Sit Down, Shut Up, Hang On

For they are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the Lord; who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.” -- Isaiah 30:9-11

Here we have another, more pernicious response to the word of God and the truth. At the foot of Mount Sinai, the terrified Israelites in Exodus 20 cried out for a mediator, a prophet who would convey the Word of the Lord to them. They did not reject the truth. You need electricity, but the electrical circuits in your house cannot be hooked directly to the main power line without a disastrous result; you also need a transformer to step the power down so that it is usable and not destructive. Moses and the prophets who followed were transformers, men and women specially equipped to bring the Word down to a people whom God loved but who had little time to devote to Him.

In the times of Isaiah the prophet, however, the attitude was different. Those living in the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were no longer runaway slaves in the wilderness. They were a settled and fairly prosperous people who felt they knew how to run their own lives and make their own way. They had agendas to pursue, pleasures to seek out and enjoy. They were wise in their own sight and righteous by their own standards. They saw the prophets as old-fashioned, out-of-style relics of history who did not understand the ways and days in which they were living.

Isaiah was not a fundamentalist any more than was Job -- though I cannot say the same about Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, or Mushroom for that matter. For myself, the easy answers still come easily, and I can be placated by platitudes too much of the time. Those to whom Isaiah spoke preferred “smooth things” and “illusions” to the sometimes harsh, sometimes paradoxical, always challenging truth brought by God’s prophets. We know to stay away from the Gospel According To Oprah and related spiritual Twinkies, but we also must be wary of trying to make God fit into a Procrustean theology of health and happiness. Sometimes, the best response we can give is to admit in wonder that we have no idea what God is doing.

One reason I do not enjoy debating atheists is that in the course of argument I might slander God. I would not do it intentionally, yet in rushing to defend the Divine, I may fall into an entrenched fundamentalist position. As a fundamentalist, I am not wrong; I am just not fully right. I find myself reading through the arguments of Job’s friends and agreeing with them. The tendency is to say that God does this, and He would never do that; nevertheless, sometimes He must do exactly that, and, since He does, and since we cannot say that He is not Good, we have to say there are limits to His power or resort to verbal contortionists to explain how evil is really good. It is better to tell the truth even if it seems to cast a bad light on the Almighty.

Prophets are never going to be overly popular people. In fact, it is not unwise to assume, if an alleged prophet is universally well-received and highly spoken of, he or she is most likely a false prophet. Jesus concurs . Popular teachers and preachers and speakers of various kinds generally tell people what they want to hear. That is not always the truth – and very rarely the whole truth.

To take a current example, the economic woes of America are the result of years of political prophets telling us we could have something for nothing. “Don’t Tread On Me” is a good American motto, but we must be even more devoted to the standard from Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that bore the letters TANSTAAFL -- There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. We have bought into the idea that money grows on trees or can be created out of thin air, that wealth means consumption rather than production, and that government spending can solve our problems. We heard the lies, and we believed them, not because they were true, but because they sounded good to us, they tickled our ears and our fancy. When those who told the truth spoke, we ignored them, mocked them, and pushed them off the stage. When they said we would have to pay in the long run, we laughed and replied that in the long run we would all be dead. We were all Epicureans, all Existentialists – if not in belief then in action.

When Isaiah spoke the harsh, unrelenting truth about the sins of God’s people and their need for repentance and returning, they replied, “Shut up!” They despised the words of the prophet; therefore he said:

Because you despise this word and trust in oppression and perverseness and rely on them, therefore this iniquity shall be to you like a breach in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant; … smashed … ruthlessly …(Isaiah 30:12-14)

This is a message not only to the unbeliever who rejects Christ and prefers to hear words that do not cut and chasten, it is a message as well to the believer who must be pruned and purged in order to be fruitful. We must not just hear the word of God but allow those words to abide in us, just as Jesus said. The abiding truth will do its work of cleansing and purifying, of bringing us rest and restoration.

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”