The Isaiah Project: Chapter 59, or, Twilight at High Noon
Welcome back--it's been a couple weeks. Glad you're here; hope you find today's chapter and meditation edifying. We are closing in now on the end...
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 591. See: God’s hand is not cut too short to save, nor his ears too heavy to hear.
2. It’s your corruption that separated you from your god, and your sins that hid his face from you — from hearing you.
3. Because the palms of your hands are dirty, smeared with blood, and your fingers with corruption; your lips proclaimed deceit and your tongue muttered travesties.
4. No one invokes righteousness and no one pleads the true case for justice. Trusting nothingness, proclaiming inanity — they conceive trickery and give birth to senseless evil.
5. They hatch vipers’ eggs and weave spiderwebs. Whoever eats from their eggs dies, and whenever they’re cracked they hatch vipers.
6. Their webs won’t be woven into clothing, and no one will cover himself up with the things they make — things of senseless evil. The violence they do is on their hands.
7. Their feet run right towards evil; they rush to shed innocent blood. The thoughts they think are thoughts of senseless evil. Injury and destruction line the roads they travel.
8. They don’t know the way of peace, and there’s no justice on their paths. They’ve made twisted pathways for themselves to walk down, and they don’t know peace.
9. And so justice is far away from us, and righteousness can’t reach us — we have high hopes for light, but look: pitch black dark. For radiance, but we walk in gloom.
10. We grope for the wall like blind men — like men without eyes, we grope. We stumble around at high noon as if it were twilight, like dead men in ghost towns.
11. We snarl like bears, all of us; like doves we sob and sob — we have high hopes for justice but there’s none. For the salvation which is so far from us.
12. Because our rebellions have multiplied in your presence, and our sins cry out against us; because our rebellions are with us and we know our own corruptions.
13. Rebelling and forswearing God, turning our backs on our god, proclaiming fraud and apostasy, mulling and muttering the proclamations and fraud we conceive in our hearts.
14. Justice is turned away and righteousness stands far off, because truth stumbled in the broad plain and honesty can’t come forward.
15. Truth is found wanting and anyone who abstains from evil makes himself easy prey. God saw it and it was evil in his eyes: there’s no justice.
16. And god saw that there was no man, and found himself appalled that there was no one to intercede. But his own arm brought him salvation, and it was his righteousness that gave him support.
17. He strapped on righteousness like chain mail and wore a helmet of salvation on his head. He wore vengeance as clothing and wrapped fierce desire around himself like a cloak.
18. As their actions deserve, he will repay them: white-hot rage for his oppressors and payback for his enemies. He’ll repay the islands what they deserve.
19. Then they’ll fear God’s name in the West where the sun sets, and his majesty in the East where it rises: trouble is coming, its pressure building like a river current, God’s breath chasing it on.
20. The redeemer is coming to Zion, and to anyone who turns back from rebellion in Jacob, declares God.
21. It is I, and this is my covenant with them — my spirit which is upon you and my proclamations which I placed in your mouth — they won’t slip from your mouth or your offspring’s mouths or the mouths of your offspring’s offspring, says God, from now until eternity.
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“We stumble around at high noon as if it were twilight.” Now there’s a line I just can’t shake from my mind. In fairness, pretty much all of Isaiah’s indictments here ring as true to me about us as about ancient Israel. Anyone who has tried to speak a word of peace into the uproar of modern political discourse will know that “truth is found wanting,” that hard realities and careful observation do not pass muster with a desperate and angry crowd of wounded people. “Abstain from evil” and you’re “easy prey”—counsel prudence and you are likely to be called a coward; advise mercy and you will find yourself pilloried for treachery and moral weakness.
I say all this not from a place of purity—as if all my own public statements were blameless and wise—but from the position of someone susceptible to all the temptations our political climate offers and all the sins it rewards. Thucydides says that when the Greek colony of Corcyra broke out into civil war, “prudent hesitation” was lampooned as “specious cowardice” and “moderation was considered a disguise for unmanliness.” In the seething heat of partisan animus, we are encouraged to call good evil, and evil good—in fact we are often punished for not doing so.
But of all these accusations, none is more true of us now than that we “grope around at high noon as if it were twilight.” We have either forgotten or ignored certain basic and ancient truths—that mob rule degenerates into autocracy, that recrimination begets recrimination, that forgiveness is good not because it doesn’t hurt but because it sets us free. Since we do not have a realistic understanding of creation’s basic dynamics—and above all since we cannot bring ourselves to accept and prepare for the facts of sin and death—we are constantly thwarted and frustrated in our expectations. None of our high utopian endeavors have the results we expect them to, because our ideas about reality are false and naïve: “we have high hopes for light, but look: pitch black dark. For radiance, but we walk in gloom.”
As consolation for this bleak reality, Isaiah offers the only good thing good enough to match how bad things are otherwise: it was ever thus, and God has already decided upon his response. Long ago in ancient Israel—before then, really—God already “found himself appalled that there was no one to intercede. But his own arm brought him salvation, and it was his righteousness that gave him support.” In other words, disappointed though we may be in ourselves, God has no illusions about us which are shattered by our failures. It is for this ignorant and self-deceiving world, for this blinded mess of a species that he chose long ago to stride into battle. There is no imaginary better version of us; there is only the real, broken version of us God saw through Isaiah’s eyes and chose to save.
And so “he strapped on righteousness like chain mail and wore a helmet of salvation on his head.” For protection against the otherwise fearsome consequences of our own shortcomings, we have to look not for a future in which we will do better, but for an eternity in which our champion is forever striding into battle on our behalf. His ear is not too heavy to hear, nor his arm too impotent to save: he knows us utterly and, if we know ourselves, we will take refuge beneath his shield.
Rejoice evermore,Spencer