“A Christian View of the War [In Iraq]”

Isaiah 59:1-21

March 30, 2003

Text Comment

The section of which our text is a part begins at 58:1 and, as we read there, the verses that follow expose the rebellion and the sins of God’s people. We are still in that same section and dealing with that same subject as we begin chapter 59. The first 8 verses of chapter 59 contain further charges against the people, a listing of further sins.

v.2 Troubles have come upon the people not because the Lord has heard but was unable to act (1a), nor because he couldn’t hear (1b), but because their sin had raised a barrier between themselves and God. [Motyer, 484]

v.4 Sins are public and private, are committed in both action and speech. In both ways they have done harm to others, which is the sense of “hands stained with blood” in v.3. And with the word “rely” in v. 4 we learn that their life rests on a foundation of self: self-assertion, self-effort. Their reliance is not on the living and true God. Now, of course, this is not what the people thought. This is what Isaiah is telling them their way of life means. They probably had a well-thought-out position on all of these matters and would justify them with high-sounding arguments. But Isaiah knows better.

v.5 You notice that the narration has changed to the third person. An objective account of the situation is now provided, both figuratively, in vv. 5-6 and literally in vv. 7-8. Both illustrations are of a product: eggs that are harmful to others and a web that is useless to its maker. Destruction and futility are the outcome of man’s rebellion against God.

v.8 Verses 7 and 8 provide a literal explanation of the figures of the egg and the web the prophet used in vv. 5 and 6.

v.9 Verses 9-13 are cast in the first person plural. There are those among the people who accept that the verdict that God has pronounced on their lives is true and just. They have come to repentance, and the first sign of that repentance is an owning up to the whole terrible truth about themselves.

v.10 The problem of human sin is a profound one. It leaves men and women blind to themselves, a spiritual blindness so profound that it is not simply blindness, it is akin to the condition of having no eyes at all. It is an incurable condition. Only a divine work of creation could overcome it.

v.12 Vv. 12-15 provide a summary of the moral, spiritual situation. Public morality has collapsed and so has individual moral character. Now, remember, the people wouldn’t have thought so. They would have thought of themselves as very moral, upright people. They were blind to all of this. They were past being able to add two and two and get four, morally and spiritually speaking. Not unlike our present situation, is it?

v.15b The rest of the verses in the chapter describe the Lord’s response to this situation.

v.16 The Lord’s “righteousness” in contexts like these is his immutable, unchanging holiness according to which he must act both to vindicate his people and to punish those who are in rebellion against him.

v.18 There will be a settlement, a final settlement, between the Lord and those who oppose him. As so often in Isaiah, the whole world is taken into view, both in the matter of God’s judgment and in the matter of his salvation.

v.21 It is not apparent in the English translation, but the “you” and “your” of v. 21 is singular. In the context of Isaiah, easy enough to demonstrate but requiring too much time at this point, this is certainly a reference to the Servant of the Lord, the Messiah. It will be through him that the blessings of the Spirit and the Word of God will be secured for God’s people forever. That the Servant appears in the argument suddenly and unannounced is a feature we find elsewhere in Isaiah. So, we have at the end, a promise of eternal salvation, as the true and only solution to human sin and alienation from God, a salvation that comes through Jesus Christ, the Servant of the Lord.

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Now, I am aware that the specific reference of this text is to Israel, the people of God. And I know very well that it can be a great mistake to apply texts that concern Israel or the church to a secular nation, such as our own United States, which has a substantial Christian base and still a sizeable Christian population, or to some other country, such as Iraq that is anti-Christian in its religious foundation. That mistake has often been made. People have applied the Bible’s teaching to our own political life as if the United States were as Israel was in the days of the prophets, a nation in covenant with the Lord. No, according to the Bible, the historical continuation of Israel as a nation in covenant with the Lord is not some nation of the world, but is the church of Jesus Christ. She is the Israel of God, not the Holy Roman Empire as many once thought; not Great Britain or some other European country as many once thought; not the United States as some American Christians still think.

However, it is also true that in many addresses to his people, the Lord deals with them according to categories that are universal in their scope and application. The reason certain things are true for Israel, in other words, is that they are true for every people, even every individual human being. If it is true that Israel’s sins have made a separation between herself and God, well that is true of all men. It is a universal truth that is here given a specific and particular application. And, if it is true for God’s people that the want of peace, that a life of unpeace is the consequence of rebellion against God, it is so because the loss of shalom is the universal consequence of human sin. We know this, specifically in respect to our text this morning, because Paul, in Romans 3:17, in the midst of his description of the human condition apart from God, of man still in his sins, of Jewish and Gentile man alike, quotes Isa. 59:7-8. He uses these very words to describe the universal predicament of mankind before and until and unless he finds peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ.

