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. 

Isaiah 33

Isaiah asked a lot of his people. Their country was being devastated by the Assyrian army, the Nazis of their day. And they weren’t even supposed to get help from their bigger and more powerful neighbors, who were gearing up for their own war against Assyria. 

He wasn’t quite saying to turn the other cheek. The Assyrians still had to be punished for their crimes: 

Woe to you who plunder, though you have not been plundered; And you who deal treacherously, though they have not dealt treacherously with you! 

When you cease plundering, you will be plundered; When you make an end of dealing treacherously, they will deal treacherously with you. 

-- Isaiah 33:1-2 

The people of Judah, along with their other victims, would be avenged. But they would not be the ones to do it. That task fell to God:

“Now will I arise,” says the Lord. “Now will I be exalted; now will I be lifted up. You conceive chaff, you give birth to straw; your breath is a fire that consumes you. The people will be burned to ashes; like cut thornbushes they will be set ablaze.” 

-- Isaiah 33:10-12 

Isaiah’s message went hand in hand with his calls for people to put their faith in God to get them through the crisis. They were not supposed to do anything. Their salvation was not in their own hands.

The bigger issue was their own lack of faith. The Jewish people had gone their own way over the previous century, creating an unjust society that oppressed the poor and ignored every commandment that God had given them. That was the real source of their problems. 

It would have been a difficult message to hear. No one wants to believe they are ultimately responsible for their own misfortune. The more natural reaction would have been to focus on what had been done to them and vow revenge. 

There was an obvious boogeyman. The Assyrians were led by a ruthless king named Sennacherib. He ran the imperial bureaucracy for his father Sargon II until his death on the battlefield in 705 BC. The problem for Sennacherib was that he had not campaigned himself, and military service was how Assyrian kings gained legitimacy. So he had a hard time controlling their massive empire when he took over. Babylon, their most important territory, instantly revolted. 

Sennacherib’s response was doubling down even further on violence and cruelty, which is saying something given Assyria’s history. Sargon II had conquered Israel, the northern of the two Jewish kingdoms in the ancient Middle East, in 722 BC, and ethnically cleansed the region. Sennacherib showed even less mercy when he fought his way to the gates of Babylon. His army sacked the city and killed tens of thousands of people. They did the same thing in their march towards Jerusalem in 701 BC. Judah, like Israel before it, looked doomed. 

It all worked out in the end, exactly as Isaiah promised. The Assyrians put Jerusalem under siege, but never conquered it. Their army mysteriously withdrew rather than attack. The city was saved. So was the nation of Judah, as well as the Jewish people. 

But the Assyrian Empire had not been destroyed. They had plenty more armies, and still controlled most of the known world. Sennacherib sat on the throne in their capital city of Nineveh like nothing had happened. One of the reasons why we know the story told in the Book of Isaiah is true are the monuments that he built, which listed Jerusalem among the huge number of cities that he besieged, but not on the list of ones that he captured. The failed campaign was a footnote in the history of the Assyrian Empire. Justice had not really been served. 

The main characters in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove had to deal with the same issue. It tells the story of a late 19th century cattle drive from Texas to Montana led by two aging sheriffs. A woman (Lorena) is abducted from their party by a group of bandits. One of the sheriffs (Gus) rescues her in a dramatic firefight, but the leader of the bandits (Blue Duck) escapes. Gus decides to let him go rather than chasing him through the countryside: 

“Son, this is a sad thing,” said Gus. “Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don’t you go attempting vengeance. You’ve got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I’ll kill him. But if I don’t, somebody else will. He’s big and mean, but sooner or later he’ll meet somebody bigger and meaner. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he’ll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he’ll just get old and die. Don’t be trying to give back pain for pain. You can’t get even measures in business like this.” 

His decision fits the broader themes of the book. The plot twists and turns and goes in unexpected directions. It doesn’t end when the cattle drive does. Not every crisis is resolved. Bad guys get away. The good guys don’t always “win”. 

The more important question in that situation was what “winning” would even mean. Lorena was in no shape for a manhunt, while Gus was needed by his friends back on the cattle drive. There was no guarantee that he would find Blue Duck, or that he would capture him if he did. The odds were that he would be throwing away the lives of a lot of people for nothing. 

What Gus says perfectly sums up the Christian perspective on revenge. We know that we live in a fallen world that will not be made whole until Jesus returns. There is no such thing as perfect justice on this side of eternity. But the good news is there is another side. God has promised us that every wrong will be addressed. We don’t have to live our lives consumed by vengeance. We can let things slide. After all, that’s what God did for us. 

