Scripture Daily

Context No. 574 of 4322 · Isaiah

Context · Reflection

Isaiah 57:1-16: in context

1The righteous perish, and no one lays it to heart. Merciful men are taken away, and no one considers that the righteous is taken away from the evil. 2He enters into peace. They rest in their beds, each one who walks in his uprightness. 3“But draw near here, you sons of a sorceress, you offspring of adulterers and prostitutes. 4Whom do you mock? Against whom do you make a wide mouth and stick out your tongue? Aren’t you children of disobedience and offspring of falsehood, 5you who inflame yourselves among the oaks, under every green tree; who kill the children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks? 6Among the smooth stones of the valley is your portion. They, they are your lot. You have even poured a drink offering to them. You have offered an offering. Shall I be appeased for these things? 7On a high and lofty mountain you have set your bed. You also went up there to offer sacrifice. 8You have set up your memorial behind the doors and the posts, for you have exposed yourself to someone besides me, and have gone up. You have enlarged your bed and made a covenant for yourself with them. You loved what you saw on their bed. 9You went to the king with oil, increased your perfumes, sent your ambassadors far off, and degraded yourself even to Sheol. 10You were wearied with the length of your ways; yet you didn’t say, ‘It is in vain.’ You found a reviving of your strength; therefore you weren’t faint. 11“Whom have you dreaded and feared, so that you lie, and have not remembered me, nor laid it to your heart? Haven’t I held my peace for a long time, and you don’t fear me? 12I will declare your righteousness; and as for your works, they will not benefit you. 13When you cry, let those whom you have gathered deliver you, but the wind will take them. A breath will carry them all away, but he who takes refuge in me will possess the land, and will inherit my holy mountain.” 14He will say, “Build up, build up, prepare the way! Remove the stumbling-block out of the way of my people.” 15For the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, says: “I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite. 16For I will not contend forever, neither will I always be angry; for the spirit would faint before me, and the souls whom I have made.

This chapter is heavy with judgment against idolaters, but it turns, at the end, to one of the most surprising descriptions of God in all of Scripture. Listen to how he introduces himself: thus says the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy. Every word piles up his transcendence. He is high, lofty, eternal, holy, utterly beyond us, dwelling in a place we cannot reach. And then, having established how impossibly exalted he is, he finishes the sentence in a direction no one would predict. I dwell in the high and holy place, he says, and also with him who is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble and to revive the heart of the contrite.

Sit with the two addresses God gives himself. He has two dwelling places, and they could not be further apart. One is the high and holy place, the throne of eternity. The other is the crushed and humble human heart. The God who fills eternity and needs nothing chooses to make his home not only in unapproachable glory but in the broken, lowly, contrite person, and the reason he gives is tender: to revive them. He comes down to the humble not to condemn what is already crushed but to breathe life back into it. Contrition, which feels like the thing that should keep God at a distance, turns out to be the very address where he chooses to live.

That overturns what I instinctively believe about when God is near. I assume he draws close when I am strong, put-together, spiritually impressive, and withdraws when I am broken, ashamed, at the end of myself. Isaiah says the opposite: the high and lofty One makes his home precisely with the contrite and humble, coming down to revive exactly the heart that feels too crushed to be worth his presence. When I am lowest, most broken, most contrite over my own sin, do I believe that this is where the exalted God draws near to dwell and to revive me, rather than the place he abandons me?

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