Isa11

If you want to be blessed and encouraged, there are certain areas of the Bible that do that very obviously. This is not one of them. Within parts of the Bible there is scripture that needs very carefully looking at. In these first five chapters of Isaiah we find words that are largely of condemnation. We don't like being told off; we don't like having our faults exposed, and so it is possible that we might have negative responses to these chapters for that reason – though we may not like to acknowledge that. In these meditations so far we have sought to face the uncomfortable truth, that here we find Jerusalem and Judah exposed and God's warnings of what will happen if they do not change. It is not pleasant or comfortable reading. Yet, all Scripture is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” (2 Tim 3:16).

Before we look at the detail of where we have got to, let's ask what, in general, these chapters tell us. Well, I believe they scream loudly to us that God has standards, design-rules I have called them, that reflect the way He has designed us to work best. He made those design-rules known to Israel through Moses and they accepted them. Unfortunately they failed to keep them but their failure was more that they failed to be faithful to God, and then failure to keep the rules followed. Godlessness always comes before unrighteousness. Now part of the equation was that God wanted Israel to be a light to the rest of the world, to reveal Him to the rest of the world, and reveal His desire to draw people back from sin (godlessness and unrighteousness) and re-establish them in a relationship with Him, out of which they could order their lives according to His design rules and receive His blessing.

When Israel turned from Him, this meant that, being known as God's people, they would now be conveying a very confused and distorted picture of the Lord, and therefore the Lord had to draw them back to Himself and His ways for them, that the rest of the world might receive a true picture of Him. For those reasons the Lord acts against Israel in such a way as designed to remove the wrong elements and at the same time preserve the right elements, while at the same time giving more people opportunity to turn from the wrong to the right. That is what these chapters are all about!

Thus in the ‘song' that Isaiah wrote, we find a picture of the Lord removing the security from the nation (5:5) and leaving it barren (5:6) and just in case they were slow in understanding he clearly identifies the vineyard as God's people (5:7).

From verse 8 to verse 23 we find a series of ‘woes'. These are expressions of distress about Judah 's state and what will happen to them. They are materialistic (v.8), carousers forgetting the Lord (v.11,12), who rejoice in sin, deceit and wickedness and decry the law of the Lord (v.18,19), who distort and reverse the truth (v.20), who think they are smart (v.21), who are big drinkers (v.22), and who distort justice (v.23). Tragically they are exactly the same as seen in so much Western society today. These do not portray the Lord's people as He has designed them to be, and so he will take action against them.

We see that He will bring down their fine houses which they use to boost their image and their ego (v.9), bring down their crops, which is their source of wealth (v.10), allow an enemy to come in and wreak havoc (v.13,14,26-30) so that their pride will be humbled (v.15). If this is the only way that He can bring this people to their senses, He will do it for the sake of the rest of the world. That is what our reading of wider Scripture tells us is behind this.

Now when our home or car has been broken into, we demand that the police do something about it. We want them to catch the offender and punish him. That is justice and we expect it, yet when many of us read of the Lord dealing with Judah , we suddenly take on different standards. How terrible this is, the hypocrites say. Excuse me? Surely what we have been considering and reading about is simply justice. Yes, these people have “rejected the law of the LORD Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.” (v.24) and although some of us aren't bothered by that, we would be bothered by the outworking of that as far as it concerns human rights abuses: “he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.” (v.7) and those “who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent.” (v.23). THAT is how they spurned God's design rules, and any civilized person should agree that that outcome was bad – criminal in fact!

Justice demands that this people be dealt with. God is dealing with them. At the end of it all of these injustices are removed, all these human rights abuses are ended. At the end of it, there is peace and right living in the land. It has been purged of the evil, the wickedness and the deceit for which it had been known previously. When that happens the world may look on and wonder and realise that THIS God is different from any idol they have worshipped. This God is the One who designed the world, and passed on to His people the rules for living that conformed to that design, and He even enforced it, so that goodness and peace should return to it. It is only the foolish or the petty who quibble against this outcome and if you don't like it, one might ask, have you got a better way that would produce that good outcome from this messy state?