Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 128th episode. In this episode I want to study Isaiah chapter 57. This chapter promises comfort for righteous people who pass away. Good people die everyday and often they go unnoticed. But God sees all of us, and He will not forsake the righteous who have been forsaken by the world. We also see further criticism made against Israel for their radical idolatry. Their apostasy is likened to spiritual harlotry. It’s not uncommon for Scripture to compare idolatry to prostitution. The idea is that you are selling your soul to a false god who isn’t real. It’s possible that this analogy emerges from the fact that many pagan religions involved sexual rituals. Pagan temples often had prostitutes on staff and sexual immorality was considered part of their worship. Israel’s idolatry brought swift, destructive judgment down upon them. But despite their wayward behavior and their faithlessness, God was gracious and He didn’t allow them to suffer in captivity any longer than was necessary for repentance. This chapter makes more observations about God bringing their exile to an end and restoring them to prosperity. Let’s begin with verses 1-2:
Isa 57:1 The righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; devout men are taken away, while no one understands. For the righteous man is taken away from calamity;
Isa 57:2 he enters into peace; they rest in their beds who walk in their uprightness.
At the end of the previous chapter we talked about how the leadership in Israel had become like blind watchmen. This was the leadership who lived during Isaiah’s time – so that would have been about 100 years before Babylon sacked Jerusalem. It turns out that Israel’s leaders were not the only people who were ignorant and sottish. The general population had fallen into this trap as well. It’s no surprise really, congregations tend to reflect the character of their leaders. During these difficult times in Israel there were not very many godly people left alive. Isaiah suggests that the providence of God tends to remove good people out of this world during hard times. If a system becomes corrupt enough then the ones who stand for righteousness become targets. Righteous Abel died at the hands of his own evil brother Cain. But even when things are peaceful none of us are exempt from death. Those who die in Christ are delivered from the sting of death but not the action of it. The righteous never perish but they are utterly removed from those who are still alive on earth. This is counted as a great loss to the world and to the community they lived in. When good people die it’s far more difficult for the ones they leave behind than it is for themselves.
When a culture descends headlong into chaos – even merciful people are taken away. Merciful people are the ones Paul referred to in Romans when he said some would even dare to die for them. When a society really goes sideways, the fruitful trees are cut down by death and the barren ones are left to burden the soil. It’s true that good people are often hurt and destroyed by the hands of evil people. I mean Christ is the ultimate example of that. But even the apostles – all twelve of them – were either persecuted, martyred, or both. In a reprobate society it is often good works that get you killed. Before Israel was exiled to Babylon, it’s likely that the good people were killed or driven off to the point that there were scarcely any left. What’s more telling is that the ones who survived the deaths of these good people didn’t pay much attention to it. The value for human life had likely deteriorated. The culture failed to lament their passing as the great loss that it was. And even fewer people recognized the public warning that was sent by it. If you can imagine yourself watching Christ be crucified in the same way you’d go see a matinee. That night you’d go to sleep peacefully the same way you would as if nothing happened. This is the danger of slipping into a godless culture. That loss of value for human life is what results in death camps.
When good people die the wise thing for those who survive is to search out why it happened. I don’t mean to obsess over what-ifs – that will only drive you insane. I mean that if a population is purging itself of good people, you need to ask yourself if there’s something wrong with that culture. This is a painful question because it truly is directed against yourself. The culture is made of you. It’s far easier clinging to a fiction about why those people deserve to die. It’s much more comfortable resting in an ideology that demonizes them and views them as a threat to yourself and your family. But is that really what happened? This question needs to be answered because it’s possible their deaths function as signals of incoming judgment. The fatal mistake of wicked people is the belief that they are merely contending with the good ones whom they murder. They fail to see the truth that they stand in rebellion against the Holy One of Israel Himself. And that is not a place where you want to stand.
God desires for us to lay it to heart when good people pass away. When the righteous see good people die, they should try to figure out how they can shore up the breach that is left behind. They understand the magnitude of the loss. But the wicked count it as nothing. In fact, it’s possible for individuals to become so evil that they rejoice at the loss of good ones. Such is the case in Revelation when the ungodly celebrate the slaying of God’s witnesses. There is hardly a blessing more precious than a good person. These people are gifts of the highest order from God Himself – and chief among them is Jesus Christ. So you understand how a population might fall into evil and no longer recognize the value of a good person. In this way the society turns a blind eye to God’s greatest blessings. They shut themselves off to goodness and all that’s left for them is the brutality of a fallen world. This pain makes them bitter and further entrenches their position against God. The apex of this psychopathology is rebellion against being itself. The evil person surveys reality from a warped perspective and sees nothing worth saving. Indeed, what he sees is a world fit for destruction – and his convoluted sense of virtue says he should be the one to carry out that destruction. He should be the one who makes the world pay for the pain that he feels. That state of mind is one that occupies a very dark corner of hell.
