Community Bible Study -- Isaiah

Text of Presentation, Lesson 14, Isa 43:1-44:5

Click Here for Lesson 14 Photos -- Click Here to return to Isaiah Home Page

The Servants of the Lord, His Witnesses (Part 2)
“You Are Precious”

Tonight’s session is the second one emphasizing the certainty God will deliver the Jews from Babylonian captivity, and how that deliverance will witness for God and against idolatry. But notice the dramatic shift in tone from the last session. In 42:22 God spoke of looting and plundering the Jews for their sins; but in 43:1 God speaks of grace. And the Jews don’t have to do anything for this grace . . . not repent or even promise to. God simply declares, as in 40:1-2, He has "redeemed" them. It’s a completed fact.

God can redeem the Jews because He created them (43:1). God the Creator can redeem his people from both captivity and sin – if He wishes. And He proclaims He will be with them to prevent the judgment of captivity and exile from destroying them (43:2). The fires of judgment bring hope to these people (cf chapter 5), not destruction.

Why? The pronouns "I" and "you" recur twice in 43:1-7 as God says, "I am/will be with you” (43:2,5). God has a personal relationship to his people; He identifies Himself as “the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior” (43:3). The Creator of the universe loves them; they are “precious” to him. We wonder why He pays any attention to rebel beings on this small planet? But he does! And although these people have broken their covenant with him time and time again, he will keep his side of the bargain. God will pay any price to ransom them – even exchange Egypt, Sheba, and Cush (43:3).

43:5-7 reiterates the promise first made in 11:11: God will recover his people from where they have been taken. The expectation was that exiles would disappear as an identifiable group as succeeding generations mixed indistinguishably with the local population; but God’s emphasis on “your children” indicates this will not happen to the Jews. God’s ancient promises to Abraham will be kept alive! The exiles taken from Jerusalem may not go home, but their children – God's “sons” and “daughters” (43:6) – will. He “created” Israel for his "glory,” and that purpose will be realized (43:7)! . . . the LORD’s control of history again proves His Godhood.

But that raises an interesting for today. Without inspired prophets like Isaiah to interpret events, how do we know God is still controlling history? Is AIDs or the recent Asian Tsunami God’s judgment . . . or not?

We may not have prophets like Isaiah to explain individual events . . . but on a larger scale, it seems clear God does still control history. The fact that the church of Jesus the Messiah has stood for 2000 years – despite gross imperfections – is surely such evidence. Likewise, the survival of the Jewish people despite all odds . . . and the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel in 1948 for the first time in 2200 years. And how about the sudden and shocking collapse of godless Russian communism!

This passage of scripture also helps understand adversity – and how to overcome it. The Babylonians viewed life as a playing field for good gods and evil gods, with man as their pawns. We follow such a pagan way of thinking if we say good things come from God and bad things from Satan: if more bad things happen than good things, we need to do more religious things . . . as if to strengthen the “good gods.”

By contrast, the biblical perspective begins with God as sole Creator and Lord, the ultimate good (43:1,7). Nothing exists outside of him. Evil is not an eternal principle; it’s failure to surrender to and obey God. We have free will and must accept responsibility for the consequences of our choices, but we must believe nothing happens to us apart from God's will – because the alternative is that other divine or semidivine beings can cause things to happen contrary to God's purposes; and that is an unacceptable option.

Adversity is not outside God's control. This does not mean God causes everything to happen. If I do something stupid and hurt myself, God does not necessarily cause this. He could prevent it – but he permits it to happen in keeping with the cause and effect principles He programmed into the world. When God permits a bad thing to happen, it means he can enable me to deal with it and use it for positive purposes.

43:1-7 reminds us of the fundamental importance of grace in man’s relation to God. In the Garden of Eden the serpent questioned God’s grace by suggesting God had an ulterior motive in telling Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Their sin severed the relationship between man and God, and there was no way man could reestablish it; only God could do that. So God offered Abraham a free, unconditional promise (Gen 12:3). And God freed the Hebrew slaves in Egypt – then later gave His law on Mount Sinai. The Hebrews were not freed from slavery by obedience, but by God’s grace . . . then came the call for obedience. Hope for the human race comes from God's grace . . . not from anything man does. Obedience does not produce deliverance . . . but gracious deliverance should result in obedience.

This is the paradigm presented here in Isaiah. God calls his people to listen to and believe His promise to deliver them . . . but His grace is declared to them even before they are necessarily prepared to hear. And His grace is not conditioned on obedience. God simply announces through Isaiah that he will deliver them. It’s a stated fact.

