Scripture: Isaiah 7: 1-9; John 6: 51-58

“If you will not believe, surely you shall not be established.” (RSV)

“But if you do not stand by me, you will not stand at all.” (JB)

-- Isaiah 7:9

We noted last week that Isaiah of Jerusalem was the prophet of the holiness of God, of faith, and of hope. Today I want to take up the second of his contributions, to the understanding of the nature of biblical faith. He expresses biblical faith perhaps more clearly than any other biblical source and in any case quite strikingly, and so can be a helpful guide to us who want to know what it means really to believe in God. In order to appreciate his teaching we need to know his situation.        

Isaiah was advisor to three kings of Judah, Jotham (740-736 BC), Ahaz (736- 716 BC), and Hezekiah (716-687 BC). Most of the oracles we have from him come from the reigns of the latter two, both of whom were embroiled in a foreign war and challenged to make the right foreign policy arrangements. Let us look at the two kings and their two wars. Our text, “If you do not stand by me you will not stand at all,” comes from the reign of Ahaz and the period when Israel and Aram attacked Judah to force it to join them in a military alliance against Assyria. Ahaz refused to join and so the two kings made war on Judah in order to replace Ahaz with their puppet, someone named ben Tabeel, who favored their Anti-Assyrian politics. Assyria was the great power in the North East, and Isaiah’s advice probably lay behind this refusal, because he believed that tiny Judah should trust in God and not in military alliances to preserve them. Geopolitically this was a plausible policy because Judah was wedged between a rock and a hard place, the Mesopotamian powers in the North East and the Egyptian powers in the South West, two 800-pound gorillas that one should stay away from. Isaiah’s advice was essentially, “Keep your head down and don’t attract attention, and trust in God.”  Ahaz, however, vacillated and then panicked - no doubt pushed by hawks in his administration - and appealed for help to Tiglath Pileser the Assyrian king. Thus Ahaz put Judah under Assyrian protection, and made Israel suspect in Assyrian eyes. This hastened the end of the Northern kingdom of Israel, which the Assyrians annexed in 734 and finally destroyed in 721. So the threat Israel made to Judah was their undoing, the northern tribes of Israel disappeared from history and all that was left were the Judahites (or Jews) of Jerusalem and surroundings, made up of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin.

King Hezekiah who succeeded Ahaz in 716 was unable to keep the pro-Assyrian politics of Jerusalem on target and found himself maneuvered – by powerful forces in his administration we surmise - into an alliance with Egypt against Assyria. Consequently Sennacherib of Assyria devastated the territory of his former vassal and ally, Judah, and invested Jerusalem in 701. Isaiah advised Hezekiah to defend the city, despite the terrible odds, and surprisingly when the Jerusalemites looked over the wall on the day they expected to die, they found that the Assyrian army had disappeared. The conjectures are that a plague had overtaken the Assyrians, or that Sennacherib had received news of a coup d’etat back home and hurried off to save his throne (Isaiah 37-39 par. 2 Kings 18:13-19:21. Whatever the historical cause, the theological cause was the faithfulness of God in response to the faith of Judah. In this case Judah had stood by God and so God had caused her to stand, she had waited for the Lord and the Lord had come through for her.

Faith therefore in Isaiah’s teaching is trust in God rather than in one’s own strength or in the strength of other humans, abiding in the assurance that the God who brought us into being in the first place and chose us for his special people will preserve us in his own mysterious way. This faith is embedded in the life of the group not the individual, it is the confidence that God is with our group and will not let us be destroyed. The prophecies concerning Immanuel, “God with us,” were given to Ahaz during the earlier (Syro-Ephraimitic) war to encourage him neither to fight nor to seek alliances, and we shall return to them in detail next week. For now let us simply mark that he disobeyed the prophet, did not trust God but trusted rather the King of Assyria.

