Those are the words of the great Chicago preacher, A.W. Tozer. I believe they are truer today when he first spoke them to his congregation two or three generations ago. The “god” that Tozer describes is certainly not the God of the prophet Isaiah, from whom we will be reading throughout the four Sundays of this season of Advent. But first we need to say a little bit about Isaiah himself.What this country needs, what the church needs, is a restoration of the vision of the Most High God… The honor of God has been lost to men. And the God of today’s Christianity is a weakling. He is a little, cheap palsied “god” that you can pal around with. He’s the “Man upstairs”. He’s the fellow that will help you in difficulty and not bother you too much when you’re not.[1]
In fact Isaiah reveals very few details about his personal
life. His name means, “The Lord is salvation”. He tells us in the opening verse
of his prophecy that his father was called Amoz and that his ministry extended
from the end of the reign of King Uzziah of Judah into the reign of Hezekiah,
which adds up to a period of about forty years. Although we don’t know his
wife’s name, we do know that he was married and that they had two sons, who
bore two of the most unwieldy names in all of Scripture: Shearjashub and
Maher-shalal-hash-baz.
According to tradition, Isaiah was of noble blood. There is
also a tradition that he was martyred by order of the evil king Manasseh, by
being sawn asunder. Thus when the author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes of
saints of the past who were sawn in two, this may just be a reference to a
tradition about Isaiah.
Far more important than any of these details is the fact
that Isaiah’s prophecy sprang out of a profound experience of the presence of
God. There is hardly a more arresting passage in all the Bible than Isaiah’s description
of God’s call to him as he worshiped in the Temple: the hem of God’s garment
filling the whole of that vast structure, the flying seraphim each with their
six wings crying aloud, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!” and the
prophet himself falling on his face and protesting, “Woe is me! I am lost… for my
eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
The Lord
It is this astounding vision of God that permeates and
dominates the whole sixty-six chapters of Isaiah’s prophecy, not least the
chapter that we have before us this morning. The nine verses that we have read
fall in fact towards the end of a longer poem, which begins in verse 7 of the
previous chapter. There, Isaiah begins, “I will recount the gracious deeds of
the Lord…” He takes his listeners back to the time when the Lord revealed
himself to his people on Mount Sinai. There, Isaiah tells us, “he became their
Savior”. He did not send an angel to rescue them but led them himself.
The sad truth was, however, that the people quickly forgot
about what the Lord had done for them. Their life-changing experience had faded
to less than a dim shadow their memory. And what had been true of the nation of
Israel in Moses’ time continued to be true in Isaiah’s time as well. For them
God was like an absentee landlord, little more than a vague concept. As chapter
63 draws to a close, Isaiah laments, “We have long been like those whom you do
not rule, like those not called by your name.”
So it is that as our passage opens this morning Isaiah cries
out, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…” We find that verb
which our Bibles translate “tear open” numerous times in the Old Testament. In
most instances it has to do with people tearing apart their garments much like
the Incredible Hulk does as he rips off his shirt. In those days, however, it
was a sign of deep sorrow, of repentance and mourning. People would tear off what
they were wearing and then clothe themselves in sackcloth. In the same way,
Isaiah begs the Lord to tear apart the heavens, to rip open the clouds and to
be undeniably, unmistakably present with his people as he had been in the days
of Sinai. “That the mountains would quake at your presence…, that the nations
might tremble at your presence!”
Isaiah’s dream, Isaiah’s fervent desire, was that God should
reveal himself to his people with power as he had done with Moses at Mount
Sinai. The words that Moses had heard that day were these: “The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and
faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving
iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty…”
(Exodus 34:6,7).
The God whom Isaiah worshiped and served was not only
infinitely powerful. He is also holy: and therein lies the problem. He would
not countenance the people’s sins. He would not tolerate their waywardness and
rebellion, their apathy towards him on the one hand and their indifference
towards their own sins on the other. Isaiah’s words for his people (and note
how he includes himself: it is always “we” not “they”) are devastating. “We
have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a
filthy cloth.” In fact, Isaiah’s term in the original Hebrew is considerably
coarser than our English translations render it. It should really be a
menstrual rag.
