Isaiah 8

Isaiah preached during some of the darkest times in Judah’s history. Fifteen years after his ministry began, it was invaded by two larger northern neighbors -- Syria and Israel. And that was only the beginning.

In Chapter 7, Isaiah told King Ahaz not to fear the invasion. God would protect them. But Ahaz wouldn’t listen. Instead, even though Isaiah warned him against it, he reached out to Assyria for protection, a decision which would have disastrous consequences.

In Chapter 8, after Ahaz ignores him, Isaiah tells his countrymen how to respond to what was coming:

This is what the Lord says to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people: ‘Do not call conspiracy everything this people call a conspiracy; do not fear what they do not fear, and do not dread it.’

- Isaiah 8:11-12 

There were two paths ahead of them, as things got worse. They could either fear Man or God.

Ahaz chose the first path. He panicked when he saw the armies of Syria and Israel. He thought he needed an ally who would even the odds. The obvious choice was Assyria.

Isaiah wanted his people to choose the second. He looked at the world like a game of Risk. The pieces on the board didn’t matter. There was an invisible hand controlling everything. Not even the armies of Assyria, the most powerful the world had ever seen, had any real power in the grand scheme of things. God could wipe them off the board with a flick of His wrist, which is exactly what He did in 701 BC. 


Photo: Melanie Hayes

It all comes down to how you view the world. Most historians believe the outlines of the story told in the Book of Isaiah actually happened. There really were two invasions of Judah at the end of the eighth century BC, first by an alliance of Syria and Israel and then a much larger one by Assyria that reached the gates of Jerusalem. But then, right on the cusp of victory, thousands of their soldiers died suddenly without any explanation.

Isaiah saw the hand of God in the destruction of the Assyrian army. He said an angel of the Lord came down in the middle of the night and killed them. Historians have speculated that a plague might have swept through their camp.

Neither side is necessarily wrong. It’s not an either or question. Think of it this way -- wouldn't a plague be the simplest way for an angel to wreck an army in one night? There would be no way to tell the difference from the outside.

The same thing held true for the rise of the Assyrians. Maybe it was a matter of geopolitics, as a history book would say. Or maybe, like Isaiah said, they had been raised up by God to punish the Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah for their sins:

Because this people has rejected the gently flowing waters of Shiloah and rejoices over Rezin and the son of Remaliah, therefore the Lord is about to bring against them the mighty floodwaters of the Euphrates -- the king of Assyria with all his pomp. 


 -- Isaiah 8:6-7 

Once again, both interpretations could be true. Figuring out the right answer is not about having the right facts. It’s about the worldview that you use to interpret those facts.

Isaiah saw through the world through the prism of religion. But everyone, whether they are religious or not, has a worldview. Many turn to political parties and ideologies for a framework to understand the world around them. There are a lot of people who don’t explicitly choose a worldview — they go with some combination of what they were taught growing up and what the culture around them believes without thinking about it too much.

The bottom line is that every human being needs some type of filter to process reality. The universe is far too complicated to understand without one.

Every worldview is built on a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of life. Philosophers call these ideas first principles.

The easiest way to understand how the process works is to go back to high school geometry. Euclidean geometry is built on five ideas (or postulates) about shapes in 2-dimensional space. The first four are fairly self-explanatory:

1. A straight line can be drawn between any two points.
2. It can be extended indefinitely and be straight.
3. In a segment of a straight line, a circle can be drawn with the segment as the radius and one endpoint as the center.
4. All right angles are identical. 

The reason they are called postulates is that you can't actually prove any of them. How do prove that a straight line can be drawn between two points? It just depends on how you define concepts like "straight" "line" and "point".

But, once you accept those postulates as true, you can use them to prove 28 increasingly complex theorems, all the with the same structure: "If A and B, then C, D, and E."

The postulates are the building blocks upon which everything else depends. Euclidean geometry is incredibly useful. Engineers still use it thousands of years after it was first discovered. But it all depends on a starting point of taking a few things on faith and then working your way up from there. If you remove the postulates as givens, the whole thing falls apart. They are the bottom level of the Jenga tower.

First principles, as the foundation of a worldview, work the same way. Most political and religious arguments ultimately come down to first principles. That's why two worldviews can reach the exact opposite conclusions from the same set of facts and both be logically consistent.

So the question becomes -- what first principles to accept? What things do we believe about the world simply on the basis of faith?

The first principle of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The basic facts about his life, just like the story told in the Book of Isaiah, are not disputed by most historians. They believe there really was an itinerant Jewish preacher named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago in ancient Israel and was crucified by the Roman Empire. What no history book can tell you is whether he actually rose from the dead.

Christian theology is logically consistent. You can reason your way to every point of it — as long as you start from the premise of the resurrection. The problem is that it’s not something you can prove with any certainty. You just have to take it on faith:


For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

- 1 Corinthians 1:18-20

What the Apostle Paul is saying here is that God didn’t want the resurrection to be something that only smart people could figure out. The secret to understanding the universe isn't a secret at all. It's not the theory of relativity or some other piece of abstract knowledge. The resurrection is something that anyone, no matter how intelligent, can grasp.

Conversely, it doesn't matter how smart you are if you don't accept it. If you don’t take the resurrection on faith, than it becomes a stumbling block for you, preventing you from seeing the world as it really is. As Ghostface Killah said, there are a lot of smart dumb people out there.

Paul was echoing something that Isaiah wrote 700 years before. For him and his people, the stumbling block wasn't the resurrection. It was believing in God in the first place, and that He was in control of their affairs:


The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread. He will be a holy place; for both Israel and Judah he will be a stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall. And for the people of Jerusalem he will be a trap and a snare.

- Isaiah 8:13 

Isaiah knew that most of his countrymen would fail that test, just like King Ahaz. They would be far more afraid of the Assyrians than He who sent them, which would cause them to make short-sighted decisions that would send their lives down the wrong path. That's the reality of the human experience. Most people will put their trust in what they can see than what they cannot.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

- Matthew 7:13-14 

Every believer since the beginning of time has walked the same path. What making a leap of faith comes down to is changing your first principles. It's a scary process that most people won’t do. All we can do is offer a hand and tell them that the leap isn’t as crazy as it seems. It only makes sense when you get to the other side.