Abraham Lincoln told of how he and his brother were plowing the corn
one day. He was driving the horse, and his brother was holding the plow.
The horse was lazy, but suddenly it took off so fast that even with his long
legs Lincoln could hardly keep up. On reaching the end of the furrow he
checked the horse, and he found what they called a chin fly fastened on him.
Lincoln knocked it off, but his brother scolded him for doing so. He said,
"That's all that made him go."
The prophet Isaiah was like a chin fly on Israel. The prophets were not
popular. They were despised because they were always biting and stinging,
and aggravating the people by their constant denunciation of their sin.
However, without this negative aggravation the people would have been like
a lazy horse, and they would have done little or nothing for God. The
prophet kept them going, or at least kept the remnant going by reminding
them constantly of their folly and their duty.
The prophets were great examples of the power of negative thinking. It is
superficial to be always encouraging people. When they are missing God's
best, they need to be discouraged, and then condemned in order to motivate
them to stop going down the wrong road. It does not harm your child to be
scolded and disciplined for their foolish acts, and when they rebel and begin
to go the way of the fool, they need to be punished. The negative approach,
when they are going astray, is just as important as the positive approach
when they are walking in obedience to God's light. Isaiah is an excellent
example of how the negative and the positive can both be used effectively. In
Isaiah we see the ideal balance of God's justice and God's mercy.
One of the reasons modern Christians do not care much for the prophets
is because we live in an era of positive thinking, and the prophets are too
negative. They go on for chapters at a time denouncing sin and evil. It gets
to be quite a bore when you are conditioned to hearing the positive. If we
are to gain the value from Isaiah that God intended His people to gain, we
must be convinced of the value of the negative. In other words, we must see
how the negative can lead to positive values. This alone will motivate us to
pay attention to the negative thinking of Isaiah.
First, let me share with you what Dr. Dunlap, a psychologist learned. He
made a simple but irritating error as he typed. Instead of THE, he typed the
H first and had HTE. The harder he tried, the more he goofed. He decided
to try something. He began to deliberately type HTE over and over
hundreds of times. After this deliberate negative practice, he discovered he
could then type it right with no difficulty. He found this negative practice
worked in many areas of life, such as swimming, golf, sending Morris code,
etc. When you bring the subconscious mistake to the surface, and gain
conscious control over it, you gain freedom from it. He wrote, "By
practicing the mistake you learn to break the power of the mistake over
you."
How does this apply to the prophet Isaiah and his condemnation of sin?
In this way. We know that the more unconscious sin is the greater power it
has over our life. The man who does not even know he uses a curse word in
every breath he takes cannot break the habit because he is blind to his folly.
However, if a man can be made conscious of his bad habit, so he is shocked
by it, and aware of what an offense and embarrassment it is, he will have a
choice at least to stop or alter his habit. Awareness of the negative is a key to
reaching the positive. Being tied up makes you long for freedom; being
hungry makes you long for food; war makes you long for peace; loneliness
makes you long for fellowship. The negative experiences of life drive us to
seek the opposite and positive experiences. It is only those who fully feel their
lossness who respond to the Gospel, and rejoice in being found by the Good
Shepherd- the Lord Jesus.
Find a man who is perfectly content with himself, and no matter how
wicked and lost he is, he will have no interest in salvation. It is only the man
who thinks negative about himself, and who feels worthless and lost who can
benefit from the positive Gospel of salvation. It is the same story with those
who are saved. If they backslide and are content in their fallen state, they
will not be interested in repenting and returning to God. It is only when
they become conscious of their folly, and begin to think negative about their
rebellion against God, that they will respond to the mercy of God, and like
the prodigal return home.
The positive thinker fanatics which can never tolerate the value of
negative thinking would have the prodigal son saying something like this to
his father: "It was a tough experience dad, but I learned a lot about life,
and now I'll be a better man for it all." But what the prodigal really felt and
said was, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no
longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants."
It was the power of this negative thinking that changed this rebel into a son
who could humble himself before his father, and return determined to follow
the path of wisdom.
Don't knock all negative thinking. It is God-ordained method of reaching
men, and one of the primary methods of the prophets. Let's examine some of
Isaiah's negative thinking as he begins his own lament over Jerusalem and
Judah.
