40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Isaiah 1:1-15 (Episode 442)

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

In this episode, Chad and Daniel begin the book of Isaiah. They introduce the author and the historical context of the book. God has some hard words for Judah from the mouth of the Prophet. And God still has a big problem with idolatry. Have a listen. Show Notes: ·       HWSS NWA ·       Support 1517 Podcast Network ·       1517 Podcasts ·       1517 on Youtube ·       1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts ·       1517 Events Schedule ·       1517 Academy - Free Theological Education   What's New from 1517: ·       Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation, Book 1 of 2 by Amy Mantravadi ·       Junk Drawer Jesus By Matt Popovits ·       Listen to 1517 Executive Director Scott Keith and Magnus Persson on the latest Re:Formera podcast ·       Signup For Free Advent Church Resources for 2024 ·       Clothed with Christ by Brian William Thomas   More from the hosts: ·       Daniel Emery Price ·       Chad Bird

1517 presents our 2024 free Advent resources, entitled His Gospel is Peace, the Advent of Christ and the End of Fear. This will include an Advent and Christmas sermon series for pastors to use midweek or on Sundays, along with other helpful resources for congregations. We've also created a personal devotional for every day of the 2024 Advent season, written by 1517 contributors. His Gospel is Peace is available as a free download. Sign up today to get access. Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. you can go to 1517.org slash podcast

check out all the other podcasts that are living over there and while you're over there make sure you check out everything else that 1517 is doing which is a lot of things articles, other podcasts videos, academies all the stuff, books and of course you can go to some events you should check out the Here We Still Stand

events, see if there's tickets to those there's the national event in San Diego, the regional event in Bentonville, Arkansas and both those are great as of recording this there's a handful of tickets left for those, I would go check. There's a link in the show notes,

and you can go over there and grab some tickets. Come hang out with us. We'd love to see you. Chad, we get to start a brand new book and a little bit of a new genre, I would say. Yeah, this is a little bit different than anything that we've covered thus far. We're going to take a little bit of a turn.

Yeah, we're entering into the book of Isaiah, which is going to be awesome. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how long we're going to be here. Long time. it's yeah it's gonna be a while and we got 66 chapters to go we got uh a lot of just incredible material to cover i mean it's i don't know that it's the most well-known book of the old testament that'd probably be genesis i guess but i mean it it ranks pretty high up there because you know so

much of it features in the new testament in fact i was reading this morning that so it's it's not i got my stats here and i've written them down so it's not the most quoted book in the new testament That'd be psalms. But it's quoted 66 times. Quoted, you know, 66 times. But the allusions, at least one number that was given, is around 350. And that's more than any other Old Testament book. Well, it's certainly the, I don't know, popular, most well-known, well-read, I would think, of the prophetic books.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely. I mean, you've got those beloved chapters, like Isaiah 53, but not just that. I mean, you have a lot of these sections that you hear every single Christmas, unto us a son is given, a child is born, unto us a son is given. You've got some famous musical pieces that are based on Isaiah. Just a lot of fantastic material that's not just theologically rich, but that's literarily rich, too. Isaiah is often called the Shakespeare of the prophets. It's, you know, not all writing styles in the Bible are the same, of course, or writing

quality is the same in the Bible. These were human authors, and so just like today, you have some authors write better than others, more literarily beautiful, it's the same in the, you know, same in the Bible. And Isaiah ranks right up there as one of the most eloquent of the Hebrew writers. Now, one of the good things, Chad, about us going into Isaiah is we're a little bit going back in time here, right? And the thing is that—this is kind of a weird thing when you're reading the Bible— is that it's not all chronological.

You have the prophets all bunched together, and you have to go back and try to remember, okay, wait, where were we? In these other books where we were getting the history of Judah and Israel, what was going on? Who was in power? Who were the enemies? and then you can kind of get the color of what Isaiah is trying to say in the context in which he's saying it.

Yeah, and this material here is set in the Kings. So, I mean, we're way past the reign of Solomon. We're in 2 Kings when most of this happens. In fact, in the opening verse, he tells us that he was a prophet during the reigns of four different kings, starting with Uzziah and then going all the way to Hezekiah. And most of what we're going to hear, as far as when there are specific references to kings or to situations that involve kings, it's during the reign of Ahaz and Hezekiah. So, in fact, we're going to hear quite a bit about Ahaz in this opening part of Isaiah chapters 1 through 12.

