Isaiah E-Book

Ray Ortlund

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 930

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Isaiah is widely considered the deepest, richest, and most theologically significant book in the Old Testament. It is, without question, a profound statement by God about his own sovereignty and majesty spoken through his chosen spokesman, the prophet Isaiah. In this expository commentary on the book of Isaiah, Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr., argues that Isaiah imparts a single vision of God throughout all sixty-six chapters. It is a unified, woven whole presenting God's revelation of himself to mankind, breaking through our pretense and clashing "with our intuitive sense of things." Ortlund makes a point of man's uninterest in God and his unfailing inclination to disbelief, and thus the need for God to "interrupt our familiar ways of thinking." The emphasis of this addition to the Preaching the Word series is this: God saves sinners. He saves them willfully and powerfully and needs no help from us, presenting himself in all his unmistakable glory. The message of Isaiah, shown thoroughly and thoughtfully in this commentary, will reignite a passion for the glory of God in the hearts of believers and will present that glory clearly and potently to those who have yet to be brought to saving faith. Part of the Preaching the Word series. Part of the Preaching the Word series.

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Isaiah

Copyright © 2005 by Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr.

Published by Crossway BooksA publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Cover banner by Marge Gieser

First printing, 2005

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from Holy Bible: English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Bible quotations indicated as from RSV are taken from the Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, copyright © 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Bible quotations indicated as from NRSV are taken from the Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Bible quotations indicated as from KJV are taken from the Holy Bible: King James Version.

Bible quotations indicated as from NKJV are taken from the Holy Bible: New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Bible quotations indicated as from NLT are taken from the Holy Bible: New Living Translation, copyright © 1996 by Tyndale Charitable Trust. All rights reserved.

Bible quotations indicated as from NIV are taken from the Holy Bible: New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Bible quotations indicated as from NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation and are used by permission.

Italics in Biblical quotations indicate emphasis added.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ortlund, Raymond C., Jr.Isaiah : God saves sinners / Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr. ; R. Kent Hughes,general editor.p.     cm. — (Preaching the word) Includes indexes.ISBN 1-58134-727-8 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Bible. O.T. Isaiah—Commentaries. I. Hughes, R. Kent. II. Title.III. Series.BS1515.53.O78      2005224'.1077—dc22

2005004960

RRD        16   15   14   13   12   11   10   09   08   07   06   05 15      14   13     12   11   10   9   8   7     6     5    4    3    2    1

For my lovely wife Jani

“Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!For I am God, and there is no other.”ISAIAH 45:22

