Christianne's Spiritual Journal

Isaiah 58

Shout with the voice of a trumpet blast. Tell my people Israel of their sins! Yet they act so pious! They come to the Temple every day and seem delighted to hear my laws. You would almost think this was a righteous nation that would never abandon its God. They love to make a show of coming to me and asking me to take action on their behalf. “We have fasted before you!” they say. “Why aren’t you impressed? We have done much penance for you, and you don’t even notice it!” I will tell you why! It’s because you are living for yourselves even while you are fasting. You keep right on opressing your workers. What good is fasting when you keep on fighting and quarelling? This kind of fasting will never get you anywhere with me. You humble yourselves by going through the motions of penance, bowing your heads like a blade of grass in the wind. You dress in sackloth and cover yourself with ashes. Is this what you call fasting? Do you really think this will please the Lord?

No, the kind of fasting I want calls you to free those who are wrongly imprisoned and to stop opressing those who work for you. Treat them fairly and give them what they earn. I want you to share your food with the hungry and to welcome poor wanderers into your homes. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help. If you do these things, you salvation will come like the dawn. Yes, your healing will come quickly. Your godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind. Then when you call, the Lord will answer. “Yes, I am here,” he will quickly reply.

Isaiah 58:1-8

I swear I love this book. This book concerns the prophecies that the prophet Isaiah received from God, but when I read through it, it’s not me learning something about God. Meaning, I feel like I’m Isaiah and I’m just directly getting spoken to by God. Before I go into what I got from this text, I wanted to put out there that God isn’t some distant, far-off being who gives us rules to follow and to obey. God speaks to us in very direct ways, and the best way to know God’s will and to know who He is, is to read His Word and to constantly be seeking Him in deed and in prayer. He can be found and known for Who He really is. For myself, I realize how important it is to know Who He is as my God and my Saviour, and not just What He is. I’m beginning to really see just how personal of a God He is and how much He is involved in the workings of my life.. how He directly speaks to me on the daily. I just need to learn how to sit, and listen for Him.

So back to what I was saying: God is speaking here. I like how God is just a straight-up God. You will never find in Scripture God trying to sugar-coat any of His truths. You will never find Him half-saying things because He doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. The Bible says that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and that no one comes to the Father except through Him. God didn’t say, “Well, uhm, I’ll tell you soon how to get to Heaven.. I just don’t want to hurt your feelings.” No. Reading Isaiah and skimming through other prophet books, God is mighty and powerful and strong, not weak. If you wrong Him, He will tell you. If you do something that displeases Him, He will call you out on it. Most of the books in the Old Testament actually testify to this, since Israel was being rebellious in their ways against the Lord many times! God sent so many prophets and allowed so many pagan nations to invade Israel to teach and to warn them of coming judgement and to punish them for their sins. God will not hesitate to tell you what you’re doing wrong.. but He does hesitate in the punishment of our sins, and that’s why He warns us first; that’s why He speaks to us, so that we will not fall away in sin, toward punishment.

I realized that I love this quality about God. I love that God speaks straight-up and doesn’t beat around the bush. He tells us in this way, because He loves us.

So I think this passage is talking about human beings and how we try to be righteous for the wrong reasons and with the wrong intentions; doing righteous things for the Lord, yet these things still being unacceptable to God despite the end result. It spoke to me about my heart and my intentions, because that is what God looks at.

The Lord doesn’t make decisions the way you do! People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at a person’s thoughts and intentions.

2 Samuel 16:7

From Isaiah 58, I see that God could care less about what you do for Him if it’s not with the right heart and mind. Honestly, do you think God needs you to praise Him? Do you think He needs your worship? Do you think He should be proud of you because you gave your monthly tithe? Everything we do is nothing to Him, unless we do them to honor Him and for His glory.

I was reading the book of Genesis again, and I was paying extra attention to Cain and Abel, and their offerings to God. God was pleased with Abel’s offering of choice meats, but He was displeased with Cain’s vegetable offerings. Some people would look at that and think that God was displeased because He got some crappy vegetables instead of steak from Cain (Ha, I would) but I don’t think it was about that. I think if Cain gave vegetables to the Glory of God and to truly honor Him, God would have been very pleased with him. It was because Cain’s heart was not right—he was not thankful or appreciative of God; he gave an offering just to fit in with his brother, just to make do the righteous thing. But looking at Abel, why would God need lamb? God doesn’t need anything from us! If He wanted meat offerings, He could make fifty for Himself. No, God looks at the heart and is pleased with our intentions to honor Him and only Him. If Abel gave the vegetables and Cain gave the meat, God would still have been pleased with Abel and displeased with Cain. It’s about what we give, but why and how we give it.

