It's Not Too Late To Learn From God's Judgments On You (Isaiah 42:18-43:7) Series

Imagine, if you will, a married couple having an argument. One spouse accuses the other of being difficult, or pig-headed, or lazy, or unreasonable, or something. Some harsh words are said by one party. The spouse on the receiving end of it looks at the other, and says, "Hey, wait. That's you. You're the pig-headed, difficult, lazy, unreasonable one." Can we all imagine this, or is it too much of a stretch? You're with me?

Now, imagine that you aren't one of those spouses. Instead, you're hanging out with one spouse or the other, and they have this argument over the phone. You hear one side well enough to know, that you're happy to not be either spouse. But you don't hear everything clearly, word for word. But if you really want to know what's going on, though, you can reconstruct the other person's side. 90% of what's said, isn't that hard to figure out. You can come pretty close, without too much trouble.

That, basically, is the first part of our passage today. It's an argument-- what scholars would call a "disputation"-- between God and his exiled people in Babylon.

Now, this is not the first disputation/argument that we've seen in these chapters. Let's turn back to Isaiah 40:27 (NIV):

27 Why do you complain, Jacob?

Why do you say, Israel,

“My way is hidden from the LORD;

my cause is disregarded by my God”?

In Isaiah 40, Israel complains, in a very careful way, that the path it's on in life is one that is hidden from God. They're stuck in exile, scattered across the Babylonian empire, and the judgment/cause/decision they need to fix this isn't coming.

Maybe that doesn't sound very careful to you. So let me show you how careful this is. Imagine me saying of my wife, "My suffering is hidden from her." That's a very different thing than saying, "My wife doesn't care about my suffering." Right?

Isaiah 40:27 is kind of like with your spouse, in the initial stages of an argument, where you are still trying to be careful with your words, and not have it turn into some great big thing. In the Isaiah 40 argument, God indirectly addresses this careful complaint. He says, "It's not that I don't see you. It's not that I don't care about you. Be a little patient; my help is on its way."

Now, this week's argument/disputation is quite a bit less careful. Our verses are still addressed to God's people who have been scattered into exile across the Babylonian empire. And what we will see in these verses, is an argument about how they ended up there. Why have we lost everything? Why were our cities burned? Why was our wealth looted? Why are we stuck in a strange land, far from home?

The Babylonian exiles have a theory about all of this, and they, on one end of the phone, talk perhaps to God, but I'm guessing mostly to each other, about that theory. That theory revolves around Yahweh, their God, our God, being something of a failure to them. God doesn't pay very close attention to them. God's a bit deaf. He's a bit blind. And this whole situation they're in is completely unfair (Claus Westerman and John Goldingay both unpack all this very nicely).

All of that is the other end of the phone. Our verses don't come out and explain any of this straightforwardly. They don't have to, because our verses are God's response. The exiles know what they've been thinking, and saying. No one needs to tell them those things, and no one does. But what they need, from God's perspective, is to stop saying stupid stuff, and start seeing things from the right perspective. This is that possibly rare kind of argument where one spouse is totally right, and the other is totally wrong. God wants them to stop saying stupid stuff, and thinking stupid things, and so he sends his prophet to respond. [I should maybe say that there's a text-critical issue in verse 19-- a really weird, ambiguous word, that doesn't make much sense and probably should be emended-- but it doesn't really change the meaning of the passage as a whole.]

Now, there's one last thing I need to talk about before I jump in, and that has to do with tone. All this talk about arguments and name-calling could very easily lead us to think that God here is frustrated, or angry, or upset. And it's hard sometimes as readers, to figure out the tone of the passage. These verses would've been performed for the exiles by the (exilic) prophet. How did he sound? How did it come out? At the risk of spoiling my surprise for you, I'll just say up front that this argument doesn't end with judgment, but rather, with words of love and comfort and encouragement. So I think we should God's/the prophet's tone here as being reasonable, as wanting to help, as working very hard to create a better and more stable future. There's no anger here. What God wants, is for his people to learn something really important.