The Isaiah Project, Chapter 65: The Inconvenience of Hell
The closer we get to the end, the more I find myself reflecting on what a remarkable journey this has been, almost four years in the making. I'm so grateful to you all for following along. Thank you for being here.
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 65
1. I was there to be sought; they never asked after me. I was there to be found; they never looked for me. I said, ‘look! Look here, here I am! to a nation not called by my name.
2. I spread wide my hands all day long towards the people as they slipped away — walking down worthless pathways, following after their own thoughts.
3. The people: goading me to my face relentlessly, making sacrifices in gardens, lighting incense on altars of brick,
4. Sitting in graveyards and spending the night in secret vigil; eating pig’s meat, with filthy slop in their bowls.
5. Saying, ‘go off on your own; don’t come near me — I’m more sacred than you.’ They’re smoke up my nose; a fire smouldering all day long.
6. See what’s written in front of me: I won’t hold back until I’ve repaid this, and repaid it right back into their cores.
7. ‘Your corruptions,’ says God, ‘and the corruptions of your fathers, who lit up incense on the mountains and blasphemed me on the hillsides: I’ll tally up what they’ve done right into their cores.
8. So says God: ‘just as fresh wine is found in a cluster of grapes, and someone says, “don’t destroy it: there’s blessing in it” — that’s how I’ll act for my servant’s sake, to keep from destroying the whole thing.
9. I’ll make seed come out of Jacob, and out of Judah will come someone to possess my mountain. My chosen one will come to possess it, and my servants will find rest there.
10. Then Sharon becomes a pasture for sheep, and the
11. But you who abandon God and forget his sacred mountain — who set a table for the goddess of Fortune and fill a goblet of mixed wine full for Fate —
12. I will make the sword your fate. All of you will kneel and be butchered, because I called and you didn’t answer. I proclaimed, and you didn’t listen. You did evil in my sight: you chose what displeases me.
13. Therefore so says my Master, God: ‘See. My servants will eat and you will go hungry. See, my servants will drink and you’ll thirst. Look: my servants will rejoice while you’re put to shame.
14. See, my servants will sing in triumph from the good in their hearts, and you will scream from the brokenness in yours. Out of the brokenness in your spirit, you’ll wail.
15. You’ll leave behind your name to curse my chosen ones. But my Master, God, will kill you and call his servants by a different name.
16. So that he who finds blessing for himself on the Earth will find blessing secure in the god of truth. He who swears by the Earth will swear sure by the god of truth. Because the original disasters are forgotten — they’re hidden from my eyes.
17. But look: see me creating new heavens and a new Earth, and the originals will not be remembered; they’ll never even come to mind,
18. Yes, celebrate for ever, and for ever delight in what I am creating, indeed see me creating Jerusalem: celebration, and her people: delight.
19. I will celebrate in Jerusalem and take delight in my people, and never again will the sound of sobbing or of screaming voices be heard within her.
20. Never again in that place will there be an infant only days old, nor an elder statesman who doesn’t complete his days: young men will die at a hundred years old, and sinners who live to a hundred years old will be cursed.
21. They’ll build houses and live in them. They’ll plant vineyards and eat their fruits.
22. They won’t build things for others to live in; they won’t plant things for others to eat, because the days of my people will be like the days of a tree. My chosen ones will savour the things their hands have made.
23. They won’t toil for nothing. They won’t give birth in horror, because they are the offspring of God’s blessed ones, and so are the offspring that come from them.
24. And it happens: before they even call out, I will answer them. While they’re still forming their words, I’ll hear.
25. Wolves and lambs will share one pasture, and lions will eat hay like cattle; serpents will devour the dust. They’ll do no damage and no violence over all my sacred mountain, says God.
-- -- --I kind of wish Isaiah’s prophecy ended differently. I hope I’m allowed to say that. I suppose it doesn’t matter what I wish: Scripture is Scripture. But here we are, one chapter from the end of this long journey, and I have never minced words with you. So I might as well confess: I wish the thing had a different ending.
C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain that “there is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity” than that of hell, “if it lay in my power.” That is how I feel about these closing chapters of Isaiah. The vision of salvation which has been worked out in this final section, building steadily since Chapter 40, is ecstatic in its glory. That glory burns no less brightly here at the end; if anything, it builds to a crescendo: “look: see me creating new heavens and a new Earth, and the originals will not be remembered; they’ll never even come to mind, Yes, celebrate for ever, and for ever delight in what I am creating” (verses 17-18). But this vision is placed remorselessly alongside graphic descriptions of doom: “You who abandon God.... All of you will kneel and be butchered. My servants will eat and you’ll go hungry.... Out of the brokenness in your spirit, you’ll wail” (verses 11-14).
I would like in these closing chapters to be unmolested by the nastier side of things. I would like to enjoy nice a moment’s contemplation of eternity without the screams of the damned echoing in my ear. In other words I find myself wishing, fool that I am, to sanitize the Bible.
But I have said already, and several times, that it is pure pride which tempts me to imagine I am nicer than God. And so Lewis’s conclusion must also be my own: it is not in my power to wish away hell. The reality of that doctrine "has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord's own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.” Indeed, heaven would not be heaven if there were wailing, or violence, or blasphemy in it. It stands to reason that those who insist on such things must be kept out. Far be it from me to hold heaven hostage to the recalcitrance of hell.
And so this reminder of all that is, salvation and damnation, this completeness at the end of Isaiah, though fearsome, must be good for me somehow. I wish it weren’t there; God has put it there. God must be right and I must be wrong. What are we to make of it?
Perhaps this: even if heaven is offered us, as I believe it will be, we must still choose it. We have seen multiple times throughout this prophecy that admission to God’s kingdom is not based on birth or social position: all the nations will come flooding to Zion at the Last Day. And our rescue from sin is not even based on our own particular goodness: we are protected purely by the mercy of God’s servant, the Messiah—who hovers over us, as a husbandman hovers over a cluster of grapes, and says, “don’t destroy it: there’s blessing in it” (verse 8). God sees, as no one else can, the good that can be drawn from us. And so he preserves us. That’s it.
But will we want to be preserved? We will have to leave our destruction and violence at the door (verse 25). He will usher us into a world with no grudges, no enemies, no more wrongs to avenge. Will we want that enough to let go of our own thirst for recrimination? If we do release all our grievances, large and small, how much will be left of us?
If we are kept out at the gates of the new Jerusalem, it will not be for any deficiency on God’s part, any mercy that he will not offer us or help he will not provide. It will be a question whether we can bear to live, can even conceive of living, in a place where sins are forgiven.
This will be harder than it sounds, and better than we can imagine. If my own brokenness is to be healed, I can only speculate that other people—people who are just as messed up as I, people who have hurt me and others terribly—will also have forgiveness should they seek it. I will have to come alongside those people, will have to believe God when he tells me that I must either live in this paradise or no other. There is none other: only the one where broken sinners, saved at last, break bread together. That is the paradise into which, if we will accept the invitation, even we will be allowed.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer