Isaiah 1-12: Bad News, Good News

All right, so now we move into Isaiah.  I'm going to put up a sidebar that lists the books of the Old Testament in the order they appear in the Tanakh, so you know that I'm really not being arbitrary.

Isaiah was written during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah - who, if you remember, were really good, good, really bad, and really good, respectively.  So this was right around the time of Israel's fall.  The prophecies in Isaiah are mostly about Judah and Israel, but there are some about other nations too.

The beginning prophecies are about Judah and Jerusalem, and they are condemning the sin of the people.  Now this is interesting to me, because this was written mostly during the time of good kings.  But if you remember, the high places were still in place all the way until the reign of Hezekiah.  What it sounds like to me is that the people were basically following the law, sacrificing to God and observing the feasts (with the exception of Passover) and whatnot, but they were also serving other gods and just not doing good.  So God says that he doesn't even like their sacrifices or feasts or any of the things they do "for" him, so that he's not even going to listen to their prayers anymore.

The first several chapters go back and forth between good news and bad news.  The bad news is, God is going to destroy Jerusalem and Judah to judge them for their wickedness and idolatry.  The good news is, he is going to restore Jerusalem and people will worship God from their hearts.  The bad news is, first will come a day of judgment against all the people who are proud, adulterous, who don't take care of the poor and needy, who take bribes and permit sin, and against the leaders and rulers who are corrupt.  The good news is, there will always be a remnant of the faithful.  Even though God is not going to punish Judah, he is not going to leave them alone forever.  He's going to make sure that Judah never entirely forsakes him, and he's not going to forsake them either.

Then Isaiah describes a vision that he has during the year that Uzziah died.  He has a vision of the throne of God, what Paul calls the "third heaven," and he sees these angels called seraphim gathered around God's throne.  These seraphim are so high up on the angel hierarchy that they are actually in the direct presence of God, standing before his throne all day and night, and yet even they must cover their eyes with two of their wings.  And all day long they say to each other, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory."

What I understand about the Hebrew language is that they don't have comparative or superlative suffixes like English and other languages do.  That is, we add the "er" and "est" suffixes of words to show degrees of how extreme something is.  Hebrew doesn't have that; instead, the word would be repeated - twice for the comparative, three times for the superlative.  (Another way to state a superlative would be to say "X of Xs," as in "king of kings" and "song of songs.")  So it would be like, instead of saying "better," they would say "good good," or "good good good" for "best."  That is what they are doing here.  As my old Bible teacher said once, "God is not 'holy.'  God is not 'holy, holy.'  He is 'holy, holy, holy.'"

When Isaiah sees God like this, he is completely overwhelmed by the holiness, the perfection, the goodness, the righteousness, the otherness, the un-humanness of God.  God is holy - holy, holy, holy - and Isaiah knows that he is not.  He does what every thinking, feeling person does when they encounter God: he falls flat on his face.  Then he does the second thing every thinking, feeling person does when they encounter God: he acknowledges his sin.  But then, amazingly, one of the seraphim takes a burning coal from the altar and touches it to Isaiah's lips.  Now, it doesn't say so, but I have to imagine that this would hurt, even in a vision.  Don't you think?  But the coal cleanses him.  And then God asks for a messenger to send, to speak on his behalf - as if he really didn't know who he was going to send.  And Isaiah, quite unlike Moses, volunteers to be sent wherever God wishes him to go.  I find it interesting that it's only after Isaiah's been cleansed that he mentions being sent.  I don't think this means we have to overcome our sin and become perfect in order for God to use us, though.  Remember, Isaiah didn't actually do anything to become clean - he just acknowledged his uncleanness, and it was God who declared him clean.  I think this means that in order to receive God's calling on our lives, we have to acknowledge our sin and accept his cleansing forgiveness.  And I think that the process of cleansing may not be painless.  I don't think it was for Isaiah.

One thing I have always wondered is whether this vision took place before Isaiah received the prophecies recorded in chapters 1-5, or if the whole thing is written chronologically.  It seems as if this story is the beginning for Isaiah, but I don't know.

Then it goes back to prophecy, and this time there's a specific context: Ahaz, the bad king, is at war, and God tells Isaiah to tell Ahaz not to be afraid because Judah is going to win.  God invites Ahaz to ask him for a sign to know that this is true, but he says he will not test God.  But God says he will give a sign himself, and guess what it is?  "A virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel."  Immanuel means "God with us" - this is the first time Isaiah references Messiah, I think.  I wonder if Ahaz knew that this sign was not really related to his little battle.  Because then God goes on to tell about more bad things that are about to happen to Judah, and also, that Israel and Samaria are going to fall.  That happened during the reign of Hezekiah, from what I understand, so it must have been pretty close to the time.

