Stop Sinning

Wash!  Cleanse yourselves!  Remove your sinful deeds from My sight.  Stop sinning! – Isaiah 1:16  (NET)

Earlier in this chapter, Isaiah writes that “The sinful nation is as good as dead, the people weighed down by evil deeds” (1:4a).  Furthermore, it can be learned that “They are offspring who do wrong, children who do wicked things” (1:4b).  This is clearly not good.  What’s more, “They have abandoned the Lord, and rejected the Holy One of Israel” (1:4c).  The result of this is that “They are alienated from Him” (1:4d).  Isaiah goes on to write about a dreadful and ghastly situation, in which it is said that the Creator God’s people “insist on being battered” (1:5a), while adding that it is as if their head has a massive wound (1:5b), and their whole body is weak (1:5c) with bruises and cuts and open wounds that have been left unattended (1:5d).  Worse than that, the devastation and desolation that has been brought about by their evil deeds, wicked things, abandoning and rejecting and being alienated from the Lord, means that their land has been devastated and burned with fire, that their crops have been destroyed by foreigners” (1:7). 

It is the midst of this that Israel’s God, through His prophet, tells His people to “Wash!  Cleanse yourselves!  Remove your sinful deeds from My sight.  Stop sinning!” (1:16)  A few lines later, their God gives His people comforting assurance, saying that “Though your sins have stained you like the color red, you can become white like snow; though they are as easy to see as the color scarlet, you can become like white wool” (1:18b). 

Furthermore, their God extends His mercy, telling His people that if they will simply “Stop sinning,” and rather, “have a willing attitude and obey, then you will again eat the good crops of the land” (1:19).  With such a will to obedience, God promises to reverse the curse on the land and the crops.  Though the covenant God has said “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I look the other way; when you offer your many prayers, I do not listen” (1:15a), we can imagine His reversing promises to extend to this as well. 

Here, one remembers God’s promise to Solomon at the dedication of the Temple, in which He is reported to have said, “if My people, who belong to Me, humble themselves, pray, seek to please Me, and repudiate their sinful practices, then I will respond from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).  This can be neatly harmonized with what is being said here in this first chapter of Isaiah.  Even though the Creator God has said that He will not hear His people’s prayers “because your hands are covered with blood” (1:15b), that He will wash away the stain to make them appear as white as wool.  Conversely, in the midst of the merciful extension of His grace, this God also warns His people, saying “But if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword” (1:20a).  To this is appended the ominous and punctuating statement of “Know for certain that the Lord has spoken” (1:20b). 

Now, following the story arc of Scripture, one cannot help but know that the judgment that is promised to fall upon God’s people, according to the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, comes first and foremost because of idolatry (coincident with a failure to keep the Sabbaths and reverence the sanctuary, which would certainly be a by-product of idolatry).  Isaiah is apparently alluding to this here in this chapter.  Along with failing to keep the Sabbaths and reverence the sanctuary, idolatry (the divine-image-bearer worshiping the creation and therefore giving over his rightful dominion) most clearly represents their abandoning of their Lord and their rejection of their God.  However, here in Isaiah, there is more to be found. 

When the Creator God instructs His people to remove their sinful deeds and to stop sinning, calling them a sinful nation, saying that they are weighed down by evil deeds, doing wrong and wicked things, He goes on to give them and all that would read or hear these words an insight into what He had in mind.  Thus, one might be more than a bit surprised to read, “Learn to do what is right!  Promote justice!  Give the oppressed reason to celebrate!  Take up the cause of the orphan!  Defend the rights of the widow!” (1:17) 

Those are the words that follow the exhortation to stop their sinning.  That is what precedes the Creator God’s speaking about their being stained red with their sins that are red as scarlet.  It would seem that it is the failure to do these things that covered their hands with blood, that made their God refuse to hear their prayers, to hate their keeping of the feasts that He Himself had ordained and given to them, and to reject their sacrifices (1:11-15).  Apparently, it was the failure to do these things that caused their God to compare His own people to Sodom and Gomorrah (1:10) (the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah being oppression of orphans and widows, and the denial of justice, which is certainly well implied by the story of Lot as recorded in Genesis). 

The covenant people of the Creator God, according to Isaiah and their circumstances, were not doing what was right, in that they were defeating justice, causing the oppressed to mourn, turning away from the orphan, and casting off the widow.  In stark contrast to those things that so many generally want to classify as sins, it was these things that were their evil deeds.  This was their sin.  Ultimately, in this, they were failing to be God’s light.  Israel was failing to bear the image of their God.     