And Hezekiah is going to feature a little bit later on. In fact, there's a strange situation in Isaiah where you've got about three chapters where it's not verbatim what we read when we were in Kings, but it's pretty close. So we're going to hear a lot of stuff that's very familiar to us when you have the Assyrians breathing down the neck of Hezekiah and everything that happens in that situation. So this is all, if you're wondering year-wise, this is all set within the 700s BC. So you can check Bible dictionaries and commentaries, and the numbers are going to vary a little bit. But the way I just kind of round it up, I would say 740 to 700 BC is a pretty good way. So we're looking at approximately 40 years of ministry during the reigns of four different kings. So that's a little bit about the time frame.

We're going to get a lot more into the historical details as we go along. But I guess the only thing I would say is when Isaiah was at work, man, this was like, I don't even want to compare it to maybe the maybe our 20th century, you know, where you had so much happening, so many wars, so much upheaval. It's kind of like that during the ministry of Isaiah, because you've got about, I think, maybe 20 years or so into into his ministry is when the Northern Kingdom falls to the Assyrians. i mean just just imagine how huge that would have been to uh the southern kingdom you know all of their the northern neighbors the ten tribes up there they are not just conquered you know and forced into some sort of submission where they have to be a state that you know pays so much to assyria i mean they're wiped out exiled and then after that the assyrians almost take out the southern kingdom so there's a there's a lot going on in in the 40 years that that he's that

he's at work well one of the things that you're going to find as you as you go through isaiah and then and you just got to go through the prophets in general it's going to feel a little redundant because if if uh if you are wondering how god feels about idolatry uh if we didn't like make that explicitly clear as we were going through the historical narrative of going through this. Well, when God puts words in the mouths of His prophets to tell His people, well, He'll tell you what His chief complaint is, and it's going to come up over and over and over again. Yeah, it's definitely idolatry. Just this morning, so I've been listening to Isaiah, I like to listen to the Bible route, use the YouVersion Bible app.

And I just finished Isaiah this morning. And there's a couple chapters in there. I mean, they almost leave you laughing because it is just, it's so sarcastic mocking the idols. You know, this guy chops down a tree, you know, half of it he uses to make a fire, cook his meal. The other half he makes into an idol and bows down to it. So a lot of sarcastic mocking of idolatry that goes on in Isaiah. Yeah, that's a big deal. This repetitive, they've left me, they've forsaken me, they've turned their back.

I mean, it's just over and over again that God is speaking to a people. It almost seems like the prophet is yelling at people's backs, right? I mean, this is the impression you get, that these people have altogether completely turned their back on God, and he's screaming, not screaming in someone's face, but yelling at them as they are faced the opposite direction they're supposed to be faced. Yeah, yeah, that's an excellent way to put it. So Isaiah joins many of the prophets in a ministry that was certainly sent by God, but as a prophet, had to have been very frustrating. Oh, yeah. You know, we'll see this when we get to his call narrative, which is chapter 6. You know, I've always thought to myself, when God says,

whom shall we send, who will go for us and Isaiah says he's like waving his hand, I'll go hear my, send me some meat after he hears what God says to him, he probably regretted his decision because he's going to be preaching to a people that

won't hear and won't listen and won't see they just will not turn back from idolatry I was thinking about this the other day in modern times you have people pop up and say they're a prophet or this person's a prophet or they'll call people prophets, so-and-so.

And this is some kind of desired calling or something like that. But if you read the prophets, this is not a desirable calling at all. I mean, it's all brutal. It's all thankless. It usually feels like it's all done in vain. Even when you go all the way up to the last prophet, John the Baptist, he's out there preaching in the wilderness and being homeless and all this stuff, and then gets his head cut off at 32 years old or however old he is, and that's it.

