The Isaiah Project: Chapter 44, or, "Do You Believe I Can Do This?"
Hello again! Please enjoy this week's chapter and essay below.
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 441. And now listen, Jacob, my servant. Israel, the one I choose:
2. So says God, who made you and sculpted you in the womb; God, who will help you. ‘Don’t be scared. Servant, Jacob, and Jeshrun, the one I choose —
3. Because I’m going to pour water where there is thirst, and send cascades flooding onto dry land. I’ll pour my spirit onto your offspring, and flood your progeny with my blessing.
4. They’ll blossom forth among the blades of grass, like willows next to rolling streams.
5. Someone will say, ‘I belong to God.’ And someone will be called by Jacob’s name. And someone will inscribe a pledge of his own hand to God, giving himself the title, ‘Israel.’
6. So says God — Israel’s king, his redeemer, the God of Legions: ‘I am the beginning, and I am what comes after, and besides me, nothing is god.
7. Who is like me? Who will call out, and tell, and lay it all out in order for me, from the moment when I set forth my people forever? And the things to come, which are on their way — let them tell all about it.
8. Stop your trembling and don’t be afraid. Haven’t I told you about it from way back when, and declared it? You are my witnesses: does any god exist besides me? There’s no other rock, no refuge, I know there isn’t.
9. They sculpt their idols — they’re inanity, all of them. And their fetishes: they’ll get nothing out of them. They are their own witnesses: they don’t see a thing; they know nothing; and because of that they’re put to shame.
10. Who has sculpted a god? Smelted an idol? they’ll not get one thing out of them.
11. Look. All their accomplices are humiliated. The artisans too, skilled beyond human skill: let them assemble themselves, all of them, and stand, and tremble. Let them be humiliated all at once.
12. The blacksmith makes an axe, and works his trade in the cinders, and hammers it into shape, and works at it with his brawny arms — but even he gets hungry, and his strength is gone; he drinks no water, and gets lightheaded.
13. The woodworker stretches out his measuring line; he traces alongside it with the point of a pencil; he makes it trim with a chisel and makes marks on it with a compass blade, makes it into the image of a man, with the beauty of human form, to dwell in the house.
14. He chops down cedars for himself — takes cypresses and oaks. He grew one for himself among trees in the forest thickets. He plants a pine tree, and the rain makes it grow.
15. Then it becomes a man's kindling. He takes material from it to burn. Just as sure as he ignites it and bakes bread, so surely he makes a god out of it and grovels before it. He makes an idol out of it and prostrates himself to it.
16. He sets half of it ablaze in a fire. With that half he eats meat; he roasts it and has his fill of the roast. For sure — he warms himself and says, ‘ahhh, I’m warm, and I see light.’
17. Then he makes what’s left over into a god — into an idol. He falls on his face and prostrates himself to it, prays to it — he says, ‘rescue me — you are my god.’
18. They don’t know. They don’t understand: he has glued their eyes shut, too tight to see, and their hearts too tight to contemplate.
19. No one’s turning it over in his mind: no one knows, no one understands, no one thinks to say, ‘I burned half of this stuff in the fire, and in fact I baked bread over the ashes, and roasted meat, and ate it. So now I’m going to make the leftovers into a travesty? I’m supposed to prostrate myself in front of pulp from a tree?
20. He fights over ash: a deluded heart made him swerve from his path; he can’t save his own soul or say, ‘there’s a lie in my own right hand.’
21. Remember these things, Jacob. Israel: you are my servant. I sculpted a servant for myself, and that’s you. Israel, you won’t slip out of my thoughts.
22. I’ve wiped away your rebellion like a thick fog, your sins like an overcast sky. Come back to me: I have redeemed you.
23. Sing triumph songs, you heavens: God has done it. Bellow in joy, you deep underpinnings of the Earth. Break out into triumph hymns, you mountains, you forest thickets — every last tree: God has redeemed Jacob, and adorned himself in Israel.
24. So says God — who redeems you, who sculpts you from the womb: ‘I am God — who makes everything, who stretches forth the heavens. Only me: I who unfurl the earth out of myself.
25. I who thwart the liars with their fake signals, and drive those fortune-telling hacks insane; who turn wise men around backwards and make their knowledge into drivel.
26. Who makes his servant’s proclamation stand firm, and brings his messenger’s plans to their completion. Who says, about Jerusalem, ‘she will be lived in,’ and about Judah’s cities, ‘they will be built — I will make the arid places in you rise and stand firm.’
27. Who says to the depths, ‘dry up’ and ‘I will shrivel your rivers.’
28. Who says, about Cyrus, ‘my shepherd — he will bring to completion my every delight.’ Who says about Jerusalem, ‘she shall be built,’ and about the temple, ‘its foundations shall be laid.’
Once there were two blind men who came to Jesus of Nazareth asking to be healed. When they came, he asked them, 'do you believe that I am able to do this?' 'Yes, Lord,' they answered. He touched them, and they saw (Matthew 9:27-31).
A strange question: 'do you believe I can do this?' Presumably so, since they came to him. But Jesus asked it, and I must assume he had a reason for doing so.
Perhaps the reason was this: the blind men might have come simply as a last-ditch effort, not because they had any hope but because nothing else they tried had worked. If so, then after this one miraculous healing they would likely go back to relying on whatever they had relied on before in times of need. Maybe Jesus wanted to hear the men say that no, they came to him because they believed he could do what no one else could do.
Christians talk a lot about the importance of faith and belief, but we don't always say why they're important. It's not because believing in God gives him magic powers that he wouldn't otherwise have. He's not Tinkerbell -- clap your hands if you believe, and he'll come back to life.
No, God does not need us to believe he is all-powerful in order to be all-powerful. He invites us to believe it so that we'll treat him as if he is. Only if we really think he can do impossible things will we turn to him, rather than to anything else, when we need impossible things done.
That is also what this chapter of Isaiah suggests to me. 'Stop your trembling and don't be afraid,' says God in Verse 8. 'You are my witnesses: does any god exist besides me? There's no other rock, no refuge, I know there isn't.' From the very beginning of its foundation as a people and establishment as a nation, Israel had been shown that there was only one God worth relying on, worth believing in, worth trusting for salvation. They had forgotten this again and again at their peril, most recently when King Ahaz refused to rely on God for protection from the Assyrians.
The political alliances with which Ahaz tried to replace God's protection turned out to be disastrous in the long run, as Isaiah said they would. Now, in the wake of those disasters, facing down exile in Babylon, the Israelites are asked to believe that God can still rescue them. In spite even of Israel's own apostasy, God will 'pour water where there is thirst, and send cascades flooding onto dry land' (verse 3). If only the faithful will turn to him and ask for it. If only they believe he can do it.
It seems to me that this is one reason why Chapter 44 includes a lengthy description of a false god -- a sculpted idol -- being created in Verses 12-17. As Isaiah knew all too well, if you doubt that God is the one who can rescue you from every catastrophe, the world is apt to present a number of very appealing alternative candidates.
In Isaiah's day people put sculptures in God's place. Today we put our bank accounts, and our economic forecasts, and our disaster shelters, in that same place. Not that those things are evil per se. But our reliance upon them to save us from disaster tends to obscure the one crucial question at stake in such cases: 'do you believe that God can do this?'
God does not ask us that question for the sake of his health. He asks us because if the answer is 'no' then we will make the wrong move when the rubber meets the road. In our moments of terror and of need, to what will we reflexively reach out? To him who we believe can help us. To him, we must hope, who is mighty to save.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer