If you look back on the last 10 to 50 years the amount of change we have experienced in this country is pretty staggering, isn’t it. From propeller planes to space shuttles, from Ozzie and Harriet to Ozzie Osborne, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. But at least we’ve had the same government, more or less, and the same borders, which is a luxury the residents of Jerusalem didn’t have during the time Isaiah was prophet. Even with all the changes we’ve experienced, it’s been a whole lot more stable an environment than the last 50 years of the 8th century BC, when Isaiah was around. Let me give you a little background.
After Solomon died, the kingdom he had built on the foundation King David laid fell apart. From then on, there were two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. And the people in the northern kingdom didn’t want to go all the way to Jerusalem to worship. Besides, controlling the only authorized worship center gave Judah too much power over them. So King Jeroboam the 1st built a separate temple in Bethel, just across the border, and another one all the way up north, in Dan, so that nobody would have to travel too far. He also appointed all his own priests, and didn’t pick them from the house of Levi the way God had commanded Moses, and then he built idols so that people would have something concrete to focus on.
So you can see already that the northern kingdom was going to be in big trouble with God. Their days were, in fact, numbered. But, as usual, God gave them plenty of warnings, and plenty of time to shape up, before bringing up the heavy guns.
For the next couple of hundred years, then, Israel was an independent country, sometimes fighting with Judah and sometimes forming alliances with her against other enemies, like the Arameans and the Moabites. They had palace revolts and civil unrest and more than a few coups, but they managed to muddle along from one dynasty to the next. But then a new kingdom, one so much more brutal than any they had ever fought before that they almost had to invent a whole new vocabulary to describe their atrocities, began gaining power in the north. Right around the year Isaiah started preaching in the southern kingdom of Judah, a king named Tiglath-Pileser took the throne of Assyria. And King Tiglath scared King Ahaz of Judah so badly that instead of allying with Israel or remaining neutral, he actually entered into an alliance with Assyria.
It was sort of like the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, back at the beginning of WWII. And Isaiah did not approve.
You see, Judah was supposed to be the good guys in this story. And good guys do not sign treaties with bad guys, just to save their skin.
But the truth of the matter was that King Ahaz was not a good guy even if he was a Judean. And Ahaz didn’t like Isaiah, and didn’t listen to him, and didn’t want anyone else to pay any attention to what Isaiah said, either. And besides, Isaiah kept harping on religion, too, not just politics. I mean, everybody knows that there’s no connection between personal behavior and leadership ability, don’t they? I mean, what does who you worship have to do with the strength of your armies?
Isaiah had the nerve to recommend cutting down the sacred groves where people held their fertility rites. And then he criticized Ahaz for melting down the temple gold to make images of himself. And to top it off, he had the nerve to denounce the practice of sacrificing your first-born to Ba-al! Isaiah was not, you might say, politically correct.
Of course, he said the same things about Israel, too. By this time there wasn’t that much difference between Judah and Israel, you’d think they’d be natural allies, wouldn’t you.
But hey - survival is survival, right?
And frankly, Ahaz just did not see how anyone could prevail against Assyria, so he made a deal with Tiglath-Pileser and sat tight behind the borders of Judah while Assyrian soldiers shipped away the people of Israel - some to slavery, some to be tortured to death for the amusement of the troops, and some just hauled away and dumped in other occupied territories so that they wouldn’t have a base to mount a rebellion from. A few refugees made it to Judah. The city of Jerusalem nearly doubled in size in those last few years. And the Assyrian troops kept whittling away at the territory surrounding Jerusalem, until she was not much more than an island in the middle of a sea of desolation. Ahaz’ signature hadn’t bought much.
But Isaiah was out of favor, and only a few people believed that Israel had fallen because of disobedience to God, and only those same few believed that if Judah didn’t shape up that she would suffer the same fate.
However, one of those few was King Hezekiah, who came to the throne after King Ahaz died, which he did five years after the fall of Israel.
And all of a sudden Baal-worship was out and the Jerusalem temple was in and no doubt Isaiah was invited to state functions and stood at the king’s shoulder when he met with foreign delegations and made decisions. And you know what happened?
The current king of Assyria, Sennacherib, who had already conquered what little was left of Palestine, finally came inland to lay siege to Jerusalem. Following Isaiah’s advice, Hezekiah refused to surrender. And instead of sacking and looting the town, which from the size of the force and their recent successes they would surely have expected to do, the whole Assyrian army got up and left and went back home to Ninevah. Sennacherib’s records, which tell us in great detail about his victories earlier, are suspiciously silent about this unexpected retreat. Isaiah tells us that the angel of the Lord wiped out half the Assyrian army overnight. It’s no wonder Sennacherib’s scribes don’t mention it, isn’t it?
