Reflections on Isaiah 29

Isaiah 29 (Contemporary English Version)
1. Jerusalem, city of David, the place of my altar, you are in for trouble! Celebrate your festivals year after year.
   
2. I will still make you suffer, and your people will cry when I make an altar of you.
   
3. I will surround you and prepare to attack from all sides.
   
4. From deep in the earth, you will call out for help with only a faint whisper.
   
5. Then your cruel enemies will suddenly be swept away like dust in a windstorm.
   
6. I, the LORD All-Powerful, will come to your rescue with a thundering earthquake and a fiery whirlwind.
   
7. Every brutal nation that attacks Jerusalem and makes it suffer will disappear like a dream when night is over.
   
8. Those nations that attack Mount Zion will suffer from hunger and thirst. They will dream of food and drink but wake up weary and hungry and thirsty as ever.
   
9. Be shocked and stunned, you prophets! Refuse to see. Get drunk and stagger, but not from wine.
   
10. The LORD has made you drowsy; he put you into a deep sleep and covered your head.
    
11. Now his message is like a sealed letter to you. Some of you say, "We can't read it, because it's sealed."
    
12. Others say, "We can't read it, because we don't know how to read."
    
13. The Lord has said: "These people praise me with their words, but they never really think about me. They worship me by repeating rules made up by humans.
    
14. So once again I will do things that shock and amaze them, and I will destroy the wisdom of those who claim to know and understand."
    
15. You are in for trouble, if you try to hide your plans from the LORD! Or if you think what you do in the dark can't be seen.
    
16. You have it all backwards. A clay dish doesn't say to the potter, "You didn't make me. You don't even know how."
    
17. Soon the forest of Lebanon will become a field with crops, thick as a forest.
    
18. The deaf will be able to hear whatever is read to them; the blind will be freed from a life of darkness.
    
19. The poor and the needy will celebrate and shout because of the LORD, the holy God of Israel.
    
20. All who are cruel and arrogant will be gone forever. Those who live by crime will disappear,
    
21. together with everyone who tells lies in court and keeps innocent people from getting a fair trial.
    
22. The LORD who rescued Abraham has this to say about Jacob's descendants: "They will no longer be ashamed and disgraced.
    
23. When they see how great I have made their nation, they will praise and honor me, the holy God of Israel.
    
24. Everyone who is confused will understand, and all who have complained will obey my teaching."

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The time of judgment was coming upon Judah when the Assyrians would lay siege to Jerusalem. Its destruction would seem inevitable and then God would miraculously deliver it (29:5-8). When God delivers the city, the horrors of that siege, the sight of the attackers surrounding the city, and the siege-works against the walls will seem as if it were merely "a dream, a vision in the night." (29:7)

But the threat of imminent destruction followed by an awesome deliverance by God does not turn the people of Judah back to God.  Instead, they were too spiritually insensitive to recognize the spiritual significance of God's deliverance. Rather, they continued to go through their rote worship of God. As verse 13 says, they honored God "with lip-service . . . and their worship consists of man-made rules learned by rote." So, God's further judgment was to completely blind them spiritually.  Thus, God would "confound these people with wonder after wonder," but "The wisdom of their wise men will vanish, and the understanding of the perceptive will be hidden." What happens here with Judah is indicative of what happens when one consistently turns from God. In the beginning it is a choice. We choose not to recognize God's hand in our lives or the world around us. But over time, as we continually make this choice, we then lose the ability to recognize God's activity in us or in our world. God may do "wonder after wonder" before our eyes, but we will be blind to His wonders.

In Judah's case, Isaiah illustrated their blindness by likening it to having written all of this on a sealed document and presenting it to them to read. But both those who could read and those who could not would refuse to read the document.  The excuse of those who could read would be that "It is sealed." Those who couldn't read would use that as their excuse. It was as if they didn't want to know the truths of Isaiah message to them. Therefore, since they refused to know, God took from them the ability to know.

Having refused to know or understand Isaiah's message to them, they then went about making their diabolical plans in secret as if God wouldn't know what they were doing. Isaiah likens this to clay in the hands of a potter that refuses to acknowledge the potter. Then Isaiah asks the question, "How can what is made say about its maker, 'He didn't make me'"? Or, he asks, "How can what is formed say about the one who formed it, 'He doesn't understand what he's doing'"? But that was what Judah was doing, and it is what many even now continually do. We act as if we are the judge of what is right or wrong, as if God must meet our criteria if He is to prove He exists. But whether we acknowledge God's existence or not, He exists, and those who refuse to acknowledge it have chosen ignorance over knowledge.