Table of Contents

Abbreviations

A Word to Those Who Preach the Word

Preface

1 Introduction to Isaiah (ISAIAH 1:1)

2 Our Urgent Need: A New Self-awareness I (ISAIAH 1:2-9)

3 Our Urgent Need: A New Self-awareness II (ISAIAH 1:10-20)

4 Our Urgent Need: A New Self-awareness III (ISAIAH 1:21-31)

5 The Transforming Power of Hope and Humility (ISAIAH 2:1-22)

6 The Enriching Power of Loss and Gain (ISAIAH 3:1 — 4:6)

7 Receiving the Grace of God in Vain (ISAIAH 5:1-30)

8 The Triumph of Grace Over Our Failure: Isaiah (ISAIAH 6:1-13)

9 The Triumph of Grace Over Our Failure: Judah I (ISAIAH 7:1 — 8:8)

10 The Triumph of Grace Over Our Failure: Judah II (ISAIAH 8:9 — 9:7)

11 The Triumph of Grace Over Our Failure: Israel I (ISAIAH 9:8 — 10:15)

12 The Triumph of Grace Over Our Failure: Israel II (ISAIAH 10:16 — 11:16)

13 Our Response to the Triumph of Grace (ISAIAH 12:1-6)

14 The Supremacy of God Over the Nations I (ISAIAH 13:1 — 20:6)

15 The Supremacy of God Over the Nations II (ISAIAH 21:1 — 23:18)

16 The Supremacy of God Over the Nations III (ISAIAH 24:1 — 27:13)

17 Our One Security: God’s Sure Foundation (ISAIAH 28:1-29)

18 God’s Power on God’s Terms (ISAIAH 29:1-24)

19 The Counterintuitive Ways of God (ISAIAH 30:1-33)

20 Our Only True Hope (ISAIAH 31 — 32)

21 Finding God in Failure (ISAIAH 33)

22 The Two Final Outcomes (ISAIAH 34 — 35)

23 In Whom Do You Now Trust? (ISAIAH 36:1 — 37:7)

24 That All the Kingdoms of the Earth May Know (ISAIAH 37:8-38)

25 Peace and Security in Our Days? (ISAIAH 38:1 — 39:8)

26 God’s Glory, Our Comfort (ISAIAH 40:1-11)

27 God’s Uniqueness, Our Assurance (ISAIAH 40:12-26)

28 God’s Greatness, Our Renewal (ISAIAH 40:27-31)

29 The Reality of God in an Unreal World (ISAIAH 41:1-20)

30 A Delusion, a Servant, a New Song (ISAIAH 41:21 — 42:17)

31 God’s Way to Reformation (ISAIAH 42:18 — 43:21)

32 God’s Way to Revival (ISAIAH 43:22 — 44:23)

33 God’s Surprising Strategies (ISAIAH 44:24 — 45:25)

34 Gods That Fail and the Collapse of Their Cultures (ISAIAH 46:1 — 47:15)

35 God’s Commitment to God Is His Assurance to Us (ISAIAH 48:1-22)

36 Not with Swords’ Loud Clashing (ISAIAH 49:1 — 50:3)

37 Why Do We Have Ears on the Outside of Our Heads? (ISAIAH 50:4 — 51:8)

38 Wachet Auf (ISAIAH 51:9 — 52:12)

39 Guilt, Substitution, Grace (ISAIAH 52:13 — 53:12)

40 When Grace Dances (ISAIAH 54:1 — 55:13)

41 Revival and the Heart of the Contrite (ISAIAH 56:1 — 57:21)

42 Revival and Responsibility (ISAIAH 58:1 — 59:13)

43 Revival and World Renewal (ISAIAH 59:14 — 60:22)

44 Revival, Preaching, and Prayer (ISAIAH 61:1 — 62:7)

45 Revival and the Wrath of the Lamb (ISAIAH 62:8 — 63:14)

46 Revival and the Descent of God (ISAIAH 63:15 — 64:12)

47 Revival and the Eagerness of God (ISAIAH 65:1-25)

48 Revival and Worship (ISAIAH 66:1-24)

Notes

About the Book Jacket

Abbreviations

ANET

Pritchard, James B., editor. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Third edition with supplement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.

ARAB

Luckenbill, Daniel David. Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia. 2 volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926-1927.

BDB

Brown, Francis; Driver, S. R.; Briggs, Charles A. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1907.

BHS

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1977.

ESV

The English Standard Version (2001).

GKC

Kautzsch, E., editor; Cowley, A. E., reviser. Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar. Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press, 1910.

IBHS

Waltke, Bruce K., and O’Connor, M. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990.

KB3

Koehler, Ludwig, and Baumgartner, Walter. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. 5 volumes. Translated from the third edition by M. E. J. Richardson. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1994-1999.

Motyer

Motyer, J. Alec. The Prophecy of Isaiah: An Introduction & Commentary. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993.

NASB

The New American Standard Bible (1971).

NEB

The New English Bible (1970).

NIV

The New International Version (1978).

NJPS

The New Jewish Publication Society Translation (1988).

NKJV

The New King James Version (1982).

NLT

The New Living Translation (1996).

NRSV

The New Revised Standard Version (1989).

Oswalt

Oswalt, John N. The Book of Isaiah. The New International Commentary on the Old Testament. 2 volumes. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1986, 1998.

REB

The Revised English Bible (1989).

RSV

The Revised Standard Version (1952).

Wehr

Wehr, Hans. A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. Fourth edition. Edited by J. Milton Cowan. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1979.

A Word to Those Who Preach the Word

There are times when I am preaching that I have especially sensed the pleasure of God. I usually become aware of it through the unnatural silence. The ever-present coughing ceases, and the pews stop creaking, bringing an almost physical quiet to the sanctuary — through which my words sail like arrows. I experience a heightened eloquence, so that the cadence and volume of my voice intensify the truth I am preaching.

There is nothing quite like it — the Holy Spirit filling one’s sails, the sense of his pleasure, and the awareness that something is happening among one’s hearers. This experience is, of course, not unique, for thousands of preachers have similar experiences, even greater ones.

What has happened when this takes place? How do we account for this sense of his smile? The answer for me has come from the ancient rhetorical categories of logos, ethos, and pathos.

The first reason for his smile is the logos — in terms of preaching, God’s Word. This means that as we stand before God’s people to proclaim his Word, we have done our homework. We have exegeted the passage, mined the significance of its words in their context, and applied sound hermeneutical principles in interpreting the text so that we understand what its words meant to its hearers. And it means that we have labored long until we can express in a sentence what the theme of the text is — so that our outline springs from the text. Then our preparation will be such that as we preach, we will not be preaching our own thoughts about God’s Word, but God’s actual Word, his logos. This is fundamental to pleasing him in preaching.

The second element in knowing God’s smile in preaching is ethos —what you are as a person. There is a danger endemic to preaching, which is having your hands and heart cauterized by holy things. Phillips Brooks illustrated it by the analogy of a train conductor who comes to believe that he has been to the places he announces because of his long and loud heralding of them. And that is why Brooks insisted that preaching must be “the bringing of truth through personality.” Though we can never perfectly embody the truth we preach, we must be subject to it, long for it, and make it as much a part of our ethos as possible. As the Puritan William Ames said, “Next to the Scriptures, nothing makes a sermon more to pierce, than when it comes out of the inward affection of the heart without any affectation.” When a preacher’s ethos backs up his logos, there will be the pleasure of God.

Last, there is pathos — personal passion and conviction. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher and skeptic, was once challenged as he was seen going to hear George Whitefield preach: “I thought you do not believe in the gospel.” Hume replied, “I don’t, but he does.” Just so! When a preacher believes what he preaches, there will be passion. And this belief and requisite passion will know the smile of God.

The pleasure of God is a matter of logos (the Word), ethos (what you are), and pathos (your passion). As you preach the Word may you experience his smile — the Holy Spirit in your sails!

R. Kent Hughes Wheaton, Illinois

Preface

God saves sinners. We don’t believe that. We bank our happiness on other things. But God says to us, “I’m better than you think. You’re worse than you think. Let’s get together.”

The prophet Isaiah wants to show us more of God and more of ourselves than we’ve ever seen before. He wants us to know what it means for us to be saved. Do we have the courage to listen? We might as well. Our friends disappoint us. Our own good intentions let us down. Sooner or later our very bodies will give out. But God has opened a way for us to swim eternally in the ocean of his love. Our part is to look beyond ourselves and stake everything on God, who alone saves sinners.

If you aren’t a Christian believer, I dare you to give Isaiah a hearing. God speaks through this prophet even today. How else can you explain the fact that after 2,700 years there is still a market for books on Isaiah? Why are you holding this book right now? God wants to speak to you through Isaiah. If you’re a new Christian, Isaiah offers you a God-centered confidence that can face anything. If you’re an experienced Christian, Isaiah will challenge you to trust God in new ways. And if you’re suffering, Isaiah will help you reach out and grasp God’s mighty hand on your behalf.

