The Isaiah Project: Chapter 45, or, Disaster

Greetings in tense days. If there was ever a time to read the Bible, this is surely it.

Given the high anxiety of the moment, I thought it might be helpful to provide a few reflections about the coronavirus based on this week's chapter. And as you'll see below, there are parts of this passage which speak directly into the heart of what's going on.

What I don't address in this essay is the historically fascinating, but right now theologically less urgent, appearance of Cyrus the Great in verse 1 (and at the end of the previous chapter). Cyrus, the Persian king who conquered Babylon in 539 BC, sent the exiled Jews home to Jerusalem and so is hailed here as a liberator. For more on this see the glossary, and my notes on Chapter 13. For a meditation on Isaiah in the time of coronavirus, read below.

1. So says God to his anointed — to Cyrus, whom I clasp by his right hand to bring down whole populations in front of him. And I loosen the bowels of kings, loosen the doorways in front of him, and city gates — to leave none of them closed.

2. I myself will go in front of you and straighten what’s twisted; I’ll shatter brass doorframes and slice through bolts of iron.

3. I’ll give you treasures from the darkness, and hidden riches from secret places, so you’ll know that I am God who calls you by name — Israel’s god.

4. Because of my servant Jacob, and Israel whom I’ve chosen: I call out to you by name; I give you a high title, though you don’t know me.

5. I am God. There is nothing else beyond me; other than me there are no gods. I’m strapping on your gear, though you don’t know me.

6. It’s so they can know, from the eastern sunrise to its setting: there’s nothing other than me. I am God; nothing else is.

7. I who shape the light and create the dark, who make peace and create disaster: I am God, who makes all these things.

8. Cascade down, heavens, from above, and let the clouds pour forth righteousness. Let the earth break open; let it bring forth salvation like fruit; let righteousness blossom forth all at once — I am God; I created it.

9. Oh, doom, for anyone who fights with the one that sculpted him — he is a shard among shards of clay pottery in the soil. Can mud say to him who shapes it into brick, ‘what do you make?’ Does the work you make say ‘you have no hands?’

10. Doom for anyone who says to his father, ‘what do you give birth to?’ Or to the woman, ‘what does your labour produce?’

11. So says God, Israel’s Sacred One, who sculpted him: ‘ask me what’s coming. Give me orders — about my sons and about the things my hands are making.

12. I made Earth, and created humanity on it. Me. My hand stretched the heavens forth, and I arrayed all their legions in one array.

13. I’m the one: I lifted him up in righteousness, and straightened out all the paths he walks on. He’s the one who’ll build my city, and send forth my prisoners, and not in exchange for some price or bribe, says the God of Legions.

14. So says God: ‘Egypt’s capital, the merchandise of Kush and the Sabean men, for all their magnitude — they’ll cross over to your side, and be yours. They’ll walk along behind you; in chains, they’ll cross over and grovel before you — they’ll pray to you: ‘‘in you is the real god; no other idol is any real god.

15. ‘‘Ah, you — you are the god that hides himself. Israel’s god, who saves.’’

16. They’re humiliated. Put to shame, in fact, all of them at once — they walk on in their humiliation, those artisans of lovely idols.

17. Israel is saved in God, and that salvation is forever. You will not be humiliated, not put to shame — forever and for all time.

18. So says God, who created the heavens — he is the god who sculpted the earth and made it, who fixed it firm. And not for nothing — he created it, sculpted it to be lived on: ‘I am God, and nothing else.

19. It wasn’t in some hiding place that I made my proclamation — in some corner of the deep dark land. I didn’t say, ‘hunt after me for nothing’ to Jacob’s offspring. I am God, who proclaims righteousness and tells about justice.

20. Gather, come, get close up all together, refugees from every nation. They don’t know, they who raise up wooden idols and pray to them like gods — gods who cannot save.

21. Tell all about it. Bring them up close, yes, let’s see them scheme together: who’s been speaking up about this from the start, from long ago? Who’ll tell about it from way back when? Am I not God? No one besides me is, there are no gods other than me — the righteous god, the one who saves. No one else.

22. Turn your face to me, and be saved. All you remote corners of Earth — I am god; no one else is.

23. By my own self I’ve sworn. The proclamation of righteousness came out from my mouth and will not go back, not until every knee bends to me and every tongue swears allegiance.

24. What they’ll say about me is, ‘in God alone rests righteousness and might. They’ll all come to him, and everyone with a grudge against him will be put to shame.

