Thoughts on Isaiah 41

Today’s reading: Isaiah 41; Revelation 7

When God challenges the idols to declare what is to come to prove they are gods, is He challenging them to predict the future, or is He challenging them to try to exert their own will over His?

The Bible affirms, over and over again, that there is a spiritual reality behind the idols of the nations. Yes, the images themselves are wood and metal, but there are very real and significant spiritual powers behind those images. God tells us in Deuteronomy 32 that when He divided up the nations at Babel, “he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.” When humanity rebelled against their maker, He gave them over to be ruled by lesser spiritual beings, and chose Abraham to make a people for Himself from, saying from the beginning that He would bless all the nations through Abraham, in context, saying He would bring the nations back to being His own through Abraham’s family. This ultimately happened through Jesus, allowing people of every tribe, tongue, people, and nation to be adopted back into the family of God by faith, but the point is that the gods God is talking about in Isaiah 41 are real spiritual beings. 

This tells us, first and foremost, that God’s challenge to the gods in Isaiah 41 is not just a challenge to generically do anything at all, as though claiming there is no reality behind them at all, but is specifically to declare the future, with a view to this validating who is the real God.

I know the standard view of this is that God, being uncreated and not part of this universe, stands outside of time and can therefore declare the future because He can see all times, past, present, and future, simultaneously. I have talked before about how God’s having created time does not necessarily mean He can see/know the future, as that assumes a lot about the nature of time and God’s interaction with it that we simply are not told. But the bigger issue in this context is that the spiritual beings over the nations probably have the same relationship to time as God Himself does. In Job 38, God is asking Job where he was when God was creating the earth, and He says that when He laid the foundation of creation, the sons of God (the same word, elohim, for who He gave the nations over to in Deuteronomy 32) were shouting for joy. This means that those beings already existed before God created the universe, and therefore, if time is a construct of our created universe, those sons of God are just as much outside of time as God Himself is. So if God is talking about seeing the future, and He can see it because He is outside of time, it seems like those He is challenging would be equally able to see it.

This is why I personally think it is more likely that God is challenging the other gods to overcome/overpower His will with their own. Psalm 82 is an indictment against these same sons of God because they did not rule the nations they were given in justice and equity as they were supposed to. These spiritual beings rebelled against God’s intentions and led the people to worship them instead, and Psalm 82 is saying that they will ultimately be judged for this. They had pit their own will against Yahweh’s, and Yahweh declared that they would face judgement for this.

But if they can all just see the future, would this rebellion make sense? If it is a foregone conclusion that Yahweh would come out on top, how foolish and short-sighted must these members of God’s divine council be to rebel in this way??

However, what if they can’t all simply see the future? What if, when God declares the future, He is not telling us what He has already seen come to pass by looking at the future, but is telling us what He, by His sovereign power and might, will bring to pass? What if the future is less of a foregone conclusion, and more of a chess match being played out between Yahweh and the spiritual forces aligned with Him on the one side, and those spiritual forces in rebellion on the other? In that case, when God tells them to declare the future, He is not simply saying that He can see the future in a way they can’t, but He is challenging them to overcome His will with their own, essentially saying, “You declare what you will bring about, and then let’s see if you have the power to actually bring it to pass against me.”

I think this is more likely, and honestly makes more sense of the entire biblical story. I don’t think God is simply mocking the other spiritual beings for their inability to see future events that He Himself can see, but I think He is challenging them to defy Him and successfully bring their own purposes to pass against His will.

Yahweh alone is God of gods and Lord of lords, and His will and purpose will always prevail over every power and enemy.