Isaiah 5

In the first four chapters of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet lays out why the Assyrian army invading Judah was an instrument God was using to judge His people. There were spiritual undertones to the invasion. The Jewish people had walked away from their Creator and ignored His commands, and He was punishing them for their rebellion, just as He promised when He initially gave them the Promised Land.

It was a harsh punishment, which is why Isaiah made a point to remind his people about the goodness of God in spite of what was happening around them. To further illustrate that point, he introduces the parable of the vineyard. Like Jesus, he understood that people could see things more clearly when a new context was put around a familiar story:

I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower in it and cut out a winepress as well. Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit.

- Isaiah 5:1-2 

As Isaiah goes on to explain, Judah is the vineyard, the Promised Land is the fertile hillside, and God is the one who planted it. The good grapes were righteousness, and the bad fruit was sin. God’s creation had gone bad so He was going to tear it up and start over:

Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall and it will be trampled.

- Isaiah 5:4 

The key to understanding this parable is to look it at from the point of view of the vines. Why should they have to produce good fruit? Don’t they have the right to do what they want? Who is God to tell them what is or is not bad fruit?

The answer to those questions is where Christianity conflicts with the way most Americans view the world. Our culture places a huge emphasis on independence. No one can tell us what to do or what to think. We determine the course of our own lives. Anthony Kennedy, the recently retired Supreme Court justice, summed it up in one of his most famous opinions:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

For the most part, God agrees with Kennedy. He doesn’t make us obey Him. He has given us the gift of free will. We are free to believe anything that we want about this world. The difference is that He doesn’t leave open the question of what the right answer is.

It comes back to first principles. If the universe is the product of random chance, and humans are nothing more than self-aware animals with the same value as any other creature on Earth, than there is no point to our brief existence other than what we make of it. Conversely, if the universe has a Creator, and human beings are created in His image, than the point of our lives is to know and experience Him. If you start with that belief, than good and evil are not things we can define for ourselves.

“Woe to those who quarrel with their Maker, those who are nothing but potsherds among the potsherds on the ground. Does the clay say to the potter, ‘What are you making?’ Does your work say, ‘The potter has no hands?’

This is what the Lord says -- the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Concerning the things to come, do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands?

It is I who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshalled their starry hosts.

- Isaiah 45:9-12 

I have lived both sides of this question. I didn’t grow up as a Christian. My parents raised me in the Unitarian Universalist church. The UU church is the combination of two radical branches of the Protestant Revolution -- The Unitarians believed in the unity of God (i.e. not the Trinity and that therefore Jesus was just a human being) while the Universalists believed that God would save all of mankind regardless of whether or not they believed in Jesus. They eventually merged into a religion whose primary tenet is that we are free to believe anything as long as our beliefs don’t harm anyone else. It is a church for people who want church without religion.

We took comparative religion classes in Sunday School. The New York Times was our Bible. This was our version of the Lord’s Prayer:

Love is the doctrine of our church.
The quest for truth is its sacrament. [Emphasis added]
And service is its prayer.
To dwell together in peace.
To seek knowledge in freedom.
To serve humanity in fellowship.
Thus do we declare. 

The quest for truth is like the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. The implication of searching for something is that you haven’t already found it. Just like the Founding Fathers couldn’t promise happiness to the citizens of their new nation, the UU church fathers didn’t promise truth to their parishioners.

In my experience, what happens when people are left to search for meaning in the world is that they find it other people. Everyone needs answers about themselves and their purpose in life. We all need to identify as something. Either we get that answer from a supernatural belief system or we look for one in the natural world. Without God, the best way to know how to think about myself is to see what other people think of me.

Here's the problem. If you get your identity from what other people think of you, then impressing those people becomes the most important thing in your life. The result is that nothing you do matters unless other people see you doing it:

Most Americans are Unitarian Universalists. They just don't know it. The actual religion, with its buildings, doctrines, and ministers, is a vestigial structure. (The classic example is the appendix, an organ that still exists within our bodies even though it no longer serves its original purpose.) That's the reason why only 12.5% of kids raised in the UU church stay in as adults. The religion already exists all around them. It is the default option in American life. Going on Sundays isn't necessary to believe in it.

The only way to actually leave is to opt out and join a different religion, one that gives answers about the world and about your own identity that exist outside of what other people think about you. In my experience, the most powerful part of becoming a Christian is learning that my identity comes God. I don’t have to impress anyone. I have value beyond my place in society. God loves me and died for me on the cross.

The flip side is that He decides what is right and wrong, not me. I don’t have all the answers. No Christian does. Those answers have been handed down to us for thousands of years. The choice that everyone is given in this life is to either believe in an objective Truth or go searching for a subjective one.

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

- John 18:33-34 

Just because you don’t believe in Good and Evil doesn’t mean those things don’t exist. That’s what Isaiah was trying to tell his people all those years ago. There is objectively good and bad fruit in this world. Go to a supermarket if you don’t believe me. No one is going to plant a vineyard and live with bad fruit forever. It may seem cruel to the vines to tear them out of the ground. But they were created for a reason.

Isaiah 4

The Book of Isaiah is set during an apocalyptic invasion of Judah, the southern of the two Jewish kingdoms in the ancient Middle East. Israel, the northern kingdom, had already been conquered by Assyria and its seemingly invincible military. Now the Assyrian army was marching towards Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, and threatening to do the same thing. Isaiah and the people of Judah were left to grapple with the spiritual implications of their military defeats. Why had God abandoned them?