But those who die in Christ Jesus are rescued from the grips of that sort of evil. God takes them away before that evil is unleashed. It’s not that they won’t die at the hands of such evil – but they will be rescued from participating in it. When the flood comes God’s people are brought into the ark. They take refuge in the safety of heaven – a sanctuary that might have been completely denied to them on earth. And again, when good people are starting to be removed en masse this is absolutely a call for us to wake up and pay attention. When God removes His righteous and merciful ones, there are none left to hold back His holy wrath. In the words of Matthew Henry, it is a sign that God intends war when He calls home His ambassadors. Death removes the righteous from the temptation and the plight of evil. It’s not easy to be Christlike in a broken world. Sometimes it can mean being crucified. But the righteous enter into peace and rest when they die. Those who run the race and persevere to the end will find peace in the perfection of God and reside in a place where there is no trouble. When we die in Christ we enter into the joy of the Lord. Revelation says blessed are the ones who die in the Lord because now they may rest from their labors. This peace, comfort, and rest is where the godly will live as they await the final works of Jesus. Let’s read verses 3-12:
Isa 57:3 But you, draw near, sons of the sorceress, offspring of the adulterer and the loose woman.
Isa 57:4 Whom are you mocking? Against whom do you open your mouth wide and stick out your tongue? Are you not children of transgression, the offspring of deceit,
Isa 57:5 you who burn with lust among the oaks, under every green tree, who slaughter your children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks?
Isa 57:6 Among the smooth stones of the valley is your portion; they, they, are your lot; to them you have poured out a drink offering, you have brought a grain offering. Shall I relent for these things?
Isa 57:7 On a high and lofty mountain you have set your bed, and there you went up to offer sacrifice.
Isa 57:8 Behind the door and the doorpost you have set up your memorial; for, deserting me, you have uncovered your bed, you have gone up to it, you have made it wide; and you have made a covenant for yourself with them, you have loved their bed, you have looked on nakedness.
Isa 57:9 You journeyed to the king with oil and multiplied your perfumes; you sent your envoys far off, and sent down even to Sheol.
Isa 57:10 You were wearied with the length of your way, but you did not say, “It is hopeless”; you found new life for your strength, and so you were not faint.
Isa 57:11 Whom did you dread and fear, so that you lied, and did not remember me, did not lay it to heart? Have I not held my peace, even for a long time, and you do not fear me?
Isa 57:12 I will declare your righteousness and your deeds, but they will not profit you.
We talked a little bit about the providence of God removing His righteous ones from a wicked generation. When this happens, we should pay careful attention because it could mean God’s judgment is incoming. Here we see charges brought up against the wicked generation of Isaiah’s time. We can see from their conviction that they were children of disobedience. Isaiah calls them sons of the sorceress and offspring of the adulterer. Sin is considered sorcery and adultery because it is you departing from God to engage with evil. Isaiah’s generation was strongly inclined toward sin as were their ancestors before them. This point is of great utility for parents. If you want your children to avoid unnecessary suffering and evil in this life, the best way for you to make that happen is to work on yourself. Human beings are oriented toward imitation. Our brains are structured so that we imitate those we find admirable. Children will learn more from your example than they ever will from what you try to teach them. That’s why role models (both good and bad) tend to have such influence over children. If you think you can tell your child, do as I say not as I do, you need to revise that because it will not work. Isaiah called the wicked to draw near and hear their fate. Death would not bring them peace the way it did for the righteous. The neglect of their parents and their societal upbringing had woven transgression and deceit into their very nature. They were setup to backslide from God and deal treacherously with Him. And they embraced these evil ways.
Isaiah increases the resolution of God’s charges against them and begins to lay out the specifics of their sin. They were a generation of scoffers. They summarily dismissed God and His word. When they were pushing and trampling the prophets, they falsely assumed that they were attacking mere humans. It’s true that the prophets themselves were only human, but the words given to the prophets came from God Himself. Of all the sins Israel was committing, mocking the messengers of God was among the most fatal. Since God was speaking through His prophets, Israel’s reception was functionally equivalent to mocking God Himself. And that’s how God viewed it. What they did to the prophets they did to Him.
It’s amazing how humanity still hasn’t learned from this sin today. You’ll often hear people dismiss Scripture as iron-age nonsense which is the product of mere human effort. If you approach the Bible with the faith-based presupposition that God had nothing to do with it and it’s only human writings, then you’ll give up trying to understand it before you actually understand it. That’s what it looks like when God conceals Himself from you. You lack the faith to see Him. Contrarily, if you approach it with the faith-based presupposition that it has been composed and edited by the providence of the Creator of the universe – only then will you give it proper due diligence and only then will God reveal Himself to you in the wisdom of His word.