Life is hard, and it comes in unexpected ways. Blue Duck is captured in Lonesome Dove, years after the cattle drive is over. Gus and his friends had nothing to do with it. There was just only so long that he could get away with his life of banditry before it caught up with him. 

Sennacherib didn’t escape justice, either. He fought numerous wars in the years after his failed siege of Jerusalem, extending the reach of the Assyrian Empire even further and destroying many civilizations in its path. The promise of vengeance that Isaiah had given him was probably the furthest thing from his mind when it finally happened in 681 BC: 

One day, while [Sennacherib] was worshiping in the temple of his god Nisrok, his sons Adrammelek and Sharezer killed him with the sword, and they escaped to the land of Ararat. And Esarhaddon his son succeeded him as king.

-- Isaiah 37:38

There aren't many worse ways to go than being murdered by your own children. But death is death even in the most pleasant circumstances. There's only so much time we are given in this world, and we all have to stand before God when we die. How we get there doesn't really matter all that much. 

There's no need for revenge. Life is hard enough as it is.

Isaiah 32

Isaiah knew he would be ignored. It was one of the first things God told him after he became a prophet:

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

- Isaiah 6:9-10 

The people he was talking to wouldn’t understand him. Not because they were deaf or blind, but because they were spiritually blind. Our eyes filter an overwhelming amount of sensory information from the world around us and turn it into something our brains can understand. We only “see” a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s the same thing with our brains and the way they filter our experiences. 

The world is too complicated to understand without a filter. That filter can be religious, societal, or cultural, or some combination of all three. Everyone takes things on faith, even if those things aren’t spiritual claims. The average American is taught to believe that science has all the answers, and that supernatural explanations are relics from our unenlightened past. 

Most people have not actually investigated the nature of the universe for themselves. Where would they even start? They have just been taught how to think about it from a young age, and assume that everyone else thinks similarly, and that the ones who don’t are ignorant. 

In his famous (or at least famous in unbearably pretentious circles) commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, David Foster Wallace tells a story about a religious person and an atheist: 

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” 

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says,” After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple of Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to the camp.” 

Both interpretations could be right. Maybe it was luck that some Eskimos were there to save the atheist’s life. Or maybe God heard his prayer and sent them. There’s no way to “prove” either answer. 

The same thing is true for the events of the Book of Isaiah. Most historians believe some sort of plague struck the Assyrian army when it was besieging Jerusalem and forced them to withdraw, saving the city. Isaiah believed that it was an angel using a plague to save Jerusalem. 

Each interpret events through their particular worldviews. Christians have to remember that people with a more secular worldview will never “see” the same things as us. So the only way to change their mind is to change their worldview. Everything else is a waste of time. 

God allowed people to make up their own mind when Jesus came to Earth the first time. That will not be the case when he returns. The promise that Isaiah makes in Chapter 32 is quite different from what God tells him in Chapter 6: 

See, a king will reign in righteousness and rulers will rule with justice. 

Each one will be like a shelter from the wind and a refuge from the storm, like streams of water in the desert and the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. 

Then the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed, and the ears of those who hear will listen. 

-- Isaiah 32:1-3 

Our job, until that happens, is to help people open their eyes. It’s not to get angry about their blindness. 

Christianity is not about a series of rituals and behaviors that will lead to a better life on Earth. That’s part of it, but it’s not the main thing. Nor is it about “traditional values” or a certain way you have to live your life. None of that stuff will save you. It will not make you a righteous person, or holy before a righteous God. Having a couple of kids, a spouse, a good job, and a white picket fence is not a ticket into the kingdom of heaven. Voting for a particular party or giving all your money to charity or devoting your life to good works isn’t one, either. 

The Jewish religious leaders in Jesus’ day devoted their lives learning the Law that God gave to Moses. They knew it inside and out and made their people follow it down to the letter. They were as righteous and holy as any men who ever lived. But that’s a low bar to clear in comparison to the standard of God: 

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbled at just one point is guilty of adultery. [emphasis added] For he who said, “You shall not commit adultery,” also said, “You shall not murder.” 

If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment. 

- James 2:10-13 

The good news of Christianity isn’t that there’s a long list of rules that you have to follow to be a good person. The rules by themselves will not save you. They aren’t that important in the big picture. They are the end products, not the cause, of Christian life. 