There is no one righteous, not even one;

There is no one who understands,

        no one who seeks God. …

Their feet are swift to shed blood;

        ruin and misery mark their ways,

        and the way of peace they do not know.

There is no fear of God before their eyes.

In other words, what is said here in Isaiah 59 is what God always says about the human predicament. The situation that is here described, human nature not changing and God’s ways never changing, is the situation as it exists in our world all the time and in every part of this world. And what God promised to do in confronting the rebellion and wickedness of men applies directly and immediately to our own present moment.

The United States is once again at war. We have been glued to our TVs and radios seeking news of the progress of this war. We live with a new sense of unease and disquiet because of the uncertainty of its outcome. We are thankful that, so far, the loss of life has been small, relative to other wars where armies this large and so well equipped with the instruments of death have faced one another in the field, the loss of life has been to date remarkably small. We pray that it may continue to be so. As one of our elders reminded me the other day, there have been many moments in previous American wars in which the opening 30 seconds of a battle took many times the number of American lives than have been taken in this war in all its days to this point. We have been praying for a swift conclusion to the war and a just outcome that fosters the well-being of all the peoples and nations involved. Surely that is right.

But there is something that Christians can say about the war, something that rises above political viewpoints and military strategies and the prediction of outcomes. If I were to talk about those aspects of the war, I could only give you my opinion, worth only what you pay for it. But, Christians have something to say that runs far deeper and will prove absolutely and unqualifiedly true about the war, no matter one’s views about its wisdom or rightness, no matter its political and military consequences, no matter its short- and long-term outcomes. And, without a doubt, it is essential that Christians think about the war as Christians; not as Republicans or Democrats, not even as Americans in the first place; but as Christians. As those who know God and who, with the Bible in their hands, can interpret his ways and the human condition, no matter the political situation.

Verse 8 holds the key to our main thought. When one rebels against God, a man or woman makes a tangled mess of life and the result is that the future holds no prospect of peace: no peace with God, no harmonious and peaceful society, and no personal peace. They are on a road, Isaiah says at the end of the verse, that cannot take them to peace. Peace, shalom, is a blessing that comes from God and is given only to those who trust in him. [Motyer, 486] The absence of peace is his judgment, the divine punishment of sin! And so it is that a world in rebellion against God often finds itself at war!

I don’t deny, of course, that Iraq is experiencing the judgment of God, but clearly the United States is as well. Even the victor in war suffers from its victories. I will never forget the impression made upon me many times when Florence and I worshipped at Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen. Beneath the pulpit, in the beautiful wood of that high structure, were two panels on which were printed in letters of gold the names of the war dead from that single parish, one panel from the First World War, another from the Second. There were some 40 names listed in those two panels. Forty men dead who were sons, husbands, fiancés, brothers, friends; forty men who left loved ones desolate, a number of young men who would never marry, leaving behind them a generation of women who would never marry because there were no men to marry. And these were the victors! This was the army in the right! We may well win this war and suffer for our victory for years to come.

I do not deny that the result of this present war may prove favorable to the welfare of the people of that part of the world and the interests of justice. Time will tell, but it is possible that such will be the result. I don’t deny that the United States and its allies may be in the right in this conflict, so far as the question of the justification of the war is concerned. It is quite possible, of course, that we could be in the right and still be suffering the judgment of God. The Almighty can accomplish many things at once and often mixes his kindness and his punishments in the very same providences. “Behold the goodness and severity of God!”

It is, in fact, a high crime against the majesty and sovereignty of God for a mere creature to presume to fathom the ways and purposes of God. God has a thousand purposes in this present war, he is dealing with every life in it and through it, he sees the end from the beginning in a way we cannot begin to do; he has woven everything into a tapestry in which everything is connected to everything else. We cannot know the infinite scope of the divine counsel in the Iraq war any more than we can know that in regard to anything else that happens in the world. And we certainly do not know what the next weeks or months or years will bring in the Middle East or the world. Who can predict the future?

But, what we can know for a certainty is that war and the absence of peace, that violence and alienation and hatred in human life is the outworking of human sin and God’s judgment upon that sin. War is one of God’s comprehensive responses to the efforts of human beings to manage their world apart from submission to him, apart from faith in him, apart from the acknowledgement of his rule and kingdom.

