Story 4: Strange and Mysterious Messages from Lord
Isaiah 6:8-13
Isaiah was in the throne room of the Most Holy God in Heaven. He was standing before the Lord of all Creation who reigns in power over all the universe. The bright, pure holiness of God’s presence made Isaiah see the filth of his own sin in new and shameful ways. He cried out to the Lord for help, and God showed him mercy. A bright, flaming, angelic seraph touched a burning coal to Isaiah’s mouth to purify him. God was raising Isaiah up to deliver a very special message to the people of Judah. It was also a strange message. This is what God said:
“Go and tell this people; Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
Did you understand that? Read it again. What do you think it means?
God was sending Isaiah to give a message to the people of Israel and the world. He was being sent to tell them that God was not pleased. They were full of sin and shame and had rejected the ways of the Lord. Isaiah would tell them that they needed to change their ways.
This is not something most people want to hear, is it? So Isaiah was sent to tell them about God’s judgment against them…what was going to happen if they didn’t change.
God is merciful, and He was giving His people another chance to turn their hearts towards Him. Unfortunately, God already knew they would reject Isaiah’s message. That is why God declared that they would “be ever hearing, but never understanding.” They would hear Isaiah’s message, but choose not to understand it. Their hearts would become more and more hardened and calloused against God, so they would be able to see and hear less and less truth. The more they rejected Isaiah’s message, the more impossible they would make it for their hardening hearts to be healed. Terrible things would happen because they refused to repent of their sin and trust in the Lord.
When Isaiah was in the throne room with God, the purity and holiness of God showed him how sinful he was. What choice did Isaiah make? Did he get mad at God or reject God? We saw that Isaiah responded with humility. He allowed himself to be humbled. He repented. He was deeply sorry for things he had done. It will be Isaiah’s job to explain God’s holiness to the people of Judah. It will be his job to help them repent the same way he had repented. A few of them would. They are called the remnant. Their hearts would become more and more soft and open to the truth. They would see the right way clearly and God would heal them from their sin and shame.
But God warned Isaiah that most of the people in Judah would reject Him. They would ignore the words that God gave him and keep doing what they wanted to do. It is a very dangerous thing to hear something from God and reject His words.
How terribly sad must have been for both the Lord God and Isaiah. How the Lord longed to bless His people with the bright, holy cleansing of His love. How Isaiah wished to see his own people right and whole before their Lord. They could have had the same wonderful, clean, right relationship of love and power that he had with God. But God knew that most of them would turn away and choose lives of wickedness. God’s plan was to judge them. He knew that the only way to cleanse the children of God from their sin was to remove His protection and allow them to feel the full destructive force of their sin.
God rules in power over all of human history and over all the nations. He would use the powerful armies of the great empires of the earth to judge the people of Israel. For hundreds of years, God had protected Israel in spite of their sin. He had been restraining the power of evil against them. Now God was going to remove His protection. The Lord showed Isaiah that over the next two hundred years, both the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom would be attacked by other nations and destroyed. The entire nation of Israel would be gone. Their cities would be laid to waste, and the people would be forced to leave.
The Lord of Heaven had called them to be the priests of God to the world. Instead, they had given themselves to the worship of false idols and all kinds of morally repulsive rituals. They did not trust their God, and so His hand would move against them. But God still had an amazing message of hope.
This judgment was not the end of the story. The nation of Israel would be crushed, and most of the Jews would be forced to leave the land of Promise and move far, far away to different countries. They would live in places where they could not speak the language. Many of them would be like slaves. But God would use this strong judgment to purify His people. The hardships of living in a strange place would teach the righteous to put their trust in the Lord. And after many years, God would bring the righteous, purified remnant from the far-off countries back to Israel. He would rebuild the nation all over again with the people that had chosen to trust and obey the Lord.
Isaiah stood before the throne of God as all of these things were revealed to him. God told Isaiah they would happen to the Kingdom of Judah, but He did not tell him when. Isaiah spent the rest of his life prophesying about these things to the kings and people of Judah. His message was God’s amazingly gracious and patient offer, giving them chance after chance to repent. Yet Isaiah knew that few would listen, and that one day, Judah would fall.