Then there's another Messiah prophecy.  After a bunch of talk about gloom and darkness and destruction, it says that the gloom is going to end, that the people who are walking in the darkness will see a great light, and the light will shine on them.  Deliverance is going to come in the form of a child, who will be given the throne of David, but he's more than just another king.  It says he will be called Mighty God and Eternal Father - somehow, this child is going to be God.  I wonder what the Jews think about these names, what they thought at the time this prophecy was written.  Obviously they are holding on to the part where it talks about him reigning over David's kingdom, but what about the part where it calls him God?

But for now, Israel is not doing so hot.  I think this next prophecy is against the ten tribes that now form the nation of Israel, specifically, because it mentions Ephraim.  Ephraim is only one tribe but its name becomes synonymous with the nation of Israel.  God says they are proud and they do not seek God, that the teachers are leading the people astray.  There's a repeating phrase in the next several paragraphs: "His anger does not turn away, and His hand is still stretched out."  Basically Israel is acting wickedly, even in tribe fighting against tribe.  So God says that Assyria is his instrument for justice and judgment.  But, don't forget, Israel was God's instrument of judgment against Canaan, and now they're getting busted for their own sin.  Well, the same thing is going to happen to Assyria, because they're not good either.  So basically God is saying that after he's done with Israel, Assyria is going to be judged as well.

But then there's more good news: another Messianic reference, and it talks about a time of paradise - the wolf dwelling with the lamb and the leopard with the goat and things like that.  When that happens, the remnant of the Jews will be restored from all the countries where they will be scattered to.

So this has been kind of a cyclic passage - good news, bad news, and super good news - the news of a coming Savior.  The thing is, Israel has gotten itself really screwed up, screwed up beyond repair.  God wants his people to return to him, but their hearts are so hardened that it's going to take something really drastic to repair the damage that's been done.  For almost the first time, we're getting a glimpse of what God has planned.

Leviticus 16-22: Atonement and Holiness

I'm covering a lot of ground in one post here, and if you look at the chapters you might think, that's a lot of different subjects, but the more I've been reading and thinking, the more I see a very strong connection between them. I apologize if this is a little disjointed; unfortunately, it seems that I have the most difficulty articulating the most profound concepts.

In a nutshell, chapters 16-17 talk about Atonement Day, when once a year the high priest would enter the Most Holy Place and make a sacrifice to cover the sins of all the people, as well as sacrifices the people had to offer to the Lord. Chapter 18 lays boundaries for sexuality. Chapter 19 starts off talking about idolatry and then goes into a bunch of miscellaneous laws. Chapter 20 goes back to the immoral relations and then introduces the idea of clean and unclean animals. Chapter 21 is about how priests are supposed to be clean and the things they have to abstain from, and chapter 22 goes into more rules for priests and what they're supposed to do with certain offerings.

Some of the little things that stuck out to me:

God makes a connection between certain sins - human sacrifices and sexual immorality, namely - and the land. He says that the land became defiled when the pagan people did all these things, so it "spewed them out" - kind of like in Genesis 3 when God said that the ground was cursed because of Adam and Eve's sin. Paul says somewhere that the whole world is groaning, as if waiting for the day when it too will be redeemed.


There's a debate I've had on the Circle a few times over whether it is moral to lie in order to protect someone's life (think about Jew-smugglers during the Holocaust, or members of the Underground Railroad). The Bible says not to bear false witness or lie, but in Leviticus 19:16 it says "you are not to act against the life of your neighbor." That's kind of like "you shall not murder" expanded - even if you're not the one killing somebody, anything you do that acts against the life of your neighbor is sin. Regardless of your position on this particular argument I mentioned, I think this verse really shows that morality isn't always as clear-cut as we wish it were. And I think that points to the fact that really, it's about your heart even more than it's about your actions. If your heart follows God, then your actions will be right. So in that sense, it's really more simple than we think it is. Sort of a paradox I guess.

Certain sexual sins got the death penalty, whereas with others it says something like "he will bear his guilt" or "They will die childless" or "they will be cut off from among their people." The latter two are a little more self-explanatory, but I wonder what it means by simply "he will bear his guilt." And I do think it's interesting that we like to say sin is sin, it's all equal - and in a sense that is true - but the Bible also implies otherwise, that some sins deserve to be punished more than others.

Now, the thing that struck me the most while reading this whole passage, and later when I read through Matthew 4 and 5, is just the sheer complexity of this whole law system. Some of the rules seem a little weird, like don't cut your sideburns and don't mix two different kind of cloth. The priests especially had to stay away from a lot of things - they couldn't even touch a dead person unless it was an immediate family member.

A guy at my small group said once that the ceremonial law was really about making a distinction between the Jews and the Gentiles, a way of showing what holiness is. I think he had a point. The word "holy" means literally "cut off" or "separate." And when God brought Israel out of Egypt, He had to show them that they were no longer to live like Egyptians, nor like anyone else. He wanted them to be different, different in a very noticeable way.