I. We are to see war as divine judgment, in the first place, because it is punishment, it is a bad thing that hurts and causes pain, and because that pain is inflicted as a response to sin.

The horrors of war, its sorrows, its costs, is one of the punishments God regularly visits upon a people for its sins and its rebellion against him. The Lord says it plainly in vv. 7-8. And it is a thought often repeated in the Bible. Wickedness is visited with war from on high. Peace is taken from them who will not walk in the ways of the Lord. How often do we find in Holy Scripture both the people of God, the nation of Israel, and the other nations of the world, at war with some neighbor or some great empire precisely because they have rebelled against God and he has visited upon them their just deserts.

Of course, he applies many other punishments as well. In our time we have seen them all. When a nation, such as ours, sins defiantly against God, it will find itself beset on all sides by troubles: political and intellectual impotence, crime, new and sinister diseases, economic instability, deepening alienation between people, social dysfunctions such as the breakdown of marriage, family, and community, and so on. And, as the Bible makes clear many times, this is not the result of some impersonal law of nature, as if when one violates the norms of the created order, things invariably break down, just as if one treats a piece of machinery in ways forbidden in the operator’s manual, the machine will soon break. No, this is the personal response of the living God to the rebellion of his creatures, which is one reason why these judgments fall in such different measures, in such different ways, at different times. Not long ago I read an article reporting the results of a study of American’s attitudes about sin. The author reported that few of the people surveyed have any longer a sense of guilt. They view sin, so far as they think of it at all, in what the professor describes as narcissistic terms, as “destructive habits.” Sin for them, therefore, is hurting themselves, not offending God. Most Americans, including many who would call themselves Christians, have lost all sense of the fundamental character of sin as wrong committed against the holiness and goodness of Almighty God. And this is not an American problem only. It is the problem of this world, a world of rebels against God. We are part of that world, our nation partakes of that rebellion as does Iraq. In that sense, the most fundamental sense, in the sense that matters forever, we are far more like Iraq than we are different. Does this world or any nation of this world deserve to live at peace? No it does not. We cannot look around ourselves at our beloved land without acknowledging with shame that nothing so well describes our common life as Paul’s words: “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

War will always be, sooner or later, the destiny of the people and nation that defies the Lord. The way of peace those people will not know. This may be a righteous war and may even lead to some good results, but Christians – while they rightly think about those things – must think more deeply about what war means and where it comes from and what it says about this world in its rebellion against God. War is punishment, it is pain and loss, and it is what this world gets for its pains to live apart from God.

II. Second, we should see this war as divine judgment for its demonstration of the futility of man’s efforts to succeed apart from God.

Since Cain unbelieving man has been trying to build his city, and since Cain he has been unable to build it. And more often than not it has been war that has brought his efforts to ruin and required him to begin again, like Sisyphus pushing his boulder back up the hill. This is the point of Isaiah’s images in vv. 5-6. Men can hatch an egg, but out of it comes a snake. We can hatch eggs alright; we can even clone them. But our eggs do not nourish us. An egg should nourish, but this one kills. They can weave a web – oh human technology nowadays can weave amazing webs. I wonder if it is just an accident that they call it the “World Wide Web”! But somehow they can never clothe themselves with what they weave.

I don’t know if you remember this, but at the time of the last Gulf War there was much talk about the “new world order” that would result. The war was going to bring a new day in the Middle East and in the World. Well, no one has been talking about a new world order recently. Because that world order that resulted from the last war has not proved to be any better than the old one and, indeed, appears to be worse. V. 10 describes not only the present day, but every day in the long, tortured history of men and nations in this world. “Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like men without eyes.”

Does anyone here think that we are going to solve even the Middle Eastern problem with this war in Iraq. I do not say that it should not be fought. But thinking more deeply about our world and about the people in this world, in every nation of this world, do we have hope that mankind will solve its problems? I don’t say that efforts should not be made or that they might do some good. I only say that Isaiah spoke the truth when he wrote that men apart from God are doomed to unpeace! And religion, far from making matters better, may make them worse, for false religion especially will not gain God’s blessing. All the praying being done so publicly nowadays will come to nothing. Isaiah made that point in the previous chapter, and at many other points in his prophesy, when he told Israel straightaway that religious posturing, even weeping and wailing before the Lord, made matters worse, not better, if folk are unwilling to repent, to trust the Lord, and to obey him. How many of these prayers that you see and hear about in the media nowadays, how many of these prayers do you think, included the sincere act of submission which is the genuine hallmark of all prayer: “not my will, O Lord, but thine be done”?

