Isaiah (4)

Alas, sinful nation,
People weighed down with iniquity,
Offspring of evildoers,
Sons who act corruptly!
They have abandoned the Lord,
They have despised the Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away from Him.  (Isaiah 1:4)

The term, “the Holy One of Israel” occurs around 25 times in Isaiah. Peter writes (1 Peter 1:13 - 21) that we are to be holy in all our conduct because God has said, “Be holy, for I am holy” (see Leviticus 11:44 - 45). Whether ancient Israel or the Church, God’s people throughout time have been called to be holy for their God is holy, their Redeemer is holy, their Father is holy, their Savior is holy - and of course, the Spirit is holy.

God through Isaiah pictures offspring who have rejected the nature of their Father, to the point of despising Him, the Holy One of Israel. They have despised Him and they have turned away from Him. God’s sons and daughters are leaving their home of purity, of righteousness, of light, and turning to darkness, sin, and pollution. How was Judah enticed to repudiate God and exchange Him for a lie? How are we entinced?

As with most things, I imagine it started small and grew. It perhaps started with an exception here and an exception there until the exception was the rule. It is amazing how we rationalize away disobedience and sin, we are exceptionally creative in justifying ourselves. We expose ourselves to idols and sin until our consciences are devoid of sensitivity; as Paul says, our consciences are seared as with a hot iron (1 Timothy 4:2) and we enter into a state in which we are “past feeling” (Ephesians 4:19) in our pursuit of pleasure and money.

To despise the Holy One of Israel is to despise the nature of God, for His nature is holy. Consider that the word used in the NT more than any other word to refer to Christians is “saints”, consider that the word “saint” means to be dedicated, consecrated, and holy - then consider what God’s people ought to look like - God’s sons and daughters ought to look like their Father, they ought to resemble their elder brother Jesus, they ought to bear the family likeness. If our Father is holy then we ought to be holy.

We can only know what holiness is as we behold the Holy One - do we understand this basic truth? If we are not “looking unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2) we cannot know what is holy and what is not; and when we make ourselves the arbiters of right and wrong, of good and evil, of the holy and unholy we cannot but descend into self-deception and suffer spiritual and moral disorientation. God does not give us common grace, He does not give us a conscience, so that we will rely on our conscience, but rather so that our conscience will be convicted of sin and the unholy and that we will seek Him for wholeness and salvation - in and of ourselves we simply do not have the power or ability to consistently discern the holy and true from filth - we need God.

This is a great danger when the professing church becomes therapeutic and takes its text from soft sciences such as sociology, for then we abandon the Biblical text and narrative for trends and currents - we cease looking unto Jesus and His Word and focus our attention on the world...and when we focus on the world’s “culture” we become like the world’s culture...which is decidedly not the culture of God’s Kingdom.

In our quest to be “relevant” we become profane and thus abandon our sacred place in God and His holiness - thereby depriving our generation of a sacred place where it can go for hope and healing in Jesus Christ. The world does not need us to be like the world, it needs us to be like Jesus, and Jesus is holy.

God desires us to be “partakers of His holiness” (Hebrews 12:10) and of His “Divine Nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Yet, just as ancient Judah brought idols into the Temple, just as Israel and Judah built altars to idols throughout their land, just as they intermingled the “worship” of Yahweh with the worship of demons, so much of the professing church has exchanged the holiness and centrality of Jesus Christ for religious “success”, the Cross for the dollar, the Bible for marketing and sociological textbooks, repentance for self-help, confession of sin and forgiveness for psychological diagnosis and therapeutic treatment, and (I suppose I should mention) the Great Commission for political agendas.

And so the world’s “values” become the church’s values, the world’s definition of success the church’s definition (O how we want to be respectable and measure up to the world), the world’s language the church’s language (even when the language is filthy), the world’s subject matter the church’s (after all, we must be relevant), the world’s entertainment the church’s. We simply don’t think that Jesus in and of Himself is enough to present to the world, to our neighbors, to our families.

Perhaps this is because He is not enough for us?

Perhaps this is because He is not enough for us?