How many of you occasionally fantasize about winning the lottery? You can spend a lot of time making lists of worthy causes and deserving relatives and fabulous vacations and your dream house. In fact, most of us have dreams we play with when reality gets to be just a little too much for us. When I was a little girl in Brazil, I used to fantasize that Tarzan would come swinging through my window and carry me off to his jungle hideout. Which wasn’t too farfetched, if you believed as I did that Tarzan was real. Because Rio was in the tropics, we had jungle, and vines, and monkeys. The fact that we came up a little shy on lions and elephants didn’t get in my way at all. And then of course there’s the fairy tale with a zillion variations about being granted three wishes. You can spend hours on that one. What’s your favorite fantasy?
I’m not sure that it’s necessarily a bad thing to dream a little about a day when all of our problems will be over, or all our wishes will come true. Sometimes having a vision of a perfect future is the only thing that gets us through hard times.
In Isaiah’s day things looked just about as bad as they could be. Whether you lived in the northern kingdom of Israel that had recently been conquered by Assyria, or in the southern kingdom of Judah, which was not only being overwhelmed by refugees but looked like it was next on Assyria’s shopping list, there was not a whole lot to look forward to. And to make matters worse, the most prominent religious leader in the entire country was telling them that God was mad at them. “I will turn my hand against you,” [Is 1:25] Isaiah says in chapter one, after listing all the appalling things they have been up to, from a corrupt justice system to empty worship.
But all of a sudden, in this chapter Isaiah lays out in front of the people a vision of how things could be, indeed of how things will be. Instead of telling the people God will refuse to hear their prayers until they clean up their act, Isaiah promises them that “all the nations shall stream to [the house of the Lord].” [v. 2] He is telling them that the day will come when not only the disobedient Judeans and the captive Israelites, but the Assyrians, Egyptians and everyone else will fall in line. Not only will they obey God, they will actually hunger for his wisdom and righteousness; the now besieged city of Jerusalem that God has threatened to abandon will be the center of the known world, the source of wisdom and power and goodness.
And when that day comes, there will finally be peace. The people who have escaped the Assyrian sword, perhaps seen family members and neighbors hauled off behind the Assyrians chariots, who knew that it was only a matter of time before the armies would be turned against them, would have no more reason to be afraid.
What a lovely thought. What a wonderful promise. What an impossible dream. What a fantasy to escape to. When all people turn to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who rescued the Israelites from slavery and gave them their land and the law, there will be peace. When God’s perfect justice is the universal standard, “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” [v. 4]
When is that going to happen?
Is that ever going to happen?
How many wars have there been since Isaiah first spoke these words? Jerusalem was conquered by Babylon, and except for a brief period under the Maccabees was never really free again. After the Persians conquered the Babylonians, Alexander the Great conquered the Persians, and finally the Romans conquered the Greeks. And that little strip of land connecting Europe and Africa and Asia was a battleground in every single one of these conflicts. Shall I go on? After Rome fell, the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean led to the Crusades which were stopped by the brutal Ottoman Empire, which after its fall in the early part of the 20th century led to the partition of Palestine that Arafat’s successors are still fighting over. Folks, it’s been almost 3,000 years since Isaiah promised peace! You can hardly be blamed if you read this passage with the same degree of confidence that you check off the numbers on your lottery ticket. Nice, but hardly realistic.
So how do we handle passages like this? Do we lump it in with the other fantasies we beguile ourselves with when times are hard, do we shrug and resign ourselves to waiting for the Lord’s return? Or can we actually learn something from Isaiah’s words about how to live in the present?
The Book of Isaiah portrays God’s view of history, and the role his people play in making that history happen. Isaiah’s vision tells us that God has a role for his people to play, but it is not the role of conqueror, of ruler, as most had expected. Their role model, the one they longed to emulate was David with his military victories. But Isaiah says no. Long before Jesus washed the disciples’ feet, Isaiah told Israel that God’s people would rule only by serving. Israel will rule, have dominion, be influential in the world, only by serving and witnessing to the nations, bringing everyone everywhere to a knowledge of God and willing acceptance of his ways.
God’s people are to put aside the pursuit of political and military power, they are to stop competing with the Assyrians, or the Babylonians, or the Persians or whoever comes along in their wake. Their job is to call people to the proper worship of the only one true God. As far back as Moses' final speech to Israel before they entered the Promised Land, Israel was supposed to impress people with the superior way of life that comes from following the will of God.
