Lenten Devotions - Day 31

“Now this is the answer of the holy God of Israel: ‘You rejected my message, and you trust in violence and lies. This sin is like a crack that makes a high wall quickly crumble and shatter like a crushed bowl. There's not a piece left big enough to carry hot colas or to dip out water.’” Isaiah 30:12-13

We tend to see God in the Old Testament as violent, vengeful, or angry. We equate the Old Testament God with force, war, destruction, and calamity. We want to believe that this God is somehow different from our perception of Jesus, as though the character of Jesus were not the character of God. There are indeed passages depicting God along those earlier lines of force, but they are not the whole picture, nor the clearest. Here in Isaiah's words is a whole other aspect of God's character, Yahweh's determination that violence is not the better way, not God’s chosen path.

To be honest, this latter face of God is visible from the third and fourth chapters of Genesis if we cared to look for it. God's trade in mercy, grace, and forgiveness is long-standing—as long-standing as our own propensity to violence, deceit, and selfish advancement. It should not really be a shock to find that God is indeed a God of love and has been so from before creation. Perhaps the difficulty we face is more that at heart we are not a people of love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness. We are the ones prone to seek violence and the use of force rather than love and humble submission.

We want to picture God as violent, fierce, and vindictive in order to cast ourselves in a better light. We want to feel free to wage violence along the force of our emotions, to determine that violent means may be justified in the pursuit of loftier goals. We want to believe that our exceptions are more important than Jesus' commands to return good for evil, love for rejection, and forgiveness for attacks against our friends, families, nation, and self.

Trust in “violence and lies”, or in “perversion and oppression” as in other translations, is much closer to our natural inclinations. This is not the purpose and objective of Yahweh in the words of Isaiah. It was rather God's plan to allow the nation to face deportation without recourse to violent response, even that of self-defense. They were to learn submission to God, rather than the defense of rights, freedoms, or self-determination. They were to accept Yahweh's sending the Assyrians as judgment for their own lack of faithful service.

Rather than repentance, contrition, and seeking forgiveness, the establishment struggled against God's will. They had too much invested in the status quo. Rather than humility and submission, they stood their ground in defense of their own purposes, in defiance of God's stated will. In the balance, they lost the blessing of being the people of Yahweh. In their attitude of defiance, they rejected God's purposes for their lives and the very independence for which they chose to fight. Humility and submission would have brought them the overall goal they sought, but they were too enamored of their choice of means to accept God's direction.

Where do your own actions flow from an attitude of violent response? Offer your struggle against God's way of love and submission in sacrifice to God's will. Ask God to help you live according to the example of Jesus en route to the cross.

“Lord, help me to match the means and direction of my life with your purposes of love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness.”

—©Copyright 2009 Christopher B. Harbin http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/

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