Isaiah, a.k.a. Dr. Death

I have watched enough medical dramas, as well as witnessed real life episodes, to know how devastating it is when someone gets the bad news about their “condition”, their “disease”, their “inoperable brain tumor”, etc. Doctors, of course, don’t go to medical school for all those years to articulate the miseries of suffering and death; they go to school so they can help people heal and get better. No one dreams about being by the bed side of someone who has no chance of cure, and having to tell them that. They may have grand visions of performing the miraculous surgery to save someone from cancer, but not the other way around.

It is so much more interesting, then, when we consider the mission of Isaiah in chapter six of the book he wrote. He had a vision, also, and he made himself available to become a missionary: “Here am I ,LORD, send me.” But perhaps he didn’t have a chance to sit down with his guidance counselor or recruiter for an adequate amount of time, because it wasn’t exactly, perhaps, what he had envisioned. God told Isaiah essentially that he would be delivering the bad news to the family. He would be telling the people of Judah there is no hope; you have a disease; and you’re going to die. To make matters worse, God tells Isaiah to prevent them from hearing; keep them (spiritually) blind; make their hearts calloused. Why? “Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” What? Isn’t that what we are supposed to be here for? Are we not supposed to be involved in healing people? When someone has cancer, don’t we want to tell them how they can be healed? Not so in this passage, where God appears not to want them to repent, so that they can be led into national desolation and exile.

I must admit that this is a difficult text to swallow, because of the apparent implications that God is merciless and unloving. The reader of the fact that God here does not want these people to be healed, nevertheless, has to extrapolate several other points from this text:

(1) Up to this point, God has been very longsuffering and loving with Judah. Time does not permit me to elaborate on the history of Judah, but suffice it to say, there has been much mercy and love and forgiveness poured out on this people. Not only that, but God entered into a covenant with this people, and the deal was if they broke the covenant he would break the covenant and judge them for their disobedience.

(2) The “until” in Isaiah 6:11 indicates a renewed opportunity of repentance that would occur. Isaiah seems to be as beleaguered as we are at the thought of delivering the message of doom and gloom, and questions “For how long, O LORD?” Surely this is only temporary, since Yahweh is a loving God and this is his covenant people. The answer he receives is not much comfort for the one in his shoes, however, but it does give some comfort to us, as well as insight into the character of God. The word “until” introduces the happenings of the Babylonian Invasion, in which King Nebuchadnezzar would sweep in and destroy the city of Jerusalem and lead the inhabitants off to Babylon as exiled slaves. The amazing thing is that judgment upon Judah ,in retrospect, was one of the greatest acts of mercy God could have ever shown the world, because it forced Judah to be “the Light to the nations” that it was designed to be. Therefore, Isaiah’s quest to become a missionary seemed very disappointing, when in fact he played an integral role in the nations coming to know the true God of Israel, by Judah’s dispersion into their regions. As they were exiled, many of them repented and were used to bring many others into a relationship with Yahweh, and eventually there was a collective repentance that took place.

So, what is the lesson from all of this? (a) God sovereignly works the events of history for his ultimate glory, (b) God is holy and just in all that he does, (c) Repentance is solely the work of God, and (d) God’s abundant mercy many times precedes abundant judgment, nor is it always an assumed given. Therefore, we must humble ourselves and take heed to the words of Dr. Death.