To Hell With Religion. We Need Justice. (Isaiah 1)

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If we continue in the outward practice of religion without seeking to right injustice in our own communities, we do not have a religion problem. We have a heart problem. True worship is a lifestyle, not something we just do on Sunday morning or in their car as we listen to Christian radio. God’s people are a called-out people. We are called to be holy, separate, other, a light in the world of the nature and character of God. Salvation is not an individual affair. We are called into a community of salvation by the power of God. The evidence of our salvation is in the salvation we minister to the world, our participation in the continuing story of salvation in which we now have a part. We are actively seeking justice always, for our neighbours, and for the world, even in resistance to the authorities, should they be rebels against the justice of the True King.

Isaiah 1:23 (ESV)

"Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves.

Everyone loves a bribe

and runs after gifts.

They do not bring justice to the fatherless,

and the widow’s cause does not come to them."

The marks of success praised by the world, riches, titles, and glory, have nothing to do with those things that God desires. All such worldly glory is vanity, and means nothing in eternity. On the contrary, the power and authority perverts true justice, robbing the dignity and basic necessities of life from the poor and weak for the sake of the comfort of the arrogant rich. Many are oppressed so that a few may become royalty. All such riches are kindling for the flames that shall consume the unjust rebel kings.

True righteousness is judged by our treatment of the most vulnerable among us. The Way of the Master is for the privileged to willingly become less for the sake of the powerless.

None of us have really done all we can to turn back the wheels of corruption that grind the poor in our nation and in the world. In truth, we may hardly live a few minutes in the privileged West before participating in some way in the violent machine of injustice that allows us the privileged life we have. Though we may cry out daily for the sake of the oppressed innocent, and fight tirelessly for change, none of us may claim to be free of the systems that take the lives of those for whom we struggle. We will not stop raising our voice. But Isaiah also includes a welcome relief, lest we burn out in our zeal.

Isaiah 1:16-18 (ESVUK)

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

    remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

    learn to do good;

seek justice,

    correct oppression;

bring justice to the fatherless,

    plead the widow's cause.

“Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord:

though your sins are like scarlet,

    they shall be as white as snow;

though they are red like crimson,

    they shall become like wool.

God called Israel his “firstborn son”. The first five chapters of Isaiah show us how bad things have gotten for the people of God, how deep their rebellion and how sinister their corruption. The Kings and the Chronicles become God’s evidence before the court that Israel is guilty. The Law by which they made their covenant with God clearly states their just punishment. In Isaiah, God argues that the firstborn son of God deserves humiliation and destruction.

However, even in the very beginning of the book, God offers his people a way out. The book will go on to promise a Messiah-King, who will not only rescue Israel from their bondage to violence and corruption, but will actually change them from the inside out. No more will their covenant be made according to their keeping of a law and sacrifice of innocent animals. Instead, God promised to come and be among them as one of them. He would become their righteousness. The law would be written on their hearts, and they would be changed from the inside out.

Every one of us guilty with the same sins as the corrupt nations judged by God in scripture. We have all participated in violence, or injustice, or allowed others to experience pain for the sake of our own comfort. Isaiah calls our sin “scarlet”, an indelible dye that could not be removed from a fabric though it were scrubbed to threadbare. God promises to remove from us that which we cannot remove ourselves. God promises to take our blood soaked hands and wash them.

Jesus Christ was the only human being who could call themselves innocent of the accusations of Isaiah. Jesus Christ, God’s own son, experienced all of the humiliation and destruction owed by God to the people of God in his being on the cross. He has taken our scarlet-soaked clothes, and traded them for his own. In the rest of knowing that we may live as though we are perfectly righteous in the eyes of God, we may now receive the power of Jesus’ resurrection in our being, so that by his power we may live this life of justice and resistance to injustice to which we are called.

The change in us will happen from the inside out. We live in hope for the day when we can see the change manifest in all of humanity, in all of Creation, God’s justice fulfilled in the world.

Isaiah 1:24-27

“Therefore the Lord declares,

    the Lord of hosts,

    the Mighty One of Israel:

“Ah, I will get relief from my enemies

    and avenge myself on my foes.

 I will turn my hand against you

    and will smelt away your dross as with lye

    and remove all your alloy.

 And I will restore your judges as at the first,

    and your counsellors as at the beginning.

Afterwards you shall be called the city of righteousness,

    the faithful city.”

 Zion shall be redeemed by justice,

    and those in her who repent, by righteousness.”

Like the people of Israel, who looked around and saw nothing but destruction and death on all sides, yet were promised that they would see the justice of God come to pass and the glory of God returned to them, we may now struggle in a world bent by corruption, violence, and selfishness, but with the freedom to have a sure hope that things will not always thus be. As sure as Jesus’ resurrection, we will see Justice come. We will live to see the day that the garden of God is restored in the earth, that all rebel kings are destroyed, and that the One True King, the only king that would inaugurate his kingship by first being chained up with the criminals, will reign in true justice and freedom for all eternity.

A new world is coming. A new world is here.