But you know, the next thing Hezekiah does is forget how God delivered Jerusalem from Sennacherib, and goes and gets cozy with an upstart new power far over to the east, called Babylon. Isaiah tells him he’ll be sorry. But it’s too late. And when Hezekiah dies, Menasseh comes to power, and he’s even worse than Ahaz was. As a matter of fact, King Menasseh eventually has Isaiah put to death, but that’s another story.
Now, mind you, for the first twenty or so years Isaiah had been telling people that Israel would be conquered and sent into slavery by Assyria. And now for the next few years, Isaiah is telling people that Judah is going to be conquered and sent into slavery by Babylon. And Isaiah was right the first time, so maybe he’s going to be right the second time. But since God relented when Hezekiah repented, people were probably thinking that God would put up with their crazy religious merry-go-round indefinitely, with good kings winning forgiveness for the crimes of their predecessors, and Judah staying secure in their special relationship to God, because after all, wasn’t God’s house right there in Jerusalem?
Because Isaiah did keep talking about deliverance. He’d talk about doom and destruction on one hand, and then he’d switch topics and promise redemption on the other. Maybe it was just a sort of good-cop/bad-cop routine, with Isaiah playing both parts.
But you see, it wasn’t just the kings’ behavior that God was worried about. Because even when Hezekiah cleaned up Jerusalem, most of the people hedged their bets with surreptitious visits to the sacred groves and clandestine rooftop worship of the moon goddess. And even when people worshiped at the temple, they cheated on business deals, robbed widows and orphans, and otherwise ignored their covenant obligations.
And even those who listened to Isaiah, even those who were serious about their identity as God’s people, even they were no doubt expecting God to do something obvious, like destroy Assyria and all the rest of Judah’s enemies completely and restore the kingdom as it had been in Solomon’s day. They expected God to do what he had always done, namely, punish them to get their attention and then relent and then put things back the way they were. But Isaiah says no. Isaiah says,
"Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland." [v. 18-19]
Some translations say, “I will make a way in the desert.” So which is it? Is God doing it right now or will it come to pass in the future?
Well, believe it or not, it’s both. Hebrew doesn’t distinguish between past, present, and future. It only refers to complete or incomplete action. And with God, it hardly matters, does it. Because he never changes, God is always making a way in the desert. As in the past, so will it be in the present; and if not now, then in the future. It is the nature of God to make a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland. And of course everybody knew about what God had done for them during the forty years in the wilderness. If God was promising them deliverance, why should they worry?
Does the next verse give us a clue?
“The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.” [v. 20-22]
Oh. God’s harping on that old theme again.
That’s what Isaiah started the book with. “The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people does not understand.” [Is 1:3]
Even with everything God has done for them, the people of Judah can’t understand what it means for them to be his people. They can’t see any further than today, whether the issue is an enemy at the gates or getting the better of someone in a business deal. For some reason they think they’re better off cutting a deal with the Assyrians than by living up to their covenant with YHWH God. No matter what God does for them, they’re always trying to get out of their part of the contract. God formed them to proclaim his praise, and look what they do.
You see, their worship - such as it was - was superficial. “You have not called upon me,” [v. 22a] says YHWH. They were going through the motions of religious observance, but they weren’t actually calling upon their redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the worker of mighty deeds. Instead, they called on a tame deity of their own design. They wanted YHWH to be their savior, but they didn’t want to act like his people.
“You have not brought me sheep for burnt offerings, nor honored me with your sacrifices.” [v. 23a] Actually, they did make offerings. But they didn’t get any credit from God for them, because they were offered with the wrong spirit, sort of as a bribe to keep God out of the rest of their lives. As it says in chapter 1, these were meaningless offerings. YHWH had called his people into fellowship; this involved hearing and obeying his word, but they chose another way. To walk with the Holy One was too exacting, and they settled for the less costly option of religious fervor. And so their sacrifices did not honor him. In fact, quite the contrary. The mechanical sacrifices dishonored the moral holiness of God by trying to manipulate him through a kind of magical formula.
God goes on, “I have not burdened you with grain offerings nor wearied you with demands for incense.” [v. 23b] God’s requirements are not burdensome. They were intended to give freedom and relief, to give the people a means by which they could restore their relationship with God, in a sort of glad homecoming. But instead of enjoying that holy freedom, the people settled for a powerless imitation.
