When God Wants Us to Get the Point
...that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.
— Isaiah 40
Isaiah 40 is one of the most comforting passages in all of Scripture.
“Comfort, O comfort my people.”
“A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.”
“He will feed his flock like a shepherd.”
Those are beautiful words. Christians hear in them the distant approach of John the Baptist and, beyond him, the coming of Christ.
But before Isaiah gets to any of that, there is this: Jerusalem has suffered. Terribly.
She has “received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.”
That's hard.
Ten years ago, when I reflected on this passage, I tried to turn it into an explanation for suffering. Bad things happen, I reasoned, because human beings are sinful and God sometimes takes extreme measures to make us understand just how serious sin is.
I would be more careful saying that today.
Scripture gives us plenty of warnings against looking at someone else's suffering and confidently explaining why God allowed it. Job's friends tried that. They were certain they understood the relationship between suffering and sin, and they were wrong. Jesus Himself rejected the assumption that people who suffered particular tragedies must have been worse sinners than everyone else.
So when something terrible happens to another person, Isaiah 40 does not give me permission to point at that person and say, “See what God did?”
That's not reflection. . . . That's judgment.
But neither do I want to run away from what Isaiah actually says. Sin matters.
It matters enough that Scripture contains stories of judgment that make me uncomfortable. Nations fall. Jerusalem is destroyed. People are carried into exile. Human selfishness, cruelty, idolatry and injustice have consequences, sometimes catastrophic ones.
God does not look upon evil and shrug.
And perhaps the safest place for me to apply that truth is not to somebody else's suffering, but to my own life.
What am I tolerating in myself because changing it would be inconvenient?
Where have I become selfish?
Whom am I failing to love?
Where have I withheld mercy because I didn't particularly like the person who needed it?
Where do I need to repent?
Those questions are harder than explaining somebody else's misfortune.
And then comes the astonishing thing about Isaiah 40.
After judgment comes:
“Comfort my people.”
God's objective was never destruction for destruction's sake. Jerusalem's story wasn't over. The same God whose judgment Isaiah refuses to minimize now announces restoration. The road is being prepared. The people are going home.
That changes the way I hear “extreme measures.”
God takes sin seriously because He takes His creation seriously. He wants selfishness, cruelty, exploitation, hatred and everything else that destroys His children finally gone.
Including when those things are found in me.
Perhaps that's the part I most need to remember.
When Scripture speaks harshly about sin, my first impulse should not be to look around and decide who deserves God's judgment. I should look inward.
Because the voice crying in the wilderness isn't telling me to prepare somebody else's way. It is telling me to prepare mine.
And then, wonderfully, comes the comfort.
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