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Tomorrow: Isaiah 2 - Swords to Plowshares
Thursday: 1 Peter 1 - Salvation and the End of Suffering

Click the image for the entire series from Isaiah

To Hell With Religion. We Need Justice. (Isaiah 1)

 

All praise and worship and prayer is meaningless if it does not flow from a life dedicated to the justice and love of the God it claims to praise. One cannot speak truly of the character of God when one denies that character by one's life. To ignore injustice and then claim to extol the name of the source of all justice is abominable.

Isaiah 1:14-17 (ESV)

"Your new moons and your appointed feasts

my soul hates; they have become a burden to me;

I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

learn to do good;

seek justice,

correct oppression;

bring justice to the fatherless,

plead the widow’s cause.

Isaiah’s name means “God is Salvation”. The book that bears the name lives up to it. The entire book of Isaiah is about the salvation of God, speaking of it more than twice as often than all the other Hebrew prophetic books combined. But this salvation was not of the personal and private kind, as we often speak of salvation in the 21^st century church. The salvation of God in Isaiah is a complete restoration of an entire people whose land has been decimated and their people scattered to exile among the empires of the North. Better than that, Isaiah prophesies of a salvation of all nations, and of all of creation. This salvation is better than a reformation, better than a revolution.

The salvation of Isaiah is a resurrection.

All corruption and injustice will be destroyed by the judgment of God, and a new world, a New Creation will grow to life from the ashes of the old world.

Isaiah prophesies of a coming Messiah who will turn all things to right, who will be the beginning of the end of the old way, and will by his authority turn the world to justice. No other book in the Hebrew scripture but the Psalms is quoted more frequently in the Christian New Testament than the book of Isaiah, confirming the Messianic Anointing of Jesus Christ, and continuing the story of salvation of all Creation from Jesus’ resurrection to return in harmony with Isaiah’s prophesies from hundreds of years before.

Isaiah’s book does not begin so hopeful, however. Before describing things as they will be, it condemns the injustice in how things are.

Isaiah 1:1-5a (ESVUK)

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth;

    for the Lord has spoken:

“Children have I reared and brought up,

    but they have rebelled against me.

The ox knows its owner,

    and the donkey its master's crib,

but Israel does not know,

    my people do not understand.”

Ah, sinful nation,

    a people laden with iniquity,

offspring of evildoers,

    children who deal corruptly!

They have forsaken the Lord,

    they have despised the Holy One of Israel,

    they are utterly estranged.

Why will you still be struck down?

    Why will you continue to rebel?

The judgment of the people of God is heard in the courtroom of all of Creation. All of the earth and heavens are called upon to hear of the corruption of God’s people. Those of us who claim to be of the people of God today should take care to remain humble. God’s people are held to the standard of the Word of God they know. We have no excuse.

God describes his people as his “children”. In the book of Exodus, Moses was told by God to call Israel “my firstborn son” when telling Pharaoh to let his people go (Exodus 4:22). Exodus tells the story of Israel rescued from slavery in the land of Egypt by God’s hand. 800 years later, Israel is now a ruined nation, attacked, destroyed, and occupied by the empires of the North. Isaiah tells us that this, too, was by God’s hand.

God’s patience with his people’s hypocrisy had come to an end. Their religious practice had become nothing but a worthless show. Though they may continue to go through the motions of religion and piety, Isaiah compared them to the stubborn donkey or stupid ox, two animals who could at least remember to return to their home, while God’s nation offended God by arrogantly building their own empire of violence and slavery, completely forgetting the story of their redemption, or the God who had called them to minister that same freedom they’d received to others. They were adopted into the family of God, and chosen so that they may display to the world the justice they’d come to know by their salvation from Egypt. Instead, they’d become worse than Egypt, worse than the nations that God had judged outside of his covenant. They were worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, burnt by fire and sulfur from heaven. God even addresses them as Sodom and Gomorrah, lest there be any doubt.

Isaiah 1:9-15 (ESVUK)

“If the Lord of hosts

    had not left us a few survivors,

we should have been like Sodom,

    and become like Gomorrah.

 Hear the word of the Lord,

    you rulers of Sodom!

Give ear to the teaching of our God,

    you people of Gomorrah!

 “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?

    says the Lord;

I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams

    and the fat of well-fed beasts;

I do not delight in the blood of bulls,

    or of lambs, or of goats.

 “When you come to appear before me,

    who has required of you

    this trampling of my courts?

 Bring no more vain offerings;

    incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations—

    I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.

 Your new moons and your appointed feasts

    my soul hates;

they have become a burden to me;

    I am weary of bearing them.

 When you spread out your hands,

    I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

    I will not listen;

    your hands are full of blood.”

Do we hear this? Even our complicity in the oppression of others stains our hands red with blood. We are responsible for the treatment of the poor among us. Without seeking justice for the least of those marked by the Image of God, our religion is absolutely worthless.

Let us seek to emulate the God we think we know before we dare to speak to or of God. All such words will only become a witness to our own corruption, evidence that we truly do not know God at all. God promises to be revealed in us if we will repent and follow God, according to God's word and will. This life of justice is the work of God in us, making us righteous, if we will submit to it.

However, if we continue in the outward practice of religion without seeking to right injustice in our own communities . . .(End Page 1 of 2 - Click here for page 2 of 2)
 

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Tomorrow: Isaiah 2: Swords to Plowshares

Thursday: 1 Peter 1 - Salvation and the End of Suffering

 Click above for the whole series from Isaiah