The Isaiah Project: Chapter 51, or, God's Calling Card
Hello there,
We are back with another chapter, and an essay below. This is one of my favorites.
The Vision Isaiah Saw: Chapter 511. Listen to me: you who hunt down righteousness, who go searching for God — take a close look at the stone you were carved from, and at the hole in a pit from which you were mined.
2. Take a close look at Abraham, your father, and at Sarah who delivered you: I called him, alone, and blessed him, and made him multiply.
3. Because God consoled Zion. He consoled her every dry place, and made her wasteland like Eden — her desert like the garden of God. Glee and delight will be found in her, and gratitude, and the sound of melodies.
4. Listen closely to me, my people — nation of mine, lend me your ears: teaching emerges from me. In a sudden moment I burst my justice open as a light for the nations.
5. My righteousness is close by; my salvation emerges — my arms will judge nations, and islands will put their high hopes in me. They’ll put their trust in my arm.
6. Lift your eyes up to the heavens, and take a close look at the earth beneath them: the heavens will be dissolved like smoke, and the earth will wear out like clothing, and everyone living on it will die in just the same way, but my salvation will be forever. My righteousness won’t be erased.
7. Listen to me — you who know righteousness, people with my teaching in your heart: don’t be scared of scorn from mankind, or fear rejection from them,
8. Because moths will eat them like clothing, and vermin will eat them like wool. But my righteousness will be forever, and my salvation from generation to generation.
9. Arm of God, wake up! Wake up, and clothe yourself in might. Wake up as in days long ago, in ancient generations. Wasn’t it you that sliced through Rahab and skewered the serpent?
10. Wasn’t it you that dried up the ocean, those waters of the void? Who made a path out of the ocean depths, for the redeemed to pass through?
11. The ones God ransomed will come back, will go to Zion with triumph hymns — with joy forever upon their heads. They will attain joy and delight; wailing and grief will flee from them.
12. I, I am he, who consoles you. Who are you to be afraid of mankind, which will die — these sons of the soil, who will be made like grass?
13. Did you forget God — who makes you, who stretches forth the heavens and lays Earth’s foundations? Have you felt relentless terror, every day, in the face of seething rage from your persecutor — as if he had the wherewithal to destroy? And where is it, this persecutor’s rage?
14. The captive is bent double, but his release is coming fast. He will not die in the chasm of destruction; his bread will not run out.
15. I am God, your god, who splits the ocean apart, and its waves roar. God of Legions is his name.
16. I put my proclamations in your mouth, and hid you in the shadow of my hand — to stretch forth the heavens and lay Earth’s foundations, to say to Zion, ‘you are my people.’
17. Wake up — get yourself up, Jerusalem, and stand. You who drank the cup of God’s seething rage from his own hand. You sucked down the last dregs from the cup of trembling, drained it dry.
18. No one is there for her to be a guide. Not one of all the sons she gave birth to — no one to clasp her hand, out of all her full-grown sons.
19. These two things — look, you’ve come up against them, and who will mourn for you? Annihilation and brokenness, and famine and blades — who will console you for me?
20. Your sons collapsed — they are splayed out at the intersection of every street like antelopes in nets. Full of God’s seething rage, and of your god’s rebuke.
21. And so hear this — you, abased and drunk, but not with wine:
22. So says God — God your Master, God your god, who pleads his people’s cause: ‘see. I have taken the cup of trembling out of your hand — the dregs of the cup of my seething rage, and you won’t ever drink it again.
23. I will put it into the hand of your persecutors — the ones who said to your soul, ‘bend down so we can go over.’ And you laid out your body like the ground, like a road for them to go over.
After God freed Jerusalem from Egypt, he reminded them of it constantly. I wonder if they got a little tired of it, frankly: like kids listening to their dad recount that one great football play he made in high school. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery" (Exodus 20:2; Deuteronomy 5:6; 2 Kings 17:36, etc.). "With a powerful hand the Lord brought you out of Egypt" (Exodus 13:9). And on and on--tie the reminder to your forehead (Exodus 13:16), tell your sons about it (Exodus 13:14), never ever forget. It became, to turn a phrase, God's calling card.
But somehow I do not think God issued those reminders to gratify his ego. I think he was insisting on his role in the Exodus because it expressed something essential about who he was, something the Israelites were liable to forget. Bringing the Jews out of Egypt is not just "some thing God did one time." It is who God is, embodied in a concrete series of events from history. There is a sense in which those events are in themselves an answer to the question "what is God like?"
Isaiah repeats that answer with poetic flair in this chapter, verses 9-11. "Wasn't it you that dried up the ocean, those waters of the void? Who made a path out of the ocean depths, for the redeemed to pass through? The ones God ransomed will come back, will go to Zion with triumph hymns." And then again in verse 15: "I am God, your god, who splits the ocean apart, and its waves roar." In the midst of their anguish and exile, the Jews were being reminded once again that their God would reach bodily into the world to set them free.
The genius of Isaiah's retelling the Egypt story here is that he frames it in such a way as to connect the Exodus with all God's work in the world--past, present, and future. God parted the waters of the Red Sea to let Israel out of Egypt, but here those waters are referred to as "the void" (Hebrew תְּהוֹם) the metaphysical waters of chaos which God overcame to create the world in Genesis 1. And the Israelites whose ancestors were saved from bondage in Egypt will once again be "ransomed" and "redeemed," returning to Zion with triumph hymns after the Babylonian exile is done.
This one act--this reaching into chaos and liberating the human race--is the eternal act of God, the thing he does forever and anew each morning. It is the thing he did to form the mountains and to free the Jews, the thing he will do tomorrow when you repent and ask him for forgiveness. That is who he is: he is the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, and Babylon, who will at last reach physically down from heaven to bring mankind out of sin.
There is a reason why Jesus, the night before he died, replaced the Passover lamb which commemorates the Exodus with his own body and blood. That was a reminder, too: a reminder that this was that same God, the one the Jews had learned over painful years to recognize, the one who brought them out of Egypt. It is his calling card and his identity, the truth of who he is: in the heart of sorrow, in the depths of despair, in the teeth of death, it is he who will set you free.
Rejocie evermore,Spencer