The Isaiah Project: Chapter 48, or, The Complicated God
Welcome back! We have reached a stretch of very passionate and, in my view, particularly intriguing pronouncements on God's part. As always, you'll find the translation and my essay below.
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 481. Hear this, household of Jacob — you, called by the name of Israel, who come forth from Judah’s waters. You, who swear in God’s name, who call to mind the god of Israel — but not in truth. Not in righteousness.
2. For they claim to be from the sacred city, and they lean on the god of Israel — God of Legions is his name.
3. I told all about those beginnings from long ago, from the start. They emerged from my mouth and I made them heard; in an instant I did them, and they came about.
4. It’s because I knew you: how stiff you are, with sinews of iron in your neck and a steel brow.
5. I told you, from time past; before it came about I made you hear — so you couldn’t say ‘my idol did that,’ or ‘my smelted image gave those orders.’
6. You heard — behold! — all this, and will you not tell? I let you hear about new things from now on, hidden things you did not know.
7. Now they are created — now, and not from time past, before the day when you didn’t hear them, so you couldn’t say, ‘see: I knew them.’
8. No, you didn’t hear; didn’t even know; from time past your ears weren’t even open — because I knew you would shroud yourself in treachery, concealed and called a rebel from the womb.
9. For my own name’s sake I will postpone my rage; for my own reputation I will hold back and not cut you down.
10. Look: I purified you, but not like silver. In the kiln of suffering, I refined you.
11. For my sake, for my own sake, I am doing it: how could I let my name be degraded? Or my glory? I will not give it to anyone else.
12. Listen to me, Jacob, and Israel whom I call: I am he. I am the beginning, yes, and I am what comes after.
13. Yes, my hand laid Earth’s foundations, and my right hand stretched the heavens smooth. I am the one who calls to them, and they rise: all together, they stand.
14. Gather yourselves, all of you, and listen. Who among them told all about these things? God loved him; he will do what he pleases in Babylon, as will his right arm among the Chaldeans.
15. I, I have proclaimed it, yes, I called him forth, and he will make the path he walks triumphant.
16. Come up close to me. Listen, and hear this: I did not make my proclamation in hiding at the beginning. As long as existence and time have been, there I am, and now the Master, God, has sent me — his spirit too.
17. So says God, who redeems you, Israel’s Sacred One: ‘I am God — your god, who teaches you to rise up; who guides your steps when you step onto the path.
18. Oh, if you'd only pay attention to my commands! You would have peace like a river, and righteousness like the ocean waves.
19. Your offspring would be like sand, emerging from inside you like its countless grains — it would never have been cut off, never wiped away from out of my sight.
20. Come out of Babylon; escape from the Chaldeans. Declare it with the sound of triumph hymns: make them hear this, make it go out to the ends of the Earth — say, ‘God redeemed his servant, Jacob.’
21. They felt no thirst when he led them through scorched lands; he made water cascade forth from rock for them. He split the rock, and the water gushed forth.
22. ‘No peace,’ says God, ‘for the wicked.’
Sometimes I think we don't allow God the full range and complexity of emotion we allow ourselves. Which is funny, when you think about it, but nevertheless true: we're perfectly happy to concede that we get conflicted, that we find ourselves assailed from time to time with apparently competing impulses. That we can hate and desire and love and despise someone all at once with perplexing fury and in equal measure.
But we seem to imagine--whether we admit it or not--that God is above all that. Or at best that he has one very intense and unambiguous emotion at a time: love, say, or rage. It's a perfectly natural assumption which plenty of very wise people have made. Even Homer, whose Olympian gods were proud and volatile, imagined that in the last analysis all divine beings 'live without care'--that though they may entertain themselves with the affairs of men they can turn aside at any time and enjoy a ceaseless banquet of unmitigated pleasure.
Still more the philosophers. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, for example, were all convinced that no real god could be involved with anything so irrational, so confused, as feelings of the kind we humans feel. Removed, impassive, dignified above all grief or angst--this is a standard way of picturing God.
It is not the Christian way. Nor was it Isaiah's way. In this chapter the prophet quite frankly--some might even say bewilderingly--represents God as swinging at breakneck pace from one mood to another. 'I knew you,' he says to the Israelites whom he has chosen as his people: 'how stiff you are, with sinews of iron in your neck and a steel brow' (verse 4). And yet 'for my own name's sake . . . I will hold back and not cut you down' (verse 9). He has proclaimed himself to Israel since before time began, and yet--to his dismay and fury--they would not listen. But still: 'declare it with the sound of triumph hymns . . . "God redeemed his servant, Jacob."' (verse 20).
I can only conclude that this God--the emotional God on whose behalf Isaiah speaks, who fumes with indignation at his people's blockheaded recalcitrance and yet pulls himself back from the brink of outburst with a sudden recollection of who he is, which is mercy and triumph and love--this God, and not the sedate God of the philosophers or the simple God of my imagination, is the real thing. Indeed upon reflection it stands to reason that my own inner multitudes--the many elaborate impulses and feelings which coexist within me all at once--are only dull and garbled reflections of the incalculable subtlety with which a thousand thousand passions coexist, in searing clarity, at the heart of the Almighty in whose image I am made.
To say that such a God loves us is, at this point in history and the development of the English language, to sell him short. He does not merely feel all gooey inside when he thinks of us, the way cartoon lovers do on network television. He finds us exasperating, is furious with us and yet, perhaps even despite some part of himself, will not blot us out but will behave as if fascinated with us, as if eager to spend time with us. Because though we are all the things he faults us for and more, in the end we are his.
In short, God feels towards you and me everything that we feel when we fall really, generously, frantically in love with someone, and then he feels infinitely more. In this as in everything else, we cannot outdo him. We can only observe the magnitude and brightness of the fire that is capable of burning in us--even us--and wonder what ecstasies there are still to be enjoyed in that far greater flame which burns, burns, burns, but does not consume.
Rejoice evermore,Spencer