Isaiah had an ugly answer: God turned away from His people because they turned away from Him. He lead the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt hundreds of years before and gave them land in Canaan (modern-day Israel) for two interconnected reasons:

1. To create a godly kingdom that spread the love of God to the rest of the world. 

2. To punish the previous inhabitants of Canaan for their crimes against their neighbors and God.

But God’s people did not live up to their end of the bargain. By Isaiah’s time, they had split into two warring kingdoms that were just as evil as their neighbors. Now, as a punishment, the same things they had done to the Canaanites were being done to them by the Assyrians.

It could not have been an easy message to deliver. The Assyrians were known for the savage way they treated their enemies. The people of Israel had been massacred and their survivors resettled hundreds of miles across the desert. It would have been easy for the people of Judah to conclude that God was harsh and uncaring. They would have had many of the same questions that modern audiences have about a God who consigns people to Hell.

Isaiah had to make a key distinction. Just because God judges people doesn’t mean that He enjoys doing it. Judgment is not an end in and of itself. There is a greater purpose behind it. God wanted to bless the Jewish people, not punish them. Isaiah made that point over and over again.

The Book of Isaiah is still hopeful despite the tragedy surrounding it. Isaiah never lost his faith. He believed in the goodness of God, and always balanced the good with the bad in his writing. In the same breathe that he warned about the coming judgment of God, he also pointed past it to the day when his people would be restored to fellowship with their Creator:

In that day the branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors of Israel. Those who are left in Zion, who remain in Jerusalem, will be called holy, all who are recorded among the living in Jerusalem. The Lord will wash away the filth of the women of Zion; he will cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire.

Then the Lord will create over all of Mount Zion and over those who assemble there a cloud of smoke by day and a glow of flaming fire by night; over everything the glory will be a canopy. It will be a shelter and shade from the heat of the day, and a refuge and hiding place from the storm and the rain.

- Isaiah 4:2-6 

For Isaiah, any understanding of God started with what He had done in the past. After all, God had shown his goodness to the Jewish people many times before. When Isaiah talks about a cloud of smoke that will cover Israel like a canopy, he is referencing a story from their exodus from Egypt:

By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way any by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or by night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.

- Exodus 13:21-22 

The exodus was a migration of hundreds of thousands across an inhospitable desert. People of all ages made the journey. It wasn’t just military-aged men. It was the very old and the very young, along with pregnant and nursing mothers. The Jews should not have been able to make it to the Promised Land, much less have the strength to conquer when they did. The only reason they survived is because God literally guided them along the way.

This is where the Old Testament loses modern readers. A pillar of smoke and fire sounds more like science fiction than history.

But we believe far more insane things about the world than that. The latest research on string theory and the multiverse is wilder than anything you will read in the Bible. There are many scientists who believe that we are living in a computer-generated simulation, which begs the obvious questions of who is running the simulation and whether they left us any guidance for how they want us to live in the world they created.

Humans pretend that we understand the universe because we have invented a few gadgets when we really don’t have much of a grasp on the true nature of reality. Maybe that will change if scientists discover the elusive Theory of Everything. Or maybe that answer will just create a hundred more questions.

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

- 1 Corinthians 13:12 

Here is one thing we do know. The survival of the Jewish people was not guaranteed when Isaiah was preaching. It was a miracle they survived the Assyrian invasion, much less that they are still around thousands of years later. But Isaiah never doubted they would, even when all the evidence pointed to their impending doom.

Isaiah didn't just believe in God. He believed that He was good. That is the biggest problem most people have with faith.

It can be hard to reconcile God's judgment with His mercy. There is so much evil and suffering in the world. It is hard enough to get through life in one piece without having to worry about being judged at the end by a God who created our cruel and seemingly arbitrary existence in the first place. 

That conflict is the underlying premise of the TV show The Good Place. In season 3, the characters realize that no human being has made it to “the good place” (aka heaven) in over 500 years because the interconnected nature of modern life makes it impossible for the good we do to outweigh the bad. None of the characters are Christians. If they were, they wouldn’t be shocked to learn that we are all sinners living in a fallen world:



There is a lot of truth to the point that Michael (played by Ten Danson) makes. It is impossible for any of us to earn our own salvation. That is why God made another way.

There are hints sprinkled throughout the Book of Isaiah, which was written 700 years before the birth of Jesus, about what was to come. God, not Man, would earn salvation for all:

The Lord looked and was displeased that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, he was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm achieved salvation for him, and his own righteousness sustained him.

- Isaiah 59:18-19

God came down to the world that He created and assumed human form so that He could live the sinless life that none of us could. He then sacrificed His life so that He could pay the punishment for our sins.

That is the beauty of the gospel. We don’t have to be like the people on The Good Place, endlessly striving for a perfect life forever outside of our grasp. We don’t have to rack up a bunch of points to be saved. We just have to trust someone else to do it for us.

It's far easier for us to accept this message than for the people in Isaiah's time. They didn't know what was coming. All they had were hints. They just had to trust that God was ultimately working for their good even when they couldn't understand how. We, on the other hand, are living on the other side of the most important event in human history. Jesus already came. He already died, and already rose again. To paraphrase Jay-Z, he's already home.

God has reached out His hand to save us. We just have to take it. Mercy triumphed over judgment at the cross. That is the hope that we have to hold onto no matter what happens to us in this life.

Sing the praises of the Lord, you his faithful people; praise his holy name. For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but joy comes in the morning.

- Psalm 30:4-5