When Isaiah tried to reprove his generation with the conviction of God’s word – they ridiculed it, laughed at it, and expressed the most indecent gestures of disdain. They made sport out of defying it and celebrated their rebellion against it. The word of God which should have humbled them and made them serious they abused to make themselves merry and prideful. They denied the prophets basic human dignity and abandoned their own proper civility when dealing with them. The idea that their insolence was directed against Almighty God and not against mere humans never entered their cognition. We still see this reaction in defiant people today. I know you can recount a time when someone who claimed utter disbelief in God reacted so defensively to hearing His word. Why lose your calm civility over Scripture if you truly believe it is a compilation of erroneous observations from men that have been dead for thousands of years? I think it’s because the word of God skips right past these straw-men arguments and slams into the conscience of the listener. Whether in a room full of professing atheists or professing Christians, the Holy Spirit will use His word to accomplish His purposes.
In addition to their scoffing, Isaiah’s generation was also enamoured with idols. Idolatry was the sin the Jewish people were most notoriously guilty of – and it’s the sin Babylonian captivity was designed to purge. It’s likely that Isaiah’s charges are leveled against Ahaz and Manasseh, both of whom were considered wicked kings of Judah. These kings and their people were madly infatuated with their idols. Pagan idolatry had a way of inflaming people into doing unthinkable things. It was almost like mob mentality or being possessed by an ideology. There are accounts of Baal worshipers leaping up onto the altars and cutting themselves with swords while being overcome with passion. It sounds crazy but similar things still happen today among some charismatic Christians who fancy themselves overcome with the Holy Spirit. The idolaters in Israel became more inflamed with their corruptions the more they gratified them. They would worship their idols openly in the midst of nature and they thought the beauty of nature glorified their false gods. Scripture tells us that the beauty and order of nature points to the Creator of the universe, but it’s possible to become so wrapped up in pathological thinking that these observations about nature draw you further away from God. What you perceive is predicated on what you believe, so if your beliefs become distorted then it can be very difficult to reorient yourself toward the truth.
Many Christians have differing opinions on this but I tend to air on the side of calm, collected, level-headed, and ordered worship. I want to anchor my relationship with God to His word and maintain as much rationality as possible. The common push-back against this is that I’m attempting to put God in a box. And that’s actually kind of true. If God is everything then God is nothing. It is the distinctive character of God that defines Him and allows us to relate to Him. But it’s also important that these definitions do not become all-encompassing or totalitarian. Because then we end up with an ideology. The mystery of God is what prevents Christians from descending into ideology. But to abandon all structure in favor of emotionalism means we lose sight of God altogether. Passion has a contagious element to it. It’s not hard to manipulate a mob of people into thinking and acting as one unit. Clever propagandists do it all the time. I think the best road to walk with God is to have the faith that you can know Him through His word, and also have the humility to understand that you’ll never fully comprehend Him this side of heaven. That way we leave the door open to prevent totalitarian ideology but we also have a foundation for our understanding of who God is. This sets us up to have intelligent conversations about God, and having intelligent conversations about God is the project we should be engaging with until we die. We’ll never arrive at the end of the conversation, but the conversation itself is the point.
There was this place called the valley of the son of Hinnom where the idolaters would go to slaughter their own children and offer them as sacrifice to their gods. This practice spread to other valleys and also took place in the dark corners under cliffs of rock. Their appetite for this sort of thing was insatiable. They could never have enough idols and they spent huge amounts of capital on creating them and servicing them. They had gods of the valleys, gods of the hills, and they had gods they worshiped beside the waters. Things got so bad for them that if they encountered a way-marker that was a human-carved stone they fell down and worshiped it. They took these stones and carved images as their lot and their portion when they could have had God Himself. The idolaters made offerings of food and drink for these inanimate rocks. Indeed, they loved their idols more than they loved their own children – it was not uncommon for children to go hungry because parents sacrificed what little food they had at the altar of their idol. They failed to understand that the true and living God doesn’t want them to starve themselves in an effort to make food offerings. He wants them to eat and drink to His glory.
God directs our attention to the wicked behavior of these idolaters and asks us why He should take pleasure in individuals such as these. Why should He bless people who take the gifts of His providence and sacrifice them to made up deities? The Israelites were meant to be the people who were God’s witnesses against idolatry – yet they themselves fell into it. How can God be expected to show compassion on those who have no compassion themselves? I think He was genuinely hoping for a way that He could spare them despite the fact they were being so provoking. The more they practiced their wickedness, the more their consciences became deadened to it. They started out sacrificing their children in valleys and hidden places. They tried to conceal their lustful passion in shame. But more and more they became bolder. Soon they were setting up altars on the highest hills they could find – in an effort to show themselves as competition to the Most High God Himself.