And you're like, this is not something that I feel like anyone wants to sign up for. Yeah, no prophet built a megachurch and retired in peace. Never happened. I mean, they were lucky to have a few people follow them and listen to them. And they were also lucky to actually die of old age because many of them didn't make it that far. In fact, this is not recorded explicitly in the Bible. It's alluded to in Hebrews 11, but tradition says there's a non-canonical Jewish writing about this that says Isaiah was sawn in two. that's how he was martyred

which is just gruesome and horrific even to think about but yeah it's certainly possible there were plenty of prophets who were taken out especially by rulers who didn't want to hear what they had to say so often a thankless job

you know but in the bigger perspective very thankful of course that God called them and had them do what they did what else we know he's, just a couple more things. We know he's married. There's mention of the prophetess at some point that he has a child with, and we know that at least he had two sons, and they both have strange names. It's not like Joshua or Ezekiel or whatever. It's

Shear Yashuv and Meher Shalal Hashbaz, both of which have symbolic names. So we'll get to those. We'll get to those later on, but has at least two sons. So at least he had a wife and had a family. ministered a long time and I don't know if there's anything else we really need to get into as far as introductory material I will say this, in fact some of you might

be wondering, if you've studied Isaiah before or maybe you've taken a class on Isaiah or maybe read some literature on Isaiah just to let you know up front we do believe that Isaiah wrote this whole thing so the guy, Isaiah there is a

And the reason I say that, there's a pretty widespread opinion out there that Isaiah, the historical figure we're talking about, wrote the first part of the book, the first 39 chapters. And then depending upon where a person stands, they'll say the second half of the book, which would be 40 through 66, was written by what's usually called a Deutero-Isaiah. That just means second Isaiah, some unnamed figure in the future who added to what the original Isaiah had said. And some people even hold that there is a Deutero-Isaiah and a Trito-Isaiah, meaning a third Isaiah. So the whole book was composed by three different people. And why would they say that, you say? Well, there's a few arguments. The main one, though, is based upon a rational rejection of prophecy.

Because Cyrus, like King Cyrus, the Persian, is prophesied by name in that second half of Isaiah. And so people who have a rational presupposition, which precludes the ability of someone to prophesy, will say, well, there's no way that this guy could have known, you know, centuries ahead of time that this guy named Cyrus is going to come up. It's a funny argument for a prophetic book. Yeah, I know. I thought that was strange, too. And it's ironic, too, because there's a lot of sections of Isaiah where God will say something like this. Have I not announced it for long ago? God is saying, listen, I'm able to forecast the future. I'm not forecast, but I can tell you what's going to happen in the future.

And so those who deny the ability of a prophet to prophesy are undermining what the text itself says. But anyway, all that to say, we believe that Isaiah, the entirety of the book, was written by, well, Isaiah, the guy. okay uh well that's a 13 14 minute introduction not too bad for us yeah i think we spent more time with the song of songs introducing all that so let's get after it all right i've already i've already mentioned the opening verse uh this is kind of is a what you might call a heading to this first section which is going to be chapters one through five and that first verse

says, the vision of Isaiah, the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of these four kings, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. So keep in mind, he's given us a geographical location. He's not a northern prophet. We do have northern prophets like Hosea. That's not Isaiah. I mean, he speaks to both north and south, but he's primarily a prophet of the south he's in jerusalem and he reigns he doesn't reign he he prophesies under these these four kings so this is a heading for the for the entire book now as we're getting into this um these first five chapters i did have one more introductory comment to say so you probably know the call narrative of isaiah is chapter six so this is when he sees the lord city sitting in

his temple he hears the seraphim singing holy holy holy and you have the coal touching his lips that whole very famous call narrative is in chapter six which might seem strange to people at first be like shouldn't it like immediately follow this heading you get the heading get the call narrative and then you're going from there well it could but the way the book was structured is where you you have the call narrative is a word delayed until chapter six and these first five chapters. These first five chapters are a way of kind of introducing the themes that are going to serve us again and again throughout the whole book. So you have an indictment of the sin of the people. You have reference to the nations. You have a promise held up for what God is going to do

at Zion, at Jerusalem. So you have both, we would say, law and gospel. You have threat and promise that are discussed in these opening five chapters. It's kind of a long preamble, we might say, to the entire book. And then after chapter six, you're going to have these various themes that are briefly discussed in the opening five chapters, expanded upon when you get past that call narrative. Okay, so verse two. He starts out here with something that today we might say

