by camouflage, conspiring with Egyptians as friends; they were hard drinkers, issued crooked judgments, threw out misleading ideas, pampered themselves with luxuries. Everything that had ruined Samaria and the ten tribes of Israel, which Amos prophesied against, is present right here now in Jerusalem, said Isaiah (28:7, 14–22). And you don’t care!
The celebrations go on and on: new years. thanksgiving days, convocations and feasts at the beginning of things, blast after blast—Is this the “city of God”? the place where God drops in? tabernacles? Gossip, preening self-righteous deeds cloaked in the muted tones of civic service, the official headquarters for “religious activity”!—But your daily deeds, beloved soul music and bedtime reading do not square with this being a “God-center,” you fakes! So the Lord Yahweh is going to choke you to within an inch of your life. Assyria, as an agent of God! is going to knock you to the ground so hard your breath will be gone; prone in the dust, your talk-talk-talk will sound like beeps and cheeps of a disembodied spook. You are going to be hurt, not so that you just cry, but hurt till you weep in deep grief, till you call out for me, your God, and maybe learn that I want to be in the thick of whatever you are doing, whether it be happy or sad.
And with that Isaiah brilliantly sketches the coming invasion of the invincible Sennacherib, son of the great Sargon, who utterly ruined Babylon in 703 and then came southwest in 701 to mop up Phoenecia, Philistia, and Judah. Sennaeherib took forty-seven fortified cities and Judean towns around Jerusalem, deported more than 200.000 people captive, spoiled the countryside; for the promise to leave extracted a mint of silver and gold from Hezekiah (he had to chisel the temple doors and pillars to get enough) only to double cross and say, capitulate anyhow. But when Hezekiah, backed by Isaiah, let Yahweh read Sennacherib’s letter in the temple saying, “Is Yahweh any better than the city-gods I have already massacred?”: that very night the Angel of the Lord massacred 185,000 Assyrian soldiers. sending Sennaecherib back to Nineveh where he stayed put (II Kings 18:1316ss., 19:10–19,35–37).
Isaiah smashes this foretelling upon the startled Jerusalem people enjoying their official state-religious banquet—Hordes of enemy soldiers closing in! Lightning strike by Yahweh—poor! all gone—They were stupified! This crazy Isaiah prophet! who walked around Jerusalem for three years with no sandals on, barefoot, no clothes on, only a loin cloth in the blistering heat and gray cold (lsaiah 20)—audio-visual aid, so to speak, dramatizing his preaching what the captivity that is coming means for those who forsake the God of Abraham, Moses and David (the miniskirts go up above the privy parts and you are bare to the buttocks, men are stark naked, and it’s not so much fun anymore, chained in the streets…). They couldn’t imagine what they were hearing! It is like my telling you dressed lip people the North Vietnamese or Chinese Communists are an agent of God to run proud, materialistic, in-god-we-trust U.S.A. into the ground: the communists are an agent of God to ruin us who do not repent, and they are coming!—you couldn’t believe that, could you?
Isaiah’s listeners were blank, and he mocks their stupefaction: Boggle your goggle-eyes! blink them shut and be blind, go ahead! What’s the matter, are you doped? can’t you understand what I have been saying?
You honor me only with your yakkety-yak lips, for the show, but t he heart of you is closed to me like steel.
I am going to make you stupid, unable to handle what comes your way, till your great society disintegrates.
Plainer than that God cannot be, says Isaiah.
Prophetic Reach of the Word
You wonder why, if it is so plain, why God’s people always seem to go to pot.
The New Testament church gets idealized if you think Ananius and Sapphira were an exception for long; Corinth, Ephesus and other early “churches of God” in Asia Minor went bad, soon had elements as rotten as the original, Pharisee-ridden “city of God,” Jerusalem. Gradually the “God-center” of Rome took as accomplice a pseudo-holy Roman empire; not till the Reformation drove people back to God in Western; Europe did the brilliant degeneracy of the Renaissance papacy get shook up. Later on industrious Christians conceived the Industrial Revolution and brutalized the poor with a secular work-righteousness that was a shame! until Marx and communizing revolutions called the bluff of their monied hypocrisy and broke God’s people into powerless pieces. Today the church is largely allied with the established status quo, fleeing to the suburbs of neatly trimmed yards, taking refuge in rural areas where public godlessness is confined to TV sets and sin goes on behind closed doors; they talk to themselves on Sunday and are indistinguishable from my fellow Americans timing the week, utterly devoid of the world shaking power Paul and Silas knew how to bring to bear upon their age. Again and again in history God’s people have gotten soft in the bellies, gone soft in the head, paunchy, a little too comfortable and apparently righteous, with affected manners, impotent.
