“What will you do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which will come from afar? To whom will you flee for help? Where will you leave your wealth?” (Isaiah 10:3 New Heart English Bible)
Right after most-quoted section of Isaiah 6-12 (9:1-7), filled with words that glow with great light, we are plunged into the most-troubling section of Isaiah 9:8-10:4, ash-grey words of darkness and wrath. Isaiah paints with colors that contrast, with darkness and light chiaroscuro like Caravaggio.
Sometimes the colors are side-by-wide, and sometimes a single image will contain two colors in itself, so that it is double-sided language. A stone’s nature is two-sided: it can protect, or it can block. In December 7’s entry on “The Inner Rock and the Rock” (8:14-15), we saw YHWH both as a stone fortress and stone of stumbling, depending on whether you hide in the rock or try to climb over it. In Isaiah 9, this image recurs: life is heavy as a stone, and everything is falling down. God’s word “falls” on Israel (9:8) as they sit amid “fallen” walls (9:10) and in the same way that people “fall” or trip over the stone that is YHWH. (8:14-15)
Now we see another image, with YHWH as a fire, in 10:17 where “The Light of Israel will become a fire, their Holy One a flame.” (NIV) How can this fire be the same light that shone in the darkness in 9:1? We don’t sing 10:17 as much as 9:1 this time of year, because these words are hard as a stone and seem to burn like a fire.
Part of the answer is that the people are in a different place, and they are feeding the flames with their own frantic actions. The people’s faithless actions are part of the fire, and they participate in their own downfall, in 9:18 where “wickedness burns like a fire” (NIV). YHWH is one and the same, ever-faithful, but we shift like sand, looking for safety from our own designs, like King Ahaz’s plan to run to Assyria for help.
If this is so, then what are the people doing to participate in their own destruction? Isaiah 9:8-10:4 is divided into four parts, like the four-part name in Isaiah 9:6. Each of these parts ends with the refrain, “For all this, his wrath is not turned back, and his hand is still outstretched!” (9:12 NAB)
The first three parts are directed at the northern Kingdom of Israel/Samaria, which allied with Syria/Damascus against the Assyrian Empire, but will soon be destroyed by that Empire. The fourth part is directed at the southern Kindgom of Judah/Jerusalem, for their laws that steal from the poor. The first three are international politics, and the fourth is elite manipulation of the legal system. Both incur God’s wrath.
For me, when I am shocked by the language of wrath in sections like this, I try to remind myself of the two-sided mystery of God. God is both Wholly Other, and God is Love, and I can only see glimpses of how those two aspects go together.
The one thing I don’t want to do is reduce God to a set of feelings or rules, either liberal or conservative rules, no matter how self-consistent or comforting. If God is Love, then God is an-other person with His own feelings, and not a set of contractual rules. A Person Who Loves will act in ways that I can’t always predict and don’t always understand. Love starts with understanding that the person across from me is a mystery – how much more of a mystery is the God all around me?