all rise. You know, we've got a, the judge is about to enter the courtroom. This is a courtroom scene. And the people on trial are the people of Israel. And we have a couple of witnesses right away. It's going to be the heavens and the earth. God is summoning this judgment scene, and he's going to indict Israel for what they've done. Hear, O heavens, and give Rear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken. Children, literally sons, ESV has children, but you can go either way here. Children or sons have I reared and brought up,

but they, and the they in Hebrew is emphatic, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master's crib, but Israel does not know. My people do not understand. and i'll do uh one more verse ah sinful nation a people laden with iniquity offspring of evildoers children who deal corruptly they have forsaken the lord they have

despised the holy one of israel they are utterly estranged you could uh that last phrase utterly estranged you could translate something like they have bestranged themselves backward That's the way that my favorite commentator on Isaiah, a guy by the name of Alec Mateer, that's the way he renders that. They have restrained themselves backward. It's like they've converted themselves to an alien status. Things aren't sounding good so far.

Yeah, this is sort of what we talked about at the beginning. I mean, right from the jump, what's the issue here? Well, the issue here is that Ox and Donkey know more than these people. That is, they know where they belong, you know, who they belong to, where they belong, where they're supposed to be. But these people, not so much. They do not, they have forgotten to whom they belong, where they're supposed to be, what they're supposed to be doing, who they're supposed to be worshiping, first and foremost. Yeah, and because of this, they have, that they that you were talking about,

It wasn't as though like, ah, they got tripped up or deceived, and they've gone astray, but they were just lured by the White Witch and some Turkish delight. No, this seems like it's very emphatic. This is like a willful move on their part, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, and there's some real, what's the word for it? And kind of like the feeling the parent has when your child's gone astray, you know, like, man, I did, I thought I did everything I could for you, you know, and now you basically slap me in the face and walk away and won't have anything to do with me. This is God saying, listen, I did everything. I mean, I rescued you from Egypt.

I brought you through the wilderness. I gave you the promised land. I reared you. I brought you up. And now you've gone and rebelled against me. This is really the theme that we see in the Torah of the rebellious son. You know, the one who is not just dishonors his mother and father, but rebels against them. And that's Israel.

This is what Israel has done to the Lord. So much so that, as you say, animals know better their owner and their master than do the people of Israel. There's a lot of very negative comparisons in Isaiah, especially this opening chapter. You know, it's bad when God says that animals are better followers of the Lord than you are. Or, as you'll say in just a minute, when your city and your people have become—your city and your rulers have become like the people and the rulers of Sodom and Gomorrah. So he's not pulling any punches in these opening verses. This line here where it says, you know, a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, isn't this how, like, sin works too? It's certainly how idolatry works.

You go out and you serve something other than the Lord, you go worship something other than the Lord, and it's not freedom. It's actually this humongous burden, right, and this sin that piles up on your back, and you end up heavy laden with all this iniquity. and somehow there's, I don't know, there's some kind of correlation here where as this happens, as you start to engage in not having God as your God, you become just completely deceived and delusional, and this increases the way that you despise God. And this is what he says here, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, And somehow, and you get this impression with Israel a lot, like, they'll be doing a bunch of stuff on their own, rejecting the Lord, having all this stuff happen to them, and then, like, sort of, in the back of their mind, sort of blame God for their hardship, and this will, like, increase how much they despise the Lord, right?

And this is pretty common language for God to say, to worship another God, to serve another God. He doesn't take this just as a, you know, as some kind of decision that you've made, but he takes it as a despising of him. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the great irony of people, not just in ancient times, but people still today. we've all, I think most of us anyway, have gone through this. We think we're going to find freedom, the kind of freedom we want by, you know, leading a life of hedonism, whatever it might be. And what we find is more enslavement. You know, I'm going to get this burden of following God off my shoulders and I'm going to go follow my own heart's desire. No, you're just, you're

not exchanging a burden for a burden. You're exchanging freedom for captivity, you know, They're exchanging no burden for this 100-pound weight that you're carrying around on you. And then, yeah, like you say, you turn around and you don't blame yourself, but you end up blaming God. Yeah, why isn't God, what is God doing to me? And you're like, wait, what are you talking about, man? You're out here doing this.

