Bible Reading Challenge Blog

This is one of the most powerful chapters in all of Isaiah, I would even say in all of Scripture.  The prophet removes from us any notion that all God wants is a personal relationship with him and that our relationship to our neighbor doesn’t really matter.  There is so much more to a full Christian life than just a quiet time and a pietistic approach to faith.  The fast that God chooses for us is not to skip meat during Lent.  The fast that God chooses for us is to loose the bonds of injustice.  What does that mean?  Where in our legal system is there a clear injustice?  What about the percentage of those who are of color who are in our criminal justice system?  That counts.

What is the fast that the Lord chooses?  What about undoing the thongs of the yoke.  What is it that keeps people locked into their lot in life?  It is in our culture and our society a system that is rigged to benefit those who are in power giving them the ability to stay in power.  I know this all sounds political, but it is really just the prophet Isaiah speaking.  It continues: let the oppressed go free, break every yoke, share your bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see the naked cover them.  

This is the relationship that God wants us to have with Him and with each other.  This is a Matthew 25 church that wants to fast in a way that God wants us to fast by reaching out to  those in need.  This is acceptable to the Lord.

There is so much in this chapter.  We can’t overlook vs.12 and the words which speak about our role being the repairers of the breach in society and culture.  Where is the a breach, where has the fabric of society been rent?  That is where we need to step in to help healing and to knit things back together again.  No one likes the one who tries to knit things back together again, but that is okay, it is our job.  

This is a little more normal as far as the Lord speaking about the positive things and the negative things.  We hear the prophet calling those who are not following God’s way “children of a sorceress” and “offspring of an adulterer and a whore.”  Not really the most diplomatic speech, and not something that we would necessarily read in church as an edifying Scripture to get us motivated to do God’s work.

Starting at vs.14 we see that God has plans to build up, to rebuild the city, and to remove any obstacle that is in the way of the people to inhabit God’s city again.  But He insists on pointing out all the faults that the people have, and they are many.  But I am grateful that we get a promise in vs.19.  “Peace, peace, to the far and the near.”  We need that peace because it feels as if we are right in the middle of the tossing sea.  “There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.”  

The prophet speaks about foreigners who are living in the land and who have given of themselves to the Lord.  Do you ever find yourself thinking…American?  Let me explain.  I’ll never forget when I was a first year seminary student and I spend the entire summer in Prague, what was then Czechoslovakia, helping organize an ecumenical conference.  I was surrounded by people from all over the world who were my age.  I remember thinking that the Beatles were somehow American music.  But no, they are European.  I remember thinking that certain things like the telephone were American by nature, but actually before Bell there was an Italian who had pulled off what Bell did years later.  The list continued where things in my customary ordinary life I assumed had been American all along, but they were not.  

Did you know that the majority of Christians, by a long shot, live outside of the US?  Did you know that Palestinian Christians were worshiping Jesus 1,500 years before we were?  Did you know  that they have had church for over a thousand more  years than we have?  So much of who we are is defined by where we live and our American way of doing things.  But in this Scripture Isaiah reminds us that those foreigners who were living in Israel but still loved God were welcome in the family.

By the way, the foreigners that the prophet Isaiah is referencing are us.  We are the ones who came into the Christian life in a very circuitous way.  We were not Jewish by background, and we were not Christian by way of an apostle who spoke the Gospel to us.  We are Christian by thousands of years removed, most of us at some time had the church in Rome as part of our heritage, and then as Protestants we came along much, much later.  It should be sobering to place ourselves on the bottom of the totem pole in regards to being foreigners who were embraced in Jesus’ family even if some wanted us to be kept out.  Nice to be a foreigner who is allowed in.  That is our current status.  We are all foreigners who were shown grace.

This chapter should bring praise upon your lips and make you feel like God loves you in so many indescribable ways.  We have a promise in vs.10 and following that the word of the Lord shall never come back empty.  That which God proclaims will happen and does happen.  The promises  that we have from God will always be fulfilled, whether we believe it or not, they simply will be fulfilled.  These verses remind us that we are the messengers of the Word of God.  So while the Word will not come back empty, God uses us to make sure that His purposes are accomplished.   God doesn’t perform a miracle for every single situation in life which we face.  God’s purposes are accomplished, but often they are accomplished in very mundane ways.

If you look at vs.8 you will see other verses that are very familiar.  We hear the prophet Isaiah say to God: Your ways are not my ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.  That is surely the case.  God’s thoughts are higher than ours, higher than the heavens are above the earth, as an example.  

To close things out we see in vs.12 that we will go out in joy and come back in peace.  The very creation will burst forth in song and praise.  The trees of the field will clap their hands.  Oh man, for some reason the scene below comes to my mind.  

If you look at vs.10 you will see a verse that should sound familiar.  The mountains may fall and the hills be moved, but the steadfast love of the Lord will not depart from me and his covenant of peace will not be removed.  For the Lord has compassion on us.  Breathe that in.  