In verse 4 we see the first word is oh, or alas. It is used by Isaiah 21
times, and all the other prophets together use it only 28 times. It is one of his
favorite words, and it expresses his emotion of mystified wonder that people
can be so utterly foolish in their relationship to God. He pictures them as
laden with iniquity. The Living Bible says, "They walk bent-backed
beneath their load of guilt." But instead of turning to God, who alone can
remove that heavy load, they do just the opposite. They turn from Him and
forsake Him. Their folly is to be compared to men in a sinking ship who
throw their life preserver overboard. Or to men in a falling plane who throw
out their parachutes. Isaiah has already said it, they are more stupid than
the dumbest beasts known to man.
God is saying to His people through Isaiah just the opposite of what Jesus
cried on the cross. God is saying, "My people, my people, why hast thou
forsaken me." God's people had abandon Him. They were like an entire
army who had gone AWOL. God refers in verse 9 to the remnant. There
were a few fine guards who stayed at their posts of duty, but the vast
majority had fled the camp of God.
The fact that God even bothered to send His prophet Isaiah to these
deserters has a powerful lesson to teach. God does not forsake those who
forsake Him. Most pastors and church members do not have much hope for
those former members of the church who have become inactive dead wood.
We get more excited about new bodies than about trying to revive the life of
the dead bones of, used to be members. This is natural and normal, and also
realistic. But one of the facts we must also face is this: That God never gives
up on His apostate people. His wrath falls, and He punishes them severely,
but He always has a profit in the field crying out for them to repent and
return, and I will forgive. God never forsakes even the hopeless case, and so
we must never stop trying to win those out of fellowship.
Man use to throw away the wood chips from the mill. Now they use them
for useful wood products. The so-called dead wood of the church can also be
reprocessed and made into useful servants for the kingdom of God. It is no
easy task, and like the work of the prophets, it is mainly failure, but God
cared enough to send the prophets anyway, and we should care enough for
any rebel to never give up. Dr. Walter Woodbury, secretary of evangelism
for the American Baptist Home Mission Society, delivered a stirring message
on this theme to the delegates of the American Baptist Convention. He got
the deacons of a large church to join him in calling on the good-for-nothing
indifferent members. It was very disappointing and frustrating. He felt the
deacons were right, and it was useless and hopeless.
He had a burden, however, and asked people in every group of the church
to pray for those non-attending members. Deacons were asked to pray even
in the morning service for them. The atmosphere began to change, and
people no longer looked on them as good-for-nothing, but as people with a
deep need that only Christ could meet. After a month the deacons went out
again, and they found a radical change in the attitudes of people who were
AWOL. Over a hundred on a list of four hundred were brought back into
the fellowship, and Dr. Woodbury said some of them became the finest
Sunday School teachers he ever worked with. There was not total success,
but they won back a noble remnant. That is God like work, for that is what
God is ever seeking to do among His people.
We need to learn not to let that three fourths of failure rob us of that one
fourth of success that makes it all worth while. Let us also keep in mind that
the backsliding people may be from your own family. All through history
the people who fall away from God often have a great heritage. They are the
sons and daughters of the leaders of God's people. Great and righteous
kings had rebellious and wicked sons who led the people astray. This was
the case with the great priest Eli whose sons were totally corrupt.
The Waldenses were a noble people of God in the Piedmont Valley of
Northern Italy. They refused to conform to the corrupt ways of the Catholic
church, and they went off to worship God according to Scripture. They sent
out many missionaries, and copied the Bible by hand. They spread the truth
of the Gospel everywhere. Many died for their faith, as they were captured
and burned at the stake. Recently, a church group of youth camped in that
valley. They sang Christian songs around the campfire, and some of the
Waldensian people came by to listen.
After the songs and testimonies were over, one of their elders stepped
into the light of the campfire and said, "We are proud of the history of our
people, but during the last years in these valleys so filled with sacred history,
we have no longer the vision we once had. We have tried vainly to hold our
young people in the church. Their interest is now down in the bright lights
of the big city. No longer do they want to remain here. What a miracle it is
that your church still has young people who are interested in coming up here
to our valley to study the history we have so much loved. But that is all in
the past now. The sad thing is that we are not moving forward with courage
for the future. You must carry on!"
The Apostasy of Israel is symbolic of the process that goes on all through
history. Converts are full of zeal, and they follow Christ with full devotion,
but their children are less devoted, and their grandchildren may end up
back in the world completely. Some great theologian said, "The church is
always just one generation away from extinction." This is a great negative
reality of life and history, but knowing it, and being conscious of it, can be a
positive force in keeping us from falling away. It can convince us of never
taking anything for granted, but to assume that all of our youth are
consistently battling the temptation to forsake God and be conformed to the
world. If we would listen and take seriously the negative message of the
prophets, we would be a much more powerful and positive force in achieving
the goal of keeping God's people faithful to Him and His Word.