You're piling this stuff on top of yourself, headed in the wrong direction. Yeah, it'd be like the prodigal son, you know, when he finally comes to his senses, blaming his father for the situation that he's in. my dad's fault i'm way out here and starving to eat pigs feed nobody you're you're the only one to blame there yeah buck stops with you oh by the way i should i should mention uh this phrase the the holy one of israel which is uh kadosh israel that is uh that's that's possibly even coined by

isaiah i mean it's uh i didn't double check on that but it is definitely one of his favorite phrases he uses it 25 times in in his book i'm guessing because of his the call narrative right when he hears kadosh kadosh kadosh holy holy holy is uh is the lord of hosts and so this becomes uh one of his favorite titles that he uses to uh to talk about god so yeah now we have a you know instead of a holy nation we have a sinful nation instead of having a chosen people we have a people laden with iniquity, instead of having God's offspring and children. We have offspring who are offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly, and now they have forsaken the Lord and turned themselves basically into an alien status. Not good. So how's God going to respond

to all this? He responds as he commonly does. He's like, ask questions. Like, why? Verse 5, why will you be struck down why will you continue to rebel and then he goes into this long description of how the body of israel is just almost get the feeling like they've been mugged just beat up so he says the whole head is sick the whole heart faint from the sole of the foot even to the head there's no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds that are not pressed out or bound up or softened with oil. They're in bad shape. Yeah, this is the, hey, how long are you going to keep doing this thing and getting these same horrible results? This is like the insanity of idolatry, right? Is that it only brings bad things, but you keep doing it. Yeah. You're

touching the stove over and over and over and over again and finding out that it's never not hot yeah it's a this actually kind of fits with the whole animal theme that was introduced a few verses earlier you know typically if animals do something and it hurts them they don't do it again i mean anyone who's been around cattle for instance if you have a hot wire fence up yeah and the you know the cow walks up there and you know get shocked and they don't spend all day don't spend all day doing that no and here's the thing you know once you say okay you take the hot wire fence down good luck driving cattle through that the fence is no longer there but for them it's there yeah so it's really hard to get them to get past that point again but us i mean we'll

be like hmm what if i touch this a hundredth time if it's also going to shock and sure enough it it does that's the that's the the crazy nature of of humanity uh created by god to be the the highest of the creatures and yet the way we act sometimes is below the below the beast i think the reason for that is that uh animals don't have a god complex but so uh they don't they're not confused about uh about whether they are god or not uh but but man is different uh man is always uh trying to figure out maybe maybe i am god this time you know maybe maybe it's things have changed maybe i've changed and uh yeah it never works out yeah maybe this time my self divinization project is going to work out for me not gonna not gonna happen so uh now we again to

what i mentioned earlier that you know we don't know exactly when the situations that are described here in these opening five chapters, none of these are like historically specified. So Isaiah in this opening section might be talking about something that happened under the Assyrians where they're beat up or something else when they were beat up. We're not told it. It really doesn't matter. The historical specificity in these opening chapters is absent on purpose. This is to kind of give you the entire picture of what Israel was going through as a result of them engaging in rebellion against God. Okay, so that was using the image of a person, a body. So head to toe, nothing but bruises, beat up. Okay, now we're going to switch to the image of country.

So this is verse 7 through 9. I'll read those. Your country lies desolate. Your cities are burned with fire. In your very presence, foreigners devour your land. It's desolate as overthrown by foreigners. And the daughter of Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a lodge in a cucumber field, like a besieged city. If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we should have been like Sodom and become like Gomorrah. So here we have, of course, I think this probably fits very well with what happened under the the assyrians there wasn't a full conquest jerusalem was spared but there was a lot of a lot of devastation and so you here have just you know everything's desolate you got cities that are smoking in ruins you got uh whoever

has come in as their conquerors they're just devouring the land it's kind of like you know if you picture someone invades your house they tie you up in a chair and they they just sit there and eat eat your food and drink your drinks right right in front of you that's kind of the image that's being used here and the daughter of zion which is uh perhaps just another name referring to jerusalem but usually if you talk about the daughter of blank naming the city it's the daughters of a city are like what today we'd call the suburbs or the villages around that city but either way whether it's jerusalem or or its cities it's it's like it's left like basically today what we call a tent or lean to so if a farmer has uh you know he's gonna he's doing a

