Yet again, Isaiah
speaks of the fact that man fades away into death, doing so through employing
the imagery of the disappearance of the inhabitants of the earth. As has
been said, the impact of man’s sin (failure to rightly bear the divine image by
violating the covenant requirements established by the Creator God) extends
beyond himself, reaching the created order, which is why Isaiah insists that
“The new wine dries up, the vines shrivel up,” and with terminology that would
remind his readers or hearers of the exodus (set in motion by the groaning of
Israel in its slavery), and can put readers of the post-Christ era in mind of
Romans chapter eight and liberation of the creation, saying “all those who like
to celebrate groan” (24:7).
Bringing an awareness
of the Adam and exodus story forward to the time in which he was writing,
Isaiah could easily have looked around him, considered what it was that Israel
was charged with doing and being under their God’s covenant, and determined
that Israel had done the same thing as Adam.
In a sense, Israel was also recapitulating what Egypt had done to them.
Whereas Israel, now representing mankind, was supposed to be the means by which
the Creator God revealed Himself, the way in which that God had chosen to deal
with the problem of evil in the world, and accordingly functioned as a shining
light of the Creator God’s glory to draw all men to Himself and bring them into
a right standing with Him under His covenant, they were instead actively
engaging in the further defiling of the earth that has begun under the
influence of their purported progenitor (Adam).
Contrary to what was
occurring under the watch of His covenant people, the Creator God’s plan,
beginning with Abraham, was to reverse the devastation of the curse through those
covenant people, but instead they contributed to its ongoing devastation.
Israel, of course, had been given specific laws and ways of living as the
covenant people so that they might rightly bear the divine image by their God, yet
the recorded history of this people insists that they violated those laws almost
unceasingly. From time to time, their history suggests that Israel would
recognize the violations and come to repentance, but for the most part, there
was an utter disregard for the regulations that had been delivered to them,
especially in the area of caring for orphans and widows.
Yes, just like Adam,
sadly, the Creator God’s people had broken their everlasting covenant, failing
to uphold their covenant requirements to represent the Creator to the whole of
the creation. As a result, devastating judgment of cursing and exile
would come upon them, with this cursing provided context by the promises of
both Deuteronomy twenty-eight and Leviticus twenty-six. This would occur
as an outworking of their God’s faithful justice. He had brought them
into a treaty---an everlasting covenant with Him---and the execution of coming
destruction, in according with the aforementioned promises, was the ongoing
demonstration of their God’s righteousness (covenant faithfulness) towards His
people and towards His creation.
Ultimately, it would
take a Redeemer ---a messiah, for the Creator God Himself, as it would be
understood to act in the flesh, returning to His people to repair the treaty
and to set His people and this world to rights, doing so through a people who organized
their lives according to a new covenant, a renewed Israel, that live in a
believing covenantal union with Jesus.
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