Catching Up

Isaiah 33-35

            First, my apologies for missing my blog these last several days. I have not been feeling well.

            Truth be told, what we’ve missed is a whole lot of judgment. In chapters 24-26, things took a turn for the cosmic. Chapter 24 expanded the Lord’s judgment to the whole earth. This is a typical prophetic move. On the one hand, from the original perspective, it’s a way of giving voice to the suffering of the moment through hyperbole—literary exaggeration, as when we say that our whole world ended. On the other hand, it looks forward to the day of final judgment, when the Lord sets the entire creation to rights. That that cosmic judgment is paired with final restoration is seen in chapter 25, with its glorious vision of the mountain of the Lord, the destruction of death, and the feasting that marks eternal salvation.

            Chapters 28-24 consist of a series of six woes: 28:1, 20:1, 29:15, 30:1, 31:3, 33:1. As we would expect in Hebrew, a series of six just begs to be completed with a seventh element, and that element is one of the most familiar and comforting passages in Isaiah, chapter 35, that after all the disasters the Lord will remember and redeem His people. The language is the language of return from exile. The wilderness areas that Israel will have to traverse will be transformed from lifeless desert to life-sustaining plain. Those whose strength is used up will be revitalized. And they will return as on a highway—safe and swift. “Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

            Once again, the language works on multiple levels. First, it works for Israel coming out of her troubles. The reference to eyes opened and ears unstopped is redolent of Jesus, the Messiah, who by His ministry of healing—and most especially in His death and resurrection—brought the truest of healing, healing from sin’s fatal wound. And, as so often, the whole thing sings of our hope for a world reborn, in which sorrow and sighing flee away once and for all.