lot of work in the vineyard. He doesn't want to go back and forth between the vineyard and his house every night and every morning, so he just kind of camps out there for the evening so he can work in the vineyard or in the cucumber field. That's the image here. It's just a temporary shelter that's thrown up for a night or two. And Isaiah says that is what Zion is left like, a booth, a lodge, or even worse, a besieged city. In fact, it was almost so bad that we were like Sodom and, like Gomorrah, just totally, totally wiped out by fire and brimstone. But we at least have, he says, a few survivors. Yeah, I mean, he's just piling up the reasons that it makes all the sense in the world to turn to the Lord,

and yet the people are like, no. Yeah. Not going to do it. He really is painting an insane picture here. It's like, hey, you should try something else. And sinners will do this, and sinners say, no, I'm not going to do that. This time it will work out. No, it will not.

Repentance seems like this thing that is so expensive. but the truth is it costs you nothing repentance is just all it costs you is your pride all it costs you is all your sin and shame and you have all that taken away but we cling to our own sense of rightness

which we confuse for righteousness and repentance just seems like the last thing in the world that we want to do. We do not want to turn away and turn back to the Lord. We don't want to do this because that means we're wrong. And

every time it works out wonderfully if you would just turn. It is one of the great lies the devil tells us and we tell ourselves too that the last thing we should do is repent. It just costs too much, chad like it's just too the price tag is so high yeah being honest and confessing our sins it just

it's too much too much i'd rather destroy my life again yeah than do that that's the way that the irrational center thinks um the only thing we're about to hear about sodoming and more again i mean of course people are very familiar with with these uh these cities these become almost the capital T, archetypical cities. And you have others, Babylon, of course. So in Hebrew, Babel, like the Tower of Babel, and Babylon are spelled exactly the same. So Babel or Babylon becomes an archetypical city.

Sodom and Gomorrah become archetypical cities. Jesus, of course, talks about Sodom and Gomorrah. He uses them as examples in his own preaching. But they're throughout the Old Testament. In fact, what was I going to mention here? Oh, yeah, where he says, what verse is that? Verse 7, when he says, That verb in Hebrew for overthrown is used, I think, about half a dozen times in the Old Testament.

Every single time, with this one exception, that overthrow is explicitly linked to the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah. so he's already using language here that readies us in verse 7 for what he makes explicit in verse 9 about the comparison with with Sodom and Gomorrah so verse 10 is where he's going to continue this except now he's going to shift the focus a little bit he said why why earlier and now he's going to say he's going to repeat the same two verbs with which he began in verse 2 where he said you know hear and give ear oh heavens and earth and now he's going to say hear and give ear but he's going to address not the heavens and the earth but somebody else I mean, do you take the, I mean, he does this, hey, we could have ended up like Sodom and Gomorrah, and then proceeds to call them Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sodom and Gomorrah, yeah. Oh, it's so, it's rhetorically sharp, yeah. You can just see, almost his hear is like, even if they are inclined to agree with him, thinking, yeah, we were almost there. And then he turns right around, and he's like, no, you are there. Yeah. Yes. Give ear. Oh, hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom. Give ear to the teaching. That's Torah in Hebrew there. They actually translated it properly here for once. Instead of give ear to the law of our God, they say give ear to the teaching of our God. So kudos to the

ESV translators there. They got it right. Give ear to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah. I like how he doesn't say you princes of Gomorrah he gets everybody right rulers of Sodom, people of Gomorrah he's not just attacking the leadership you might have it in your head you guys were almost

Sodom and Gomorrah level and the people are like yeah well at least there's somebody that we're better than and he's like no that's your new name don't think that you're better than Sodom and Gomorrah you're not It's almost what Paul does in those opening chapters of Romans where, you know, he indicts

all those terrible people out there for doing these things. And he turns around and says, you know what? You're no different. Yeah. Yeah. Almost the same kind of move that's going on here. So after that, so after here, give ear, rulers of Sodom, people of Gomorrah. Now he shifts.