The good news is that the Creator of the universe took on human flesh and walked among us for a short period of time in ancient Israel 2,000 years ago. Then he was killed and rose from the dead. Now we have the chance to follow him and to spread that good news to the rest of the world. 

If you don’t make that good news the foundation of your life, and your identity, then all of the other stuff doesn’t matter. You might as well not do it all. You are better off doing whatever you want and not following any rules than trying to be a Christian without a relationship to Christ. Both paths are equally fruitless. It’s just more obvious with the former than the latter. 

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” 

-- Matthew 7:21-23 

Pat Riley, who has won titles as a player, coach, and general manager in a more than 50-year career in the NBA, coined a famous saying when talking about the challenges of maintaining success -- "Keep the main thing, the main thing". Winning a title creates opportunities for everyone involved and turns star players into celebrities. But all those opportunities ultimately stem from winning basketball games. So people that lose focus on the main thing will ultimately lose everything else, too. 

 

That's why Isaiah always came back to preaching repentance and belief in God. He had many specific pieces of advice to his people, like telling them not to trust in foreign militaries to save them against the Assyrians, but he knew that it would all be ignored if there wasn't change in their hearts. Their spiritual rebellion against God was the ultimate cause of their problems, as well as their only chance of a solution to them. It does not good to point out all the evil things happening right in front of someone if they can't even see them. 

We are dealing with the same issues almost 3,000 years later. The difference is that Isaiah was pointing his people to the coming of the Messiah. We, on the other hand, are lucky enough to be living on the other side of that. 

The main thing in Christianity is Jesus. The religion is built around his message and what he did in his time on Earth. The rest of it won't make sense unless people learn to follow him. That's the only way that people will ever be able to open their eyes.

Isaiah 31

The people of Judah had a choice. The Assyrian Empire was conquering every country in its path. They were next. 

Isaiah wanted them to repent and trust in God for protection. They put their faith in an alliance with Egypt instead: 

Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in the multitude of their chariots and in the great strength of their horsemen, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel, or seek help from the Lord. 

 -- Isaiah 31:1 

But Egypt couldn’t actually help. They were an aging empire living on past glory. Their armies had little chance against the Assyrians. This is how the Assyrian general who led the invasion of Judah described them: 

Look, I know you are depending on Egypt, the splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it! Such is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who depend on him. 

-- Isaiah 36:6 

But help from the Egyptians was at least something. They had horsemen and chariots. It was tangible. Isaiah, on the other hand, was telling them to hope in an unseen God. 

His advice was in line with the rest of the Old Testament. God prohibited His people from having chariots after the exodus from Egypt. (Deuteronomy 17:16) It’s hard to overemphasize how crazy that would have seemed. It would be like a modern army not having tanks. 

It was the ultimate test of faith. Did they have the courage of their convictions? If they really believed they were following the all-knowing and all-powerful Creator of the universe, they should have no trouble believing they could win wars without the latest and greatest military technology. But, of course, all that stuff is easier to believe in theory than practice. 

Anyone can say they believe anything. Talk is cheap. It only means something when it is backed up by actions. 

That's why God often told His people to fight with one hand tied behind their back. Before a crucial battle in the initial conquest of the Promised Land, He had a general named Gideon repeatedly shrink the size of his army, from roughly 32,000 men all the way to 300: 

The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’” 

-- Judges 7:2 

A few hundred years after Gideon, a prophet named Elijah was battling a Jewish king who worshipped a god named Baal. He set up a challenge between himself and the prophets of Baal. Both sides would build an altar on a mountain and pray to see which would light on fire. But instead of trying to make the process easier, Elijah poured gallons of water on his altar. 

Photo: Fs999

The point was that God didn’t need help from human beings to accomplish His ends on the earth. He could do it on His own. When lightning struck and lit Elijah’s logs on fire, it was all the proof that he needed. 

Imagine being Elijah in that moment. Better yet, imagine watching him. Maybe you would have believed what he was saying or maybe you wouldn’t. But you couldn’t question whether or not he did. He was all-in. 

Isaiah was telling his people to do the same in their moment of crisis. The size of their military (and their military alliance) would not save them against Assyria. Only God could.

The military is a tool that believers have turned into an idol since the beginning of time. The greatest misunderstanding that people had about the coming of Jesus Christ was that he would lead an army against the enemies of God. The Jewish people were like Luke Skywalker heading to Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back, looking for a mighty warrior named Yoda to lead them. But he found a tiny hermit who spoke in riddles instead. 

  

Yoda: Help you I can. 

