Isaiah 45 "Not in Secret" Scott Hoezee

Imagine a situation in which you are in rather desperate need of help. Perhaps you need financial assistance to pay off a debt or perhaps you are stuck in some other unhappy situation and you just cannot see how you are going to get out of it. Then imagine that a friend promises to make some arrangements that will lift you out of this pickle. "I know someone who can turn things around for you," your friends says. And so you wait until one day you discover that your troubles are gone, the heavy weather of your life has mysteriously lifted, and you just know that it was through the arrangements of your friend.

So you call her up to gush forth your gratitude. "How did you do it?" you might ask. And suppose your friend replies, "Well, I had some help and this evening I'd like you to meet the person whose intervention did the trick for you." So you go to your friend's house but upon entering the living room you see your savior seated on the far side of the room, and it turns out to be your worst enemy, a person who has for years made it clear he cannot stand you, an individual whom you have seen purposely cross over to the other side of the street just to avoid having to say "Hi" to you.

Finally suppose that your friend's arrangement of this enemy's help was a double-blind: he did not know whom he was helping any more than you knew who did the work. How would you react? There may be a number of responses, but probably one of your first reactions would be a bit of anger, maybe disgust, that your friend would so sneakily arrange to bring you and this nemesis together. "How could you enlist his aid behind both our backs!? You know full well the way he feels about me. How could you put us into this position!? I'd rather go back to being stuck than be beholden to the likes of him!"

The Israelites of Isaiah's day had a similar reaction to the prophecy contained in this 45^th chapter. They had been in exile in Babylon for many years. Throughout this time, however, prophets like Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah kept whispering words of hope, promises of some kind of return to Jerusalem. As time went by, the people perhaps identified in a new and special way with their ancestors who had once been in a similar situation in Egypt.

That similarity, combined with promises of redemption, perhaps led them to envision some kind of a new exodus. They began to pine for and imagine a new Moses, a leader of towering faith and spiritual stature who, like the real Moses, would gloriously lead them to a better day. Who knows? Perhaps it would be better than even Moses--perhaps the one who would lead them home would be no one less than the promised Messiah, the Anointed One of God promised from ages past.

So how shocking the opening of Isaiah 45 must have been! Because there God announces that a Messiah is indeed coming--an "anointed one," in Hebrew a meshiach or "Messiah" would indeed lead the people home and re-build Jerusalem. And it turned out to be a pagan named Cyrus of Persia! No godly Moses, no Son of David, no Son of God but an Arab from Iraq! It is probably impossible for us to understand how this must have hit the people. This is definitively not the place from which the exiles looked for salvation! It would be as though today the Christian Reformed Church fell into some vast disarray but then an issue of The Banner would come out in which some professor from the seminary would write, "The CRC will be saved, it will be re-built, and it will be a Muslim holy man from Baghdad who will make the difference for us."

That's what the people heard from Isaiah, and they didn't like it one bit. There would be no Moses, no miracles, no partings of any Red Sea. There would just be the king of Persia, conquering Babylon, and then setting the people free. There would just be Cyrus authorizing folks like Ezra and Nehemiah to lead pathetic little bands of people back to Israel to work on re-building the Temple altar and the walls of the old holy city of Zion. It was not near spectacular enough! It did not even seem terribly holy or obviously God-glorifying. This is not the kind of salvation they wanted. So they grumbled a bit, muttered into their beards about the way this was apparently going to work out.

Much of Isaiah 45 is God's reaction to the people's disgruntlement. Verse 9 is particularly poignant. Borrowing the oft-used image of a potter with clay, Isaiah pictures a clay pot sneering back at the potter saying, "What are you doing? Why are you making me this way!" Then he further shows one pot saying to another, "The potter has no hands!" Of course, that is meant to be absurd since if the potter had no hands, there would be no pot to say such an outlandish thing!