The wayward Israelites even brought their idols into their own homes. They set them up in places where the law of God was supposed to be. It wasn’t memorabilia either, they were so infatuated with their idols that they could never forget them. The household gods were more like evangelistic tools. They wanted to display for their neighbors how mindful they were of their idolatry. They wanted to bewitch their children into adopting their own ideology. The more they grew attached to their idols the harder their hearts became. Soon Israel was going in great crowds to the idol-temples in the same way they had once worshiped at the house of God. They were no longer ashamed of the sin and they did not fear the punishment – and all of that was a consequence of misapprehended belief. As the moral relativism crystallized, things that were once understood to be in defiance of God became things which were professed at righteous. They trained proselytes to teach their ideologies to others. In this way they enlarged the bed of their spiritual prostitution. The people became so submerged in idols that there was no way of breaking them free – apart from judgment. Israel had renounced their covenant with God and formed a contract with idols. They vowed to live with them, to die with them, and they made resolutions to persist in their apostasy. And what’s more: they loved it.
When faced with problems or difficulties, idolaters tend to rely on anything and anyone but God. The same was true for these Israelites. They sent envoys with gifts to foreign nations in an effort to create alliances. They sought communion with the false god Moloch, whose name signifies king. Ahaz attempted to court the king of Assyria and Hezekiah did the same with Babylon. The underlying issue here is that these foreign powers worshiped idols and Israel wanted to be just like them. They really believed there was strength in idolatry. Israel spared no expense in their efforts to procure these alliances. They beautified themselves with perfumes and ointments in order to ingratiate themselves with more powerful nations. They brought extravagant gifts because they wanted to bribe the attention of mighty leaders. They were willing to weaken their own economy if that meant favorable judgment in the sight of these other nations. But all of them completely forgot that God is One who judges every person – even the most powerful of world leaders. Proximity was no problem either. If the foreign powers were too far away for Israel’s leaders then they just sent messengers. You can see that on an individual level as well as on a national level Israel disparaged herself. On an individual level because human beings are endowed with the powers of reason and it is an affront against this gift that we should worship items of our own manufacture. On a national level because they were eager to lower themselves into the dust if that meant a favorable glance from an imperial power.
To be a child of God is to be in a place of honor. It means that the one true and living God is in covenant with you. Divine revelation is a privilege of the highest order. It means the Creator of the universe has chosen to show Himself to you. It should have brought Israel incredible shame to forsake these privileges in exchange for sticks and stones. It’s the same dishonor that should attend forsaking love in favor of manipulation. They gave up so much to neighboring countries in an effort to depend on them when all the while they had a God who is all-sufficient and who wants to be in covenant with them. The idolatrous Israelites disgraced themselves beyond measure when they forsook the fountain of life in exchange for broken cisterns. You cannot serve God and serve sin at the same time. To serve sin is to be loaded down with the iron shackle of ignominious slavery. It is a miserable life that serves only to breed more misery until you reside in your own little pocket of hell – and without Jesus there’s nothing on the menu but to extend this misery on into eternity.
Another issue Israel had was that they became bored and tired in their sinful ways. This is true of us today. If we endeavor to lead sinful lifestyles we will inevitably discover the vacuous nature of them. They grew weary in their search for satisfaction and happiness. Israel was searching for peace in their worship of idols and for strength in their dependence on foreign nations. But they discovered that this search only led them in a massive circle which had no end. They marched tiredly in a multiplicity of aimless directions. You need an aim. Almost all of your positive emotion is associated with you observing yourself making progress toward a worthy goal. That’s why if you sit around and do nothing it won’t take very long for you to become anxious and depressed. Imagine negative emotions like they are always present in the background noise of your mind. You need positive emotion to be present or else the negative emotion will come forward and dominate your existence. The positive sense that has the most durability over negative emotion is meaning. Meaning is associated with you knowing you are in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing to achieve your purpose. Meaninglessness strips away your armor and disarms you against negative emotion.
Israel had to learn all of this by experience. No matter how passionately they worshiped, their idols never did them any kindness. No matter how generously they courted, the foreign nations only caused them distress. Sensible people would have made these observations and had the humility to ask whether they were doing something wrong. But that’s the problem with bad belief. You can read stories of people who were imprisoned in the Soviet gulag all the while praising the communist system that put them there. So they were literally rotting away in a cell because of communism, yet they continually made excuses for why the problems weren’t endemic to the system. So many Israelites were unwilling to admit that pursuits of idolatry could never end in satisfaction. This conviction of emptiness and depression is supposed to function as the greatest hope for people who find themselves in this position. It’s like a first realization that something is wrong and you need to turn back to the Creator. But not everyone has the humility or the faith required to admit that.
But another reason Israel was unwilling to turn back toward God was that they were finding worldly wealth in sin. They were successfully getting what the fallen culture prescribed they ought to want. In some sense it didn’t matter that these things failed to satisfy them. If the culture says you should want them and you don’t, then you just need to be more like the culture. That’s the trap people fall into today that causes them to blindly follow the herd. Really one of the worst case scenarios for a person is to be prosperous in the world with no understanding of why they feel empty. I say it’s a bad situation because if you already have everything then what is there to aim at? If you have what the culture says you should want, yet you still feel empty and depressed, you may be tempted to believe there is something irreparably wrong with you. This can lead to a very deep depression with no perceived way of escape. Many people have gotten stuck in that ditch to the point of suicide. If you’re having strong success in worldly affairs yet you cant’ shake the sense of meaninglessness – I would urge you to make an investigation into your spiritual condition. You should resist the temptation to safely reference your worldly success. You may be getting things wrong in ways that cannot be seen.
