Thoughts on Isaiah 43

Today's reading: Isaiah 43; Revelation 9

Reading Isaiah is a lot like reading John's letters in the New Testament to me; I often have to read a chapter or a section over and over, a handful of times, before I start to feel like I have any real grasp of what's going on.

I say that to start off today partly because I know it can be discouraging to read the Word, wanting to learn and understand it better, but feeling like you have no clue what is going on. Here's the thing about Isaiah though; it is a really difficult book... I don't have a seminary degree, and have never attended a seminary, except for taking one seminary class on Isaiah through a remote/extension program with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. So if there's one book I should probably know pretty well, it's Isaiah. We had to read two commentaries cover-to-cover (plus others when/where needed), write our own verse-by-verse commentary of almost the entire book, write a couple papers, and take an exam on it, all in less than 10 weeks. I have never worked so hard on a class or learned so much in such a short period of time in my life. It was so much work, in fact, that it is why I never took another seminary class after that, because I just do not have the kind of time that that single class required. So all that to say, if you are struggling to understand what Isaiah is talking about at times (or most of the time for that matter), don't be discouraged, it is a very difficult book. It is an incredibly valuable and useful book, but it is an incredibly difficult one.

What caught my attention in today's chapter is at the end when God says that He will blot out Israel's transgressions for His own sake, really in spite of Israel herself. The chapter is full of imagery calling back to the Exodus, and essentially making Babylon the new Egypt. When Egypt enslaved and oppressed God's people, He was not impotent to rescue them, ransoming them at the cost of Egypt, and while Israel has been carried off into exile, and Judah is facing the same fate, God is just as capable of redeeming and restoring them as He was back in the days of Moses. Whether it is Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, or later Rome, God will always be capable to keeping His promises to His people and bringing about His purposes for His nation.

I think this gives us a cool glimpse though into the fact that God's purposes are really far beyond merely Israel. Israel is His chosen instrument to bring about His ultimate purpose of reclaiming the nations and gathering a people to Himself from every people through Christ, but this is often Israel being used in spite of herself. It is not for their sake, their repentance, their righteousness, their sacrifices, or anything else of their own that God is going to blot out their transgressions, but for His own sake and to His own ends.