No, God has not wearied his people with demands. Quite the contrary, in fact. “You have burdened me with your sins, and wearied me with your offenses.” [v. 24b] Not only is God’s patience running out, but also they have tried to make God their servant.
Wow. What an indictment, right?
But what is the new thing that God is going to do? "I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.” [v. 25]
That’s the very next line. God goes straight from everything they’ve done wrong to what he is going to do for them. Just when they’re confronted unmistakably with how far they are from having met the requirements of their covenant relationship with God, and they’re likely groveling on the floor wondering what he’s going to do to them, God says, "I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more.”
This is our God, who even in our sin and rebellion is the one who feeds us, who watches over us, who restores us, who rescues us.
This is our God, who parted the Red Sea so that Israel could escape from Pharoah, who forged a nation out of a ragtag band of desert nomads, who defeated armies which outnumbered Judah’s by a factor of ten. This is our God, who knows that our greatest enemy, the one we most desperately need to be delivered from, is not outside us, but within us.
This is our God, and the new thing that he was doing is to rescue his people from themselves. Judah had proven over and over again that even with God’s law, even with God’s protection, even with all the promises they had seen fulfilled over and over again, the people were unable to maintain a relationship with God, because their very natures squirmed in discomfort from too close a contact with the holiness of God. People do not, by and large, want to be close to God, at least not for long. Unless of course it’s a God they’ve made up. Because he asks us to be more than our best. God asks us to be his best.
The new thing that God was doing was abolishing the old Israel, where religion and politics, power and piety were all mixed together, and begin to lay the groundwork for the true redemption, the release of our souls from the weight of our selves. The wilderness that needed to be watered was a wilderness of their own making. There’s a saying that you don’t know that God is all you need until God is all you have. And it would not be until the exile in Babylon that the people of Judah began to rely on God himself rather than on the temple or the king. Because they didn’t have a temple, and they didn’t have a king.
But what has this to do with us, anyway? We’re not surrounded by enemies on every side - or are we? We’re not cutting unsavory deals for temporary political gain – or are we? We’re not oppressing the poor and cheating at business - or are we? We’re not sacrificing our children to false gods – or are we? We haven’t gotten smug and complacent about having a special place in God’s plans – or have we?
What is a wilderness, anyway? Isn’t it simply a place where safety and prosperity are precarious, at best, and survival itself is sometimes in question? Is our identity as a people of God at risk, in this time and place? We’re living in what most historians recognize as post-Christian age. Rather than spiritual nourishment we find spiritual challenges on all sides. Is Isaiah’s promise, that God will provide a way through the wilderness, for us?
If you find some similarities between Judah’s wilderness and our own, there are three things to keep in mind.
And the first is to examine the quality of your worship. Does God have your heart, or only an insurance premium? Does your worship carry over into the rest of the week? Does your relationship with God rule you at work and at home, in your shopping and in your entertainment? You will not find the way if you are not looking in the right direction.
The second thing to remember is that God is far more interested in rescuing us from ourselves than from our surroundings. Judah and Israel spent 400 years under the judges, and another 400 under the kings, learning that all safety and prosperity did for them was to make them vain and complacent and unfaithful to God. The wilderness is more than a place of punishment, it is a place of discipleship and growth.
And the third is that God is always doing something new. We can learn from the past. It is in God’s nature always to provide water in the desert. It is in God’s nature to redeem his people. It is in God’s nature to bring life out of death, hope out of despair, and beauty out of brokenness. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. The path is always there.
But it is always new. Don’t look for things to be as they were in the past, but look for the new ways that God is making himself known in the present. We can’t let ourselves be locked into old forms, or waste time bemoaning how bad things have gotten, although I confess I‘m at the age where it is really tempting. You know the sort of thing, “when I was your age, I had to walk 5 miles to school, uphill both ways.”
Our world is changing. It is changing almost too fast to absorb, in technology, in culture, in demographics. The temptation is to cling to the past, to insist that God preserve us in our comfort zone. But that’s a trap. We’ll be caught by surprise if we’re looking nostalgically back in the rearview mirror while God is preparing a new path in the wilderness before us.
But if we let go our death grip on the past, and stop trying to gain a stranglehold on the future, there’s a surprising freedom that comes from following God unto the unknown. Enjoy it. God knows what he’s doing. We don’t have to.
