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Learn To Do Well
Exploring Isaiah chapter one, with the shaking and the end-times in mind
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone, California, United States
Delivery: 2007-08-12 04:04Z
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2007-08-12 04:04Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-isaiah1.php
Heaven and Earth Called to Witness
Isaiah chapter one makes an intriguing study. This is especially so if you have a basic understanding of the great controversy war between good and evil.
Notice the second verse. “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth.” God addresses the heavens and the earth, the totality of His creation. Verses two and three are His complaint. My people have left Me. Even oxen and asses know their owners, they know who feeds them. The dumb animal recognizes its master, but Israel, God’s people, rebel against Him. Thus, the book of Isaiah begins by recording an injustice, rebellion, the idea that God’s own have found fault with His ways and ventured forth with their own plans.
The fourth verse shows that Israel’s behavior is steeped in sin. They forsake God, and they provoke Him. Their movement is in the opposite direction than God would like to move them. He wants their good. These verses represent the opening theme of Isaiah. God has set out to bless His people but they have chosen the way to which they are more inclined. In so doing they cast their influence precisely where Satan would have it.
Israel’s Condition Described
Verses five through nine are another stage of the discussion. Israel’s condition is described. God puts the question unambiguously. Why do you behave in such a way that I cannot be a just God and yet protect you? The nation is sick through and through. She is prey to her enemies consuming her at their leisure. Israel has made herself alone, she stands unprotected, vulnerable. Her sins have thus positioned her. Only God’s merciful intervention has prevented utter destruction. He preserves a remnant. Without this, she would have been utterly destroyed—another Sodom and Gomorrah.
Remember, Sodom and Gomorrah were not destroyed by other heathen nations, but God Himself. Israel, for her unfaithfulness, is worthy of wholesale destruction. He has held back. He has been merciful, not for Israel’s righteousness, but His own purposes.
Plea to a Wayward People
Verses 10-15 move us to another stage of Isaiah’s revelation. God turns His discussion. He had been expounding to the heavens and the earth (1:2), but now, using the same language, He addresses His plea to His wayward people:
Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah” (1:10).
In the immediately preceding verse, God tells the heavens and the earth that except for His forbearance, Israel would have become like Sodom and Gomorrah. But here, immediately He speaks to Israel, identifying him as Sodom and Gomorrah again come to pass. Their empty worship He completely rejects. He asks them to cease their hypocrisy; He refuses it. He will not hear their prayers; He will not respond.
Learn to Do Well
He insists that they wash themselves. Not that they be washed, but they wash themselves. Look closely at 1:16:
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil.
God commands Israel: make a choice. The people of God are to wash, to clean, they are to put away the evil of their doings, to cease to do evil. We are not talking about the people doing it in their own power; we know that God alone provides that strength. The emphasis in God’s appeal is on the choice of the individual. We are moral beings; we have free choice; we must exercise that choice morally. This is what He calls us to—to exercise that choice morally.
The next command is to “Learn to do well.” But what is necessary in order for learning to take place? What is here implied? Unless we can choose we cannot learn. We learn to do well by exercising our capacity to choose to do well. Seeking judgment is seeking justice and fairness, upholding it. Isaiah puts this into the most concrete form here in these three items: relieving the oppressed, judging the fatherless, pleading for the widow.
Hear verse 17 in the JPS Translation:
Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice; aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan; defend the cause of the widow.
God calls His people come to the aid of the oppressed. He is insisting that they judge the fatherless, that is, that they be advocates for them, that they see that they are treated fairly, that their needs be addressed in mercy by the community of God. Likewise, pleading for the widow means standing up for the helpless. The widow in that time and place was sharply limited in options and opportunities. Thus, God required His people especially to look out for the needs of the widow.
God lifts high the necessity of our treating our fellow human justly. Only by changing how one treats others could the Jews meet God’s purposes, and only by changing how we treat others can we be true Christians.
Parents, think of your children. What does your behavior tell them about your belief system? Are you a true representative of God? If they see you as treating others unjustly, will they not doubt your Christianity. What’s more, they may come to doubt the moral efficacy of Christianity itself. Is Christianity able to produce ethical behavior? If unfairness to others is manifest, this is called into question.
Christians cannot be Christians if they do not “learn to do well.” God is making experiments in lives. The conflict between good and evil lingers because He is showing that He can repair fallen people. If He can—in the weakest of the weak, in humans who are—literally—living specimens of degraded humanity, 6,000 years downstream from the beginning of sin’s devastating impacts on the race—then He can restore them. They can rejoin the community of the universe. If He cannot, then they are not only non-restorable, but how could He even be seen as acting in fairness and justice? If He is not so acting, then who can expect Him to govern His universe in a way that is morally correct? And so, the outcome of the great controversy war hinges on the character of God.