Romans 5:8 is the most concise statement of this truth in the New Testament: "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." God did everything necessary to deliver us from the consequences of our sin before there was any indication we would respond. Contrary to what Satan told Adam and Eve, God offers free, self-giving love, without any taint of "what's in it for me." God acts strictly out of concern for our well-being. He values us; we are “precious" to Him; and the ultimate proof is the cross of Jesus. God gave more than Egypt, Sheba, and Cush in exchange for us; God through His Son, Jesus the Messiah, offers himself for us (cf 53:10). There is nothing we can do to merit this offer. It is free.

Biblical faith is not based on intellectual principles, or on behavioral dicta or moral norms – even though it is all of these. Biblical faith is based on a personal relationship with our Creator . . . with God who walks in the garden with Adam and Eve, who admonishes Cain, who dines with Abraham, who wrestles with Jacob, who speaks “mouth to mouth" with Moses, who calls Samuel by name, who offers a house to David, who shouts and weeps and sings through the prophets. God wants a personal relationship with people! And when God through Jesus comes in the flesh and says, “Come be with me" to all mankind, it only culminates what has been so throughout the Old Testament.

Yet for too many contemporary Christians, the personal relationship side of faith is more theory than fact. Our faith is a system of beliefs or a set of habits (more or less followed), but we fail to personally relate to God on a day-to-day basis. We don’t read the Bible regularly . . . pray . . . or consciously pay attention to God’s voice throughout the day. That’s not the way God wants it. We are his special treasure . . . and to be all we can be, we must live in that reality.

The balance of tonight’s session – 43:8-44:5 – discusses Israel's role as a witness for God. 43:8-13 is another courtroom scene (cf ch 41), involving a chosen servant (43:10) who is surely Israel. Their hope is not in themselves; they are "blind" and “deaf" (cf 42:18-19) . . . not in a position to give ministry (cf 42:1-9), but only to receive it. Again they are called into court with the "nations" and the "peoples" (43:9). Once more the nations are challenged to produce "witnesses" who can give evidence their idols have made a prediction in the past ("the former things") that has then come true. Their silence proves there is no such evidence. Then the One who is both judge and defendant turns to his blind and deaf servant and says, “You are my witnesses." For God to boldly rest his case on this evidence, God must be planning an amazing work!

43:10-13 relate what will be Israel's relationship to God if only they open their eyes and ears. They will “know" (affective) and “believe" (volitional) and "understand" (cognitive) that “I am He." This is God's ultimate statement of identity; in today’s lingo it means: "I'm the one." God is the One who made all things, the One to whom all things will return, and therefore the only One who can save (43:11). There is no one else like Him, and the Jews have been called to experience that truth and demonstrate it to the world.

43:12 explains God has not merely “revealed" truth about Himself, or "saved" them, or "proclaimed" the meaning of what he has done. He has done all three simultaneously; His revelation is wholistic, touching the entire human personality. No one else but the Lord has done this, and the Jews know it; they have experienced it; they are “witnesses . . . that I am God." God is saying He is the totality of deity, revealed by what he has done for and through the Jews. 43:13 concludes: no one can successfully contest His will. He is “It"; there is no one else.

In 43:14-21 God tells his people once again he is going to deliver them from Babylon. They are witnesses to how he has delivered them in the past, and will be witnesses of this in the future. The personal relationship is reemphasized. He is "your Redeemer," “your Holy One," "your King." These are “my people, my chosen,” “formed for myself.” Because of them the almighty God will "bring down" Babylon . . . not merely to prove a theological point, but because he loves them (43:4).

How is he going to deliver them? 43:16-17 invite the people to remember what he did in the Exodus: God made a “way through the sea" (43:16) for the Israelites to pass, then drowned the pursuing Egyptian army (43:17). But God tells them to “forget" that (“the former things," 43:18). God wants man to learn things about his character and nature from the past but not to enshrine the methods of the past. God is not predictable; if God were predictable, we wouldn’t need so much faith! God the Creator loves doing things in “new" ways (43:19); and we must be flexible and attentive to new ways in which God may choose to act, just as we should try to be open to new ideas in general. And God’s new way for this deliverance will be a “way in the desert" (43:19) . . . transforming it into a place of “water" and “streams" where his "chosen" will have their needs supplied (43:20), so his people "may proclaim my praise" (43:21) as witness to His deity.

