A Peace For Us

 December 4 2022

Isaiah 2

         As we come to this second week of Advent, we are probably very aware of the sounds of Christmas that can be heard all around us. There is the jingling of the bell held in the hand of the Salvation Army volunteer standing next to their red kettle. In all the stores there is the old familiar carols playing; singers named Bing, and Perry and Johnny Mathis are once again deemed acceptable fare for longing ears to hear. Unfortunately there is also songs being sung by someone named Mariah, but in the spirit of the season we can even tolerate her for awhile. There is also the laughter of children who know that Christmas vacation will soon be here and they will be set free to focus on anticipating just what they want more than anything to see under the tree come Christmas morning. Into this mix for our ears to hear is the theme songs from the TV specials, the music which once again causes us to begin singing, “you’re a mean one mister Grinch”, or we may hear that old familiar sound of Schroeder playing on his piano which means that the the video is beginning where Charlie Brown will once again learn the true meaning of Christmas.

         Added to all of these sounds that we hear as we prepare our hearts for Christmas we must add the sound which Isaiah heard, the word that we are told that he saw. It’s easy to read this and give no heed to the really strange statement being made here; I mean just how exactly does one see a word? Just how does a person wake up one morning and suddenly there is a sound, a noise, a communication which when it is understood results in an enlightened imagination which is able to create out of that word a far reaching vision? I think that to grasp just what Isaiah is writing about here we must remember that at the beginning of every day, the people of God would pray the prayer which goes, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul and with all of your strength or resources.” Every morning was to begin with one’s ears open and ready to hear the word of God, to hear anew the command that above all else they were to love their God with all that they were and all that they had. It is not a stretch then, that Isaiah, one morning, prayed this very prayer, his ears were open once again to hear the word of the Lord, the command to love God. We have to wonder, is this vision that Isaiah had, could it be, in no small way, a fleshing out of just what loving God in all its fullness just might look like?

         When we think of loving God with all that we are, doesn’t exalting God to the highest heights seem to fit with with what must be expected of us? If we begin with the word, the command of God to love him, then what Isaiah saw begins to make sense. Sooner or later, God’s command to love him was going to be a reality and what Isaiah saw was a vision of this coming state of things. It is going to come to pass, as Isaiah tells us, that in the latter days, “the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains and the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be lifted above the hills…” As we read this we might not expect that the mountain upon which the city of Jerusalem is situated will one day suddenly be found to be higher than even Mount Everest. No, the concern here is not the height of Mount Zion but rather the lifting up, the exalting of God and his holy place of his presence. The house of the Lord is the Temple, the most holy dwelling place of the most holy God this is what must be held in high esteem.

         As we hear of how the peoples of the nations are coming to the Temple of God, I believe that this should remind us of is the promise God once made to a man named Abram. There in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, we hear God make a promise to Abram that through him, and through the descendants who would come after him, all of the families of the earth would be blessed. What cannot be forgotten is the seriousness that surrounds a promise that God makes. When God makes a promise then this promise can be thought of as already being a reality otherwise the faithfulness of God would be called into question. So, yes, we can wholeheartedly believe that all of the families of the earth will be blessed by God and this blessing will come through Abraham and his family. 