You will find this more meaningful if you open up a Bible and follow Isaiah’s text as you read along. I have used the English Standard Version. Any variations from the ESV are my own translations of the Hebrew text.

As a pastor, it’s not my job to protect people from the living God. My job is to bring people to God, and leave them there. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the British minister, asked, “What is the chief end of preaching?” His answer was, “It is to give men and women a sense of God and his presence.”1 How did he attempt that?

His approach is habitually Isaianic: having surveyed man’s pretensions, his fancied greatness and adequacy, moral, religious, cultural, intellectual, he punctures them, humbling man and exposing his weakness, futility and sin, in order then to exalt God as the only Savior.2

All prophetic preaching takes that approach. If all you want is Christianity Lite, this book is not for you. But if your interest in God is sincere enough not to set preconditions, you may well find a sense of God here.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the commentaries on Isaiah by J. Alec Motyer and John N. Oswalt. Their influence is pervasive here. Some quotations, from older works especially, I have edited slightly, in line with current idiom.

I thank Dr. Kent Hughes for the privilege of contributing the Isaiah volume to his Preaching the Word series. I thank the Session of Christ Presbyterian Church for their partnership in this project. I thank all my friends at Christ Pres for their loving prayers.

Jani, this book is for you. And it’s about time.

Raymond C. Ortlund, Jr.Christ Presbyterian Church Nashville, Tennessee

1

Introduction to Isaiah

ISAIAH 1:1

Who can tell us whether this awful and mysterious silence, in which the Infinite One has wrapped himself, portends mercy or wrath? Who can say to the troubled conscience whether He, whose laws in nature are inflexible and remorseless, will pardon sin? Who can answer the anxious inquiry whether the dying live on or whether they cease to be? Is there a future state? And if so, what is the nature of that untried condition of being? If there be immortal happiness, how can I attain it? If there be an everlasting woe, how can it be escaped? Let the reader close his Bible and ask himself seriously what he knows upon these momentous questions apart from its teachings. What solid foundation has he to rest upon in regard to matters which so absolutely transcend all earthly experience and are so entirely out of the reach of our unassisted faculties? A man of facile faith may perhaps delude himself into the belief of what he wishes to believe. He may thus take upon trust God’s unlimited mercy, his ready forgiveness of transgressors, and eternal happiness after death. But this is all a dream. He knows nothing, he can know nothing about it, except by direct revelation from heaven.1

We can know, because God has spoken. Into our troubled world, God has spoken to us “from the borders of another world.”2 Our needs go deeper than the remedies on sale in the marketplace of ideas today. Whether you are a believer or an unbeliever, wouldn’t you agree that “the solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time”?3 No matter how many experts we consult or how much research we do, the ultimate questions of life remain unanswerable unless God speaks. And God has spoken to us, in plain language. Surprisingly, his message is good news for bad people like us. Will you listen to him thoughtfully, patiently?

God spoke eloquently through Isaiah. If you have any interest in the Bible at all, Isaiah will reward a close reading. It is “the most theologically significant book in the Old Testament.”4 “Of all the books in the Old Testament, Isaiah is perhaps the richest.”5 “From ancient times Isaiah has been considered the greatest of the Old Testament prophets.”6 The scholars who know what they are talking about prize Isaiah. What Bach’s first biographer said about his music applies to Isaiah’s prophecy:

[Bach’s music] is not merely agreeable, like other composers’, but transports us to the regions of the ideal. It does not arrest our attention momentarily but grips us the stronger the oftener we listen to it so that, after a thousand hearings, its treasures are still unexhausted and yield fresh beauties to excite our wonder.7

Isaiah deserves better than to be a “classic” — a famous book nobody reads anymore. His prophecy isn’t always easy to understand. But every day all around the world people take on challenges, from climbing the Matterhorn to learning Japanese to launching a new business. If God has spoken to us through Isaiah, let’s explore this literary Matterhorn. Let’s enjoy the view from the very top, and even the effort of getting there. Let’s reach out for new understandings.

Let us begin: “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” (1:1). This heading invites three questions: What? Who? When?

WHAT?

“The vision of Isaiah . . . which he saw . . .” This book is a prophetic vision. Not that Isaiah went into a trance, for 2:1 says that Isaiah saw a “word” from God. But this book puts before us a way of seeing. And it isn’t our own brainstorm. God is the one offering us a new perspective on everything.

Left to ourselves, we live on the level of impressions and hunches and gut reactions. We are blind to the things we most need to know. But a prophet was enabled to see beyond the immediate. A prophet was not fooled or stampeded. He was a seer.

For example, Elisha was surrounded one night in Dothan by the army of the Syrians (2 Kings 6:15-17). A young man was with him there — a prophet-in-training. He got up one morning to find the area swarming with enemy troops. He was terrified. But when he alerted Elisha, the old man didn’t panic. Elisha said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” His young friend must have thought, This old guy is past his prime! He doesn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. But what did the prophet do? He prayed, “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” God did. And the young man saw that the surrounding mountains were filled with horses and chariots of fire. The prophet could see through appearances into reality, which is why the prophets were misunderstood.

Isaiah himself was enabled to see the divine King enthroned in the heavenly court (Isaiah 6). What he never could have stumbled onto, God revealed to him. This makes the prophetic vision of the Bible our clearest view into reality. Our natural outlook focuses on everything secondary. But in the Bible God is the central, unavoidable figure everywhere. All the basic questions of life are, in fact, God-questions. As John Calvin put it, “The Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life.”8 That is a prophetic way of seeing. But this awareness clashes with our intuitive sense of things. We dislike God’s word and defend ourselves against it. But Isaiah begs us, “Come, let us walk in the light of the LORD” (2:5). Let’s respect God enough to be open and think it through.

