Isaiah 29:9-16

4. SULLENNESS

TEXT: Isaiah 29:9-16

9

Tarry ye and wonder; take your pleasure and be blind: they are drunken, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with strong drink.

10

For Jehovah hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes, the prophets; and your heads, the seers, hath he covered.

11

And all vision is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee; and he saith, I cannot, for it is sealed:

12

and the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee; and he saith, I am not learned.

13

And the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw nigh unto me, and with their mouth and with their lips do honor me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment of men which hath been taught them;

14

therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.

15

Woe unto them that hide deep their counsel from Jehovah, and whose works are in the dark, and say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us?

16

Ye turn things upside down! Shall the potter be esteemed as clay; that the thing made should say of him that made it, He made me not; or the thing formed say of him that formed it, He hath no understanding?

QUERIES

a.

How is the book sealed?

b.

What was to be God's marvelous work?

PARAPHRASE

Yes, go ahead and stand around with that look of incredulity. Go ahead and stagger around in your stupor of blinding self-indulgence. The Lord has allowed you to drown yourselves in a spirit of deep stupor. The Lord has permitted your prophets and wise men to refuse to see His message. God's revelation has become a closed book to you. When men give it to a learned man and ask him to read it he says, I do not understand it, it is a closed book and I cannot read it. When they give it to the illiterate and ask him to read it, he says, I cannot read. None of you, therefore, know God's revelation. Now the Lord says, because you people pay Me only lip-service while your heart's desire is far away from Me, and because you revere the tradition and ritualism of men about My revelation, I will proceed with My program of judgment. I am going to manifest a miraculous judgment, such as only God can do. I am going to destroy the wisdom of your wise men. I am going to bring you into such difficult and impossible circumstances that none of your counselors will know the solution and their so-called wisdom will be shown to be folly. All this woe is to come upon you people because your leaders have taught you to reject the will of the Lord in your lives and they have taught you to believe the Lord is not the sovereign of your life. Your teachers have caused you to reverse reality! You have gotten every thing in life backwards. The clay vessel does not create the potterthe potter is maker and sovereign of the vessel. The pot does not say of the potter, he has no sense.

COMMENTS

Isaiah 29:9-12 BROODING: Isaiah represents the people as standing in a sort of stunned, hesitant, stupified state of sullen disbelief. They think it incredible that Isaiah is predicting Jerusalem will become a bloody altar to the Lord's vengeance. It does not make sense to them. They stare at the prophet like a drunken man stares when he does not comprehend what is being said to him. The Lord has allowed them to fall into a spiritual stupor. They have inebriated themselves and deadened their spiritual comprehension with rebellion against God's revelation and the heady intoxicant of self-exalting, self-justifying human traditions and rituals. And the Lord has made man a moral being whose choices either make him better or worse. Man's moral choices either blind him or enlighten him. That is the way God made man, so it is ultimately God's doing. The prophet who continues to choose what is false will eventually be blinded to anything true. What a man does not use he loses. When men do not exercise their faculties to choose between evil and good they soon lose the ability to see good as distinguished from evil. The people of Jerusalem have made up their minds that safety and security from the Assyrian menace is to be found in their own political shrewdness and their treaties with Egypt. They have left the Lord completely out of their plans. They do not trust Him. They do not believe He will act in their best interests. They believe their way is superior.

Sullenly they brood over the revelation of God delivered through the writings of Isaiah (cf. Isaiah 8:16-22), and when someone asks them what Isaiah's revelation means, their scholars and wise men scoff at it and call it a lot of gibberish and incredible nonsense which no one can understand. Isaiah's writings are like the sealed book of a mysticthey are completely unrealistic and far-fetched. What Isaiah says will never happen according to the wise men of Jerusalem. And, of course, in Isaiah's day many people were illiterate and depended upon priests and prophets and scribes for all their knowledge of what was written in books. The illiterate could not read for themselves, and when the literate would not read Isaiah's writings to them no one knew what Isaiah was revealing from the Lord. The whole nation learned only what the unbelieving, ungodly leaders taught them.