When Isaiah tells us that he sees the nations flowing like a mighty river up the mountain, rushing and pulsating ever up the heights, it is again, not hard to understand that this vision of Isaiah is an image of this reality that God promised to Abram. The house of the Lord situated on this high and holy hill points us to Jerusalem, the capital city of the land given to the people of Israel, the descendants of Abram. This is the land which God had promised Abram would be the home of all his children. So, here is the house of God, exalted above everything on earth, the house representing the family of Abram, and there is within this house is found the God who is beyond the bounds of earth yet even so, all the families of the world come to this house in wave after wave. Isaiah writes that many people were coming, saying to one another, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob, that God might teach us his ways and that we might walk in his paths.” Here again, we must pause and consider the strangeness of what is recorded here in the book of Isaiah. I mean, how can we not hear the words of the psalmist who, as recorded in the twenty-fourth psalm asks, “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?” The answer follows saying that the one who can ascend the hill of the Lord, the one who can stand in the holy place of God is the one “who has clean hands and a pure heart.” The people of Israel who would have heard Isaiah speak of this vision where all of the people of the nations come rushing up the holy hill of the Lord, had to be appalled. Just how do you think that these people who were far from God, the people considered to be unclean, how can you expect that these people can just come waltzing on in to the holy house of God, giving no consideration to how clean their hands are or how pure their heart might be? The people who had listened to Isaiah tell of his vision had to think to themselves that it seemed more likely that these foreigners were rushing up that hill like a mad horde on a rampage bent on storming into the house of God and taking it for their own. Isaiah, upon hearing these concerns, most likely would have wondered if these naysayers of his vision had really heard the word, the word that they were to have heard, the word which commanded the people of God to love him with all that they were and all that they had. If they had loved God they would had believed the promise of God, knowing full well that, yes, all of the families would one day be blessed by God and this blessing of God was to come through the people of God. If they had loved God they would have known that if God had made such a promise to bless all the families on earth then he is a God who is fully able to bless all of the other families on earth even if they appeared to be far from him, even if they were considered unclean. For God to be able to fulfill his promise to bless those who appeared more difficult to bless just meant that in blessing even these, God’s greatness is proved to be greater than his own people could have believed. Are you beginning to understand why Isaiah saw the house of the Lord there upon the highest mountain? Here is the greatness of God, the greatness to be able to bless those who are the farthest from him, those who seem to be the least to him, it is these to whom God extends his blessing. Through his blessing of those that seem to be the hardest people to love, God is exalted to the highest heights.

         What we cannot forget is that the reason that the nations come rushing to the house of God is that everyone has heard that there is a God and he is a God whose greatest desire is to share his goodness and glory with the very beings he has created to bear his image. This is God’s choice to be generous regardless of the worthiness of those who stand to receive his gift thus those who become aware of the graciousness of God respond to his grace with glad and grateful hearts. This gratefulness is what compels those of the nations who have heard of the blessedness of God to leave their homes and go to the house of the Lord. The people of the world come to sit at the feet of God so that they can learn the ways of God. Again, we must hold fast to the premise of Isaiah’s vision which is that what he is seeing is a demonstration of what it means to love God with all that a person is and all that a person has and no where is this love expressed more clearly than for the people of the nations to come to God in all humility and ask God to instruct them on the true way for them to live. All people have what they consider to be their wisdom, what to them is the right way to live and there is nothing more difficult than to decide that the ways that one thought were the right way to live are nothing more than something which must be discarded in order that the true way of living that God desires us to live can be learned and lived out. Only when the a life with God is loved more than than the life they used to live, only then will people take hold of this new life that God is teaching them to live. This is what Isaiah sees, people willing to learn the ways of God and it is this willingness to obey God this is the love that God so rightfully deserves.

         This love that the people of the nations have for God and the ways of God leads them to become people who can at last live with justice and righteousness. This is what is meant when we hear that out of Zion, the holy house of God, shall go the Torah. This word, Torah, is a Hebrew word which comes from a root word which means to flow out of. So, what we find here is a subtle play on words in this vision where the nations come flowing up this high mountain to seek after God and his ways and then we see the teaching of God flowing outward from this mountain into the world. What flows outward from Jerusalem we are told is the word which here again we must take as being the command to love God. When God is loved as God is supposed to be loved then it just makes sense that people will seek the judgment of God for rather than bringing fear into the hearts of people as thoughts of judgment day often do, the judgment of God is instead to be the means by which people can live together. When at last we turn to God the one who created us, the one who created us to live as living expressions of who God is, and we allow him to judge whether or not we are actually living like him, then it makes sense that the relationships we have with each other will be as they should be. Knowing that it is God alone who should determine the right way that we should live with one another it just makes sense that when we find that when we have a disagreement with someone, it is God who should be invited to come into our relationships to be the one who can bring about reconciliation.