In the 18th verse God urges Israel to respond to His appeal. Often Christians think of this text as a personal appeal from God to them to repent of their sins. Certainly, that is always His appeal. But recall our context. God’s appeal is to His wayward nation (1:5, 10, etc.). To the individual, yes, but here, it is to the nation, the corporate body. The best application of this passage for us is to see it as an appeal to God’s church today. Listen then:
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
The resort to “reason” here is not about logic (although it is logical), but is an appeal to repentance. God is offering help to the willing penitent, and he will show his penitence by changing his behavior. God is promising to remove the guilt, but it is also completely clear that obedience is involved. Isaiah 1:18 was never centered on a forensic or counted-only view of the gospel. There are changes to be made and they are internal ones. Whose sins are made white as snow and wool? The sins of the willing and obedient. As found in virtually all of religious Jewish thought, doing is the dominant theme, not merely stating or claiming.
The choices is willingness and obedience, or refusal and rebellion. Between going God’s way, and going our own way and refusing. Notice also that there is no fence to sit on, no half-way position available. The outcomes are receiving of the good of the land, or choosing rebellion and consumption by the sword.
The Morally Depressed State of Jerusalem
God’s people have degenerated. The faithful city has become a harlot. Notice Isaiah’s description in verses 21-23. The trend is from righteousness to murder, fairness to bribery. The character value (silver) of the city’s inhabitants has been reduced to dross—the valueless portion. Wine mixed with water indicates dilution. The good that was found in Jerusalem has been traded for cheapness. The brilliance of god-fearing leadership has been traded for the thieving, graft-taking materialists. The administration of the city has been overtaken by a culture of bribery.
Again God comes with His specific charges. How quickly He returns to His basic test of whether they judge the fatherless or plead for the widow! When we begin to treat the humble ones among us as unimportant, the texture of society is cheapened.
Right here we should notice something that can help us. Social justice is not about redistributing wealth, not about an indiscriminate or superficial benevolence. Ellen White spoke of our helping the “worthy poor” (Ellen G. White, Medical Ministry, p. 216, etc.), which tells us that there is also a class of poor who are not best designated “worthy.” Notice the cases given by God: the orphan and the widow. In both events we have persons, through no fault of their own, but because of that which has befallen others, having been impacted. There are those among the poor whose sloth, laziness, indifference, or willful foolishness, have sentenced them to poverty. Such are not the worthy poor, and it takes true wisdom from on high to know how possibly one might truly offer aid without enabling them in their selfish ways.
The description of Jerusalem here is not of a city where the unworthy poor are enabled to pursue their self-centered ways, but it is a place where the worthy poor, the fatherless and the widow for example, are treated with indifference if not hostility. These have not the means, or perhaps the willingness, to bribe those in positions of authority, and consequently, receive not the help of those in authority. God sees and He sees particularly those so often ignored in a society. His eye is on His own, whether rich or poor. But when the leadership has lost its way, verse 24 says that God sees them as His adversaries. They lay claim to His authority, no doubt, but they are usurpers. He will ultimately address the situation of His enemies.
Israel Shall Be Restored
Starting with verse 25, God announces what He will do. He will purge the dross of Israel, He will restore to Israel godly judges and counsellors. God’s people, unfaithful and unrighteous, will be restored to righteousness and faithfulness. But there is a progression. First, God replaces the leadership and its diluted and murderous, materialist qualities, with leaders of His own. Only “afterward” comes righteousness and faithfulness.
In verse 27, your translation probably says “Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness.” Back to the Jewish translation of the Hebrew into English, the JPS reads, “Zion shall be saved in the judgment; her repentant ones, in the retribution.” “Converts” and “repentant ones” can as well be rendered, and more literally, her “righteous” (TSaDiQah). The text sounds as if it is speaking of a violent and aggressive kind of change. And it so happens that we have a word for this. We call it, “the shaking.”
The church today, on sum, looks to be in grim state. Peculiar doctrines are borne on the wind. Many, in her leadership, it seems, are indifferent to maintenance of the core doctrines, the ones especailly affecting our understanding of the gospel, that separate the Seventh-day Adventist Church from other denominations. Let us realize that there is more than one kind of bribery. In earlier years, the leaders of the denomination rose from among our pastors and evangelists. But as time goes on, an institution often begins to drift. Specialization comes, and with it not only certain benefits, but particular dangers. Those who come to fill an “administrator” class often are not well equipped to address in any decisive way theological problems that arise. Decision-making turns vanilla. A fog develops, with some unable to discern who are the troublers in Israel and who the authentic heroes of faith.
