Meditation No. 21

Meditation Title: Hope Restated

Isa 10:24,25 "O my people who live in Zion , do not be afraid of the Assyrians, who beat you with a rod and lift up a club against you, as Egypt did. Very soon my anger against you will end and my wrath will be directed to their destruction."

The thing about Isaiah is that it is repetitious. There are a lot of warnings to either Israel or Judah , but there are also a lot of references to future hope. We have seen again and again (and we do need to keep on repeating it until we really understand and take it in) that it is not the Lord's intention to destroy Israel/Judah completely. He simply wants to restore them to a place of blessing where, living in relationship with Him, they can receive all of His guidance and His goodness. The only trouble is that because He has given us free will He will not override that free will while we are on the earth. Thus if people have set their hearts to resist Him the only thing He is left being able to do is remove them from the picture and we become witnesses to their deaths. However we have also observed the bigger picture: that we all have to die sometime and there is an eternity to be faced after the very short time here upon earth. We also noted that the fact that, even the righteous (imperfect as they are) who remain here and are not destroyed by God for their sin, live by an act of His mercy and grace, but that is something that few of us realise.

It is in the light of all this that we face the challenge of Isaiah. The Lord has called this people into being to be recipients of His blessing and goodness, so that they can be a light to the rest of the world and that many others can come to know Him and similarly receive all of His goodness. But there is this stubbornness in many of them which refuses Him and is determined to go their own way. They ignore their history, ignore all the good things that God has done for them and ignore all His promises of blessing. Thus they reveal their foolishness, for it can be described as nothing less than that. All the while there is the minority who do remain faithful to the Lord and do reveal Him to others, but their testimony is being blocked by the majority. Thus we come to the words in the back part of chapter 10. A remnant, the righteous ones, will return to the Lord (10:21,22) and to them comes our verses above. The Lord's anger against Israel will soon come to an end, for He will have completed His task of purging the nation, and so His focus will then be on dealing with Assyria.

Perhaps we need to briefly note something about the Lord's ‘anger' which is referred to again and again. For us as human beings, when we envisage an angry person we tend to see someone who has lost their temper and is releasing unrestrained hostility on another person. It is a violent emotional expression. When we come to consider the Lord, however, He never loses control. He is utterly in control. Nothing surprises Him for He is never caught out because He knows what is coming. He is never frustrated and doesn't express anger as an expression of frustration, because He can do all things. Anger, in respect of the Lord, is distinct displeasure that is always directed against wilful sin. In every case where it is expressed, the object of the Lord's anger should have known better and the anger is directed against that wilfulness.

Scholars suggest that when Jesus was at Lazarus's tomb when he wept, there was also a dimension of anger against sin involved, that had brought about Lazarus's premature death and the anguish for his sisters. Our anger has self as its origin; God's anger has the sin of mankind which spoils or mars humanity as its origin. God's anger in Isaiah is His displeasure against the sin of the majority that stops the minority being who they are designed to be. God's anger or wrath is a cool, calm and collected emotion that is determined to remedy a wrong situation. It is perhaps better described as a determination rather than an emotion, although there is an emotional dimension to it. However, we will better understand it if we focus on the Lord's set determination to bring His people through into a good place where they will, indeed, be the light to the world that He designed them to be.

Isaiah is communicating to a visual people, who do better with pictures than with mere words, and so we find this visual language to convey the end outcomes. When he speaks of what the Lord will do with Assyria he says, “The LORD Almighty will lash them with a whip, as when he struck down Midian at the rock of Oreb.” (10:26a) which just means, He will destroy Assyria in the same way He did Midian through Gideon, “and he will raise his staff over the waters, as he did in Egypt.” (10:26b) which means He will decree over them their destruction as He did over Pharaoh coming out of Egypt. In the verses that follow, Isaiah describes the oncoming Assyrian army getter closer and closer to Jerusalem (10:28-32), but then the Lord will cut them down (10:33,34). Much of Israel and Judah have been lopped down by this enemy in the hand of the Lord, so that only the faithful remnant will be left, and it is in the face of this picture, that Isaiah brings a further amazing picture of the Coming One in chapter eleven, but we'll leave that until the next meditation.

Here again we have seen the outworking of the Lord's disciplinary action in respect of this willfully disobedient foolish people. It is a controlled action and one only brought after plenty of warnings and plenty of time for consideration, and it is an action that clears away the disobedient while maintaining the faithful remnant. Fearfully awesome? Yes! But encouraging by hope? Yes, definitely! In the face of apparent impending disaster, this is very encouraging for those who are faithful and who remain strong in their belief in the Lord.