The heading in Isaiah 1:1 alerts us that his book will interrupt our familiar ways of thinking. Isaiah walks up to us, taps us on the shoulder as we struggle with our problems, and says, “There’s another way to look at all this. Interested?” God is disruptive. Without his word, we are confined to our own pretenses and bluffs. With his word, new realities open up. But if we want to get anything out of Isaiah, we have to be ready to adjust.

The other thing we should see about the What is this: The verse says “the vision” (singular), not “the visions” (plural). That is surprising. Why? Because this book is an anthology of Isaiah’s lifetime of prophetic work. He preached many sermons and made declarations for God on many occasions. What we have in this book is an edited collection of his whole career. Toward the end of his life, Isaiah gathered his papers and notes and memories together and wove them into one coherent presentation. So the unfolding sections of this book come from who knows how many different occasions, and not always in chronological order. But they all unite as one compelling new way of seeing everything. “The vision . . . which he saw . . .”

WHO?

There are two answers to the Who question. The first is obvious: “Isaiah the son of Amoz.” The Bible does not tell us who his father Amoz was, but rabbinic tradition claims that Amoz was brother to Amaziah, King of Judah, putting Isaiah into the royal family.9 We know that Isaiah was a married man with children. We think he was a resident of Jerusalem. We can see he was a literary genius. But the most important thing about Isaiah is his name.

His Hebrew name means “The Lord saves.” This man’s very identity announces grace from beyond ourselves. We don’t like that. We want to retain control, save face, set our own terms, pay our own way. Every day we treat God as incidental to what really matters to us, and we live by our own strategies of self-salvation. We don’t think of our choices that way, but Isaiah can see that our lives are infested with fraudulent idols. Any hope that isn’t from God is an idol of our own making.

Idolatry is Isaiah’s primary concern about us. This is offensive, because we thought we left idolatry behind centuries ago. But Isaiah, who understands the power of God, also understands the power of non-gods. It works on our minds. Every day we shift our deepest fears around behind amusements, professional achievements, and even lesser fears. As we drive slowly around a serious car accident, we think, It wasn’t me, to distance ourselves mentally. We think, They must have been driving recklessly, because blaming feels reassuring. We sense how vulnerable we are.10 But any evasion of plain dealing with God is idol-manufacture. And we do not let go of our idols easily.

In heaping our idolatries together, we assemble a culture — a brilliant, collaborative quest to prove ourselves. Our modern culture rarely represents itself with religious language. But Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, explained how we serve it every day with faithful devotion:

We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.11

We crave reassurance that our lives are not zeroes. But unless we are resting in God, our uncertainty generates “a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.”12 No idol can truthfully say, “My yoke is easy” (Matthew 11:30).

In today’s increasingly dangerous world, our cheery but demanding idols, with their empty promises, are failing us. The fact is, death watches us, stalks us, takes aim, and shoots straight. There is no safe place, not even in America, the land of optimism. We have terrorist hijackers, drive-by shootings, tainted blood transfusions, gun-toting kids at school, and weapons of mass destruction in the hands of maniacs. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, put it vividly:

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.13

Ignoring and forgetting is why we hold this banquet called the American Dream. Isn’t it time, with all other hopes proving false, to reach out for the strong hand of God?

A salvation we don’t even know how to define, Isaiah is an expert at explaining to us. He wants to lead us into a life that outlasts our earthly expiration date. J. I. Packer puts into words the greatness of the Isaianic message:

God saves sinners. God — the Triune Jehovah, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; three Persons working together in sovereign wisdom, power and love to achieve the salvation of a chosen people, the Father electing, the Son fulfilling the Father’s will by redeeming, the Spirit executing the purpose of the Father and Son by renewing. Saves — does everything, first to last, that is involved in bringing man from death in sin to life in glory: plans, achieves and communicates redemption, calls and keeps, justifies, sanctifies, glorifies. Sinners — men as God finds them, guilty, vile, helpless, powerless, blind, unable to lift a finger to do God’s will or better their spiritual lot. God saves sinners. . . . Sinners do not save themselves in any sense at all, but salvation, first and last, whole and entire, past, present and future, is of the Lord, to whom be glory forever, amen!14

God is announcing to us through Isaiah: The Lord, for all that he is, saves, for all that’s worth, sinners, for all that we need. That truth is better than we give it credit for.

The people of Isaiah’s day had an unrealistic appraisal of themselves, with little awareness of their own fatal salvations. They went through the motions of Biblical faith. But when it came to the hardball of everyday life, they saw no relevance in God’s help. But their brilliant stupidity only played into the hands of their enemies, as we will see. The Lutheran Church, in their service of Affirmation of Baptism, asks new members, “Do you renounce all the forces of evil, the devil, and all his empty promises?” 15 That may sound quaint. But the question on which our lives turn, moment by moment, is whether we are banking on God’s promises of salvation or on the empty promises of the false salvations pressing in upon us all around. If we are not letting God save us, we are exposing ourselves to forces of evil, more than we know. But as the truth of “The Lord saves” breaks upon us with prophetic clarity, it becomes a powerful resource for living.

In Isaiah’s day, his message was unpopular. A prophet with his name (“the Lord saves”) — well, the people could see a mile away what he stood for, and not many listened. Their hearts were too dead to resonate with the greatest thing in the universe. And so it is today. If the gospel that you can not be your own savior, but God can save you totally, does not thrill you, it’s probably an irritant to your self-importance, lust for control, and moral superiority. Even in the church, the more clearly the good news is preached and the more directly it is applied, the more inevitably it sparks controversy. So be it. “The Lord saves” is the improbable truth we’ve been looking for but resisting all our lives.