But this may be a reflection of what was going through the minds of the exiles. "What!? Does God have no hands of his own such that he has to resort to using a galoot like that Arab Cyrus to spring us from this prison!!?? Can't he do a little razzle-dazzle of his own, send a lightning bolt or two, maybe a handful of plagues, onto the Babylonians and then lead us home with a fiery pillar!? He did it before! So why do we have to wait for the Persians to come? How come we don't get some miracles?"

To all such thoughts God says, "Woe to you who think that way." Commentators say that the word "Woe" at the beginning of verse 9 is a funeral word, a dirge word of lament at a time of death. It may be God's way of saying that those who quarrel with God or with God's methods are doomed. If you refuse to let God be God and so do things his own way, there is no hope for you.

But God then goes on to continue heaping up the promises in verses 11-14. God is going to use Cyrus, it will result in the people's being freed, and there will be great blessings in the long run. God even promises that other nations will see all this and will declare to the former exiles, "The real God of the cosmos is surely among you!" It is grand and heady material to ponder, but then comes verse 15. On the surface of it this verse seems out of place. It also seems contradicted by what is said just four verses later at verse 19. Verse 15 declares God to be hidden and secretive. Verse 19 declares that God is plainly visible and does nothing in secret.

So which is it? These apparent inconsistencies and contradictions have led some scholars to conclude that this is a corrupted text. That is, they think this was never meant to be together in one unit but is instead a loose, and somewhat careless, combination of several different text fragments which, in the end, do not make much sense in this form. But others disagree. Instead it appears that verse 15 is probably what the people were saying about God and which God subsequently begins to refute in verses 16 and following.

The people heard about God's plans to free them via Cyrus and not only do they complain that God seems to be without hands to perform some miracles, they also go on to say that the whole plan seems loopy. "Why would God hide behind what most people regard as the normal flow of history? Why wait for an ordinary conquest of one country over another to free us? From the outside looking in no one will see God's hand in that. If only God would send some plagues again or split the clouds with a chariot of fire or something, then the source and reason for our release would be plain to see. So why operate in a way that is so hidden from even our eyes, let alone the eyes of the watching world?"

In reply God says, "Listen: you're going to be saved, and it is not up to you to complain about how I do it. My might and grandeur are already on display in the whole sweep of this gorgeous creation. But people miss seeing me. So I have given you the extra help of speaking to you plainly through people like Abraham, Moses, Samuel, David, and now Isaiah. You've already got an inside track, so don't complain! Let me worry about the rest of the nations, who will one day come to me and bow down before me."

That is the main line of this chapter. But along the way God says so many other things, not the least of which has to do with a critique of idols made of wood, stone, or metal. God says that although those false gods are plainly visible, the fact is that these gods are weak for saving. They cannot do anything. People made them up and people can get rid of them, too. Cultures created such gods and such gods will disappear with the cultures on whom they depend.

And, of course, it's true. There are not many worshipers of Baal left anymore. I have not lately seen any temples to Marduk and don't think that even a trip to Greece or Italy would reveal very many active churches where people gather each week to burn incense to Apollo or Zeus. There are still many religions in the world, but God promises that even as many of the idolatries of the past have faded, so all will finally fade away, evaporated by the burning intensity of God's sacred presence which, in the end, will shine with a brightness which no one will miss.

But that's just at the end. For now we have to trust that this God is real, that he always knows what he's doing, and that as God he does not have to do things our way. If God chooses to remain a bit hidden and behind the scenes of history, that's the way it is and we are not to quarrel with God about this. To bring this a bit closer to home: if God chooses to save us by dying on a cross, rising again, but then disappearing into the clouds a month or so later, not to be seen again in, thus far, the last two millennia, then that's the way it is.

We should not wish it were different, should not tell God to make it different, and should not be too very upset when cynics come up to us with sneering questions like, "If your God is so real, why is there evil? Why doesn't he step in to swat every drunk driver in the world before he runs into a school bus? Why doesn't he cup his hands around Bangladesh so those already-impoverished people don't keep getting swept out to sea by every other typhoon that roars through the Pacific?