The Personal Otherness of God is Rudolf Otto’s constant subject. In “The Prophets’ Experience of God,“ Otto insists that YHWH “is no serene principle of being, no placid law of nature; He may be moved to wrath and indignation, He burns with the fire of strong emotion; in contrast with all gods of the philosophers He is pathos and strong passion and it is in this quality that He is a prophecy of the God of the New Testament, the God of affective, genuine, strong and burning love. … it is precisely as pure and perfect ruach [‘spirit’ in Hebrew] that He is exalted above all the gods of the heathen, exalted above all identification with nature and all ideas associated with natural magic. He is a god not to be served by ritual· or the sacramental magic of any sacrificial cult, but already ‘in spirit and in truth’, in the pure surrender of will and emotion, in the ‘spiritual’ service of YHWH.” (Religious Essays, p. 139)
All things that are truly of God have an aspect that is not of this world, which includes his kingdom, his people, and his wrath. Otto in The Ideas of the Holy writes that God’s kingdom is not of this world: it is “awe-compelling yet all-attracting, glimmering in an atmosphere of genuine ‘religious awe’. As such, it sheds a colour, a mood, a tone, upon whatever stands in relation to it, upon the men who proclaim it or prepare for it, upon the life and practice that are its precondition, upon the tidings of it, upon the congregation of those who await it and attain it.” (82)
The New Testament calls the not-of-this-world members of the not-of-this-world community the “hagion.” This word can be translated as the “saints,” but Otto points out that this isn’t the best translation. The word “does not mean ‘the morally perfect’ people: it means the people who participate in the mystery of the final Day.” (83)
In this passage, Isaiah refers to this Day as “the day of visitation.” (10:3) It can also be called the day of reckoning, or judgment, or just the Day of the Lord, but the precise term he uses here is “visitation.” Visitation is when God’s fiery Otherness comes near, and the things that are not eternal fall, or are consumed. This is the day of reckoning, when debts are paid; the day of judgement, when consequences catch up. God created the world with a purpose, and that purpose does not include fear (Ahaz’s alliance with Empire) or greed (Judah’s laws that favored the rich). When he visits, and comes near, those false and selfish things fall away.
I prefer the translations that speak of God’s “wrath” rather than His “anger.” God’s wrath burns like human anger, and there the resemblance ends. The wrath of God combines three true things that many people doubt:
1. God is near;
2. God cares about us and the people we have hurt; and
3. We can choose to change, to move toward the light, but we refuse.
The first two points are descriptions of God, they are theological, but the last is a description of the human before God, it is anthropological. The human is made in the image of God, so she or he has the God-given freedom to turn toward or away from God. And at the end of this section, we see that is the whole point of all these warnings: “To whom will you flee for help?” God extends a hand to those sinking in the water, like Peter, afraid and distracted by the storm. God says, “Come to me, all who are weary and crushed by heavy stones.”
The wrath of God always occurs in this context of human freedom. It is neither capricious nor arbitrary, although it is often incomprehensible. As George MacDonald says in “The Displeasure of Jesus”: “There is a wrath of God, and there is a wrath of man that worketh not the righteousness of God. Anger may be as varied as the colour of the rainbow.” God’s wrath only falls on us when “we are able to turn our faces to the light, and come out of the darkness; the Lord will see to our growth.” God would not be pleading with Israel in Isaiah 9:8-10:4 if they couldn’t choose to stay out of doomed rebellions, or to write laws that would avoid exploiting the poor and enriching the rich.
Hard, heavy stones and fiery judgement days also fit together in the New Testament. The “day of visitation” is quoted two times in the New Testament right after mentions of stones. Jesus says not one stone will remain on another when He refers to “the day of visitation” in Luke 19:44, and then He visits the Temple and cleanses it from the moneychangers. (Also, Zechariah sings of God’s visitation in Luke 1:68.)
Peter refers to “the day of visitation” in 1 Peter 2:12, soon after several verses about how Jesus is a “living stone” and we his followers are stones built in a spiritual Temple. Peter uses the word Otto talked about, “hagios” = “holy” or “saints,” eight times in his short letter to describe who God is and who God’s followers should be. We participate in God’s Otherness when we follow His ways.
Both stones and fire are finite concepts that an infinite God has revealed for us to know His ways. Wrath is a third such concept. These tell us what it means for God to come near, and for us to participate in His ways, drawing near to Him.
Like a stone, fire’s nature is also two-sided: it can transform, or it can consume. It can anneal glass to strengthen it, or it can shatter glass with its heat. It all depends on how the glass is turned toward the power and purposes of the fire.
But even shattered glass can be brought near the fire, melted to a glowing mass, and reformed. God can do that with the shards of the most broken parts of my life, my fear and my greed, once I bring them to Him.
(Photo credit: Nick Thompson, Last Judgement 8.12.2013: 1528, west window, Cathedral of St Michael and Gudula, Brussels. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pelegrino/16283418650/)