Clearly faith is a risk, in more than one sense of the word, in so far as it makes claims about what God is doing and what God wants us to do, and bets the farm on having gotten the message right. “God really does not want me to seek protection from Assyria but simply to trust Him to deliver me from Israel and Aram,” says Ahaz, “but I can’t do that. It would be irresponsible.” Thus we see that biblical faith is very concrete and action oriented. The editors of the Jerusalem Bible describe it as follows: “In the prophets, faith is not so much a theoretical belief in the existence and uniqueness of God as an attitude of confidence based on God’s choice of Israel (Judah): he has chosen Israel (Judah), he is Israel’s (Judah’s) God, He alone has the power to save his people. This unconditional trust, a guarantee of salvation, excludes all reliance not only on men but still more on false Gods (JB p. 1153, note g).” (Clearly, the nationalistic dimension of prophetic faith is eventually to be erased by the renovation achieved by Jesus, the promised fulfillment of prophetic faith. For Jesus the faithfulness of God is not just to Judah but also to the whole human race).

We can see the origin of such an idea of faith by examining the rhetorical forms of the prophetic oracles concerning it. The sociological matrix in which an oracle comes to word shapes the form that the saying takes. For example, songs come from wedding situations, proverbs from school, confessions from situations of need expressed in worship. Working back from the form one can reconstruct the social matrix in which it was conceived and given birth. The situation that shapes the oracle in which the idea of Isaiah’s faith is originally at home is the military camp on the eve of battle; it is the “Oracle of War.” There is an early example of this rhetorical form in Deut. 31. God commissions Joshua to succeed Moses and to invade Canaan as follows, “…and the pillar of cloud stood by the door of the tent…And (God) commissioned Joshua the son of Nun and said, “Be strong and of good courage for you shall bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore to give them: I will be with you (Deut. 31 14-15).” The essence of the oracle is that God commissions the person and promises to be with him to insure success. There is a cultic version of this kind of oracle in Psalm 27, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid…. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; yea, wait for the Lord.” (vs. 1& 14).  “God has sent you to perform a task; He will be with you to enable you to succeed; therefore be patient, do not fear, and wait for the Lord.” Good advice to a general whose city is about to be overrun by overwhelmingly superior forces.

The most important fact for contemplation here is that biblical faith has its sociological origin in the army as it goes into battle, when in every head there sounds, along with the terror, the confident voice of God, “I will be with you!” (Immanuel). This military provenance of faith is surely no surprise. There are no atheists in foxholes; everyone present is about to risk his life; confidence in God is the only alternative to nihilistic violence. Thus faith is an attitude born on the boundaries of human need, where we are about to lose control of our lives and probably our very lives themselves and we need someone other than ourself to rely on. This is where faith was born and where it comes into its own, in the face of death, because at death we face the loss of all control; death is the loss of control, ultimately. And all one’s life faith has been training one to die, to give up control, to let go and let God.

That is in essence Isaiah’s prophetic advice to the kings Ahaz and Hezekiah, “Wait for the Lord.”  Ahaz did not follow the advice and made a treaty with Assyria; he could not wait, he did not trust God. Thus he set the scene for the destruction of Israel in 721 and for the destruction of Judah in 576, because once little Judah joined the game of big power politics it was bound to find itself on the wrong side eventually, as it did in 701, when Sennacherib savaged Judah and came upon Jerusalem, and then disappeared before destroying it. Hezekiah obeyed Isaiah on this latter occasion and did not surrender the city, thereby giving Judah a century’s respite, and incidentally certifying Isaiah as a true prophet; but the respite was only that. Once caught up in the rivalry between Mesopotamia and Egypt it was only a matter of time before annihilation came. It would have been better for Judah to have stayed strictly neutral as Isaiah initially advised, be the Switzerland of the Ancient Near East, and trust God, but once she rolled the dice she was bound to discover that the house always wins, and that little guys, no matter how nice, finish last.

We shall take up these issues again next week. In the mean time, let’s reflect on the fact that biblical faith was initially at home in the Holy War theology of ancient Israel and Judah, integrally part of the moment when we are called to lay down our lives for Yahweh Sabaoth, the Holy, Glorious One, in the armies of God. What has become of this faith? What difference does it make to you to know this about biblical faith? How much of this can you accept? We shall come back to those questions later.

Amen.