Whenever God’s people have not realized there was a war on in the world or did not know historically who the enemy is, they have slowly forfeited their right of existence. When the people of God have unbelievably forgotten they belong in their daily life to the jealous God of Abraham, Moses, David, Amos, Isaiah and John: when God’s collected people have not responded wholly to their calling of living singly out of the biblically revealed a priori but have made deals with their surrounding unbelieving cultures, they have gone under. God knocked them to the ground and cursed them with Pharisee and Sadducee leaders, empty of prophetic insight.
Pharisees always try to fortify God’s people in wallcd cities against blatant lawlessness outside and seek to keep God at bay by an unimpeachable concern for morality, propriety and devotional exercises. The Pharisaic orthodox mentality always tends to turn the city of God into a city of pious people, secured by doctrine and rituals, which God then has to wreak havoc on! because they cast him in the heavy role of repressive Kill-joy and frustrate his believing little ones with these constant exhortations to be good that have only the prick of an ingrown toenail, never the horizons and life of God’s moving Word that makes a man pick lip his sins, throw them away, and walk gladly before the face of the Lord.
The Sadducee pose of honest, liberal fresh leadership on the scene has always been just as fake. They encourage believers in God to practice what is literalistically prescribed but think God is not so clear on many, many of our problems—there you are at liberty to decide yourself what you may and may not do, think or may not think. And Sadducaic leaders know the soft spots in Christ’s body and finger, mock the blemishes of God’s people ever so deftly. A permissiveness for private decision and critique without biblically driving leadership: it kills beginners in the faith, breaks down what obedience builds up, balances tweddle-de-dum off against tweedle-dum-dee, and leaves God’s people at loose ends, without focus and the committed direction of being a holy people in every thing.
That is why the city of God crumbles, why churches become whitened sepulchres behind their brick facade, why Christian colleges become a farce, “Christian” only in their promotional literature: because God’s people do not have the guts to trust only His Word, give themselves only to the radical formation of Scripturally directed living, act out only a witness to his jealous, holy lordship. God wants everything! Otherwise you can keep it and go to hell.—That’s not me talking: that is what the Lord says through the prophet Isaiah. The people of God will be struck down to the ground, lose their senses, be without understanding, walk around in circles behind false, blind leaders, if their communal heart is not solidly, entirely open to seeking out the Lord’s will in creational revelation with the key of Scripture, expecting his Word to enlighten our minds, lead us into all truth (John 16:13–15). H you prefer to have your God and skip him too at times, supplement him with your own historically conditioned “common sense,” then you have missed what the true war is, misidentified the enemy and lost the source of peace.
The war in the world, as a matter of fact, is God’s people against the powers of darkness; and the enemy is not some just Judge or a separatistic people but the forces, human and devilish, which tempt us, who profess Christ, to hedge on living us a holy people, set-apart by God, peculiar for him, enacting his divisive rule in the world (Matthew 10:32–34). All of us covertly ache to be one of the boys. But if God’s children come to act like all-American boys and girls they will be ruined. Plainer than that God cannot be, says Isaiah. He forgives sin, but the Lord will not bless with fruit the deeds of those who follow him with restrictions, use his Name opportunistically (in vain!). Whether well-meant or sham, God cannot stand such double-mindedness and punishes a community characterized by it with stupidity, an inability to handle its problems, till it becomes indistinguishable from its surroundings, virtually extinct.
There is unutterable comfort given, though, in the final judgment Isaiah pronounces, for those who have been kept as a faithful remnant, a little body of obedient fools for Christ’s sake, those people of God who were dispossessed, out-maneuvered, shamed by the subterfuge and darts of evil ones yet clung to their positive calling: YOUR SHAME SHALL BE NO MORE! Those who tormented you will be gone! Those who misled others shall themselves be confounded, who succeeded by hook and crook shall fail ; those who hindered your building sacrifices in the name of the Lord, caviling with but’s and why’s, shall be rid of forever! What is false will be out! What is fake, indecisive, coming out of both sides of a mouth will not last—you can count on it!
Good God! what a great Day it will be, says Isaiah, when your own sins will not be there to get in the way. Those who were sleepy among the saints shall be prophesying even out in the streets, like at Pentecost! People who could not read the Bible shall be doing it like kids rapt in a book! Those who were crushed by malignant disease, incessant pain or emotional brokenness and loneliness shall be laughing happily.—The Holy One of Israel is glad to have his adopted kids among the children of men smile, laugh, even dance for joy at the gifts of his Grace.
And the promise of that great Day can he partly claimed even now, says the Lord Cod Yahweh. The condition is that you open your eyes to see my Great Deeds being done right among yourselves … how I forgive sin….bring abandon to life through the law of holiness…rest your troubles with patience and hope—Great Deeds! to the eye of faith, and sound relief to the men of faith who see the Almighty Holy One doing such work in their lives. Then begins the contentment in men that reaches out happily and patiently for the jubilant completion coming when nobody’s life shall be mixed up anymore…
God’s Proclamation
What does that mean for a college freshman? You mean Trinity is supposed to be a city of God!? And the question is one of whether it goes the way of all human flesh, to impersonal, godless pieces? or whether there shall be no shame anymore? where Trinity becomes a communal rallying for genuine reformation of human life that will make people elsewhere jealous?