From the outside looking in it might appear that Israel pursued other gods because they were afraid of serving the true God. So God challenged them to review their history and see that He had not treated them in such a way as to inspire unhealthy fear. They were to fear God in the sense of awe and respect, yes, but not the kind of fear that frequently attends abusive relationships. God had given them no reason to pursue kinder masters. It’s really not a good thing to be fearless. Fearlessness can only be a symptom of naivete, arrogance, or psychopathy. Bravery and faithfulness are not the same thing as fearlessness. Bravery is when you are afraid and yet you have the faith to carry on anyway. If you don’t take the word of God and lay it to heart then it’s likely you have no fear of Him. In the sense that you have no awe of Him. Fearlessness causes negligence that ruins a multitude of lives. Carelessness results in you turning a blind eye toward injustice. And forgetfulness means that you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.
The trouble with unrepentant sin is that it can distort your view of God Himself. If God punishes you justly for your sin, there’s a reasonable likelihood that you won’t survive the punishment. If God shows you patience instead, the effect can be such that your heart becomes hardened to Him. After long periods of self-indulgent sin you may begin to think that God is just like you are. But deep down you know that you are imperfect and fallen. So if you believe that God is like you, then you will map onto Him your own shortcomings and this will cause you to no longer fear Him nor stand in awe of Him. With Israel, God chose forbearance to give them the chance to repent by their own free will and save the suffering associated with judgment. When they refused, He called them to account instead. He exposed their self-righteousness for the sham that it was. He revealed that their pretentious boasting was empty of all sincerity. Here’s a good rule to live by: there is no sinful work that ultimately bears fruit. All sinful work, in its full progression, leads to death and ruin. So you might see individuals pursuing sinful work while showing off supposed benefits of it. You can rest assured that either these benefits are not what they are being made to look like, or they are temporary benefits that will mutate into permanent destruction. The thief comes to kill, steal, and destroy. Jesus comes so that we have life, and have life more abundantly. Let’s read verses 13-16:
Isa 57:13 When you cry out, let your collection of idols deliver you! The wind will carry them all off, a breath will take them away. But he who takes refuge in me shall possess the land and shall inherit my holy mountain.
Comfort for the Contrite
Isa 57:14 And it shall be said, “Build up, build up, prepare the way, remove every obstruction from my people’s way.”
Isa 57:15 For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly, and to revive the heart of the contrite.
Isa 57:16 For I will not contend forever, nor will I always be angry; for the spirit would grow faint before me, and the breath of life that I made.
Here we see God exposing idols as insufficient to relieve the troubles of Israel. The same held true for all of the worldly alliances the Israelites had so much confidence in. The faithful cry out to God when they are in distress, and He hears their cry. The idolaters simply cry out to empty space because their gods never existed. The wind of God’s wrath is imagery of Him speaking the wicked out of existence. All of their idols will be carried away like chaff in the wind – and those who trust in idols will share this fate. This is because instead of life idolaters have chosen vanity. They’ve taken the breath of life that God has given them – which is something – and invested it in things which end in nothing. Both the idols and their followers will ultimately be reduced to nothing.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There has always been all-sufficiency in God to comfort those and deliver those who make their appeal to Him. This safety and satisfaction is real because it ends in actual fruition. Trusting in idols is like taking a sugar pill with the hope of a placebo effect curing what is a very real disease. Your problems are real and the idols are not. But trusting in God is like having actual medicine, actual immunity, that provides real relief in this moment and in the end heals the disease completely. You need a God who is more real than the pain and suffering you experience. Faith is your portal to gain access to that God. Trusting in God is the best way to secure your interests in this life and in the next. In this life because a Christlike mode of being is your best shot at becoming part of a prosperous, durable, and well-adjusted community of people. In the next life because all of this is God’s providence. Sometimes it might feel like you’ve had to work for everything you have in this world. But there are plenty of people who’ve put in equal work and don’t have what you have. This is because God’s providence is an indispensable part of the equation for what happens in the here and now. And it is the only part of the equation for what happens after you die. Eternal life is a free gift of God’s providence that we would be hopelessly deprived of if we were left on our own.
If you trust in God, then much like the exiled Israelites, God will release you from your captivity. Right now you might not understand how that is possible and it might not happen at the time you desire. But when the means of God’s deliverance are made clear to you, obstacles that once seemed insuperable will be overcome with ease. Many things will just click and work in concurrence with each other to accelerate and facilitate your salvation. That was the case for Israel on their return home from Babylon. God had prepared the way using Cyrus as His instrument. Jesus Christ has prepared the way to heaven for you and this highway is the gospel. You don’t have to lay the groundwork for your own salvation – it’s already been done long ago. We work to share the gospel in order to direct lost people to this already existing structure. We encourage individuals to keep the faith in a world where heaven can sometimes feel like an illusion.
