Isaiah 17:1-14: a reflection

1The burden of Damascus. “Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it will be a ruinous heap. 2The cities of Aroer are forsaken. They will be for flocks, which shall lie down, and no one shall make them afraid. 3The fortress shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria. They will be as the glory of the children of Israel,” says the LORD of Armies. 4“It will happen in that day that the glory of Jacob will be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh will become lean. 5It will be like when the harvester gathers the wheat, and his arm reaps the grain. Yes, it will be like when one gleans grain in the valley of Rephaim. 6Yet gleanings will be left there, like the shaking of an olive tree, two or three olives in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outermost branches of a fruitful tree,” says the LORD, the God of Israel. 7In that day, people will look to their Maker, and their eyes will have respect for the Holy One of Israel. 8They will not look to the altars, the work of their hands; neither shall they respect that which their fingers have made, either the Asherah poles or the incense altars. 9In that day, their strong cities will be like the forsaken places in the woods and on the mountain top, which were forsaken from before the children of Israel; and it will be a desolation. 10For you have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not remembered the rock of your strength. Therefore you plant pleasant plants, and set out foreign seedlings. 11In the day of your planting, you hedge it in. In the morning, you make your seed blossom, but the harvest flees away in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow. 12Ah, the uproar of many peoples who roar like the roaring of the seas; and the rushing of nations that rush like the rushing of mighty waters! 13The nations will rush like the rushing of many waters, but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far off, and will be chased like the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like the whirling dust before the storm. 14At evening, behold, terror! Before the morning, they are no more. This is the portion of those who plunder us, and the lot of those who rob us.

In this oracle, Isaiah puts his finger on the root of the people's trouble: You have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not remembered the rock of your strength. Having forgotten God, they turned to what their own hands could make and plant, trusting their own works and arrangements, which would fail them in the day of grief. And the passage looks ahead to a day when, brought low, people will finally look again to their Maker, turning their eyes to the Holy One instead of to the altars their own hands had made.

Notice the diagnosis: they had forgotten the God of their salvation. Not that they had never known him, but that they had forgotten him, let him slip from mind and trust, and turned instead to rely on their own works and provisions. It is a subtle drift, forgetting the Rock of our strength while we go on trusting the pleasant plants we ourselves have set. And often it takes being brought low to make people look up again to their Maker.

That diagnosis fits us more than we might like. It is easy, especially when things go well, to quietly forget the God of our salvation, to stop remembering the Rock of our strength, and to trust instead in what our own hands have built and arranged. We do not have to renounce God to forget him; we simply let him slip from mind and lean on our own works. Guard against that forgetting. Remember the God of your salvation; keep him before you as the Rock of your strength, especially when things are going well and self-reliance comes easily. Do not wait to be brought low before you look again to your Maker; remember him now, and trust him rather than the works of your own hands.

Lord, Isaiah told your people that the root of their trouble was that they had forgotten the God of their salvation and had not remembered the rock of their strength, trusting instead in what their own hands had made. Guard me from that forgetting. It is easy, especially when things go well, to let you slip from my mind and trust, and to lean instead on my own works and arrangements. Keep me from forgetting the Rock of my strength. Help me remember the God of my salvation, and keep you before me, especially when self-reliance comes easily. Do not let me wait to be brought low before I look again to my Maker; help me remember you now, and trust you rather than the works of my own hands.