Isaiah 35

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 

The relationship between God’s anger and favor is one of the main themes of the Book of Isaiah. The prophet spends a lot of time talking about the coming judgment, both for his country and the entire world. But he also talks about the other side of that judgment. 

All the pain and suffering in this world will be redeemed. God and His people will live together and return creation to the paradise that it was always supposed to be. The judgment of Chapter 34 is followed by the celebration of Chapter 35: 

The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. 

The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God. 

— Isaiah 35:1-2 

The key is that God is the one who would make it happen. The people of Judah and Israel couldn’t do it on their own. The story of the Old Testament is them partnering with God and failing. They weren’t able to live by His commands. They started pursuing their goals instead of His. Things then went horribly wrong, like they always do once that happens. 

The judgment they experience in the Book of Isaiah is the direct result. It would be hard. But they would survive. That is the promise that Isaiah makes to them, over and over again. It couldn't have been easy to believe given how hopeless their situation seemed. 

But in the end, God would save them. Not because they are good but because He is. They didn’t have to put their hope in themselves. All they had to do was hold on and wait: 

Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you.” 

— Isaiah 35:3-4 

The first step in receiving help is accepting that you need it. It was easy for Isaiah’s people to forget that. Help from an unseen God, especially when it came attached to a bunch of commands, didn’t seem necessary. It was easier for them to believe in chariots and foreign alliances. They could see those. 

The Assyrian invasion was a painful reminder of how powerless they actually were. The Assyrians casually destroyed their armies and laughed at their alliances. Judah was a bug they crushed without giving it a second thought. The only thing left to do at that point was to return to God. 

The same basic principle holds true for us, almost 3,000 years later. We all have feeble hands, knees that give way, and fearful hearts. It just may not be obvious when everything is going well. It’s only when times are tough that we realize how much we can’t control. 

My experience over the last few months has brought that home to me. I’m 33 and I was just diagnosed with cancer. The doctors don’t know why I had the gene mutation that caused it, how I will respond to chemotherapy, or how long I would stay in remission if the chemo does work. 

There's still so much that we don't know about cancer, and that we never can. Doctors don't go "you only have X months to live" when they diagnose you with terminal cancer. That's only in movies. They can't actually predict their future. So they just give you the numbers on likely outcomes and let you figure it out from there. 

In “The Emperor of All Maladies”, Siddhartha Mukherjee finds the earliest recorded case of cancer in human history in a medical document written by Imhotep, the royal physician of one of the Egyptian Pharoahs, around 2,500 B.C. It was about 1,800 years before the events of the Book of Isaiah. Treatment has progressed by leaps and bounds since, but I’m still in the same boat as the unknown cancer victim that he wrote about. I'm at the mercy of a disease that we don't really understand, hoping for a miracle to save me. 

That makes me no different than anyone else. When you have a health crisis in a public position, you get a small taste of the pain in the world. I’ve talked to people with all kinds of cancer, and people who have buried their spouses, or their kids. 
It's a little overwhelming. There’s an ocean of suffering out there that is easy to miss unless you or someone you love is part of it. 

The one person who didn’t miss it was Jesus. It was all brought right to him: 

When they heard about all Jesus was doing, many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon. Because of the crowd he told his disciples to have a small boat from crowding him. For he had healed many, so that those with diseases were pushing forward to touch him. 

— Mark 3:8-10 

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he had and his disciples were not even able to eat. 

— Mark 3:20 

There are so many stories in the Gospels about Jesus going to do something, only to be interrupted by massive crowds of people who needed his help. They had been sick or blind or possessed for years. Or their whole lives. Or their kids were dying. And they heard that this man might be able to cure them. So they dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to see him. 

                                                                        CC: SongSimian 

They weren’t willing to take no for an answer:

Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet.

The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. “First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 

“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  


Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left you daughter.” 

— Mark 7:25-29 

There were times where Jesus didn’t want to heal. He was a man just as much as he was God. He got worn out. He needed a break sometimes. In this passage, he leaves the Jewish settlements and heads to the Gentile city of Tyre, where he meets a woman who wants him to heal her daughter. He tells her that his mission is to “the children” (i.e. the Jews) and that it wouldn’t be right to give their “bread” (his healing) to the “dogs” (Gentiles). 

But she has no time for that. Her need is too urgent. Pride will not get in the way. She tells him that she will take the children's “crumbs”.

We will all be in her shoes at some point. Life is hard. It humbles all of us. Everyone is going through something, even if it’s not always obvious on the outside. 

The hope isn’t that all the pain and suffering will go away tomorrow. It’s that it will ultimately be redeemed by God.

Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth like a wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand will become a pool, and the thirst ground bubbling springs. In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reads and papyrus will grow. 

 But only the redeemed will walk there, and those the Lord has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away. 

— Isaiah 35:6-10

The Long Night of the Soul

I wrote a piece at The Ringer about my cancer diagnosis, confronting my own mortality, and how faith has helped along the way.

Isaiah 34

The war between Assyria and Judah wasn’t a battle of good vs. evil. It’s not that the Assyrians weren’t doing evil things. Burning Judah to the ground and selling its people into slavery obviously qualifies. It was what they had done to most of the ancient Middle East. 

But fighting them didn’t necessarily make the people of Judah good. They had done plenty of horrible things of their own. Conflicts between two nations are rarely binary. Just because one side is bad doesn’t make the other good. It’s more likely that both are bad. 

That’s why Isaiah condemned both sides during the war. There was no reason for God to help either. And that same principle could be extended to all mankind: 

Come near, you nations, and listen; pay attention, you peoples! Let the earth hear, and all that is in it, the world, and all that comes out of it! 

The Lord is angry with all nations; his wrath is on all their armies. He will totally destroy them, he will give them over to slaughter. 