Situations tend to develop as follows. Across time, negative changes slowly compile. Those living through the slow-cooking crock-potted changes often do not realize what is happening. It may take one or two or even three generations for the divergence between original principles and those current ones which animate a movement to become stark. Even then, they are not clear to all eyes. Some eyes cannot see. They peer through a fog of accommodation and superficiality. They cannot see clearly and they cannot initiate or even lay hold of the need for what by then is an almost catastrophic-seeming recapitulation (a restoration or restatement of original principles) in God’s work.
There is an interesting item in Early Writings, p. 270:
I asked the meaning of the shaking I had seen and was shown that it would be caused by the straight testimony called forth by the counsel of the True Witness to the Laodiceans. This will have its effect upon the heart of the receiver, and will lead him to exalt the standard and pour forth the straight truth. Some will not bear this straight testimony. They will rise up against it, and this is what will cause a shaking among God's people.
When, as a people, we heed the counsel of Jesus, the True Witness, to Laodicea (see Revelation 2 and 3), we will see with eyes that have been given renewed sight by Jesus. His eyesalve will help us to see our many departures from purity of faith and doctrine. We will long for our own lives to portray that purer faith not only to the world, but to our own brothers and sisters in the church. But when we have a mature faith, and are able to be led of the Holy Spirit, and to employ the most winning ways of guiding others into the full light of God for these last days, two things happen. That very maturity and Holy Spirit-guidance will lend us a more than normal effectiveness. That effectiveness will also bring the scrutiny of some still blinded. Our work will, to them, be unwelcome. Exalting the standard and pouring forth the straight truth, even with all the tact and beauty that Jesus gives us, will be viewed as disrupting the work of the church. Some will not bear this work. They will rise up against it. Their antagonistic response to God’s truth will be the cause of the shaking among God’s people.
Fate of the Confirmed Rebels
Notice the remainder of our Isaiah passage from verse 28 on. Sinners are destroyed, those who will not be moved from false worship will place themselves in positions of rebellion, and, in the end, be consumed. Ashamed of the oaks that they have desired, is Isaiah’s reference to their secret groves in the high places. The application for us, in many cases, is the list of contemporary worship innovations so-called. When the worship of God is rendered so cheap, when respect for God has grown so cold, it is that very kind of empty, superficial nonsense mentioned earlier in Isaiah chapter one. You remember—the worship that God said He could not bear.
The description of the lost here is sad: like oaks with fading leaves, as gardens without water. Heaven assures us, the strong will burn, none will quench the fires that must at last begin. He will remove out of Zion all that offends. When Jesus said, “Every plant, which My heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up” (Matthew 15:13), He meant not only false doctrines and practices, but also all those who refused to forsake darkness when God sent light. These all be uprooted along with them. How important then that we hear the strong counsel of a passage like Isaiah chapter one.
Closing Reflections
Viewed from the perspective of the great controversy war, Isaiah one warns us. How easily man can lose his way, turning rebel against his God even while utterly blinding himself. It is no at all difficult to train oneself to love darkness but to insist to oneself that he walks in God’s light. The only sure safeguard is for the people of God to walk as closely to Him as possible, to be as informed by His word as possible, to be distrustful of our own wisdom and quick to deliver the fatherless and the widow; to learn to do well, to seek occasion to put our faith into practical application so that others can receive that which God longs to give them, and to receive it through us.
The Israel of God today must learn from the Israel of God in Isaiah’s day. We repeat the same mistakes. We defeat the purposes of Jesus, so often, in the very same ways that they then did. But our feeble spirituality need not harden in place. We need not persist in blindness, crookedness, narrowness, and the pitfalls of those whose mission seems as though it is to keep the machinery running at all costs. The Hebrew nation’s machinery ran for 1,000 years. But in the end God shut it down. They came to the place where they could no longer represent Him, to where their witness testified against His purposes rather than for them. As His children they were to offer evidence of His goodness, but instead, their record became monument to rebellion. Their insubordination not only delayed them, it doomed them. What is the lesson for us?
But we mustn’t close today without noting the hope in the middle of the chapter. God called His people to return to Him. He gave them the simple formula: willingness and obedience and its manifestation in right-doing.
If you see church and yourself in the message of Isaiah one, then thank God; it is not too late. We may, as individuals, return to God; we may as local churches even, return to God. Our failings, no, our sins, are as scarlet. The creation has waited long while we dallied (Romans 8:19-23). But we can return to Him. It can start with even one. Where we have come short with God, whether through failings in the home or in the church, we can change. We can make concrete adjustments in our behavior. God is ready to help. Jesus is ready to empower. All His biddings are enablings. He calls heaven and earth to witness that His character has been maligned, but also calls men and women of the last generation to be His character witnesses through their overcoming (Revelation 14:1-5).
What are we waiting for? GCO
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