Isaiah 29:13-16 BELLIGERENT: Now Isaiah turns his attention to the cause of their blindness. Their leaders were teaching them to trust in their religion as it was then being practiced. It was a syncretism of paganism and Jewish tradition. It was a religion of self-merit based on ritual observance and disassociated from any relationship to a personal, righteous, holy, loving God. It was a religion of going through certain motions and saying certain words, but it had nothing to do with morality, goodness, truth, holiness of life. They had fallen into the same trap the devil has laid for so many men and womenthat of compartmentalizing life. Religion is in one compartment; vocation is in another compartment; family relationships in another compartment; recreation in another compartment; none of these compartments of life are supposed to have any influence on the others. These people of Jerusalem gave God lip-service, but their hearttheir desires and aspirationswas focused on themselves and the things of the world. The center of their lives was not God and His holiness but their own self-esteem and self-indulgence. They practiced a religion but it had no relationship to their way of life. They did not treasure God so their heart was not with Him (cf. Matthew 5:21). They reverenced the esteem of men; they treasured the traditions and opinions of men; they believed in man and his ability to solve all his own problems by his human wisdom and so they did not need God. They had simply turned a deaf ear to His prophet and eliminated God from all their plans.

Jesus quoted Isaiah 29:13 in a confrontation with the Pharisees (Matthew 15:1-20; Mark 7:1-23) over Jewish traditions. The Pharisees valued their traditions and opinions so highly they were eager to break the commandment of God in order to promote their traditions. It is the same old story of mankind's pride rejecting divine wisdom and sovereignty in favor of its own finite and fallible wisdom. To accept and be guided by divine revelation from The Sovereign God entails human surrender and self-humiliationa full and complete trust in God's word over one's own wisdom. This is not easy. God has never said it was easy. But man's historic experience, coupled with God's historic demonstration of Himself in His Son, should prove beyond the slightest doubt that man is lost if left to his own wisdom.

Isaiah's prophecy here had immediate reference to the marvelous wonder God was about to do in the Assyrian siege and the deliverance of Jerusalem by the angel of death slaying 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in one night. When God sent the Assyrian hordes and they got their strangle-hold on Jerusalem, the wisdom of Jerusalem's wise men was shown to be the foolishness it really was. Judah's leaders had advised that an alliance with Egypt would protect them from Assyria. The leaders discounted all Isaiah's warnings of judgment from Jehovah as so much nonsense. In effect they were saying, Isaiah is a fool and he is wrong; God has nothing to do with our political affairs; what God supposedly advises through Isaiah is foolishness; we know what is right and effective in our own affairs. So, when God allowed them to be brought to utter helplessness and near to being completely consumed by the Assyrians, He was destroying the wisdom of the wise.

The climactic point in history where God demonstrably destroyed the wisdom of the wise was at the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All the human schemes and philosophies of self-righteousness, self-esteem and self-salvation were thoroughly invalidated and shown to be foolishness. The cross and the resurrection were demonstrated to be the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation. That is why the apostle Paul quoted Isaiah 29:14. Every historic demonstration of God's wisdom versus man's foolishness in the Old Testament was a type and a prophecy of the climactic demonstration at the cross and the empty tomb! The Assyrian siege and the deliverance by the Lord's angel was one of those types!

When a man takes it upon himself to exclude God from any area or circumstance of his life, that man has turned things upside down! The man who tries to hide his doings and thinkings from the Omniscient God is a fool! His attempt is as absurd as the clay vessel attempting to say that it made itself and the potter had nothing to do with it. And when man gets his relationship to his Creator upside down all of man's existence gets perverted and in opposition to his real self! All man's moral perverseness, intra-personal antagonisms and self-conflicts are directly related to man's rejection of the sovereignty of his Creator in all the areas of life.

God extends Himself in love to reclaim autonomous, belligerent, sullen man. God carries out His program of reclamation through judgments and redemptions. But man, a free moral agent, must make a willing, humble, surrendered response. Man must surrender to God's sovereignty. God's judgment and redemption of Jerusalem at the siege of Assyria accomplished the reclamation of a remnant through which the Messiah was to be born. But the majority of the Jews continued in their belligerence and sullenness rejecting God's wisdom spoken through the prophets until in Jeremiah's day practically the whole nation (cf. Jeremiah 5:1) was in rebellion.

QUIZ

1.

Characterize the people of Jerusalem as Isaiah saw them in this chapter.

2.

How was Jerusalem to become an altar to Jehovah?

3.

What was the response of the people of Jerusalem to Isaiah's revelation?

4.

What was the cause of the people's attitude toward God's prophet?

5.

What was the climactic demonstration of God's destruction of the wisdom of the wise?

6.

What is the cause of man's perverseness?

7.

How may man find salvation from his perverseness?