That is how Isaiah began his chapter. See what he says in vv. 1-2? The problem is not a lack of religious activity, in America or in Iraq. The problem is that the sins of human beings have separated them from God and have caused God to hide his face from them and made him unwilling to hear them. God is great enough to save those who call upon him; his arm is not too short, nor his ear too dull to hear; but he will not hear the prayers of those who have chosen to live in defiance of his Word and who have rejected for themselves his offer of salvation through his Son.

Imagine! Prayer vigils, calls to prayer in churches who have made it their great work to teach what is directly contrary to God’s Word; prayers offered in churches and mosques that encourage unbelief in the gospel of Christ and disobedience to the law of God! What will come of that? WAR! Says Isaiah the prophet. “When I called, they did not listen; so when they called, I would not listen,” says the Lord Almighty.

In the larger, deeper sense, it matters not whether this is a war needing to be fought and a war that has been wisely undertaken. It does not even matter if it ends well. It is war and it is trouble and it is a grand demonstration of how poorly things go in the world when people live their lives in rebellion against God.

III. Finally, in the third place, we are to think of war and this war as the judgment of God because it is an image, a foretaste, an anticipation of the great judgment that God will someday finally visit upon mankind.

There is nothing more imperative than that people today see past this small-scale conflict to the conflagration that will envelope the entire world and all mankind at the end of the age. Here in the latter verses of Isa. 59, in vv. 15-18, the Lord himself is depicted as making war upon his enemies in order to save his people. Very often in the Bible, as you know, the Lord is described in martial imagery and very often his judgment is represented as making war. These verses in Isa. 59 are only a different version of that shuddering description of the second coming in Rev. 19 where the Lord Christ is pictured as a warrior on a steed, wearing a robe dipped in blood, at the head of his vast armies, out of whose mouth come a sharp sword with which to strike down the rebellious nations of the earth. John even says that this rider comes to earth “to judge and make war.”

Human war, even far worse wars than that now being fought in Iraq, is child’s play compared to the war the Lord will someday bring to the unbelieving and the disobedient. War’s greatest use and its best use is to teach mankind the reality and the ferocity of divine wrath. How can we not believe it when there is so much of it in the world already? If mere man can wreck such havoc, what do you suppose the Almighty can do and will do?

There are important issues at stake in this present war. I do not deny it. Political realities are important. They profoundly effect the life of human beings. But they are also issues of this world and this life which is passing away. And no Christian should for a moment forget that the deaths of American or Iraqi people, however profoundly those deaths may matter for the present, are infinitely more important as fixing the eternal destinies of these same men, of whatever army.

I do not deny that it is a fearful thing to enter combat at the risk of one’s life, but it is a far more fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; and it is a comparatively minor matter whether one falls into those hands in the midst of a battle or while lying in one’s bed.

And, contrarily, if one is in Christ and at peace with God, if one is numbered among God’s children, his or her name written in the book of life, then let it be shouted from the housetops that this makes a man or a woman safe forever. No enemy can remove this peace, no bomb or missile or bullet can destroy it. “Do not fear,” our Savior once said, “the one who can kill the body. Fear instead the one who having killed the body can cast the soul into hell.” Or, to put the same point positively: “Fear God and you will have nothing else to fear.”

The same great warrior who will make war on the nations who have rebelled against him, we read in v. 20 and 21, will come in love and salvation to all those who repent of their sins and trust in his Son.

Let us be true to our Christian faith, then. During the days of this war, however many or few, let us be true to our great Captain. Let us remember that this war is but a pale image of the great warfare to come, and that in that war, the victors will be from every tongue, tribe, and nation on the earth, Iraqi and American together, all who love the Lord Jesus and long for his appearing; and the vanquished will be those who loved themselves and not God, who refused to receive the offer of salvation through the Son of God, who wanted to go their own way, many Americans and Iraqis among them.

Once again, I do not say that there are not other things to think about regarding this war, other things to hope for in and through it. Surely there are. Our Savior himself took a deep interest in the political life of his day. But he taught us to keep our eye on the ball, not to be distracted by present and worldly issues from the great over-arching issues of life. We follow him if we, who know God’s Word, think and pray and speak as Christians through this time; as those who know why wars occur and what they mean and what they portend for the future. We are being given, in living color, on television all day long, pictures of God’s judgment, images of human futility, and a foretaste of the Day of the Lord. As we explain this to others, let us ourselves, God helping us, renew our hearts in the fear of God and of his terrible judgments and, at the same time, the wonder, the glory of being delivered from that judgment forever. “Surely salvation is near to them that fear Him!”