25. In God all the offspring of Israel will be made righteous — will exult.

-- -- --

I'm writing this essay from something like a pre-emptive quarantine. The Isaiah Project has never been a place for politics. That won't change now. This isn't the venue to puzzle over the merits and failures of our various coronavirus response systems. But it would be ridiculous to send out a biblical reflection that didn't take into account what's going on outside these walls.

For posterity's sake, in the hope that some of this work will be read after the virus is history, I'll say what is currently obvious: that a ravenously infectious and frighteningly unpredictable disease called COVID-19 has made its way from China across the world, prompting private and government-mandated shutdowns on a scale far beyond anything I've ever seen. Some are skeptical that this is going to be as bad as most people now seem to think. Others are convinced it will be worse.

I will confess that I, as a committed believer in the supernatural, have a conviction bordering on the superstitious that God times the events of the world as a way of communicating with us. Psalm 19 says that "the heavens declare the glory of God," and though I am not a Muslim I can agree with the Qur'an on this one point: in the events of the world which are beyond our control, and in the patterning of creation which is all around us, "there are signs for those who reflect" (Surah 13, verse 3). This virus, which began truly to loom over us right as the penitential season of Lent began, feels to me like something with meaning, a message for us to heed.

This is difficult for me to say as delicately as I want to say it, because I believe that God is good and loves us, and I can see that this virus is deadly and tragic. To suggest that God is using it to communicate with us runs dangerously close to implying that God endorses and desires our suffering, which I do not for one second believe. I do not think God likes to see us shut indoors, or unemployed, or sick and dying. And yet it is said elsewhere that "all things work to the good for those that love God" (Romans 8:28) -- that the evils which befall the just and the unjust not only cannot thwart him but even, over time and against all apparent odds, serve his purposes. Believing as I do that God is sovereign over history, I cannot escape my intuition that he is entirely present in this, that he knew it would happen, that in it as in everything which is bigger than us, there are signs for those who reflect.

There is a verse in this week's chapter of Isaiah which brings us right up against these difficult questions, and in that too I think there is a certain providence. It seems almost too apt that at the exact moment when we all feel confronted by disaster, we have also reached the exact point in our journey through Isaiah's prophecy where God says: "I...shape the light and create the dark, [I] make peace and create disaster: I am God, who makes all these things" (verse 7). This is among the most troublesome verses in the whole prophecy: it forces us to reckon with the possibility that God, in some sense and on some level, might cause bad things as well as good to happen to us. The timing could hardly be more evocative if I had planned it this way, which I did not.

Isaiah in these chapters has been concerned with God's omnipotence, with the totality of his power over everything: "there's nothing other than me. I am God; nothing else is" (verse 6). At the same time, the prophet has been insisting that the ultimate desire of God's heart is the salvation and joy of his people: "cascade down, heavens, from above, and let the clouds pour forth righteousness. Let the earth break open; let it bring forth salvation like fruit; let righteousness blossom forth all at once -- I am God; I created it" (verse 8).

The historical mechanisms by which God's salvation is worked out in Isaiah are ugly, wrenching, and mystifying. God's people, lost in sin, forget to obey his commandments. Faced with the terrifying onslaught of an encroaching Assyrian army, they neglect to ask God for help and instead trust human alliances with geopolitical allies. This proves disastrous, and Isaiah foretells an agonizing period of anguish in Babylon. Now, for quite a few chapters, we have been reckoning with the strange fact that God, having proclaimed this exile, immediately begins assuring Israel that what comes of it will be glorious.

And so in fact some kind of answer to our difficult questions has already been indicated in these chapters. I noted back in Chapter 40 that God, when he finally drags us out into the wilderness of misery, does so in order to plead his case with us. God drags us into the desert, I wrote then, because it may be the only place where we will listen and see him clearly. It may be that this hurts him as much as it hurts us -- indeed, Christians must believe in some sense that it does.

I do not think that this worldwide shutdown is or will be a nightmare on the level of Israel's Babylonian exile. But I do believe that when God interrupts our lives, forcibly brings our pleasures and diversions to a halt, and "creates disaster," it may be that he does so because he has something he wants to say. In that, for me, there is hope. Whether I like to sit at home in silence or not, I will welcome it if there is something in it that God has to tell me and us.

What is that thing? That is what I will be asking myself for however long I'm stuck at home. God has dragged us out into a kind of wilderness: what case is he here to plead with us?