The fact that Judah was taken captive like Israel, that “Christian” Rome fell to the Visigoths, that Protestant and Roman catholic Europe was occupied by barbaric, mythologizing Nazism all seems so far away from entering a college of three hundred students. So distant from being Canadian and born in the U.S.A.
What happened in history will never touch us. Our land will never be occupied! God bless America, we almost always win the Olympics…
But why should the Lord of heaven and earth not scatter us all to the winds? We begin our national political conventions with prayer and close them wishing “may the good Lord bless us all,” but there is not a hair of him in the National Security Council meetings or our foreign policy, is there?
The fact that God has always ruined or blessed those who confess his Name according to their historical response to his loving Word, does that register with us in our nylon stockings and white shirts? Can you think about your daily life, your job, your local church—would you say there is a famine there? the judgment Amos prophesied would come—“not a hunger for bread, not a thirst for water, but starvation from not hearing Words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11). How can we church people put on our Silent Night recordings and listen calmly to the Seven o’clock news? What do you have coming to you as “people of God” when that is your response to the Lord?
The catharsis of critique is cheap, I know, if it is only picking fleas out of Christ’s body. Reform and a hand to the plow that costs time and your life blood: only this is what he blesses. One may only criticize the people of God when you are crying; otherwise it is pure hypocrisy.
But what do you think we are doing here this evening? a group of high school graduates and some college teachers, who have been around sinning somewhat longer than the rest of you?
It is bigger than going to a college.
We are facing the living Word of God, making our vows together.
To teach and study, recruit and administer affairs at Trinity Christian College is to declare with the mouth that we want to after Christ our study and sport, offer it only to Christ—who enjoys bull sessions and moonlighted kisses between his creatures as much as a reading report—give him whatever gets done on Trinity grounds.
To enroll, to teach, to retreat at this college is to profess with the mouth that it is not “our” college, but a college for God, a college of God; and we want to belong to that body: so much we mouth simply by being here tonight. Whether you came from out of state for reformational studies, just to get away from home, or whether you were sent here like drafted to the army—by being here tonight we have started to become a part of what makes Trinity special: facing God as an academic community.
But the shame of it all is that our heart and hands do not consistently back up our mouth.
If you look through all the high school records in the college flies, or were to scrutinize the lives of us faculty members, it is not a pretty picture. It is a mess God’s people are in.
No wonder those who feel threatened by the existence of us as a Christian college: no wonder such enemies find it easy to coo-coo-cachoo what goes on in the dormitories, ridicule the jargon of philosophy reports that want so hard to be Christian, and pick apart our pretenses. Our sins and troubles will always find us out. Even if we have cried like Psalm 51, wept bitterly at examples of our foolish pride, or even been changed like Zacchaeus so that Christ’s forgiveness is sure and the guilt of our sin is gone; still, the evil a student or teacher does runs its course, like the ripples of a pebble dropped in a pool, and the shame can be made public and uncontrolled.
Lord God, take away our shame…
But thanks be to the Cod of Isaiah! We do not have to fight the enemies of God (or wrestle with those provoked by Trinity) if we repent and act like his body. (Repentance means a new kind of deed.) For then the Lord is at hand! He will do the judging. Our relief and protection is the blessing of God.
It is not so that we have to build up a little city-of-God in Palos Heights or declare Trinity to be one. We must just realize that that is the calling laid upon us tonight by the Word of Cod found in Isaiah.
The real war, worse than Vietnam and Biafra, which will be fought on campus beginning Monday is the one to be faithful to this calling: to not put God first and yourself second, but to keep God first, God second, God third, fourth, fifth and last, so that Trinity be thoroughly and genuinely blessed as a city of God. Then comes his peace (Shalom) and our freedom from shame, because the Lord God looks after what belongs to him. And Trinity deeply needs looking after, curricularly, devotionally, financially, all kinds of ways.
At few places in God’s world will you 6nd a faculty as close as the one here tonight, and a student body as few as you are here tonight, with the Word of God in front of us all, saying:
from now on, your shame shall be no more.
From now on? You mean tonight is not just another night in the round of annual retreats, before the usual series of disillusioning, humdrum, uphill experiences?
From now on, those who arc mixed up by their family background, by their history of sins and troubled in their minds, from now on they shall come to their senses? Those who find fault and always agitate because they do not know how to love somebody, from now on they shall grow up to understanding?
That is the promise of the Lord through Isaiah 29 to all those with ears that can hear. All we need to do is take hold of God with this Word and pull hard.
Dr. Calvin Seerveld is professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Palos Heights, Illinois. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Christian Art.