Song Of Exodus (part 1 of 4)

If we situate ourselves with an exodus-oriented approach to David’s song (2 Samuel 22), with the looming specter of exile that stands behind his acknowledgment of the Lord as his deliverer, refuge, savior, and rescuer from enemies, we can move through the song to demonstrate more explicitly the reliance upon the theme. 

It would not be overdoing it for David to call attention to the God of Israel as the God of exodus, as he says “In my distress I called to the Lord; I called to my God” (2 Samuel 22:7a), as this is a recurring theme in Exodus itself.  When we look at Exodus, we are consistently referred back to the Israelite groaning, as we can read that the Lord spoke to Moses and said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt.  I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows.  I have come down to deliver them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land… And now indeed the cry of the Israelites has come to Me” (3:7-8a,9a).  Further on in Exodus, we hear the Lord speaking again and saying, “I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered My covenant” (6:5). 

Just as Israel groaned under oppressors and cried out to God under the knowledge of His covenant with them, so too did David.  When David cries out in praise, referencing enemies, death, chaos, and distress, he does so under the knowledge that the same God that delivered Israel from Egypt and eventually made him king of Israel, has made a covenant with him.  David can rely upon and trust in that covenant because, again, that God of covenant was and is the God of exodus; and if that God can deliver an entire nation, and raise them up as His people to be a light to the nations (no matter how far short of this ideal they fell), then that God can certainly perform according to His promises to David. 

The Lord spoke to Moses on two different occasions and spoke of having heard the cry of His people, so we hear David, in reference to his own calling upon the Lord out of his distress, saying “From His heavenly temple He heard my voice; He listened to my cry for help” (22:7b).  What happened in Egypt when Israel cried out in their distress and the Lord heard?  He responded with an awesome display of the power of His outstretched hand.  Egypt and Israel saw water turned to blood, frogs covering the ground, gnats on man and beast, the descent of flies, disease on livestock, affliction with boils, the destructive power of locusts, the falling of hail and fire, the land shrouded in darkness, and the death of Egypt’s firstborn. 

What did David see as the Lord’s response to his own call?   How did David describe the result of his God listening to his cry for help?  He would say, “The earth heaved and shook; the foundations of the sky trembled.  They heaved because He was angry.  Smoke ascended from His nose; fire devoured as it came from His mouth; He hurled down fiery coals” (22:8-9).  Yes, David called upon the God of Israel’s deliverance, claiming Him as the God of His own deliverance as well.  We are certainly able to imagine that, if David has successfully brought Israel’s God of exodus to mind with his words to this point, when he speaks of the shaking of heaven and earth, the trembling of the sky, smoke and fire and fiery coals, thoughts of the plagues upon Egypt would not be too terribly distant. 

If thoughts of the plagues of Egypt were close-at-hand, then so too would be thoughts of what resulted from those plagues, which was Israel’s liberation.  What was it that accompanied that liberation that saw Israel marching out of Egypt?  Of course, it was the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, to which we are first introduced in the fourteenth chapter of Exodus, at the Red Sea.  The record of Israel’s victory (and Egypt’s defeat) at the Red Sea would be immediately followed by a song of triumph in the fifteenth chapter of Exodus.  David’s song, in the second book of Samuel, heavily mirrors the song that was sung by Moses and the Israelites, and would, quite naturally, because of the explicit connections to the exodus that are being made by David, call to mind the song of Exodus and the events that both preceded and followed from the song. 

It would be shortly following the deliverance at the Red Sea that Israel would come to Mount Sinai.  We read that the Lord’s presence on Sinai was signaled by “thunder and lightning and a dense cloud on the mountain,” and that “Mount Sinai was completely covered with smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire, and its smoke went up like the smoke of a great furnace, and the whole mountain shook violently” (Exodus 19:16b,18).  There, God would give voice to the commandments of His covenant, speaking clearly to Moses, for His people, as to what He desired from them.  Before we get to that however, “the Lord called to him from the mountain” and said, “Thus you will tell the house of Jacob and declare to the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I lifted you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself” (19:3b-4).  What does David say, when he contemplates the Lord’s deliverance?  With words that will call exodus and Sinai and covenant to mind, he says, “He made the sky sink as He descended; a thick cloud was under His feet.  He mounted a winged angel and flew; He glided on the wings of the wind.  He shrouded Himself in darkness, in thick rain clouds.  From the brightness in front of Him came coals of fire.  The Lord thundered from the sky; the sovereign One shouted loudly” (22:10-14).