This book is also about, secondly, “Judah and Jerusalem.” Isaiah will address other nations too. His message is for everyone. But God is most present among the people of his choosing, and the revival of his people is the hope of the nations. That is Isaiah’s primary concern. So we should apply Isaiah’s vision today not to America or any other political entity but, first and foremost, to the Christian church. Jesus said to his followers, “You are the salt of the earth. . . . You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13, 14). Nothing is more important to the state of the world than the state of the church. God speaks first to believers, so that his overflowing salvation can spread to all. The world cannot impede the expansion of salvation; the mediocrity of the church can and does. If the world is not experiencing the grace of God, the church is being untrue to its destiny. What the world most needs is the church so obviously saved that the church is an alternative to convert to. If Isaiah were alive today, he would say to Christian believers, “The Lord saves, beginning with us.”

WHEN?

“. . . in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.” Isaiah preached in the southern kingdom of Judah during the closing decades of the eighth-century B.C. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. When Isaiah began his work about 740 B.C., Judah was still basking in long-sustained prosperity. But the good times were nearly over, and the people sensed it. They lived in a pivotal moment and in a threatening world. The crisis of their generation was the rising Assyrian empire to the east, and these four kings of Judah proved how mixed the nation’s response was — trust in God complicated by deeper trust in themselves. You can read more about it in 2 Kings 15 — 20. But the Assyrian threat was the point at which these leaders and their people would decide whether God would save them or whether they had to develop their own strategies of self-salvation. Every generation is tested at some point of felt urgency, and to us today God freely offers himself as our most powerful ally. Whether or not we choose him is the story of our generation, and nothing else ultimately matters.

Why did Isaiah keep speaking out? Few people took him seriously. As thanks for his ministry, according to an ancient tradition, he was sawn in two.16 How did he carry on? There is only one answer. What he saw is real. We need to see it too. We need to embrace it rather than push it away. We can discover in our crises today what it means to be saved by grace from God. Others in the past have trusted him, and he more than kept his word. Now it’s our turn. But we don’t have forever to make up our minds.

Let’s rethink everything from this prophetic viewpoint: God saves sinners. It’s the most underrated truth in all the world.

2

Our Urgent Need:A New Self-awareness I

ISAIAH 1:2-9

Paul Tournier, the Swiss psychiatrist, observed, “A diffuse and vague guilt feeling kills the personality, whereas the conviction of sin gives life to it.”1 Isaiah begins with life-giving conviction of sin. It’s our first step back to God.

We need a sense of sin. We shouldn’t fear it or resent it. It is not destructive. It is life-giving, if we have the courage to let Christ save us. We are often told — or just whispered to — that what we need is more self-esteem. That is false. What we need is more humility and more Christ-esteem.

William Kilpatrick distinguishes self-esteem, with its non-judgmental-ism, from self-awareness, with its clear consciousness of sin:

A colleague at Boston College . . . once asked members of his philosophy class to write an anonymous essay about a personal struggle over right and wrong, good and evil. Most of the students, however, were unable to complete the assignment. “Why?” he asked. “Well,” they said — and apparently this was said without irony — “we haven’t done anything wrong.” We can see a lot of self-esteem here, but little self-awareness.2

We may feel good about ourselves. But what if God thinks we’ve done wrong, a lot of wrong, and not much right? What if he wants to talk to us about it because he also has a remedy for us? What if he can see that our self-protection is really self-imprisonment? God lovingly confronts us with truths embarrassing enough to save us.

What is conviction of sin? It is not an oppressive spirit of uncertainty or paralyzing guilt feelings. Conviction of sin is the lance of the divine Surgeon piercing the infected soul, releasing the pressure, letting the infection pour out. Conviction of sin is a health-giving injury. Conviction of sin is the Holy Spirit being kind to us by confronting us with the light we don’t want to see and the truth we’re afraid to admit and the guilt we prefer to ignore. Conviction of sin is the severe love of God overruling our compulsive dishonesty, our willful blindness, our favorite excuses. Conviction of sin is the violent sweetness of God opposing the sins lying comfortably undisturbed in our lives. Conviction of sin is the merciful God declaring war on the false peace we settle for. Conviction of sin is our escape from malaise to joy, from attending church to worship, from faking it to authenticity. Conviction of sin, with the forgiveness of Jesus pouring over our wounds, is life.

In Isaiah chapter 1, God is telling us the truth about ourselves. Let’s not be fooled by our polished appearances and our stylish theories of the darling self. They’ll be the death of us. The unflattering portrait of Isaiah 1 is God’s way of disturbing us until we start asking the courageous Godward questions that can breathe life back into us.

The first chapter of Isaiah shows us the “before” picture — what we are, left to ourselves. Later prophecies in the book piece together the “after” picture — what God promises to make of everyone he saves. By the end of the book, what God achieves is not simply a patched-up version of you and me. His grace will create new heavens and a new earth (65:17; 66:22). Isaiah 1 opens the way to our God-glorification by deconstructing our self-glorification.

Isaiah crafted his message with literary care, as we’ll see throughout his work. At first glance he may seem to be meandering — confused and confusing. Martin Luther said that the prophets “have a queer way of talking, like people who, instead of proceeding in an orderly manner, ramble off from one thing to the next, so that you cannot make head or tail of them or see what they are getting at.”3 But a closer look at Isaiah’s text reveals a purposeful genius underneath that first impression.4 His first chapter is structured like this:

1. Three views of God’s uncomprehending people (1:2-26)

A The tragedy of their humiliation: “Ah, sinful nation” (1:2-9)

B The hypocrisy of their worship: “Bring no more vain offerings” (1:10-20)

C The corruption of their character: “Everyone loves a bribe” (1:21-26)

2. The alternatives confronting God’s people (1:27-31)

Robert Burns, the poet of Scotland, wrote, “O, wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us.”5 That wouldn’t do us any harm, would it? But even better is to see ourselves as God sees us. According to John Calvin, we need to know two things to make meaningful contact with reality. We need to know God and ourselves. A new self-awareness “leads us by the hand,” Calvin says, to find God.6 Isaiah begins there, with our most urgent need — a new self-awareness through the conviction of sin.