And so we go back to Isaiah 56. In this particular passage, God addresses why He will not accept their “fasting” and “righteous actions”. Why? God says this: “I will tell you why! It’s because you are living for yourselves even while you are fasting!” I read this passage a while ago while I was going through the whole Bible, and I highlighted the entire thing because of how much it spoke to me.

I’m at a stage in my life where I’m realizing that most of what I’ve done was for myself and my glory. I thought I was doing it for God, but I was doing it for myself. I was like the Israelites saying, “We have fasted before you! Why aren’t you impressed? We have done much penance, and you don’t even notice it!” While I was going through some tough spots, I would bring out everything I’d done for the church like it was some badge to be waved around before God.

But reading this passage again, now that I realize my mistakes? I realize everything I do counts for nothing if it isn’t for the Glory of God.. in my arrogance, I had thought that I was doing God a favor by doing the things I was doing. I would think, “Ha, I got so many ministries under my belt. I’m teaching this and that. I’m such a great example of what it means to serve God.” But now, I see that it’s all garbage. I can’t do anything worthy. You know what God says to this kind of attitude? “Is this what you call fasting? Do you really think this will please the Lord?”

Of course, I’m going off on a spiritual-sided take on this passage. Going by the context of this passage, God mostly adresses that the Israelites are actually living in sin while doing these things, not necessarily about their wrong reasons in what they were doing.. and so God from verses 6-7 gives examples of how he wants them to live if they are truly to claim that they are “fasting” and doing such-and-such for the Lord.

If I read these verses again, God doesn’t say, “Stop cursing!” or “Don’t steal or covet!” God focuses on others: “Free those who are wrongly imprisoned.. share your food with the hungry.. give clothes to those who need them.. do not hide from relatives who need your help.” Others. Many of us Christians pray and read our Word, but we do little for others or on behalf of others. I myself need to work on giving to the poor, although I do know I have a soft spot toward the homeless. I really hate seeing people go hungry.. maybe it’s because I love food that much, but still. This is a point many of us need to work on. Being others-centered instead of self-centered. One of my goals for myself.

So I know I’m going a little bit off of the context of the Scripture, but the main part of why I chose this piece was because of how much I think we as Christians need to examine ourselves constantly to see if what we are doing for the Lord is for ourselves or for Him. I think I’ve been seeing this reoccurring theme in a lot of my SOAPS lately because it’s something that God is telling me that I need to be aware of, which I’m grateful for. He’s enforcing it. I have another Scripture that backs this up quite beautifully:

What is more pleasing to the Lord: your burnt offerings and sacrifices or your obedience to his voice? Obedience is far better than sacrifice. Listening to him is much better than offering the fat of rams.

1 Samuel 15:22

 God doesn’t care about what you do for church, how many times you pray a day, how many people you’ve witnessed to or how many times you write in your tumblr about His Word! He wants obedience in your life toward Him.. a heart that seeks after Him. I have another supporting Scripture:

You would not be pleased with sacrifices, or I would bring them. If I brought you a burnt offering, you would not accept it. The sacrifice you want is a broken spirit. A broken and repentent heart, O God, you will not despise.

Psalm 51:16-17

King David wrote this after his affair with Bathsheba and after the murder of her husband. I really like Psalm 51 too just because I relate so much to it, but that’s for another time.. but during that period, David actually did not repent from his sin—he tried to hide it and didn’t turn to God for a year I believe, until that one prophet came and called him out on it (need to brush up on my Old Testament!). But God doesn’t want what you can do for Him. God doesn’t want your righteousness.. because God already provided it for us. The only thing God wants for us to come to Him, be humbled before Him, and love Him with all of our strength, soul, heart and mind. This will then lead to righteous living.. for the right reasons. Not for ourselves, but for the King.

After all the trials I’ve gone through so far, I truly realize that a broken and repentant heart is all I can bring to the Lord. I will mess up in the future, I know it. But by God’s grace, I’m forgiven again and again. It’s amazing. God doesn’t ask me to do all of these righteous things or to offer sacrifices to Him. He asks me to seek Him and love Him and to come to Him when I’ve messed up and when I’ve done Him wrong. He is the easiest to please, yet I don’t know why I can’t do it all of the time. We have a merciful God.