"See, just as the LORD my God has charged me, I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!' For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?" [Dt 4:5-8]
And as long as Israel obeys God, that’s exactly what happens. From Rahab to Ruth, people who were interested in being on the winning side came over to Israel’s camp.
But it never lasts long. Because the people never “walk in the light of the Lord” for more than a single generation, and then they slide right back into worshiping false gods and cheating their neighbors. And even David’s rule, which the people looked back on with such rose-colored nostalgia, was actually fraught with disorder, rebellion, dangerous neighbors, and even civil war. Isaiah is calling people to stop looking backward to the so-called good old days and pursue a different vision.
Of course there is a role for Israel and Jerusalem, but it is a religious and spiritual one. In the NT, Jesus quotes Isaiah to explain why people refuse to accept his kingdom. He says they are deaf, dumb, and blind. They hear the words clearly enough, but just like the disciples do, they translate their calling to change the world as a promise of political, economic and military power. They don’t want to follow God on his terms. They would rather dream about a fictitious paradise than set about living according to kingdom rules right in the here-and-now. “When the righteous king rules,” you can hear them saying to themselves, “then I will forgive my enemies and share my food with beggars and invite people to worship. But right now - name the excuse - I’m too busy, it’s too dangerous, it won’t work, I hardly have enough for myself, they don’t deserve it.”
When Jesus demonstrated by his own life that the kingship theology they had been counting on was really servant theology, he lost a lot of potential followers. Jesus wasn’t the king they wanted, and so they shut their ears and turned their backs on the promise of peace.
God’s ultimate purpose for his people has little to do with either Israel’s or Judah’s nationalistic dreams, not then, not now. The people who wished to be “like the other nations” [1Sam 8:5] have gotten their wish: centuries of bloodshed and warfare. They preferred the reversal of the prophecy in Joel 3:10. “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”
Now, I am not saying that it is illegitimate for nations to use military power to protect themselves or enforce treaties and boundaries. But that is just a holding pattern. The vision Isaiah puts in front of the people on the brink of annihilation is a completely different one. IF we expect God to establish his kingdom through military or economic power we miss the whole point. God’s plan for justice and righteousness will only be achieved by example, by witness, by service and sacrifice, not by military or political glory.
God took the option of independence away from Israel because she couldn’t handle it. She abused her power. If you can’t even govern yourself well, how can you become a light for the nations? A badly run theocracy will simply turn people away from God. Trying to run the world and everyone in it, even with noble intentions, will always backfire. God doesn’t need enforcers, he needs examples. The people who submit to his rule under duress are just looking for an opportunity to escape, and what kind of peace is that? And so the solution for war and conflict and injustice isn’t coercion, it’s conversion.
You and I are Israel’s heir, the people of the new covenant. We argue over which ones of God’s commands should be legislated and which should be a matter of individual conscience. And what have we done with it? We have abused our freedom in the same way, either assuming that God’s promises will be ours whether or not we obey his word, or trying to create the promised utopia by force, whether the vision is one of economic equality or sexual morality.
So what do we do with this vision of peace that Isaiah has given us?
Do we dream about it at Christmas-time, hoping that someday God will place the promised peace nicely wrapped for us under the tree?
Or do we live as people who believe that living in peace and walking in the light are one and the same thing?
When Isaiah spoke of walking in the light of the Lord, he was not referring to the darkness of foreign enemies and the light of God’s awaited reign. Isaiah was calling the people to abandon the deeper, internal darkness that threatens the soul. Isaiah was calling the people to stop clawing at one another for advantage, for status, even for what we think of as survival itself.
One thing I remember about living in Brazil is that close to the equator the sun does not set gradually. You don’t sit and watch the sunset. It happens without warning. You never say, “It’s getting dark.” Being close to the equator gives new meaning to the phrase, “Night fell.” But there’s something else about being near the equator. In the same way that night instantly falls, dawn also comes with very little warning. The sky doesn’t brighten gradually for an hour or so before true dawn; the sun fairly leaps up at you, right out of the darkness.
When we “get it”, when we understand that serving God is the way to peace not only within ourselves but in our families and in the world, when we stop thinking that we have to be in control of everything for life to work out right, when we concentrate on loving God and walking in his light, then the peace that passes understanding will indeed “guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” [Phil 4:7]
When we let God teach us his ways, when we really walk in his path, disciple joined to disciple to display the kingdom of God in progress, then the nations will indeed stream to the house of God.
Jesus and Paul alike told us not to wait for the Lord to return before we start to live in his light. “You know what time it is,” said Paul to the church in Rome, “how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” [Rom 13:11-14]
The vision of peace is for those who are already walking in the light.