This chapter is quite a change from a promise of destruction and wrath from the Lord at the hand of foreign nations which we have seen in other chapters leading up to this.  I like the image in vs.5 where we see that God is our husband, or our wife, and He is the one to whom we owe all of our devotion and our very life.  I guess this is where those who go into the celibate orders are able to say that they are married to God.  But we also see that God considers himself a wife who has been cast off, because we have cast him off quite a few times.  

This chapter is the epitome of the suffering servant.  As you read through this chapter you need to think of our Savior Jesus as the one that it is describing.  As you read through it you can almost  check the boxes that describe who he was when he walked upon the earth.  “He was despised and rejected by others.”  “He has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.”  “He was wounded for our transgressions…and by his bruises we are healed.”  “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  “He was oppressed and he was afflicted yet he did not open his mouth.”  “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter…so he did not open his mouth.” “They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich.”  “When you make his life an offering for sin.”  “The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.”  “Because he poured out himself to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.”

Our God is amazing, simply amazing.  

This begins a very powerful next few chapters that speak about the man of sorrows, and the suffering servant that we have already touched upon in the past.  If you look at vs.13 we read that the servant of the Lord shall prosper.  That prosperity shall be revealed by him being exalted and lifted up.  Now, we know that the ultimate servant, Jesus Christ, was lifted up and exalted high on a cross.  This may not be what you had in mind when you think that we would prosper.  But is there any greater prosperity than to die so that all could live?   That is the fate of our Savior, that is the task that Jesus came upon this earth to fulfill so that we could have eternal life.  

If you back up to vs.7 you will see a harbinger of John the Baptist as he is called a beautiful messenger who announces peace.  We see these verses referenced in later Gospels and it is directly tied in to John the Baptist.  There is some confluence of ideas in these verses.  You have Israel who is told to wake up after a very traumatic experience where they had the uncircumcised and the unclean invade their land and lay them waste.   There is a promise that this will happen no longer.  But as they are recovering from that experience they are encouraged to stand up and shake off their dust, even as they have been traumatized by what has happened.  

This then moves us to a celebration because God is sending his servant who will be the read guard sent directly from the Lord.  We all need a read guard who watches our back.

Let’s be clear here that when the author speaks about Rahab in vs.9 it is not the same Rahab that we find in Joshua 2 and then again appears in Jesus’ genealogy.  This Rahab is a sea creature that the people of Israel were terrified of along with Behemoth and Leviathan.  Here we see that this creature has been defeated by the Lord, which is not a usual portrayal.  Normally this creature is seen as invincible, but the Lord is portrayed as having defeated it and cut it up into pieces.  

There is a theme in Isaiah about comforting my people.  You have the classic, comfort, oh comfort my people found in Isaiah 40 which we saw already.  I love this classic piece which is based upon that Scripture in Isaiah 40.

Not really a chapter in Isaiah that you would want to read at wedding.  It is a bit of a downer, but what would you expect from people who  were taken away from their home land and forced into captivity and slavery.   This is the result of their time away from their homeland.  In the first few verses of this chapter you read the questions that are asked as to why they were sold into slavery.  The answer comes back very clearly that it was because of their sins (vs.1).  Now, we cannot, absolutely cannot extrapolate this verse into the 18th century era slavery.  The sin that was committed was not by those who were taken into slavery, but by people like us who went to a foreign land and took people for our own use.  God’s judgment will come down upon us one day for that, I am sure.  But here since God is speaking to His own people, the people of God, he tells them that they were sold because of their sin.  This was the relationship that God had with His people.

Starting at vs. 5 and following we read this servant song in Isaiah which speaks about this person being disgraced.  He was struck, his beard pulled, they spit upon him.  I’m wondering if any of that sounds like what happened to my Savior.  It actually is a direct reference to the suffering that the Messiah would undergo.  It is a direct reference to the suffering that Jesus underwent.  At some point we read  in vs.9 that it is the Lord who helps and declares us innocent.  

This is a pretty famous chapter for a number of different reasons.  First of all, if you read it from beginning to end I hope you sense the feeling of unease that I felt as it described a very graphic ending to the enemies of the Lord, especially as we look at vs.24ff.  But all of this is within the context of the Lord restoring the former glories to the people of God.

The former is actually not two of the things that I wanted to talk about.   The first is found in vs.6 where we read one of the few times a quasi evangelistic tone to a Hebrew Scripture.  Jesus often said go and make fishers of men and women and there was always a sense of evangelism within the Christian Gospel that we do not find in Hebrew Scripture.  In Hebrew Scripture there is a designated people of God, and the story ends with those people.  There is no real need to bring others on board who are  not the people of God simply because they were not chosen by God to be His people.

But when we get to vs.6 we see that there is an outreach to people of other nations who have not been automatically included into the moniker of the people of God.  “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”  That is a pretty radically evangelistic statement for the Old Testament.  I like it.  

I think the second topic will come up later.  I’ll address it later if it does.