Isaiah chapter 1 is so important that we’ll devote three studies to it —chapters 2, 3, and 4 in this book. We begin now with Isaiah 1:2-9. The prophet shows us God’s broken heart (1:2, 3), our broken strength (1:4-8), and God’s unbroken grace (1:9).

GOD’S BROKEN HEART

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth;for the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 1:2a)

I watched a television interview with the Shah of Iran after he was deposed in the 1970s. With deep sorrow in his voice he said, “It would take no one less than a Homer to tell the story of how I was betrayed.” But it takes the heavens and the earth, it takes the entire cosmos, to witness the enormity of our offenses against God. How dimly we grasp the significance of our lives. We shrink our self-awareness down to the sequential passing of one moment after another, thinking piecemeal, rarely looking beyond, unaware of the magnitude of what we are before God. We trivialize our choices. We don’t think they matter that much. But God does not trivialize us. To him, there is no greater tragedy in the universe than his own children in rebellion against him.

“Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.” (v. 2b)

What hinders God’s blessing in the world today is not Hollywood or Washington. What hinders God’s blessing is his own children in rebellion against him. The reason we see so little repentance in the world is that the world sees so little repentance in the church. And the measure of our wrong against God is the measure of his love invested in us: “Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.” Do we feel rebellious? Rarely. We may feel “more sinned against than sinning” (King Lear). We may feel that God is picking on us here. “After all, we’re doing the best we can, and life is hard. What is he expecting of us?”

Wait a minute. Examine that thought. When that impulse pops into our minds, we’re proving God’s point. That very attitude is rebellion. Whenever we resist his claims upon us and make peace with our mediocrity, we are rebelling against our Father — which is to say, we live often in open defiance against God. We don’t intend to. But we don’t need to intend to. Defiance is the way we are. We settle for a watered-down experience of God. We don’t even want that much of God. But we think of ourselves as good people, because it feels better that way. We need to be awakened to the prophetic truth. And the truth is, this verse is a cry of pain from Heaven. What wounds the heart of God is that we are as rebellious against him as we are blessed by him.

“The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” (v. 3)

God’s children make animals look intelligent. Oxen and donkeys are stupid. Even as animals, they’re dense. But they know enough to go find their master. After all, he feeds them. But we are often unmoved by God’s love. We wander from one false master to another — hungry, empty, frustrated, wondering why God seems unreal. But the name “Israel” declares that God still longs to bless us (cf. Genesis 32:22-29; 35:9-12). The words “my people” show how closely God identifies with us. What madness is this, that we treat God our generous Father as a problem to work around, while we get on with the real business of life! The prophet is saying, “That’s stupid.” And it breaks God’s heart.

OUR BROKEN STRENGTH

Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! (Isaiah 1:4a)

The prophet sees God’s people missing the point of life (“sinful nation”), oppressed with failure (“laden with iniquity”),7 going from bad to worse (“offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly”). But he isn’t railing. The word “Ah!” signals that this is a lament. Hear that in the prophet’s tone. He is not nagging; he is weeping. It is a solemn thing to see God’s children, called to greatness, dissolving into the opposite. How does this happen? Isaiah sees through the infestation of surface-level sins, down to the root.

They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged. (v. 4b)

Do we really forsake the Lord and despise the Holy One? From his point of view, yes. How so? To forsake the Lord is to treat him as the last resort rather than as the fountainhead. To despise God is to disrelish him, to put a discount on God while valuing other things. And that condition of the heart estranges us from God because of who God is — “the Holy One of Israel.” He is both the Holy One and our Holy One. Jonathan Edwards explains the moral significance of that:

Our obligation to love, honor and obey any being is in proportion to his loveliness, honor and authority. Therefore, sin against God, being a violation of infinite obligations, must be a crime infinitely heinous and so deserving infinite punishment. If there is any evil in sin against God, it is infinite evil.8

This is why theft, murder, terrorism, and other outward sins are mere fleabites compared with the mega-sin of forsaking and despising God. But the latter is common, even in the church.

For many, Christianity has become the grinding out of general doctrinal laws from collections of biblical facts. But childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator.9

Grinding it out, grinding it out — that kind of Christianity offends God and injures us more than we realize.

Isaiah uses two images to help us see how clueless we can be. The first image is a beaten man who doesn’t feel his own wounds enough to get help.

Why will you still be struck down?Why will you continue to rebel?The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds;they are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil. (vv. 5, 6)

This man has been so clobbered, there isn’t a square inch on his body not sore and bleeding. But he doesn’t feel it. So he keeps going back for more punishment and gets beaten to a pulp again and again and never learns his lesson. Isaiah is saying, “This is you — never comprehending why or even imagining that things could be better.”

The biggest obstacle to our spiritual progress is that we feel healthy, even successful. We do not sense that we’re like the boxer in the film Rocky — one massive wound from head to toe. We have so little expectation of how invigorating God is that we keep on forsaking and despising the very one who binds up the brokenhearted (Isaiah 61:1). The prophet looks at us in amazement and asks, “Why? If your aim is to make yourselves miserable, haven’t you accomplished that by now? Wouldn’t you rather start to heal?”