Then Isaiah steps back from the glorious future to talk about present reality in 43:22-28 . . . he often followed this pattern in chapters 1-39. Unbelief was rampant in Isaiah's day, and judgment was still to come (43:28). Many people during the exile will also be filled with unbelief; they may think it unfair for God to have sent them into exile, since they performed the rituals God commanded! (The English translation lacks the inference of sarcasm that seems to have been in the original.) God answers through Isaiah that ritual worship is useless without the right heart attitude. God cannot be manipulated – especially not into forgiving us. God has already done that (43:25); we only need to receive what he has done! Animal sacrifices were only symbols of changed hearts and changed lives. God did not want their sacrifices; he wanted them – symbolized by the sacrifices. But many Israelites adopted the pagan worldview that doing a ritual brought about a particular effect; they performed sacrifices and rituals to placate God, to "get him off their backs." Hence although they blame God for burdening them with offerings and rituals, these only add to a mountain of sin . . . because they refuse to undertake the change of heart that the rituals are meant to symbolize!

Thus in 43:26 God suggests His people review the "case" they are making against him. Far from being unfair, the exile was necessary because of them. From their “father" Jacob (cf Deut 26:5, Hos 12:2-4) up to the present they continued in sin, and the inevitable occurred in 586 BC when God “consign(ed) Jacob to destruction" (43:28).

But as always in Isaiah, destruction is not God’s last word; again, he implores his people to “listen" (44:1). Do not rely on mechanical rituals; listen to the One who speaks and enter into a relationship with Him. Again He appeals to creation. If the exiled Jews think God has given up on them because of their sin, they should remember God “made" them, forming them “in the womb” (44:2). If a mother cannot forget her child (cf 49:15), God cannot forget those he created.

Just as God is strong enough to do something about their captivity, He is great enough to do something about their persistent sinning. Through His Spirit (44:3), God has found a way to forgive their sin without ignoring the justice on which the world rests . . . and to transform proud, self-centered people to people who gladly find identity in surrender to Him. Just as in 32:15, the work of the Spirit is to enable God’s people to do what they cannot: to live lives of justice and righteousness. People now unable to enter into a committed relationship with God will gladly identify themselves as belonging to the LORD when his Spirit is poured out on the “dry ground" of their “offspring" (44:3). Isaiah’s talking about Pentecost (cf Acts 2) and the Christian era here . . . about a faith that will spring up in the “dry ground” of Judaism because of the word planted by Jesus the Messiah and watered by the Holy Spirit . . . and about Jewish offspring being joined by non-Jews who choose to belong to God (44:5).

We close with a comment on witnessing, because 3 times in Isaiah 43-44 the prophet refers to the Jews as his “witnesses.” We’ve all been harangued about witnessing by churchmen trying to put us on a guilt trip . . . so much so that we often identify that term with going door to door to evangelize or preaching on a street corner. Many of us cop out and justify ourselves by saying, "I live my witness" . . . but this often means no witness at all. So this passage may help clarify what God really requires.

Notice God gives no command to be witnesses; He simply declares a fact: "You are my witnesses." Jesus says the same thing. The Jews who returned from exile and Jesus’ disciples experienced things that forever changed them. In the same way, we are changed if we genuinely encounter Christ in our lives. Like it or not, we become evidence of his divine, transforming power. It is not something we must do; it is something we are.

Also notice the exiles and Jesus’ disciples became witnesses despite their shortcomings: "blind" and “deaf" on the one hand, and “unschooled, ordinary men” (Acts 4:13) on the other. That’s because one's witness is the expression of one's experience. The exiles were not expected to make speeches, but to report what they knew to be true in their own lives . . . such as God’s prediction of exile due to their persistent sin, and God’s promise of a deliverer – whom He even called by name: Cyrus. And their best witness came as they walked out the gates of Babylon to return to Jerusalem.

Our witness does not need to be dramatic or attention-grabbing like this. It is simply our story about the reality of Christ and his ability to save. But the central requirement is that God in Jesus has done something in our lives. Unless Christ has transformed the way we live, there is nothing to witness to.

That’s where Isaiah’s promise that God “will pour out (his) Spirit on your offspring” (44:3) comes in, because that promise is for us today. Isaiah spells out in 44:4-5 what Paul confirms in Romans: that when we receive God’s promised Holy Spirit, we can say without reservation, “I belong to the LORD" (44:5). And Isaiah predicted this over 700 years before Paul observed it!

The bottom line is this: God rests his claim to be the sole God on our witness: the evidence of our lives. That means we need to ask what really is the content of our daily walk to the witness stand. Are we allowing God to speak through us or not?