         You see, if you work through what Isaiah sees when he considers just what does it mean for us to love God with all that we are and with all that we have, then we should not be shocked at this image of wagon loads of swords being hauled off to the blacksmiths forge to be put in the coals so that they can be hammered and shaped into plows. Here we can at last envision that the implements designed to take life will be recast to become implements which give life. The spears held in the arms of armies will now be used to prune trees. The nations, we are told, will no longer lift up their swords against one another; war, will become no longer a subject worth studying. 

         As we pause to consider this vision which Isaiah saw when he heard the word, the command to love God, the temptation is to say, that this is all a pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, something we would love to see happen but we doubt that it ever will. Do we really believe that war is someday going to be obsolete? Do we really buy into this notion that one day everybody is at last going to get along and nations are going to be at peace? I mean, when we read these far out, over the top, images isn’t there just a little part of us that is cynical of the whole business? Don’t we want to just dismiss it all and move on to more practical teachings? There’s nothing wrong with us approaching this vision of Isaiah with a healthy dose of pessimism, yet I don’t believe that we can just wash our hands of this whole business of world peace, gladly ridding ourselves of such outlandish notions. No, what all of this negativity that we have about this grand hope that someday we will, at last, get along, is supposed to do is to cause us to wonder just why is this vision even here in the book of Isaiah at all. I mean, if it is hard for us to think that one day all of our weapons will become farm implements it could not have been any easier for the people of Israel to accept such an idea either. They lived in a place that was constantly being invaded by various nations that surrounded them. They too most likely thought this vision of Isaiah, that he wrote down and placed within this work bearing his name, was probably just the ranting of a mad man. Yet, I don’t believe that Isaiah was the least bit crazy because what he saw is the ideal, the ultimate end of all things, the grand and glorious hope that we have to hang on to when the hopelessness of the world we live in creeps into our life and we begin to doubt whether God can really make any difference at all. For a lot of people who write commentaries on Isaiah they wonder just why, here, do we have this vision of Isaiah. This vision comes right after Isaiah writes of the current state of affairs of the people of God, how God considered these descendants of Israel his children yet instead of obedience he found that they rebelled against him at every turn. The people of Israel, people considered to be God’s own people, these were the ones God said did not know him nor did they understand him. This was the tragic state of the people that Isaiah was called to speak to as the representative of God. Isaiah knew that his own people chased after idols, lesser gods, which caused them to become lesser people. So far had they wandered from God that all they could be thought of is a sin sick group of evildoers whose iniquity Isaiah compared to the depravity done in Sodom or Gomorrah. They had become so callous that they actually thought they could come to worship God with blood on their hands as if all they needed to do is just go through the motions, offering up just what was required, as if that was all that was necessary to be alright with God. The love that the people of Israel was to have had for God had grown cold, for them they saw God just as one more power they could manipulate for their own good.

         So right here, at this very low ebb in the life of God’s people, this is where Isaiah hears a word and sees what could be if the hearts of his people could be set aflame once again with love for God. If only God could once again be held in the proper esteem, highly exalted, lifted up above every earthly concern then life would be rightly ordered. When they loved God with all that they were and all that they had then God’s people would remember that they had been chosen to be the people through whom the salvation of the world would come, that they were to be the ones who would bear the blessing of God out to all the families of the earth. You see, we need to hold fast to the future that is surely coming when we live in a present where it seems as if that future will never get here. We have to know that people will not rebel against God forever. We need to know that the days of believing in idols will end. We especially need to not let go of the truth that violence will not be the last word because our God is a God of peace and one day the people of this world will learn the ways of God and be at last people of peace. This is the hope we have because the Prince of Peace has come and shed his blood to bring peace on earth and goodwill for all. I hope that when Christ returns he will find us busy being the peacemakers he expects us to be. Amen!