Isaiah 26

God will save us. That is the message that Isaiah returns to over and over again. It could not have been easy to believe.

Even though the Book of Isaiah is one of the longest (66 chapters) in the Bible, we don’t know that much about his life. It doesn’t say what he was doing before he became a prophet, or what he wanted to be. He mentions that he has a wife and two kids, but doesn’t talk about them much.

Here’s what we can assume. Isaiah probably didn’t want to spend almost 60 years telling people things they didn’t want to hear, and publicly humiliating himself to get his message across only to be ignored.

With me, it’s not just bars and music /
I walk with God. I got the scars to prove it.  

-- Mase 

But Isaiah never lost his faith, no matter how bad things got. He waited for God to move and trusted Him with the outcome:

You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord himself, is the Rock eternal.  

— Isaiah 26:3-4 

Isaiah wasn’t speaking from a place of privilege. Things never really got better for him. He didn’t retire in comfort. He was executed at the very end of his life by a new king (Manasseh) who feared what he would say.

So how could he remain peaceful in spite of all his pain and suffering? How could he still trust in God when his faith was not rewarded?

The key was that he kept his focus on the big picture. He knew what was happening in the world was bigger than him. And that it was not the whole story:

But your dead will live, Lord; their bodies will rise — let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy — your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead. 

— Isaiah 26:19 

You don’t have to be religious to see that nothing we do on this world will last. The sun will go supernova one day and wipe away any trace of the Earth. And we will all be forgotten long before that happens.

The question is what you will do with that knowledge. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animals are sentient beings who are ruled unjustly by human farmers and begin to conspire to overthrow their masters. One key step for the conspirators is getting rid of Moses, a raven who works for the humans to keep the animals in chains:

“He claimed to know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges.  

The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place.” 

This is a fairly obvious reference to the role of religion in society, which Karl Marx called “the opiate of the masses”. The idea being that it's only when people are freed from the comforting lies of what happens to them after death that they fight to improve their lives on Earth.

But the point of the book is that the conspirators, a group of pigs who represent the Communists in Soviet Russia, are pushing their own set of lies. There will be no freedom or equality after the revolution. The animals would just be exchanging one set of masters for another.

At the end of The Communist Manifesto, Marx promises that a class-less society where the state withers away will spontaneously emerge after the worldwide communist revolution. Does that seem any less plausible than Sugarcandy Mountain?

Maybe the causality is reversed. Maybe all the pain and suffering in this world is only a brief interval before before our glorious future where we are restored to a relationship with God. Maybe weeping stays for the night but joy comes in the morning. Maybe the people who are trying to sell the idea of heaven on earth are the ones pushing the lie, distracting you from your real purpose in this world and raising your hopes on a dream that will never come.

Or maybe not. Maybe this is all there is. Maybe the only hope we have is that man can be perfected and that we can all do our small part to create a more perfect society on Earth. What do you think becomes of a person who believes that, and puts their hope in other people? Is that faith ever rewarded?

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, an existential philosopher, tried to make sense of a world without God or any hope in the afterlife. He saw man as Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology who was doomed to push a boulder all they way to the top of the mountain, only to see it roll back down. And this same process happens over and over again for all of time.

This is what he concludes:

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up.  

The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days.  

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.  

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

For Camus, life is an absurd struggle with no happy ending. But one must find joy and hope in the struggle, in working to make the world a better place, even if it's for nothing. Essentially, happiness is found in the journey, not the destination.

I thought this was pretty dope when I was in college. But I can see how insane it is now. This is the best the world has to offer you. You are going to be a miserable wretch toiling for no reason with no chance to meaningfully change your fate ... and they expect you to be happy about it! 

Has that line of thought worked for anyone? Has walking away from God and embracing that philosophy made people happy and content? 

Isaiah knew where his hope came from. That’s why he never let the political turmoil in his lifetime bring him down. That’s why he was able to maintain perfect peace inspire of persecution. The world couldn’t touch him because he didn’t belong to it. He knew where he was going and that this was all going away one day.

Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed by. 

-- Isaiah 26:20