Isaiah 29:11-16
Completely Disconnected

The vision of all this has become for you like the words of a sealed document. If it is given to those who can read, with the command, "Read this," they say, "We cannot, for it is sealed." And if it is given to those who cannot read, saying, "Read this," they say, "We cannot read."

The Lord said:
    Because these people draw near with their mouths
        and honor me with their lips,
        while their hearts are far from me,
        and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote;
    so I will again do
        amazing things with this people,
        shocking and amazing.
    The wisdom of their wise shall perish,
        and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.

    Ha! You who hide a plan too deep for the LORD,
        whose deeds are in the dark,
        and who say, "Who sees us? Who knows us?"
    You turn things upside down!
        Shall the potter be regarded as the clay?
    Shall the thing made say of its maker,
        "He did not make me";
    or the thing formed say of the one who formed it,
        "He has no understanding"?

New Revised Standard Version

What an upsetting message from God! "You've lost you ability to converse with Me, as if you lost your ability to read. You still go through the motions of worshipping Me, but your worship is all of your creation, and nothing in it is about Me. Your arrogant pride and your condescention towards me has completely separated you from Me."

Let's peel this passage back a little to understand it more completely. The people "honor me with their lips", and go through the rituals and actions, but "their hearts are far from me." To the Hebrew readers, the "heart" was the higher self, as opposed to the lower, animal self. The heart was the seat of reason, of intellect, and of purpose. God is not saying that the people have "fallen out of love"; God is saying that the people have rejected the relevance of God for their lives. Worshipping God for them is to follow tradition and take comfort in heritage, not to encounter their Lord.

But God is not a tradition, or a mythology, or someone from their past. God is mighty and powerful, and God continues to work, then and now. But for God to work for the good of the people at that time, God would have to perform "shocking" miracles to pull them away from their "wisdom" and back to the true wisdom.

These shocking miracles of God are evident in history. At the time Isaiah wrote, the Northern Kingdom had just fallen to the Assyrians. The Southern Kingdom, where Isaiah lived, felt they were too smart to fall to the rogue Assyrians, for they had an alliance with the most powerful country in the region, Egypt. In other words, they didn't need God's protection, because they had already arranged for protection. Within 100 years of Isaiah's writing, the political climate in the region completely shattered. The Babylonians had rebuilt from an utterly devastating occupation by Assyria, conquered the Assyrians, captured the Southern Kingdom, and defeated the mighty Egyptian armies numerous times. Egypt would never again be a significant power, while Babylon ruled the known world.

There a question of greater importance to us, however. How did the people, the rulers, the high priests of the Southern Kingdom get so disconnected from God?

It is usually a long process to slide that far away from God. It seems to me the slide first started with a focus on self rather than on God. Even as Moses under God was leading the children of Abraham out of slavery in Egypt, the people rejected God's Way frequently to worry about their needs, wants, comfort, and convenience.

A focus on self rapidly leads to a lack of trust in God. It wasn't enough that God had performed miracles for them yesterday -- how could they know God would provide today?

Out of that lack of trust of God comes an unwillingness to wait on God's time, and instead to take action. When those actions did not immediately lead to destruction, the people became more self-assured. They started to believe in their own wisdom. They would rely more on what they decided than relying on God for guidance.

By this time, they no longer recognized God as their focus of worship and of life, as their provider and protection, or as their source of wisdom and guidance. All that was left was the mythology and the history. They had replaced God with an empty shell of tradition to follow. They had completely disconnected from God.

It would be so nice if this were just a history lesson. Instead, you and I face this same danger every day, taking our attention away from God to ourselves, and putting our trust somewhere else instead of God. Isn't it just like us to have God rescue us from a difficult situation, and we answer, "Thank you, God; now I can handle it from here"?

Don't disconnect. Keep that focus on God. Don't mistake your successes as anything more than God at work. Know in your failures, even in your sins, that God is preparing a better Way for you. Never think that because you can't see God's Way that it isn't there, for it is in that trust that our faith grows and God is glorified.