Make your tent
larger, stretch your tent curtains further out! Spare no effort, lengthen
your ropes, and pound your stakes deep. – Isaiah 54:2 (NET)
The prophet Isaiah, who
is understood to be communicating on behalf of the God of Israel, speaks to the
covenant people of this God and tells them to “Make your tent larger.”
This is in the wake of the vivid description of what would eventually be taken
to be the cruelly inflicted death and glorious resurrection of the suffering
servant of chapters fifty-two and fifty-three (though this was unlikely its
original interpretation).
If anything, the presumed
death of the servant, who was understood in some circles to have represented
the messiah that was to come into the world for the redemption and salvation of
the Creator God’s people, while some circles would have seen the servant as a
microcosm of Israel itself, would have caused an inward turning and isolation,
with shock and shame and grief being the well understood order of the
day. In the wake of this however, the Creator God directs His people to
“Shout for joy” (54:1a), primarily because they were acquitted by the actions
of the servant (53:11), and because he carried away their sins (53:11) ---
their failure to rightly bear the divine image, thus ending their cursing and
exile.
Yes, because it seems
to be insisted upon that the Creator God’s servant intervened on behalf of His
rebellious people (53:12), they were to shout for joy. Having entered into joy, they were to make,
or perhaps in the act itself, made their tent larger. What did it mean to
make their tent larger? What is this stretching out of curtains? Most
that come to this text are generally not tent-dwellers, whereas the people for
and to whom this was written, though they did dwell in permanent structures, would
have understood the tent-dwelling, nomadic lifestyle quite well. So even
though most observers are removed from such a lifestyle, the original audience
could certainly have well-understood this to mean that they needed to make room
for a larger family.
Looking into this
then, one would see (as perhaps Jesus Himself did) that the death and
resurrection of the suffering servant that represented Israel, which would see
the servant being cursed and then accepted by the Creator God in spite of the
cursing, had the effect of acquitting God’s people Israel. Along with this, it would have the effect of
extending the Creator God’s covenant to all of mankind, thus creating a
worldwide covenant family that would no longer be confined to national
Israel.
At that point, and
even through the time of the Christ, it was the opinion of the majority of those
that dwelled within the borders of Israel that all that were not members of the
nation of Israel. Therefore, those that
were outside of their God’s covenant family were cursed, standing outside of
the realm of God’s blessing. Expanding on this and reiterating, with the
benefit of hindsight, one is now able to look back to these words from Isaiah,
as did men such as the Apostle Paul, and see that the cursing (crucifixion) of
the suffering servant put the servant into the same category that Israel had
reserved for the Gentile nations. Those
that would identify themselves with the servant would fall into this category
as well.
The redeemed
(resurrected) servant, since he had been considered to be as a Gentile through
the cursing, served to imply that the Gentiles were now being pulled into the
family of the covenant God. For this reason, the original covenant family
(Israel) is instructed to prepare to welcome and accept a larger covenant
family. Not only are they instructed to welcome and accept, but they
themselves are effectively commanded to actively prepare the larger dwelling
place to accommodate this rapidly growing and ever-expanding family. In
fact, Isaiah includes the directive to “spare no effort,” as they were to do
whatever was necessary to open wide their arms of acceptance.
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