Luke: I don’t think so. I’m looking for a great warrior. 

Yoda: Great warrior? Wars not make one great. 

Jesus, like Yoda in the original Star Wars movies, never fought in any wars. He had no interest in armies. He came to Earth as a penniless carpenter and told people to submit to the Roman authorities and love their neighbors. He listened to God and trusted Him with the outcome. 

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 

Who, being in very nature, God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death -- even death on a cross! 

-- Philippians 2:5-8 

That is the relationship all believers should have with God. The people of Judah weren’t supposed to put their faith in military might like the Assyrians. They had the strongest army in human history at the time. They thought they would be safe if they crushed everyone around them. 

But it didn’t turn out that way. Assyria fell almost as quickly as it rose, taken down by an even bigger and more vicious empire in Babylon. They, in turn, fell to the Persians, who fell to the Greeks, who fell to the Romans. Empires come and go. Militaries crumble under their own weight. Chariots rust. So do tanks and aircraft carriers. 

The American military certainly seems invincible. We spend more money on our armed forces than every other country combined. We control more of the planet than any country ever has. Every politician, regardless of party, tells us our military is the greatest force for good the world has ever seen. The "defense" budget always goes up, no matter what else is happening in the world. 

The answer is always the same. Give more money to the military. Put more hope in the military. Listen to the leaders of the military. They have the answers. They will keep us safe. 

But that's not a Biblical response. No army is invincible, no matter its size and power. No soldier is, either. David killed Goliath with a slingshot. Gideon killed thousands of men with a few hundred because God was helping him. The other stuff didn’t matter. 

Isaiah told his people not to trust in Egypt. Only God could stop the Assyrian army. And that is exactly what happened. Almost 200,000 Assyrian troops marched to the gates of Jerusalem, only to be decimated in one night by a mysterious plague. 

"As a lion growls, a great lion over its prey -- and though a whole band of shepherds is called together against it, it is not frightened by their shouts or disturbed by their clamor -- so the Lord Almighty will come down to do battle on Mount Zion and on its heights.

Like birds hovering overhead, the Lord Almighty will shield Jerusalem; he will shield it and deliver it, he will 'pass over' it and will rescue it."

 -- Isaiah 31:4-5

Miracles happen all the time. The hand of God is everywhere in history, once you know where to look for it. There is never any reason to be afraid. Just believe what God has told us. 

What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all -- how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 

Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died -- more than that, who was raised to life -- is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 

-- Romans 8:31-35

Isaiah 30

Isaiah was an early warning system. God gave him glimpses of the future and told him to warn his people about what was coming. But they didn’t want to listen: 

For these are rebellions people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction. They say to the seers, “See no more visions!” and to the prophets, “Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!” 

-- Isaiah 30:9-11 

The problem was that shutting your eyes and closing your ears to a problem doesn’t make it go away. Asssyria was going to invade Judah, and there was nothing that could be done about it. It would be like a tiny Caribbean island going up against the U.S. Army. Isaiah wanted his people to admit their helplessness and turn to God. They turned to Egypt instead: 

“Woe to the obstinate children,” declares the Lord, “to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin; who go down to Egypt without consulting me; who look to help for Pharoah’s protection, to Egypt’s shade for refuge.” 

-- Isaiah 30:1-2 

Modern people would agree that the people of Isaiah’s days were children, but for very different reasons. Isaiah is saying they are children in comparison to God. We think they were children in comparison to us.

That is certainly true in some respects. A Jewish peasant in 700 BC would have no idea what to make of modern technology. We have learned a lot in the last 3,000 years. The modern worldview looks at history as the story of progress and enlightenment. Life has never been better, and it will keep on getting better as long as we believe in science. We don’t need to worship an imaginary man in the sky. We have become masters of our own lives. Worshipping the same God as Stone Age people seems needlessly primitive, if not barbaric. 

Modern man is the Imperial general in the first Star Wars movie, thumbing our nose at the idea that there is any limitation to our power: 

General: Any attack by the rebels against this station would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they have obtained. This station is now the ultimate power in the universe. I suggest we use it. 

Vader: Don’t be too proud of this technological terror that you have constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force. 

General: Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerous ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the rebel’s hidden fortress. 

Vader: I find your lack of faith disturbing. 

The religious worldview says that modern man is still a child, no matter how advanced our technology. And that our notion of progress is a myth because there are certain aspects of the human condition that cannot be overcome. 