The more I read of Him and the more I spend time writing out my thoughts about Scripture, the more in awe I become.. the more things I realize about Him. If all I can bring to God is my brokeness, I will always have something to bring, because without Him I’m broken. It’s the simplest thing God could ask for.

I guess I like where I am now. I hate being at the bottom, but when I’m at the bottom, I always look up, and I seem to always realize Christ’s Sovereignty in my life that much more. I like that I’m understanding things from a different point of view because I hit rock bottom. God really does refine us through suffering. What a strange paradox.

But back to the context of Isaiah 58! I keep going off track with my commentary and then I forget what I’m writing about, oy. But looking at it from its context, God called the Israelites to physically live righteous lives—He pretty much called them out for being hypocrites, so He tells them to live the right way (not contradicting what I said earlier.. meaning He wants them to live the right way out of their correct intentions and desire to honor Him, and not just to look good!). Then God says this, “You godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind. Then when you call, the Lord will answer. ‘Yes, I am here,’ he will quickly reply.”

I think it’s funny that God refers to Himself in the third person sometimes.

But I take it that we are still called to righteous living, no matter what. If we truly love the Lord with all of our hearts, we will want to strive for righteousness and pursue righteousness no matter what. We will constantly be killing sin wherever it comes up, and we will be fighting it. So where sin pulls us backwards, godliness draws us forward.

To be honest, I don’t have much to say about the last couple of verses. Sort of. Well, godliness is a good thing, of course. But I think whether you are godly or not, God will answer you when He deems fit to and according to His timing. I don’t think this verse is saying that the Lord will answer quickly just because you’re godly, because sometimes He makes you wait to test your endurance and your faith in Him even if you are the most godly of people. But I do think it means that when you are living righteously and seeking Him, you obviously will be closer to Him and more likely to hear Him when He speaks to you as opposed to someone who isn’t living righteously and isn’t looking for God at the moment.. this is how I take it.

Overall, this passage really spoke to me a lot, just as other Scriptures do. I tend to write late at night just because that’s when my mind works the most; that and I can’t sleep. I feel a great relief, in an odd way, knowing that nothing I physically do can please the Lord if it’s just for the purpose of being righteous. God gave us the opportunity to be righteous by providing the 10 Commandments and laying out all of the rules for holiness in Leviticus and Dueteronomy. The Israelites tried to abide by it. The verdict? It was impossible.

And so God sent down His own righteousness, Jesus Christ, in order that we would finally attain righteousness. So please tell me why God needs our so-called righteousness? All God needs is a broken and repentant heart that loves and seeks Him and strives for righteousness in order to please Him. That is it. He will not be pleased by anything else. So I thank Jesus all the time for this amazing freedom I’ve been given. I’m not blinded anymore. I don’t have the belief like others do that I need to do this and this and that in order to be saved. I already am, because I believed in a Righteousness that greatly surpassed my own.

So in everything we do, we do for the Glory of God. We live righteous lives knowing that apart from the righteousness of Christ, it means nothing. We live righteously to honor Him and His sacrifice. I refuse to do it for myself or to get some kind of stupid, worthless recognition. From what I’ve learned, I really don’t care if people think I’m righteously living, or if they think I’m some backslidden Christian just because I’m not involved in as many ministries as I used to be in. God knows. God sees my heart, that it’s broken and repentant and seeking Him, and I think for myself, that’s all that matters right now. I’ve spent such a long time getting the approval of others and making sure others see me as righteous, that I forgot the only One I need to see me as righteous is the One who chose me to be what I am now.

One passage draws so much from me, it’s crazy. I get a rush out of it. I really would stay up until 2:37AM to do this.. I’m so weird. Can’t wait to visit Kansas though, sit in a couple of Bible classes and really see what I’ll be getting into. I feel myself picking up now and it feels good to be physically and spiritually stronger. Been working out for the last three days and my body is so sore, but I can feel and see the muscles again! I suppose I need to work myself out spiritually as well.. at first, it will hurt, but after a time I will be tuned into God again as I was before I stopped “working out”. Still need so much prayer, though. Anyway, super late and it was a good day/night. Sleeeeeeeppppyyyyyyy, fight to keep Jesus on the brain.