God seems to have a thing against mixing. Don't mix fabrics, don't mix with other nations, don't mix different species in breeding. I wonder if the point of all that was to show that righteousness and sin don't mix. There is perfection, and there is sinfulness, and the two cannot go together. A lot of these things seem to be metaphors - not that the laws weren't literally followed, but that they existed to point to a spiritual truth. In this case, maybe they were pointing to God's nature as holy and separate from the world, from sin. He was calling His people to be separate too, not just for the sake of being separate, but so that the entire world could see that God is radically different from humans, unlike the petty humanoid deities they made up. You see, as much as people say that Jews didn't proselytize, I wonder about that. I think God was trying to make a statement about Himself to the world through His dealings with the Jews. Why did God send the plagues on Egypt? So the Egyptians would know He was God. What did Moses say when God said he was going to destroy the Hebrews? The other nations would see it. I think God was globally minded, even from the beginning.

Now, when I read Matthew 5, Jesus was talking about the importance of the Law and how nothing in it would be abolished, and how the people had to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees in order to see the kingdom of God. In light of all the rules and regulations in these chapters here, that seems pretty insurmountable. But I think that, with the New Testament, we can see the bigger picture of what was going on: all those laws were there to show us how holy God is and how different He is from us. Jesus came and He kept the law, but more than that - He made it possible for us to have access to God. Under the old covenant, only priests could come before God, and only if they were flawless. The point is that none of us is really flawless, but Jesus opened the door to us all anyway. He kept the law in our stead, because there's no way we could do it all.

That's what atonement is all about. It's about Jesus doing what we were incapable of in order to make peace with us. So chapters 16 and 17, which are all about the blood of the atonement, serve as a picture to show what would later happen, how Jesus would cover our sins with His blood in order to make us holy. You see, God called the Israelites to be holy in what they did, but Jesus makes His followers holy by His own proclamation. That was the point from the very beginning, but the Old Testament was a picture, foreshadowing what was to come. We have to know who God is, have an idea of the infinite gap that separates us from Him, and understand what it was that Jesus saved us from, what it was that He accomplished by living a sinless life.

The Law is holy because God is holy. It shows us God's character in that His perfection is so complete, so utterly impeccable, that we can't even understand all the ways in which God is unlike us (perhaps like we can't really understand all the ways God demanded the Hebrews be different from the world). It shows us that God's demands are beyond our ability to reach - it shows us that we cannot meet His demands. We need a scapegoat to take our sins on Himself, and we need a sacrificial lamb to cover us with His righteous blood. So when God says to us, "Be ye holy, for I am holy," it is not our actions which accomplish this, but His. That was just a picture; the reality is that Jesus separates us and declares us righteous by the offering of His blood which wipes away our sins.

Leviticus 7-8: More Sacrifice

Yikes . . . three months. Sorry 'bout that. Slowly but surely, I will make it through Leviticus!

I read chapters 7-8 a while ago, so I'm just going to write what I have in my notes, and then I'll start up again with chapter 9 next time.

Chapter 7 starts off with the guilt offering, which is "most holy." For some reason I wondered how many things in the Old Testament are "holy" and how many things are "most holy," and what the difference really is. That's all I wrote down about chapter 7.

In chapter 8, we first hear about the Urim and Thummim. Those words mean "lights" and "perfections." According to what I've heard, they were these little rocks that the priests or whoever used to cast lots and hear from God, or something. Do we really know much about them? What is the significance of their names? Unlike almost everything else in the Pentateuch, these little deals are never really explained or described, just taken as given. This leads me to wonder if they had been around since before the Exodus and therefore the Hebrews wouldn't need an explanation for them. But I don't know.

In chapter 8, Aaron and his sons have to be consecrated before they can serve as priests before the LORD. I wonder, did Moses have to be consecrated before doing anything? I mean, he was the one who consecrated Aaron, and he's the one offering the sacrifices in this chapter and earlier in the story.

My other thought, which I've been musing over for some time, is this: what was the point of the sacrifices (other than the fact that they pointed to the future sacrifice of Jesus)? Was there something the blood of certain animals that had spiritual power? That sounds silly, so I don't think so. In fact, Hebrews even says that "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (10:4). And yet, that same book also says that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins" (9:22). As Christians, we believe the only blood that has the power to forgive sins is the blood of Jesus Christ. So what was with the animals, and why did the people have to kill them to be forgiven if the animals' blood itself was powerless?

I think it wasn't about the blood at all, not directly. The animals the Jews sacrificed were not what forgave sins nor what covered them. I think the point was to show the people what the consequence of sin is: death. It was like God was saying to them, "this should be you - but I've made another way." I guess that's why Hebrews says, "In those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year by year" (10:3), because when you have to kill an animal because you screwed something up, you have to take it seriously. It makes you realize that God is so far removed from impurity that even one little slip separates you from Him. And it reminds you of what exactly God is saving you from, the ultimate consequence of your own actions.

Well, that's all I've got today. Next time I'll do more than two chapters.