Isaiah 29

Isaiah called everything before it happened. If you read the Book of Isaiah in 700 BC, you would have been prepared for every major geopolitical event in the ancient Middle East over the next few hundred years, as well as the way Christianity would change the world.

But few of his peers listened. Isaiah explained why in Chapter 29: 

The Lord has brought over you a deep sleep; He has sealed your eyes (the prophets); he has covered your heads (the seers). 

For you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll. And if you give the scroll to someone who can read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I can’t; it is sealed.” 

Or if you give the scroll to someone who cannot read, and say, “Read this, please”, they will answer, “I don’t know how to read.” 

— Isaiah 29:10-12 

According to Isaiah, God seals the minds of non-believers to prevent them from knowing the truth. The people of Judah had turned away from God, ignoring His commands and living by their own rules. This was their punishment: 

He said, “Go and tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; Be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the hearts of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their ears, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” 

— Isaiah 6:9-10 

So why say anything at all? Because what Isaiah was saying wasn’t for their benefit. It was all for the people who came after them who would be able to understand his prophecies with the benefit of hindsight. God was calling His own shot. He was leaving the evidence of His hand in world events for anyone who cared enough to investigate: 

 “Tell us, you idols, what is going to happen. Tell us what the former things were, so that we may consider them and know their final outcome. Or declare us to the things that come, tell us what the future holds, so that we may know that you are gods.” 

— Isaiah 41:22-23 

But people who don’t want to believe in God can always find ways to ignore what is right in front of them. There’s no question that the Book of Isaiah contains predictions of future events that no mortal human being could have made on their own. Even the historical scholarship recognizes that. But rather than acknowledge the hand of God in its creation, they created a byzantine conspiracy theory where several Isaiahs (if not dozens) worked together over hundreds of years to falsify a work of “prophesy”. 

And what’s their proof? The fact that no one living in Judah in 700 BC should have been able to so accurately describe what would happen in Babylon and Persia in 500 BC! In other words, they are assuming their own conclusions and calling it science. 

Science is the foundation of the way Americans understand the world. We don’t believe anything that isn’t first proven in a scientific paper. That’s why there are so many studies that try to prove things that used to be called “common sense.” You aren’t allowed to draw conclusions from your lived experience, or benefit from the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of human society. Those people weren’t “modern”. They hadn’t been Enlightened yet. Where were their iPhones!? 

But the deeper mysteries of the human condition cannot be answered by the scientific method. Why do we exist? How should we live our lives? And what happens to us after we die? 

 

There is no way to design a controlled experiment in a lab to prove or not prove the existence of God. It's the same with any other metaphysical claim. That is why most Americans don't really have firm religious beliefs. They will tell you they believe in love or progress or that they are spiritual but not religious or that they are open-minded about supernatural claims. 

The problem is that there are still some things you have to take on faith. Human beings have to live by first principles because the world is too complicated for us to understand without them:

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked in child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror [emphasis added]; 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 13:10-12 

There's a reason that these are the some of the first lines in the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident [emphasis added], that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 

Imagine trying to design a scientific experiment to prove whether or not all men are created equal. It's absurd. That's not something you can prove. You just accept that it's true and work from there. It's the same thing with God. 

Christianity is like any other belief system. It has a lot of claims that have to be taken on faith. Either Jesus rose from the grave or he didn’t. None of us were there to say what actually happened. Either his sacrifice on the cross was an adequate substitute for our sins or it wasn’t. None of us can die and report back. There is a veil that stands between us and true knowledge of the universe. Either it will be broken when we die or it won’t.

Modern skeptics have made fun of some of those unfalsifiable claims by creating a religion they call The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Their point is that you can't prove or disprove the existence of a FSM that exists in space anymore than you can the Christian God.

It's a fair point. There's nothing stopping anyone from believing in a spaghetti monster. But it doesn't prove quite as much as they think. 

Choosing to believe in something means choosing to accept its assumptions about the world. So instead of asking someone to disprove a flying spaghetti monster, you have to ask yourself what it means to believe in it. What does it tell us about the world? What does it say about how we should live our lives? In other words -- what are its first principles? 

This is the idea behind the analogy of the "red pill" and the "blue pill" in The Matrix. Taking a "pill" is like accepting the first principles of a belief system. You just swallow them on faith and they change the way you look at the world around you.

There's a certain point on the road to God where you have to walk by faith instead of sight. It's only when you choose to believe in God that everything else makes sense. But you have to make that choice with your heart, not your head. You have to swallow the pill and see where it takes you. That's too much for modern people who think they can figure out the world on their own. They don't need to believe in fairy tales. They don't have to accept the limitations of the human condition.

That's what Isaiah means when he says non-believers are "blinded" from the truth. They made the wrong choice about what to believe. Do that and you might just end up worshipping spaghetti: 

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal human beings and birds and animals and reptiles.

- Romans 1:21-23