Why does the second half of Isaiah 30 have to be so offensive? It starts with God marching out to war against Israel’s enemies, his face furious with anger, his sleeves rolled up for battle, his breath a stream of sulfurous fire. This is challenging enough in a primitive-wrathful-deity-of-the-Old-Testament kind of way. You’ve heard these objections. You might even have made them in your own heart.
But Isaiah then adds a detail that is even more objectionable.
The whole distressing scene of God’s fury being unleashed against the terror-stricken Assyrians is cast as a piece of musical theatre. While God is doing the destroying, the people of Israel are singing along with gladness of heart. In fact, “every stroke of the appointed staff that the Lord lays on them will be to the sound of tambourines and lyres” (Isa 30:32). The Lord is smashing the Assyrians’ heads in, and the Israelites are playing in time with a happy tune.
The fury and wrath are hard enough to cope with. Do they have to set it to music?
Whenever we meet something like this in the Bible—something that simply doesn’t fit with our conception of who God is, or what he is like—it’s an opportunity to be prized. It’s a chance to have our sinful, fallen thinking corrected—to have our distorted worldview (and God-view) wrenched back into shape.
In this case, I think our problem is very similar to the one that some of the Israelites themselves had. These were the people earlier in the chapter who said to their 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” (Isa 30:10-11).
I think that’s our problem. We don’t wish to hear about the Holy One of Israel—to contemplate him, to grasp something of his nature, to measure ourselves by his holiness—because when we do, we find ourselves deserving what the Assyrians got. We are offended by the blinding holiness of Yahweh.
We also might not like hearing that he is the Holy One of Israel. God’s election humbles and offends us. God chooses whom he will bless and whom he will harden. He opts for Israel for no reason that we know of, except that he loved them. That too is a slap in our face.
All in all, the ‘smooth things’ sound much more attractive. They certainly help to build a bigger church.
Thanks Tony. If God can do that to his enemies, he could well do it to his own people. That is what is really scary!!!
I know it wasn’t your intention, but reading this has again put the fear of God in me. Thanks be to God for the refuge he provides.
So much of the Bible is like this, Tony. I’ve got a post coming up on Psalm 53 which makes a similar observation; the other striking one that springs to mind is Miriam’s tambourine jig when the horse and rider are thrown into the sea, there in Exodus 15.
I’m wondering why there isn’t quite such a sense of ‘nyah-ni-nyah-ni-nyah-ni’ on the day when Jesus rises from the dead. But perhaps that must wait until we have all crossed over the other side, as we read in Revelation 19:3
<i>“Hallelujah!
The smoke from her goes up forever and ever.”</i>
Speaking of the fall and destruction of Babylon.
I suppose our current celebrations over the fall of God’s enemies is, before the Lord’s return, tempered by a sense of mercy and fear:
<i>22 And have mercy on those who doubt; 23 save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.</i>
(Jude)
What an awesome chapter that is!