 -- Isaiah 34:1-2 

God is an impartial judge. He treats everyone the same. That’s what is often missed in the Old Testament. Helping His people establish a nation in the Promised Land was as much about taking the land from other people as it was giving it to them. The Philistines, Canaanites, and other warring tribes of the region had committed grave crimes against their neighbors and their own people. Israel was a tool that God used to bring them to justice. 

But the same standard applied to them, as well. God warned them repeatedly about what would happen if they acted like the people they had replaced. The Promised Land was a privilege, not a right. It could be taken away as easily as it had been given. 

In 750 BC, about 400 years after the exodus from Egypt, God raised up a shepherd named Amos as a prophet to Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms. Amos was one of the first of the Old Testament prophets. The heart of his message would be repeated by Isaiah a few decades later, and by their successors again and again over the next few centuries: 

There are those who hate the one who upholds justice in court and detests the one who tells the truth. You levy a straw tax on the poor and impose a tax on their grain. 

Therefore, though you have built stone mansions, you will not live in them; though you have planted lush vineyards, you will not drink their wine.  

For I know how many are your offenses and how great are your sins. 

 -- Amos 5:10-12 

In 722 BC, Assyria conquered Israel and deported the survivors. God used Assyria to punish Israel just as He had used Israel to punish the Canaanites and Philistines. Then history repeated itself. The Assyrians, like the Israelites, oppressed their neighbors and created an unjust society. So He raised up the Babylonians, who did the same things as the Assyrians and were punished in turn by the Persians. That cycle has continued ever since, from the Persians to the Greeks and Romans all the way to the British and American empires. 

It’s easy to be depressed when you study history. Humans never change. We have been killing and oppressing each other for as long as we have been around. Nor do we show any signs of stopping. But God has promised that the cycle will not go on forever. There will come a time where He will stop using nations to judge each other, and will step into history and judge them Himself: 

All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree. 

-- Isaiah 34:4 

That promise is also a warning to Christians about how we should relate to the nations of this world, even our own. If God is angry with all nations, the obvious implication is that there are no righteous ones. Putting your faith in any of them is foolish. 

American Christians have long placed our faith in this country. We trace our roots to the Puritans, who founded an explicitly Christian government for Christian people. And even as we have moved beyond those roots, we still believe that we are a force for good in the world. Americans believe that all of history has been building to the moment where the US and its system of government dominate the globe. It’s a progressive view of history that says we will continue progressing to even greater heights as long as we stay true to our ideals. 

That’s why every presidential election becomes a titanic battle to determine the moral character of our nation. We have spent the last four years being told that everything will go back to normal once Trump is gone. But the sad reality is that normal is really bad. Most of the evil things that America does won’t stop regardless of who is in the White House. 

The War in Yemen is a perfect example. Saudi Arabia, with the full backing of the U.S. government, intervened in their civil war in 2015, and began a vicious military campaign that has lasted for five years and killed hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a human rights catastrophe that we are ultimately responsible for. The Saudis are using our weapons with a military that we built for them. This policy began under Obama, continued under Trump, and will likely keep going under Biden. Read about the history of American foreign policy and you will see this kind of thing happens all the time. 

In "The Jakarta Method", Vincent Bevins describes how the U.S. helped the Indonesian military engineer a coup of a Communist-led government in the 1950s, kill almost a million people, and then export that process all over the world during the Cold War. It really isn't that surprising when you think about it. A battle for worldwide domination tends to be a race to the bottom. Anything you do can be justified by the fact that the other side is doing it. 

That's why the U.S. spends so much time talking about how evil our enemies are, whether it was the Nazis in World War II, the Soviets in the Cold War, or Vladimir Putin in modern times. And it's not that any of them would have been better if they had our level of global influence. It’s that no nation can responsibly wield that kind of overwhelming power. That’s why God condemned superpowers so strongly in the Book of Isaiah. 

America is the Assyria of our day. We spend more money on our military than every other major nation combined. The military is the one institution in our society we still have faith in. There's no question that we have used it to defeat a lot of evil nations. But just because our enemies are bad doesn't make us good. 

So how should American Christians respond beyond not blindly putting our faith in America? The Bible gives us a fairly relevant historical model. The first Christians lived primarily in the Roman Empire, which like the U.S., ruled most of the known world, either directly or indirectly. And Rome was far more hostile to the faith than America ever has been.

One of the interesting things about the letters in the New Testament, which were written in the first century AD, is how little they have to say about politics. Paul wrote a letter to believers in Rome, while both he and Peter wrote numerous letters from Rome. Yet none ever talked about who was a good or bad Emperor, much less overthrowing a tyrannical system of government that forced people to worship the Emperor as a god. 

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God had established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do will bring judgment on themselves.

For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you.

-- Romans 13:1-3

These are some of the most challenging verses in the Bible for American Christians who were raised to believe that rebelling against the British was one of the most noble acts in human history. Paul had every reason to fight the Romans. They imprisoned and ultimately killed him for preaching the gospel. The same thing happened to Peter. Yet his advice was the same:

Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing god you should put to silence the ignorance of foolish people. Live as people who are free, not using your freedom as cover-up for evil, but living as servants of God. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.

-- 1 Peter 2:13-17

What both Peter and Paul understood was that justice wasn't in their hands. God would punish the Romans for their crimes, just as he would punish everyone else. They were less concerned about what other people did to them than what they did to other people. They knew that their sins had to be forgiven on the cross. And they were grateful that they were. So they spent the rest of their lives telling other people the good news instead of playing the game of thrones. 

The same lessons apply to us. America is a country with a lot of power, just like Rome and Assyria. And it will continue to misuse that power, just like every other empire before it. Christians aren't asked to wield power in this world. We are here to tell people that this world won't last forever, and that there will be justice for everything that happens in it.