The idolaters thought they could purchase their salvation with worldly wealth. They put their faith in perfumes and ointments and hoped if they could acquire enough status they would be saved. No doubt many of them also abused alcohol. But those who trusted in God were contrite and lowly of heart, they were often destitute of things which please the senses. The faithful’s privation of fast, easy, sinful pleasure will become irrelevant when they look upon the majesty of their God. He is the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity. Thoughts of God on high should inspire us to honorable consideration of Him. To what can we relate the perfection of God? There is nothing in creation that encompasses His perfection. It’s not as if God’s perfection is discernible by what we, in our fallen state, perceive as perfect. His being and perfection are exalted infinitely above what we are able to conceive of in this life. In addition to His glory is His sovereign dominion over all. His incontestable right to give both law and judgment over everyone. God is higher than the highest heavens.
Furthermore, there was no beginning to His days and there is no end to them either. Time is irrelevant to the being of God. He is unchanging and immutable. Immortality belongs to God alone and He simply shares it with us. God inhabits immortality and cannot be dispossessed of it. God is different from us in the sense that we go from mortal human life into eternity – God’s residence has always been in eternity. All things He has created are made for His glory. The glory of God was the fundamental purpose of His initial created order before the fall. And it will be the fundamental purpose when His redemptive work is complete. Even now the beauty of nature and the physical constant of the universe points to God’s power and glory. God’s name is holy, and all that desire to know Him must know Him as a holy God.
The home of God’s glory is the mansion of light and bliss above. He dwells in a high and holy place and He has revealed this truth to all the world. This is why we refer to God as our Father in heaven when we pray to Him. These words of praise and exaltation are meant to captivate us in a sense of awe and reverence. When we contemplate the majesty of God it inspires us to put our confidence in Him. It also shows us the magnanimity of His willingness to lower Himself for us. God loves us enough to lower Himself from eternity and take concern for the affairs of widows and orphans. The source of power Himself has a deep respect for those in low positions.
God’s grace and mercy means that He has sympathy for humble people in difficult situations. God’s people, though pushed around and trampled by humanity, will not be overlooked by Him. God has loving regard for those who are faithful enough to face their afflictions while maintaining penitence for sin and the fear of the Lord. This mindset is like the opposite of bitterness. It is to remain humble and thankful even when your situation is challenging. It is to trust God in the midst of trials. Cain was the first to defy God’s rebuke and turn toward murderous destruction. Innumerable people have looked upon the broken condition of reality and chosen that path since. But for those who remain humble and teachable, God will dwell with them and visit them graciously. He will converse with them by His word and by His Spirit – as readily as a person would with their own family. God will always be near and present for those who practice faithful humility. It’s one of the great mysteries of the universe that God – who dwells in the highest heavens – also dwells in the lowest hearts. He inhabits sincerity as surely as He inhabits eternity.
Allowing God to dwell with you means that He will revive your heart and spirit. He is living water to the thirsty. He is rest for the weary. He is peace for the distressed. He will imbue your life with meaning that is sufficient to counterbalance the suffering of existence. He brings you joy and hope to protect you against the griefs and fears that threaten to break your spirit. God dwells with the humble and His presence is reviving. And even if you were one of the idolaters, when God contends with you there is still hope. If you trust in Him now you can be relieved of this burden and received back into His favor. The chief reason why God chooses to contend with any of us is His desire for us to return to humility. If we allow His rebuke to center us back on a contrite heart then He will proceed to revive that heart. It’s one of God’s most gracious promises that He will not contend with us forever. He doesn’t guarantee us that He will not be angered against us. Our sins displease God. But the wrath of God need not last forever for any individual – no matter what they have done.
God doesn’t desire to place you into a spirit of bondage. He wants to bring you into a spirit of adoption. Yes, the judgments of God rip and tear – but the grace of God also heals. God’s rebuke and correction will last no longer than is necessary to accomplish His purpose for you. Indeed it is possible that your entire life may be calamitous and full of suffering, but at your end you will enter into peace and this peace will be your eternity. God is the Father of your spirit. He created your spirit and He brought your spirit regeneration through His own. He knows that if He challenged you forever your spirit would fail – and out of His compassion He will not do that. Something you should know about God is that His primary concern is your soul. Yes, a godly life is a blessing to your body, but if God must sacrifice your body to bring life to your soul He will do so. He knows the path you must walk that leads to Him, and even though it can be painful at times He is going to keep you on that path so long as your are willing. His primary concern is your soul, that it should not fail and that He should comfort it.