Our Father
Yet fortunately there is more to Isaiah’s message—and to
Isaiah’s God—than that. We see in verse 8 that God who is the almighty and holy
Lord is also our Father. To speak of God as Father is simply a given for us.
Yet in the Old Testament it is a rarity. Psalm 68:5 speaks of God as the father
of orphans. Yet that is more in the sense of a protector, a guardian. In the
messianic Psalm 89, the coming king cries out, “You are my Father…” Aside from
that there are a half dozen other references, but most of them are accounts of
Israel’s failure to honor God as Father at all.
We have to wait for Jesus in the New Testament for God fully
to be revealed as Father. There we find Jesus teaching his followers to address
God not just as Father, but as Abba,
“our Father”, “Papa”. It is a term of intimacy used only by family members.
Against the background of the Old Testament you can see why all the religious
people of his day, Pharisees and Sadducees alike, were shocked. To address the
thrice-holy God in such a familiar manner was effrontery. Worse than that, it
was blasphemy.
Yet we have the kernel of it here in Isaiah—not only here in
verse 8, but twice in the preceding chapter as well. “For you are our Father,
though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O
Lord, are our Father; our Redeemer from of old is your name.” So it is that God
comes to us not only as the mighty Lord, who causes the mountains to tremble,
he comes to us also as a Father—our Father—in tenderness and compassion. “As a
father has compassion for his children,” we read in another of those rare
references in the Old Testament, “so the Lord has compassion for those who fear
him” (Psalm 103:13).
Once again, it is Jesus who gives us the fullest picture of
that, in the parable of the prodigal son. There the father patiently,
expectantly, waits for his wayward son to return home. And when the son finally
appears, the father’s legs cannot carry him down the road quickly enough to
meet him. He wraps his arms around him, places a robe on his shoulders and a
ring on his finger and brings him home again to celebrate.
The Potter
We have only to move on a few words to find a third image that
Isaiah gives us of God: the potter. “We are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.” Isaiah is not the only prophet to use the
image of the potter. You will find it in Jeremiah also. There, Jeremiah goes
into the potter’s workshop and watches him as he works at his wheel. As he
deftly moves his hands a vessel—a jug or a bowl—begins to take shape. But then
something goes wrong and the potter reworks the soft, pliable clay into
something entirely different. “Then,” Jeremiah says, “the word of the Lord came
to me: ‘Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?’
says the Lord. ‘Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand,
O house of Israel.’ ”
Jeremiah’s emphasis was on the sovereign power of God to do
as he wills with his creatures. Isaiah, however, uses the same imagery to underscore
something quite different. I believe he is taking us back to the opening
chapters of Genesis where God takes the dust of the earth (the word can mean
literally a clod of clay) and molds it into a human being—Adam. And that lump
of clay bears his image. Isaiah’s picture is of the care and the love that a
potter or any artisan puts into each of his artifacts—to the point, I would
want to add, where he etches his mark into the bottom of it so that it is
identifiable as his work. We have a Creator who cares infinitely for each of
his creatures, who has imprinted his own image into us, whose only desire is
for our good.
So today, as we read Isaiah’s prophecy through the lens of
the gospel, what do we see? That the day would come when the Potter would
himself become the clay of his own making, to take on our form and flesh and
become one of us. The day would come when the Father would run down to the road
to draw his erring children back to himself. The day would come when the earth
would indeed shudder. But this time it would not be the heavens that were rent
apart, but the curtain of the Temple, as the Son of God cried aloud, “Why have
you abandoned me?” Praise God that he has not abandoned us. Praise God that he
has not remembered our iniquity forever. We are his people, bought with the
blood of his Son.
No comments:
Post a Comment