Isaiah 57:20-21

5. SEETHING

TEXT: Isaiah 57:20-21

20

But the wicked are like the troubled sea; for it cannot rest, and its waters cast up mire and dirt.

21

There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.

QUERIES

a.

Why are the wicked like the sea?

b.

Is there really no peace to wicked people?

PARAPHRASE

But the wicked are never healed in the inner man because they are filled with a restlessness of soul that keeps boiling up within them like the sea whose waves never stop rolling in, bringing up filth and muck. There is no secure feeling of being at peace with the wicked.

COMMENTS

Isaiah 57:20 CONSCIENCE: The contrite and humble man will be healed. He will be healed in the inner man where the conscience dwells. He will receive, by grace, through faith, an imputed righteousnessa cleansed conscience. But the wicked man's conscience is like the constantly rolling sea. It is never completely at rest. It may be calmed at times, but it is forever boiling and churning and more often than not it is casting up all the mire and muck thrown into it. The wicked, said Calvin, ... are terrified and alarmed by conscience, which is the most agonizing of all torments and the most cruel of all executioners. Luther said, Conscience is a savage beast and a devil. There is nothing which so much disturbs the peace or causes so much unrest as a frightened heart. It turns pale at the flash of lightning and at the rattle of a leaf. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of September 22, 1941 comes the following story:

Seven years of tortured nights, when he awakened screaming at the specter of the man who had befriended him and whom he had killed, have ended for Harold Malmberg. Malmberg, 27 years old, died yesterday in the Nebraska Penitentiary hospital from poison he swallowed three days before, Warden Neil Olson said. During his seven years, Malmberg was a model prisoner, who never complained and did not seek parole, Olson added. But he could not face his conscience.

Malmberg had few nights of peace after he shot Russell Goodwin three times in 1934 and left him beside the road to die, after Goodwin, a traveling salesman, had picked up the hitchhiking youth. In prison he had nightmares in which the man he admitted murdering came back every night to sit on his bed and talk to him, the warden explained.
In the daytime, Malmberg was a jovial sort who did the tasks required of him cheerfully and well.
While he steadfastly refused to tell what he had swallowed, doctors labored continuously over Malmberg from the time he was discovered ill early Friday morning until he died. The poison apparently had been stolen from the prison photographic darkroom where he worked.
Malmberg consistently denied he intended to kill Good-win when he ordered the salesman out of his car at pistol point. The jury did not accept his pleas of insanity, and the Des Moines, Iowa, youth was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Man may escape the punishment of human courts and judges. His evil deeds may be kept in absolute secrecy from everyone else. He may carry them with him to the grave, but he cannot hide himself from his conscience, nor can he escape from its tormenting judgment. Every man must live with his own conscience, and woe to him whose conscience has become his judge and executioner. Be assured of this, If our hearts (conscience) condemn us, God is greater than our heart (1 John 3:20-21).

Isaiah 57:21 CONFLICT: A guilty conscience may become a frightful tormentor and a source of intense agony and distress leading to mortal sorrow and, sometimes, even suicide if the sense of guilt cannot be removed effectively, A guilty conscience may even prove disastrous to the physical and mental health of an individual. The wicked, unfaithful, covenant-breaker can never have security, peace of mind and soul.

The point of these last two verses is to make a sharp contrast between the healing that will come to those of contrite and humble hearts and their turning to the Lord and His promises to be eventually accomplished in the Servant, and the wicked who refuse healing and reconciliation. The guilty conscience can only be healed through imputed righteousness. The cleansing of the conscience can only come by grace through faith in the substitutionary atonement of Christ (cf. 1 John 1:8-9; 1 John 2:1-6; Hebrews 9:14; Hebrews 10:19-22; 1 Peter 3:21). One of the important reasons there are certain actions required of men for entrance into covenant relationship with Christ (faith, repentance, immersion in water) is to provide man a series of overt actions and a point of reference in time to which he may relate his inner, invisible spiritual person with the cleansing of his conscience. In other words, man needs such reference points by which to express his faith and experience access into the grace of God (cf. Romans 5:1-2). It is in our obedience to the word of God that we have assurance of the purification of our souls (cf. 1 Peter 1:22-23).

QUIZ

1.

How is the contrite and humble man healed?

2.

Have you experienced the truth of Isaiah 57:20-21 in your conscience?

3.

Have you experienced the cleansing of your conscience?

4.

How are we assured, what is the source of our assurance, that we may have our conscience cleansed?