Thursday 29 November 2007

Background

We don't know when or where today's verses from the book ofIsaiah were written or even who wrote them. We can tell they werewritten after 'interesting times', as the Chinese are supposed tosay.

Those 'interesting times' included invasion, terror, siege andexile which happened to the region in the 720s BC when theAssyrians invaded, destroyed Israel and its capital Samaria andexiled its people. They devastated Judah and besieged its capitalJerusalem for several years but did not capture it. Then, just overa century later, the Babylonians invaded and succeeded indestroying Jerusalem.

This passage follows strong words against the 'invader' in verse 1and a picture of the devastation across the region in verses 2-16.But the foreign invaders have now gone and these verses pictureZion, the old name for Jerusalem, and its people safe, secure andat peace. Yahweh rules and all is well.

Remember that every time you see LORD or GOD in capitals in ourBibles the Hebrew has the unpronounceable name of Israel's God,'Yahweh' or YHWH. The name of God is unsayable because it is toosacred to say it. Jewish readers meeting the consonants for YHWH donot attempt the pronunciation but say 'Adonai' (meaning 'Lord') orsome other indirect way of expressing the name of God. Jehovah wasan attempt to pronounce the name but was an English phenomenon -this was never said in Hebrew.

A standard feature of Hebrew poetry is 'parallelism': therepetition of the same idea in different words twice or more times.Check it out in the Psalms. We find it here too, as much of whatthe prophets said is poetry. So here God is called 'judge', 'ruler'and 'king' in parallel, three ways of saying the same thing. Theclimax phrase is that he will 'save' us.

Notice that calling God judge here, as elsewhere in the OldTestament, is another way of saying that he will save us and not,as we so often might think from the way some Christians use theword, that he intends to condemn us. Judge is a greatlymisunderstood word in the Bible.

To Ponder

What do you think or feel when you hear peopletalk about the 'judgement of God' or speak of God as a judge?

Verse 22 is full of hope. So is the Lord'sPrayer which hopes for that day when God's kingdom willcome and his will be done 'on earth as it is in heaven'. But howlong can you go on hoping and what happens to your hope when whatyou hope for never materialises?