He's going to, he's going to get right to what they think is God pleasing, all their sacrifices and everything. He is going to tell them, basically, I am sick of these things. What to me, verse 11, what to me is the multitude of your sacrifices, says the Lord. I've had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-bed beast. I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats. When you come to, he's going to continue this with verse 11, when you come to appear before me who is required of you this trampling of my courts bring no more vain offerings incense is an abomination to me new moon is going to now go into their festivals here new moon and sabbaths and the calling of convocations i cannot endure iniquity and

solemn assembly your new moons and your appointed feast my soul hates that's like i hate them with all my heart we might say in english they become a burden to me i'm weary of bearing them when you spread out your hands i'm going to hide my eyes from you even though you make your prayers i will not listen your hands are full of blood we'll pause there so this is a isaiah isn't the only one who does this of other prophets who who uh on the surface will kind of attack the sacrificial system but keep in mind they're not attacking the sacrificial system as such nor are they attacking the, you know, new moons, the Sabbaths, all that kind of stuff as such. What they're attacking is this idea that simply by the mechanical performance of these sacrifices, the mechanical celebration of

these events, that God is somehow pleased just by going through the motions of these sorts of things, even though what you're actually doing is engaging in rebellion against God and idolatry. And as he says here in this gripping image at the end of verse 15, you kind of get this idea you're spreading out your hands. I know you can't see me. We're on a podcast, but I'm holding my hands up. You're spreading out your hands to God in prayer. And God's like, I'm not going to listen to that. Look at your hands. They're full of blood. So you get this in Jeremiah 2 where the people think they can go out and commit murder and adultery and steal and profane and do all these things and then run back into the temple and say, the temple of the Lord, the temple of

Lord, the temple of the Lord, as if that in and of itself is going to save them from their rebellion. It's this thing that happens where you could be doing something that the Lord could be pleased with. It's things that He set up, institutions He created. But the thing about institutions that the Lord has created is that He's never neutral about them. He's either pleased with them, or you're doing them in such a way that you actually have the opposite happen to you, which is now he hates them and now you're being judged for them. So this just reminds me of sort of like the, you know, you think about the New Testament with the Corinthians, right?

And they're, you know, all eating all the bread and getting drunk on the communion wine and not letting the poor people have any and this kind of stuff. And he says, yeah, you're getting sick and dying. You're eating and drinking judgment on yourself. And this is how it works with the things of God, is that if you think that you can just placate God by doing the thing, it's not that nothing happens. It's that the opposite of what you're doing it for happens.

And so you kind of have the same thing here, where the people of Israel think that they're making these sacrifices to God, like, well, we'll be happy as long as we're doing these things. And the opposite is true. It's like, you need to stop doing those things, because every time you do this, I'm getting more and more upset. Yeah, better not to do them at all. Yes.

Best, of course, to do them in the way that God himself would have them to be done, but better not to do them than to twist them in such a way as they actually redound to your harm than to your good. Yes. There's a very in-your-face image that's used here, too, when he says your hands are full of blood. So in Hebrew, when you talk about ordaining someone, like the priest when they were ordained,

literally the idiom is fill the hands. So their hands were filled with the offerings or whatever it might be. That's how you ordained a priest. And here God says, oh yeah, you know what your hands are full of? Full of blood. That's what they're full of.

You kind of ordained yourself to engage in evil. So just in a positive note, we'll talk about this more next time, but he doesn't stop there. He says in the very next verse, well, wash, right? Wash yourself, make yourselves clean, remove the evil of your deeds before my eyes. So he's not going to stop there. He's going to say, listen, there is hope. There's always hope for sinners. Repent, get yourself washed off, and I'll make your sins, even though they're like scarlet, they'll be as white as snow. So Isaiah's going to get to that. He's kind of been leading

us to that gospel moment, but he's going to hold out hope for these sinners, just like there's always hope for us sinners, too, because God is merciful and gracious and always ready to forgive. That's right. Well, alright, well, I mean, guys, you're going to have to come back for the gospel, obviously,

you know, so, I mean, make sure you do that. We will be hitting that up next episode. Chad, I will see you then. Alright, see you then. We'll see you next week.