Has science and technology made us happier? Or do we struggle with the same things that plagued our ancestors thousands of years ago? One of the interesting things about reading ancient history like the Book of Isaiah is that it gives you a better appreciation for how similar life was back then. They weren’t all living in huts. There were massive cities filled with people from all over the world by 700 BC. Their societies had been around for thousands of years. There were people who thought society was progressing to a better place, and those who thought things were going the wrong way. There were plagues and viruses that emerged out of nowhere. People were born, they got old, got sick, and they died. They looked for meaning in their lives, and wondered why they were here. 

I’m in a Slack channel at work for parents of small children. Two weeks ago, as the results of the presidential election came in, one of them asked what people told their kids about all the problems in society. How do you explain the existence of racism and evil and injustice in the world? 

There are three possible answers to that question: Believe in Man, believe in God, or believe in nothing. Modern man chooses the first. We say that things have gotten better from the past and will keep getting better from here. To quote Barack Obama, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. 

The hardest part of 2020 for most people (and really the last four years) is that it has shaken their faith in progress. Maybe things won’t get better. Maybe people will be as ignorant and selfish a century from now as they were three thousand years ago. One meme that popped up a lot during the election was what we would tell our grandkids about how we voted in 2020. But the reality is that our grandkids probably won’t care. You think they won’t have problems of their own in 2080? 

The religious worldview says the hearts of men do not change. We will never figure things out on our own. Our societies will always be riven with strife and conflict. People have been oppressing and killing each other since the beginning of time, and will keep on doing it until the end of time. Jesus said the poor will always be with us. (Mark 14:7). God has provided more than enough resources in this world. But we are incapable of splitting them up evenly. Politics will never give us all the answers. It only replaces old problems with new ones: 

“A conservative is one enamored of existing evils; a liberal wants to replace them with new ones.” -- Ambrose Bierce 

The skeptic who sees the human condition for what it really is but refuses to accept God will end up embracing nihilism and despair. Religion is the only way to maintain hope in a world without any. 

There's no real reason to believe in mankind. We are mortal beings trapped in a cold and uncaring universe far bigger and older than we can ever imagine. 

The Bible calls us children because we don’t know what’s good for us. A child wants to eat candy all day because it tastes good in the moment. They don’t understand the long-term consequences of their decisions. Adults are no different. We have limited lifespans that prevent us from seeing the full consequences of our decisions. Go back through history and you can see that it often takes hundreds of years for that process to play out. 

We try to build statistical models to predict what will happen 50 years from now and we don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. The last two presidential elections have shown that scientific polling is no more reliable a guide than consulting oracles or gutting animals and looking at the shape of their intestines. It’s all guessing. The future is inherently unknowable. Who was talking about the coronavirus a year ago? 

Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

-- James 4:13-14

There are only a couple of predictions that have stood the test of time. A society that turns its back on God will fall apart, and people that walk with God will be happier and more fulfilled. The stuff Isaiah was saying thousands of years ago still holds true today. So you can either listen to him or you can believe what you are told on TV and tell yourself that this time things will be different. 

Jordan, LeBron, and Jesus

Stephen A. Smith accidentally said something revealing in one of the endless televised debates about LeBron James and Michael Jordan over the last month: 

“As long as I’m living and breathing, and I’ve got breathe in my body, and I got a voice, and I got vocal cords, you will me hear say LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.”

To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future of the NBA, imagine an Air Jordan stomping on the face of every great young player -- forever. The present must always pay homage to the past. Michael Jordan is the Greatest Of All Time. The discussion is over. He dominated the toughest era in league history. The NBA isn’t what it was. It will never be that way again. 

People like Stephen A. talk about him in the same way the Apostle John talks about Jesus. Replace a few words and this could be on First Take: 

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched -- this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. 

-- 1 John 1:1-4 

Someone who lived through Jordan’s prime knows that being greater than him is about much more than checking a few boxes. Stephen A. has said he doesn’t care if LeBron wins six or even seven championships. It still wouldn’t be enough. He’s not invincible. Not like MJ. 

The problem is that there are fewer and fewer people like him in a position to really understand that. The people who saw Jordan in the flesh are all getting older. They won’t always be around to tell us about him. 

Jordan vs. LeBron is basketball’s version of Jay Leno vs. Conan O’Brien. People cared about which comedian would host an irrelevant TV show because the two represented something more than themselves. Conan was a Generation Xer who waited his turn while the Baby Boomer hung onto the job well past when he should have retired. Leno was the Baby Boomer getting rushed out the door for a fresher face even though he was still on top of the game. 

