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3 - Sin Confronted (Isaiah 1) |
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Read Isaiah 1 at Biblegateway.org
Interpreting the PassageIsaiah opens with a blazing call to repentance. Although the material in chapter 6 would make a more conventional opening, Isaiah’s text starts with a brief historical note for context, then runs urgently out of the gate. there is no time to be wasted. The call must go out! Repent! The book’s opening salvo points out the problems, promises judgment, offers grace, and demonstrates the passion of the heart of God. Not bad for an opening chapter! None of this is by accident, of course. These themes set the tone for the whole book. What follows from here is all a result of the realities of sin, judgment, and grace that are apparent in this first chapter.
“Something is rotten in the state of Judah.”Just as in Hamlet’s Denmark, something is terribly rotten in the Judah of Isaiah’s time, and it starts at the very top. Judah’s leadership has become corrupt, and the entire nation is characterized negatively in this first chapter. Isaiah offers a laundry list of sinful postures. God’s people are rebellious, in spite of the care he has given them. They deal and judge corruptly, they trust in their worship but fail to honor God in their practices. They oppress the poor and neglect widows and orphans among them. Their hands are full of blood.
Although in worship Judah is aligned with the Lord, their ethical practices are totally different. They have failed to align their lives with the things that are truly of God’s heart, namely justice and righteousness. The mistake is insidious; they retain the appearance of holiness, perhaps believe in their own righteousness, but have no holy heart. the section beginning in verse 10 is strong and punchy. Before speaking about their worship practices, for which they might expect commendation, God greets them with a serious slap in the face. “Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” You can feel the tension here as well as almost anywhere in the prophets. You can imagine Isaiah’s hearers turning red. Sodom? Gomorrah? We’re the people of God! Don’t you see the temple of the Lord? Don’t you see the smoke of the sacrifices?
The Lord presses on, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me.” (1:10-13, ESV)
Ouch, right? All the things you thought you were doing right, out the window. It gets worse. “New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations--I cannot bear iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates. They have become a burden to me; I a weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.” (1:13-15, ESV)
It’s a chilling image, one that is helpful to have burned in our minds. A man comes to worship, lifts his hands in prayer to God, only to reveal that his outstretched hands are bloody from murder. (Lightning flashes.) The villain is revealed. It’s me. All of the guilt, the oppression, the rebellion, the neglect, the injustice, it’s all on my hands, and I didn’t even know it. That’s the feeling we’ve got to be open to when we read this text. We have to give that feeling a chance if we’re going to really listen to this text.
The Outstretched Hand of GraceImmediately after this chilling image of the bloody outstretched hand, the Lord extends his own hand, offering grace and forgiveness. If the people repent, as spelled out in 1:16-17, the Lord will take away their sin, and purifying them and giving them the good of the land. Their blood red sins can become white as snow. The Lord has the power to change their reality. The offer is radical, incredible. Although the offense is great and the guilt profound, God offers forgiveness, grace.
The offer isn’t going to stay on the table forever, though. God invites their repentance, but the hand that stretches out in grace can also be turned against them in discipline. Verse 21 and following offers a dire picture of how the Lord will purify the people if they do not repent on their own, a process like smelting away the dross from silver, refining it. God will have a pure people. He offers a chance to be a part of that. Make no mistake about it, though, those who refused would be burned away. God will not allow his people to remain impure forever. While the dominance of injustice and sin among the people must be dealt with, the Lord still desires his people. He still remains engaged with them, working until Jerusalem can again be called, a “city of righteousness”.
Teaching the Lesson This text is something of a microcosm of the book, showing notes of confrontation, warning, judgment, discipline, and hope. Each of these will get its turn in the study, but for this lesson, the focus of the following questions will be on the confrontation of Judah’s sin.
Worship: Isolated or Integrated?This text provokes us to examine our worship, not in and of itself, but its connection to the rest of our lives. Worship is dangerous. It can pacify us, lead us to be satisfied with an appearance of holiness. Disconnected from the rest of our lives, our worship can deceive us, creating the belief that we are more righteous than we really are. In this text, God takes Judah to task for failing to live by justice, for neglecting the powerless in their midst. The lesson here is not only a statement of what is most important to God, but a demonstration of how Judah was fooled. They had been lulled into moral complacency by their worship and sacrifices. Instead of aligning their hearts closer to God and his righteousness, their worship had become irrelevant except as a smoke screen. What about our own worship? How would we evaluate it, not based on the quality of the “program”, but based on our own connection between our hearts in worship and our hearts during the rest of the week? Do we risk believing ourselves to be more righteous than we are because we show up at weekly worship, and a Bible class for bonus? Do we see these things as a means for becoming more mature, or as evidence of our maturity?
Is our worship integrated into our lives, or an isolated event during the week? Do we use worship to reflect meaningfully on our everyday lives? Do we reflect during the week on the God who is the subject of our worship? What are some examples of how this integration has been present or absent in our lives? This is a place for a very important discussion.
Ready to Repent?Isaiah sets out two paths for Judah: a path of destruction and a path of redemption. The path they end up on is going to be dependent on one factor, their willingness to repent. This factor is so critical, it really dominates much of Isaiah (and the rest of the Bible!). Isaiah’s story really is one where God is working to bring his people to a place where they are willing to repent. He will not force it, but uses the voices of the prophets and the swords of the pagans to create a readiness to repent.
Repentance is difficult. We become so invested in the state of our lives, in the control we wish to exercise over them, that correcting course based on an outside will is difficult at best. When confronted by God’s will, we desperately want it to match up with what we’re already doing. We want God to approve of and bless us, as we are. Why must he desire to change us?
On the other hand, what if we could discipline our hearts so that repentance before God became natural to us? What if it became our habit to correct our lives by God’s will? What if we could become super-responsive to his direction? What would it look like to be such a community? What would be different? What would we have to do to become such a community? When we look at the cost of their unwillingness to repent, what can we learn fro Judah? Can we take an easier path?
ChallengeBeing confronted by our sin is a painful, hurtful experience. Within the hurt, though, is a profound gift. As Jonah knew, God’s act of confronting sin is itself an act of grace, because it paves the way for repentance. The confrontation brings the opportunity for repentance. It is the first step in God making things right.
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