God understands that when troubles last long, even the spirits of good people are apt to fail. Extended suffering breeds temptation of hard thoughts concerning God. Sometimes you can begin to think that serving God is useless vanity. These negative considerations can lead to you putting away all possibility of grace and comfort. They can cause you to despair of relief. It’s not far beyond this point that the spirit fails. God knows this and so He will not contend with you forever. He will not forsake the work of His own hands nor make void the work of Christ on the cross. We should note that God being unwilling to contend with you forever does not protect you from continuously sabotaging yourself. There are people who habitually reject the lifeline God is throwing to them. But for those who remain humble and faithful in their trials, God knows your weaknesses and your infirmities. He will be merciful to you on account of these infirmities. God is merciful to us because He loves us, He remembers our frame – He knows that we are dust. Let’s read verses 17-21:
Isa 57:17 Because of the iniquity of his unjust gain I was angry, I struck him; I hid my face and was angry, but he went on backsliding in the way of his own heart.
Isa 57:18 I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his mourners,
Isa 57:19 creating the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace, to the far and to the near,” says the LORD, “and I will heal him.
Isa 57:20 But the wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt.
Isa 57:21 There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”
The collective population of Israel is illustrated here as two kinds of persons. One kind is a person of peace, and this person is dealt with peacefully. The other kind is not a person of peace, and peace continually evades them. One of the major contributing factors to Israel’s wickedness was covetousness or greed. Greed and ill-gotten gains were not exclusive to the wealthy either, even the lower and middle classes were deceiving their neighbors in the name of money. Again, congregations tend to reflect their leadership and the situation was no different for Israel. The watchmen of Israel sold out honesty for financial gain and this practice quickly trickled down to the common population. The only moments the wicked practiced generosity was in their offerings to idols – which was basically a twisted form of generosity. Imagine a situation where the people profusely worship a false god and then turn around to cheat their neighbor. Such a climate was very provoking to the Lord.
So God brought judgment down upon them, one after another, eventually culminating in their destruction at the hands of Babylon. God’s wrath was ignited at the sight of His people devoting themselves to idolatry and deceit. Covetousness is particularly wrath-invoking because it is a sin of the heart. Some people can effectively conceal it from their neighbors but not from God. He looks upon it with such anger because the person is setting something else on the throne instead of God. A covetous idolater raises up something other than God as a direct challenge to God’s sovereignty. When a covetous person successfully acquires that which they covet, they often mistake this gain as a blessing from God. But God sees the gain as an abomination. Here’s a good way to know when your gain is not from God: if the gain itself is more important to you than God is, it’s likely you are being covetous.
I want to make sure I’m being clear here. No one is saying that earning money is inherently wrong. Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Here’s the point: if money becomes the thing that governs your thoughts and behaviors, you can be sure that God is going to strip you of the feeling you are pursuing. He will send warnings in the same way He sent His prophets to reprove Israel. You’ll discover that no matter how much money you acquire it will never be enough. When you finally achieve that certain number you’ve had in your mind you’ll encounter only disappointment and emptiness. It won’t feel like you thought it would feel. What’s more, it might even make your life worse. If money is your highest value then you will be possessed with all manner of personality problems that will become evident in your life and in your relationships. God’s rebuke of Israel was particularly punishing because He also hid Himself from them. It’s one thing to be under God’s rod of judgment and still be able to cry out to Him in repentance. It’s quite another to be left in this punishment deprived of God’s comfortable word.
In Israel’s case, their response to this deprivation was to double down in their worldly pursuits. They were painfully aware of the injury brought on by God’s judgment – but they paid no consideration whatsoever to the Judge. They were unwilling to admit that the mistake resided in themselves because they didn’t want to change. Have you ever noticed how Christians will pursue God even more hotly when they are in distress? The same is true for idolaters. If a covetous person feels distressed, they will chase after wealth even more doggedly than they were before. We can notice two things about corruption and sin here. First is the strength and persistence of the corruption in the human heart. We have a tendency to pursue sin despite the words of God Himself and the flames of His wrath. Second is the insufficiency of affliction to reform us on its own. If God simply cast us off and let us hit rock bottom then that’s where we would stay forever. In His grace He lowers Himself to heal us while we are in our most broken condition. Without God’s grace, affliction alone would not be able to set us right.
Israel’s collective descent into covetous sin also provides the opportunity to highlight God’s infinite reservoirs of mercy. It’s true that most of them were stiff-necked and marched onward in their sin. But some of them were grieved at the obstinacy of their peers. God paid attention to those who had repentant hearts and for His own Name’s sake He determined not to contend with Israel forever. God is perfectly justified in being as resolute in His judgment as sinners are resolute in their sins. He could justly work against those who attempt to work against Him. In fact the scales of justice would be undisturbed if God utterly destroyed those who rebelled against Him in their sins. But that’s not what God has chosen to do. Instead of saying: I have seen the ways of humanity and I will destroy them, God has said: I have seen the ways of humanity and I will heal them. God uses the wickedness of humanity to show His own goodness all the more illustrious. Where sin abounds grace much more abounds.
