Isaiah - "Anomie" (1)

Isaiah has been a “go-to”place for me as long I can remember, and while I take great comfort in the explicit Messianic prophecies, and in the panoramic sweep of restoration particularly found in Chapters 40 - 66, I have also been acutely aware of God’s judgment on nations as it is portrayed throughout the ministry of this great prophet. If, as Paul wrote, “...all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come (1 Cor. 10:11), then I think we have Biblical warrant to look for Christ in the Law and the Prophets and the Writings (Luke 24:27, 44 - 49), and to look for how God deals with His People throughout generations and to discern how He deals with nations and governments.

The Apocalypse (the book of Revelation) is so filled with images and narratives from what we call the Old Testament that it can hardly be appreciated without being at home in the Law, Prophets, and Writings. We might say that God’s purpose in His People and His judgment among the nations is transposed from the earth to the heavens in the Apocalypse, that the veil is removed from our minds and hearts and we begin to see the naked reality and force of the Almighty, the glory of the Lamb, the destiny of His People, and the judgment of nations.

God has formed a new-creation corporate man in Christ (Ephesians 2:11 - 22) and is establishing His Temple; Jerusalem above is our mother (Galatians 4:21 - 31). Yet, while His People are being formed into the image of Christ (Romans 8:29; Ephesians 4:13; Colossians 1:28), God’s righteous judgment of nations, governments, and peoples is also being worked out - what we consider “human events” have both an “unseen” and a Divine element in them and they are not the same; for all that is invisible is not Divine, as Paul writes (Ephesians Chapter Six), we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood. We are assured that a time will come when the kingdoms of the earth will cease and God’s Kingdom alone will fill the earth (Daniel Chapter Two; Revelation 11:15 - 18).

While the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world have two destinies, they are destinies that bump up against each other, indeed, that are in a life and death conflict - they are destinies without compromise, and when there is compromise the children of light are always diminished. One deathly compromise is when the children of the Kingdom of God act and think like the children of the nations of the earth, when they confuse their identity and citizenship (Philippians 2:12 - 18; 3:17 - 4:1). As Jesus points out, no one can serve two masters.

We see from Genesis to Malachi that God holds nations accountable. While the people of Judah and Israel take center historical stage in the Old Testament, there are many supporting nation-actors, from the scattered people groups of Genesis to the mighty empires of the Major and Minor Prophets. God through the prophets not only held Israel and Judah accountable, He held many other nations accountable - and as we witness in the Apocalypse, He continues to do so.    

Nations, their governments, and their peoples are accountable to God; as is the Church - both the professing church and the remnant within that church. Just as not all Israel is Israel (Romans 9:6), so not all of the church is the church (consider the Seven Letters in Revelation Chapters 2 - 3 and the various false teachers the apostles encountered elsewhere in the NT).

I have said all of this to say that when we read the prophets that we ought to do our best to understand the historical setting, that we ought to look for Christ and receive Him (for He comes to us in and through His Word), and that we ought to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal God and His ways to us - for His character and His essence, His Person, is unchanging. If we understand the ways of God in the Old Testament, we can discern (by His grace) the ways and workings of God in our own times. God held nations accountable centuries ago, He holds nations accountable today. He held the nation of Israel accountable centuries ago, He holds the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16) accountable today.

And yet, having said this, we still see through a glass darkly and I think only the presumptuous (of which there are many) are foolish enough to make merchandise of precision predictions and assume the role of Babylonian astrologers. Of course, as long as we buy their books and DVDs they will keep the merchandise flowing - even when it is self-contradictory. Sheep are not the brightest in the animal kingdom.

I am afraid that many Christians allow the media and current events to mold their hearts and minds, they are more familiar with news networks than they are with the Bible, they identify more with political forces and movements than they do with the Lord Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God; they speak and act as if their core identity and interests lie not with the Gospel and the true Church, but rather with the economy, political agendas, and short lived temporal interests. In America much of the church confuses the country with God as it sings “God Bless America” when it should be repenting of its sins - this is an arrogant trap that ancient Judah fell into, as we’ll see in Isaiah. When we create God in our image, whether it is our own individual image or the image of a nation, we are indeed foolish. Not the Declaration of Independence, nor the Constitution, nor the stock market, nor the balance of trade, nor the GNP, nor the balance of power in Congress, nor the size of churches, nor anything else that we can think or imagine - none of these things are to mold our minds, our hearts, our passions; none of these things are to be our center of gravity, none are to be our core identity - for the follower of Jesus Christ, for the Christian, it is to be Jesus and Jesus alone in communion with the Body of Christ in sacrificial love to the world. If the people of God are not distinctive, if they are not identified apart from the age in which they live, then they are compromised and polluted and are dancing with darkness.

When we take our cue from the present age, when we are chameleons changing as the world changes, when our methodologies are dictated by what is “trendy” - then we have no sense of bearing, stability, assurance, and direction - we have instead what pilots term “spatial disorientation” - we don’t know up from down; no wonder people are stressed out, burned out, dropped out. Only Christ and His Word are sure and certain.

The first chapter of Isaiah gives a pretty fair picture of our current age; to be sure it is a picture of many times before us, for we do not learn. I remember underlining much of the chapter as a teenager, for I saw both the nation and the church as I read God’s Word through Isaiah. The people of Judah and Jerusalem were singing “God bless Judah” when they should have been repenting. They were trusting in their past when they should have been repenting of their present. As government and society and religious and social structures were breaking down, as morality and ethics and economic justice were disintegrating, the people of Judah and Jerusalem, including the priest and prophets and judges and kings and princes, did not see that it was the hand of the judgment of God in response to their sin. They were a foolish people. We are a foolish people.

When a nation calls good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20) it has come to a place where it has lost its discernment, it has seared its collective conscience. We have become that which Paul describes in Romans 1:18 - 32, and yet we go on our merry ways, both within and without the church. The people of the world do not need the church to “fit in” - it needs us to be Jesus to it, it needs us to be “other” in the sense that our lives are rooted in Jesus Christ and we therefore have something to share - sacrificial peace, sacrificial love, sacrificial joy and hope and care.

There is a theory in sociology called “anomie”. Here is a quick definition: “The idea of anomie means the lack of normal ethical or social standards. This concept first emerged in 1893, with French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Normlessness is a state where the expectations of behavior are unclear, and the system has broken down.” One of Durkheim’s observations was that when there is anomie there is a prevalence of suicide. I would add that there is not only a prevalence of individual suicide, but there is a collective suicide. Isn’t that what we see today? We are killing ourselves in myriad ways.

We are reaping what we have sown, within and without the church. Emile Durkheim might have looked at what Paul wrote in Romans if he wanted to really understand what he was witnessing in the 1890s:

“Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man...Therefore God also gave them up...who exchanged the truth of God for the lie…” (Romans Chapter One).

When the system breaks down people do what they what to do and anything goes. This is what we see in Isaiah, this is what we see today. Again, we are reaping what we have sown and we should not be surprised.