Stephen A. (53) is four years younger than Jordan (57). When he’s talking about MJ, he’s really talking about himself. What happened in the 90s matters. He matters. It’s the cry of a man screaming into a void and hoping to hear breath in his lungs. 

The same thing is happening when Nick Wright (36) talks about LeBron (35). Wright was six when Jordan beat the Bad Boy Pistons. He missed that era of that NBA. But what happened in the 2010s matters too. Why are we so sure that the game was better 30 years ago? Just because the people who were around back then say so? 

LeBron, like so many other Millenials, is being judged by historical standards that aren’t relevant to his life. The league is different than in Jordan’s day. The rules are different. The two barely even play the same sport. No one is winning a title in 2020 running the Triangle Offense. Saying LeBron could never be as great as Jordan because he needed to team up with other stars is like saying a modern college student could never be as great as one from the 1960s because he needed to take out loans to pay his tuition. Times have changed. 

Jordan had his time. And that time is over and is never coming back. LeBron has his time now. It will end too. For all people are like grass, and their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers, and the flower fades. (Isaiah 40:6-8) 

There’s a reason few people bring up Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell in GOAT conversations anymore. Russell won his first NBA title in 1957. A 12-year old who watched that live would be 75 in 2020. Most of the people who watched with him are dead. A 12-year old who watched Jordan win his first title in 1991 is 41 in 2020. He might still think that Jordan is the GOAT when he’s 75 in 2054. Do you think people will still listen? Do you think they will still care? 

Calling anyone the GOAT at anything is fairly ridiculous. Who are any of us to say? Stephen A. is right in the sense that you can’t really judge something unless you saw it for yourself. Only a basketball fan who had watched the game faithfully since the 1950s is really qualified to speak on it. There aren’t many of those folks left. And I don’t see any of them on TV. The span of human history goes back thousands and thousands of years. No one was around for all of it. All we can really say is who was the greatest in a particular era. 

But that’s not enough. We don’t want to be confined to a particular era when making those judgments because we don’t want to think about lives being confined to a particular era. God has put a desire for eternity on the human heart. And yet we can never fulfill it. (Ecclesiastes 3:11) 

Art (and sport is a subsection of art) is an attempt to do so. People write songs and make movies for the same reason they drew animals on the walls of caves. It’s why Jay Z made a song called Young Forever. It’s why Martin Scorcese and Robert DeNiro made The Irishman. That’s a movie about a bunch of old men reliving the 1960s one last time, using digital effects to pretend that they are younger than they are, and trying to make the cultural figures from their youth relevant to a modern audience. But Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t matter to anyone not in the AARP. And, if we’re being honest, neither does JFK. 

Soon enough, no one will care that this country ever existed. Americans have trouble grappling with our societal mortality because we are raised to believe that the United States is the culmination of history. Everything built toward the moment where the Founding Fathers founded a republic on the idea that all men are created equal and deserved the chance to rule themselves. That dream must never die. But, of course, it will. Nothing lasts forever. 

We think that the end of the U.S. means the end of the world when really it is just the end of our world. There’s a lot of talk about how the future of our democracy is at stake in this election. Maybe that’s true. But our democracy was always going to end one day. Life will go on. The world will keep spinning. People will still be born, fall in love, have kids, get old, and die. Oceans rise and empires fall. Nothing ever really changes. There is nothing new under the sun. 

There is only one name that will last forever and it’s not Michael Jordan. And there’s only one idea that will last forever and it’s not The American Dream. There’s a through line running through human history that you can find if you have eyes to see: 

But as I consider this shifting and odd variety of customs and beliefs in different ages, I find in one corner of the world a peculiar people, separated from all other peoples of the earth, who are the most ancient of all and whose history is earlier by several centuries than the oldest histories we have. 

I find this great and numerous people descended from one man, worshipping one God, and living according to a law which they claim to have received from his hand. They maintain that they are the only people in the world to whom God has revealed his mysteries; that all men are corrupt and in disgrace with God, that they have all been abandoned to their senses and their own minds; and that this is the reason for the strange aberrations and continual changes of religions and customs among them, whereas these people remain unshakeable in their conduct; but that God will not leave the other peoples forever in darkness, that a Redeemer will come, for all; that they are in the world to proclaim him to men; that they have been expressly created to be the forerunners and heralds of this great coming, and to call all peoples to unite with them in looking forward to this Redeemer. 

-- Blaine Pascal

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