The divine mystery of why God loves us is found inside of Himself. His reasons for redemption are for His own Name’s sake. The divine love emanates out from God and is not dependent on ourselves. If it were we would be lost because each of us has inside of us that which is provoking to God’s wrath. Before He created us He knew the evil things we would do – but He counted the cost and His love determined that it is worth it. God’s method is to first give us grace and then give us peace. He knew that we would never to turn to him of our own accord, and so He turned toward us. God is the one who prepares us and qualifies us for the divine grace and mercy He has stored up for us. He does all this despite the fact that our natural predisposition is to run as fast as we can away from Him. God purposes to heal the corruption inside your heart even if it is deeply rooted. There is no spiritual malady that is too great for the grace of God to conquer. And as God continues to heal the corruption, He will also take you by the hand and lead you in the ways of righteousness. In this way the grace of God both discourages you from doing evil and teaches you how to do His own good will. God’s specialty is picking up broken people and molding them into who they were always meant to be.
As God gives you a better mind and a better path, He also restores those comforts you had forfeited in your rebellion. In the Babylonian pit of their captivity, Israel experienced a truly wonderful reformation. This reformation was followed by redemption which brought the people back into the comfort of a peaceful relationship with God. This was comfort for those who mourned the collapse of Jerusalem and their people’s sins that led up to it. For these mourners the mercy of God was most comfortable. These mourners were who God had in mind when He worked it all out. Jesus said blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. It’s true that not all who were captive in Babylon responded positively. Those with repentant hearts were reformed and made better. Those with unrepentant hearts were simply hurt by it and their deliverance was not the same. It’s like how some people find God in their own suffering, while others use their own suffering as an excuse to wage war on God.
For the good captives their deliverance brought peace. This peace is typical of the peace that attends a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. God gave them reasons to praise His name and sing songs of thanksgiving. The implication is that God creates these reasons. God’s act of creation is like making something out of nothing. In this case it was like making something out of less than nothing. The people were exiled into a terrible situation while their souls were still corrupt. Yet within this dilemma God reformed those whose hearts were open to it and restored them to a better position. So they went from being individuals who spurned God’s word to being individuals who praised and thanked God all while having very bad external circumstances.
This type of transformation is an example of God publishing peace. He brought spiritual peace to those who were alienated and far from home. They didn’t have this peace before Babylon captured them because spiritually they were at war with God. In some sense it doesn’t matter how desperate your external circumstances are, you can still have a peaceful conscience and the security of the Holy Spirit. This is a serenity of mind that is only available to you if you are at peace with God. This internal peace is the beginning of a transformation that will change who you are as an individual. Who you become as an individual will in turn influence the external qualities of your life restoring those as well. In this way God redeems your soul and then redeems your situation. And that is God literally creating reasons for you to praise and thank Him. That is God publishing peace in your life.
But your heart has to be open in order for God to work this out. The wicked among the captives were graciously allowed to return home with the rest – but still they had no peace. In this way the wicked never truly leaves captivity. He carries his captivity with him wherever he goes. Those whose spirit is like a troubled sea might persistently try to rearrange their external circumstances. They might desperately try to change the world or force the people around them to change in an effort to assuage their distress. They can never find the peace that evades them because they are not looking inward. They are not allowing God into their hearts. The wicked cannot find rest for their souls because they constantly carry around the shackles of sin. There is nothing inside them to govern their spirits apart from the basest lusts and passions. Their presence becomes vexing and toxic to those around them and the storm inside their souls unleashes cruelty and abuse.
Because they are shutting themselves off to the grace and forgiveness of Jesus Christ, their only options are to sear their own conscience or shoulder the weight of their guilt. The nagging fear of pending wrath resides as background noise in their consciousness. The constant disquietude prevents them from being settled in or enjoying themselves. Their merrymaking becomes less about joyfulness and more about escapism. Unless they turn back to God they are like Cain – doomed to walk in the land of shaking. The terrors of conscience disturb all their enjoyments and make them a burden to themselves and others. There is no quietness or satisfaction in their minds and no real good. There is no peace with death because there is no hope. That is what it feels like to be at war with God.
And that’s where all of us would be had it not been for the sacrifice and the ensuing gospel of Jesus Christ. God loves us and so He will not stand idly by while we are lost in this way. Our culture is beginning to forget the ways of forgiveness and redemption. The culture can only be a consequence of its individuals, so that means more and more individuals are forgetting the ways of forgiveness and redemption. That means there are a whole lot of people walking around out there whose souls are disturbed and cannot seem to find peace. If this is you, I urge you to look to the cross. Look to Jesus because He is One who will publish peace in your life. The peace of God goes beyond comprehension and is more durable than anything this world can throw against you. If you relax your efforts in trying to change your world, and instead allow God to change your heart – I think you’ll find that He works through you to redeem your surroundings. I think God will cultivate a peaceful spirit in you, and your life will become a source of praise and thanksgiving for those around you. Real change begins inside your soul and God’s Holy Spirit is ready to work if you are. Today is your day, step out in faith and see what adventures He has in store for you.
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