"If Jesus' resurrection was the grandest event that ever happened and, as a matter of fact, the centerpoint of all history, why didn't Jesus pay a post-Easter visit to Caesar? Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, lived in the Roman Empire of Jesus' day, and yet the Bible says only about 500 folks saw Jesus after he was raised from the dead, and most of them were peasants, ignorant fishermen, and women? What kind of a backward way is that to run a miracle?!"

But that's just the way it is. And as with Israel over against their Messiah Cyrus, so for us over against our Messiah Jesus: we trust that the God who created all really has now redeemed all. We trust that he knows what he's doing and that the day will come when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. And we trust all of this not only because "the Bible tells us so," but also because we sense deep down that this cosmos has a purpose. Verse 18 contains a most sublime summary of why paganism is so vapid and bleak as well as why faith in a living Creator and Redeemer God is so fragrant with hope.

"I did not create this world to be empty," God declares. The life-bearing nature of this universe is no accident. We human beings, as well as the myriad of other marvelous life forms on this planet, are not some quirk of evolution that could just as easily not have happened had the cosmic soup cooled a little too quickly billions of years ago. We're not here because one day a bolt of lightning just happened to hit the sludge of this earth in such a way that amino acids formed and began to build life.

We live in a universe fraught with design and redolent of purpose. But if there is no God who stands outside of reality as we know it, if the only "gods" that exist are ones that came into being as part of the larger process that happened to result in also the likes of us, then there is no safeguard against nihilism and despair. If chaos is all that there was before the big bang, then there is no surety that chaos, and only chaos, will not one day return to replace all that we have ever known.

Of course, plenty of people believe exactly this. From nothing we came and to nothing we will return. One day the universe will either snap back upon itself in a reverse big bang or evanesce itself to such a great thinness that it will disappear the way a soap bubble in mid-air can suddenly pop without a trace. And without a trace we will be, with no God to remember us, much less preserve us. The most glorious beauties we have seen in distant quasars and nebulae, the intricate wonder of a Monarch Butterfly's wing, the tender affection between parent and child, the grandest artifacts of culture in poetry, art, and drama: all of it will be gone one day. We are neither inevitable nor necessary and so we are expendable and temporary at best. These kinds of dark broodings are what lead folks in the Deep Ecology movement to suggest that it would be better if humanity went extinct for this alone looks like the way to keep other species from going extinct as a result of our urban sprawl and pollution of this planet.

If there is no sovereign God who intentionally got this whole ball of wax called reality going, then there is no good reason to think that such conclusions are wrong. But if there is such a loving God who both tenderly designed life and who constantly (and with equal tenderness) takes up into his divine Self the good things of our lives, then we know that indeed this world is no accident but is our proper home. Then we know that, despite all the ways by which he appears to hide his sacred work, it is nevertheless utterly real and totally effective in accomplishing exactly what God has revealed himself to be up to: namely, the salvation of a cosmos gone bad.

We stand on the cusp of "holy week," and yet many of the events we consider appear anything but holy. Disciples betray and deny and desert Jesus. A kangaroo court is held with lies and false witnesses. A thief is released but Jesus is crucified. He gets impaled on a cross, derided by mockers, and finally just expires. He gets buried. A stone gets rolled across the entrance to the tomb, with no thought of removing it ever again.

It's an ugly week of secrets and lies, torture and death. But we dare to call it holy because we believe God knows what he's up to. As paradox gives way to resurrection, as resurrection paradoxically gives way to Jesus' disappearing into the clouds, we join the apostles in thinking about it all. They decided to trust that God knew what he was up to and decided further to invite the world to join them in this wonderful faith.

As Paul would write in Philippians 2, somehow or another by flying from the heights of glory to the depths of death and hell--by flying himself straight down into the ground like some crazed air force pilot purposely nose-diving his F-14 into a corn field--somehow or another, by God's power and grace, it worked. Jesus now bears the Name above all names. And the day will come, it really will, when that Name will be spoken loudly enough for every person in the world to hear it at once. When they do, they'll bow down even as they say, "My Lord and my God!" Amen.