“And he [YHWH] will become a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling to both houses of Israel, a trap and a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 8:14 ESV)
Suddenly the tone shifts in Isaiah 8:11, from horizontal to vertical relationships. YHWH is speaking not to the king and his court, but to “me,” to Isaiah directly, to his heart. This is a window into Isaiah’s soul, like his call in Isaiah 6. What is it like to be a prophet?
It’s a struggle. YHWH calls Isaiah to focus only on YHWH, not on what other people say or do. This means that Isaiah wants to do otherwise than his call, to join with those around him — but in this, he must stand firm by standing apart.
This feels like Jeremiah’s, or Jacob’s inner struggles, which are struggles with God Himself. The very name “Israel” means “struggles-with-God.” In this struggle, no one else is there, no audience or external verification, only YHWH. If we’re promised glimpses of the future, we’re also promised this struggle in the present.
The Isaiah of verses 11-18 is locked in his inner room, trying to focus on God and God alone. But this feels weird, because the Isaiah of verses 1-10 is part of a community, with a wife and witnesses, with a child and a king to report to. These texts are juxtaposed for a reason, and it’s supposed to be jarring.
It reminds me of how the texts of Genesis 1 and 2 show two sides of the first man, Adam. Genesis 1 shows us “Majestic Adam,” in the words of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, created male and female to manage and multiply. Genesis 2 shows us “Covenant Adam,” who starts out with just him and God, then in his loneliness, God gives him Eve.
Soloveitchik’s book about the two sides of Adam is titled The Lonely Man of Faith. Modern books about loneliness are self-help processes for “fixing” it. But some things aren’t to be fixed, not quickly. To Soloveitchik, being lonely is the primary state of Covenant Adam, so it is a blessed state – because in quiet solitude you might finally hear the still small voice of God.
Both Majestic Adam and Covenant Adam are contained in the same person, like they are described in the same text, although there seems to be a sudden shift between them. The disconnect is the point – we are all full of disconnects, yet still, here we are, and God is with us.
There are other sudden shifts in Isaiah. Reading too fast, I get thrown off by them. The judgments seem vicious, and the promises false. This back and forth is the biggest part of why Isaiah confuses me. I have to read more slowly to really unfold what’s going on, to look closely for the true color of each passage, to let it be itself, what God meant it to be when He gave these words, before moving on to the next. This is why I’m writing this Advent Calendar, taking 24 days to cover just 7 chapters. This kind of meaning doesn’t emerge from the Cliff’s Notes version.
The scholar G.W. Beale has felt this too, how reading straight through Isaiah can give the reader whiplash “between searing judgment and gracious intervention.” I think of it as red words of judgement and green words of grace and life. Each passage is given its own color. Isaiah 8:1-10 feels ocean blue, with its talk of floods. Isaiah 8:11-18 feels dark yet warm, like a room lit with a single candle. But the candle is enough.
The center of this dark section is Isaiah 8:14, which contains a familiar metaphor, that God is a rock. But even this rock has two sides to it, depending on who’s approaching it. To the prophet in his inner room, the rock is a fortress, a shelter from the storm. To his fellow citizens in Judah standing on the walls of their besieged city, the rock is a roadblock, getting in their way, making them stumble. YHWH is a snare, intended to hold them back from rash moves, alliances of war and conspiracies with hungry empires.
This passage makes me think of my favorite rock, which is also a sort of inner room. At Camp Casey, on the west coast of Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound, a boulder of island greenstone sits at the tide line. Even when waves are high, you can climb up on it and stand above the waves, although your feet might get wet.
I often have stood on that rock at different times in my life, looking out across the water, in the morning, at sunset, in the dark. Sometimes I even remember to pray there.
Once from the bluff above the beach, I snapped this picture of one of my sons (I’m not sure which one) standing there the same way as I did. Whatever he sees and however he hears God on that rock, I can’t really know. I can only ask God to speak to him and establish him in a world that feels like a flood.
Isaiah invited his children to stand where he stood. He closes this section of introspection by saying “Here am I,” repeating his own history of what he had said in 6:8. But this time is different — he is no longer alone as he was when he saw the glory in Isaiah 6. In Isaiah 8:18, he says, “Here am I, and the children YHWH has given me.”
YHWH has given gift upon gift: the children of 8:18, the rock of 8:14, the lonely inner room of 8:11, and the arrangement of these verses side by side in the text. What ties it all together is that, through it all, He gives Himself.