Isaiah’s other image of our need for God is an invaded country that does not see its own humiliation. Some interpreters read verses 7, 8 as literal. In Isaiah’s day they came close to being literal. But the similes in verse 8, signaled by the word “like,” argue that Isaiah is still speaking figuratively:

Your country lies desolate;your cities are burned with fire;in your very presence foreigners devour your land;it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners.And the daughter of Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a lodge in a cucumber field, like a besieged city.

Compare that with how the Bible describes believers at their best: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9). But Isaiah saw God’s people in his day reduced to something like a shack in the midst of a field picked over by invading robbers. The church on the defensive, the church pitiable, exposed, cornered, her influence diminished — helplessness is not God’s will for the people he intends to be redemptive in this world (Deuteronomy 26:18, 19; 28:1). The church needs a Savior too.

GOD’S UNBROKEN GRACE

If the LORD of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we should have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah. (Isaiah 1:9)

It’s a miracle that the church survives at all. But not because God is weak. He is the omnipotent “LORD of hosts.” The church survives because God saves sinners. He sees what we would become, left to ourselves, and in mercy he stretches out his hand and says, “I will not let you go.” That is why the evil inside every one of us doesn’t explode with its actual power, to our destruction (Romans 9:29). Apart from God’s preserving grace, we would relive the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. We are what they were. We deserve what they got. That’s what God says. And the only reason we’re still here is his overruling mercy saving us from ourselves.

Isaiah 1:2-9 awakens us to God’s broken heart, our broken strength, and his unbroken grace. God is saying:

See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me;I kill and I make alive;I wound and I heal;and there is none that can deliver out of my hand. (Deuteronomy 32:39)

This is the God we have to deal with. He can wound us, and he can heal us; but he would rather heal us. Will we come to our senses and turn to him? Here is good news for wounded people: Jesus was wounded too. “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Our wounds are healed by his wounds.

Isaiah intends to convict us of our sins. But we can feel convicted of a million sins without experiencing any healing from God. The only conviction of sin that ends up healing us is when we see how we have despised and forsaken the very One who died to save us. Conviction of that super-sin opens up healing for all our other sins.

So, what is your conscience telling you? If you will trust God enough to admit it and open up to his grace, he will start healing your broken heart more than you can imagine.

3

Our Urgent Need:A New Self-awareness II

ISAIAH 1:10-20

The Bible says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:8). But how do we draw near to God so that he draws near to us? That question is being debated today. The debate gets so hot, it’s sometimes called “the worship wars.” Some churches are fighting for traditional forms of worship, and others are fighting for contemporary forms of worship. The traditional people accuse the contemporary people of being superficial, and the contemporary people accuse the traditional people of being irrelevant.

Isaiah points the way out of our wars into God’s peace by helping us think in God’s categories. His categories are not traditional versus contemporary worship but, more profoundly, acceptable versus unacceptable worship. And he has told us what kind of worship he considers acceptable: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit” (Psalm 51:17, NRSV). Acceptable worship is sweetened with a spirit of repentance.

Isaiah 1:10-20 is about two things at once: worship and repentance. In essence, God puts them together this way: “I want you to repent of your worship. Your worship is unacceptable unless it is the overflow of repentance.”

What is repentance? Repentance is not morbid introspection. It is not self-punishment. True repentance is a privilege, given by the Holy Spirit, opening our eyes not only to how costly our sins are but, more searchingly, how evil our sins are.1 Repentance is not afraid of wholesome self-suspicion, because it feels an urgency to be right with God at any cost. Repentance is a power giving us traction for newness of life. It isn’t piecemeal or selective, doctoring up this problem or that. As Martin Luther taught in the first of his 95 Theses, “The whole life of believers should be penitence.”2 Repentance is an honest new self renouncing the shifty old self. And, as Isaiah teaches here, repentance turns from mere forms of worship, whatever they are, to authenticity with God.

Isaiah chapter 1 is holding before us a mirror, so that we can see ourselves more realistically. The rest of the book shows how God saves people like us, so that we become the New Jerusalem. But Isaiah begins the good news of the gospel with the bad news of the gospel, because it’s when we place ourselves under God’s judgment that we experience his salvation.

Just as chapter 1 introduces the book, verse 2 sets the tone for that chapter: “Children have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.” The verb “rebelled” also appears in the last verse of the book (66:24). The whole prophecy is framed within these two appearances of “rebelled.” Rebellion against God is our problem. But God saves rebels. And true worship is rebels like us waving the white flag of surrender before our rightful Lord in repentance.

Isaiah is portraying God’s uncomprehending people. Now he exposes the hypocrisy of their worship. His analysis takes four steps: confrontation (1:10), accusation (1:11-15), invitation (1:16-18), decision (1:19, 20).

CONFRONTATION

Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom!Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! (Isaiah 1:10)

In verse 9 Isaiah said that, apart from God’s preserving grace, we would all end up like Sodom and Gomorrah, in both guilt and destruction. We can imagine how Isaiah’s contemporaries responded to that, along with everything else in verses 2-9. “What do you mean, Isaiah, that we’re rebellious and uncomprehending and sick and desolate? We’re the people of God! Any problems we have are more than compensated for by our splendid worship here in Jerusalem. You’re overlooking something very much to our credit. How can you say we’re like Sodom and Gomorrah?” They must have felt misunderstood. Their feelings must have been hurt. I think Isaiah stopped, thought it over a minute, and then said, “You’re right. You’re not like Sodom and Gomorrah. You are Sodom and Gomorrah!” He now intensifies the confrontation. Why? Because we rarely listen the first time.

But it’s a sign of God’s grace when all of us, both “rulers” and “people,” start asking ourselves new questions like, “What have we become? Are we living proof of what it means to be saved? In our homes, in our professional influence, in our deepest thoughts, what have we become?” Only when our confidence is shaken can we hear the word of the Lord afresh. What is he saying?

ACCUSATION

With unsparing honesty, God tells us how he judges our worship. One commentator says, “Of all prophetic outbursts at religious unreality, this is the most powerful and sustained. Its vehemence is unsurpassed.”3 The way God evaluates our worship goes far deeper than the outward forms churches prize so fiercely.

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?says the Lord;I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts;I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.” (v. 11)

The key is “I have had enough . . .” The New Living Translation puts it bluntly: “I am sick of your sacrifices.” Today we’d say, “I’ve had it up to here!” Then there’s that word “your” in the first line: “. . . your sacrifices.” “Wait a minute, God,” the people would have said. “We didn’t come up with this form of worship. It was your idea. We’re just doing what the book of Leviticus tells us to do. They’re your sacrifices, Lord.” But God is saying, “No, I don’t identify with what you’re doing, however ‘Biblical’ it may be.” And do you see the lavish inventory of worship materials here? “Sacrifices . . . burnt offerings of rams . . . the fat of well-fed beasts . . . the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.” This careful catalog of sacrifices shows how bountiful, how outwardly impressive, how unselfish (in a way) their worship was. But God says, “I have had enough.” Why? We don’t know yet. He’ll explain later.

“When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts?” (v. 12)

Here is the heart of worship: “When you come to appear before me.” After all, what is worship? It is drawing near to God, entering into his felt presence. He himself calls it “com[ing] to appear before me.” But that beautiful thing can be trampled underfoot. Jesus too was offended by the vulgarization of worship (Mark 11:15, 16). When the immediacy of God fades away, no matter how proper our observances may be, God is saying that, to him, such worship has been spoiled as a “trampling of my courts” — it’s just the noise of feet shuffling on the pavement or of car doors slamming in the parking lot. Real encounter with God is easily lost.

“Bring no more vain offerings;incense is an abomination to me.New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.” (Isaiah 1:13)

Isaiah is probing down to the root of the problem. There are two clues, one in the first line and another in the last line. God does not want “vain offerings” — literally, “offerings of nothing.” That’s the first clue. What offends God is hollowed-out worship. If we force together “iniquity and solemn assembly” — the second clue — God calls our worship “offerings of nothing.” God is not saying, “I cannot endure iniquity.” He is saying, “I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.” We might think, “Sure, I have these unconfessed sins in my life. But it has nothing to do with my worship.” But God is saying, “Your unconfessed sins make your worship unendurable to me, because your sins reveal what you really think of me.” So, which claims the greater sense of urgency in our hearts — the form of our worship or the quality of our lives? Are we at least as eager to repent of our sins as we are to preserve our form of worship, whatever it may be? Where does our sense of urgency lie?

“Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates;they have become a burden to me;I am weary of bearing them.” (v. 14)

Let’s ask ourselves, what do we think is unbearably repulsive to God, to his very soul, right down to the depths of the Divine Being? We might answer, hard-core crime, the exploitation of children, terrorist mayhem —that sort of thing. It might not occur to us that what the soul of God hates and is burdened and wearied by is the worship we offer him, if we are not in repentance.

What does God see that we don’t? The worship he is rejecting is the worship of himself. It’s not the worship of a pagan idol. The worship he is rejecting is his own authorized, Levitical worship. It isn’t some ludicrous human invention. What kind of God-directed worship does his soul hate? What kind of Biblical worship makes God complain, “Do I have to go church today?” We finally see the answer:

“When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you;even though you make many prayers, I will not listen;your hands are full of blood.” (v. 15)

God makes his most damning charge in rejecting the most pure worship of all — prayer, which doesn’t even require an outward form. Even in prayer, however frequent, however fervent, bloody hands turn God’s face away.

Our hands bloody? Jesus said that murder can take many forms, including anger, cutting words, and unresolved relational tension (Matthew 5:2124).4 Character assassination, backstabbing, and “dividing wall[s] of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14) at church create a life-depleting social atmosphere rather than the life-enriching environment God wants. Are our hands bloody? Maybe more than we thought. That could be why, even in prayer, God seems aloof. A church hostile to people is a church hostile to God, whether that church knows it or not. The hard truth is this: “The curse of a godless man can sound more pleasant in God’s ears than the Hallelujah of the pious.”5

Why is God so blunt? Because he wants to save us. For our worship to be saved, it isn’t a matter of fine-tuning our outward performances. It’s a matter of repentance.

INVITATION

“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;cease to do evil, learn to do good;seek justice, correct oppression;bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” (Isaiah 1:16, 17)

Isn’t it striking how simple and direct these imperatives are, compared with the elaborate descriptions of the worship in verses 11-15? God is calling us to repent in obvious ways. He’s saying, “Clean up your lives.” He emphasizes our own active repentance, because our whole problem is our active worship concealing our passive repentance. He is telling us that treating people well beautifies our worship of him. He is saying that true worship doesn’t substitute for obedience; it inspires obedience.

God does not say, “Remove your evil deeds from before my eyes.” Some translations give that impression. But the wording of the English Standard Version is accurate and significant: “Remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes.” Repentance is not just removing evil deeds; it goes the second mile and, after the deeds have passed, goes back to clean up the residual evil, the damage done. True repentance makes things right again. God is saying, “If you want your worship to please me, do this. Become actively creative in compassion and justice for the people you have hurt, especially the people nobody else cares about, people who can’t pay you back, people who might not thank you. Set right again the wrongs you’ve been tolerating. Then your worship will be beautiful to me, and then I will be real to you again.”

As always, God is more ready to meet us with grace than we thought. His invitation is irresistible:

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” (v. 18)

God is saying, “Come on, let’s talk this over. Give me a chance. Here’s my invitation. You present your blood-red hands to me in open confession, I’ll wash you clean in the blood of Jesus, and your worship will come alive.”