Isaiah 64:1-9
Lesson Focus
In our brokenness, we long for our king to come to reshape our world and us, too.
Lesson Outcomes
Through this lesson, students should:
Recognize the history of God's intervention in their lives and seek God’s divine presence and action in unexpected ways, mirroring Israel's call for God's mighty deeds in times of distress.
Acknowledge that our prolonged separation from God is due to our sins. Be encouraged to confess their failings and the self-imposed barriers that distance us from God’s divine presence.
Embrace the hope of restoration as we turn to God as our ultimate source of salvation, expressing our longing to be reshaped and renewed by the divine hands.
Catching up on the Story
The people of Israel are all alone. Well, they feel that way anyway. They're captive in a faraway land that is not their own. It has been 70 years or so since Israel was conquered by the Babylonians and carried off into exile. And even though they have tried to settle into their new home to pray for the peace and welfare of the land they now live in, feelings of loneliness, isolation, and abandonment abound. Our passage takes place toward the end of their exile, however, most likely during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Hence, the end of their punishment is near.
To be sure, there is no questioning why Israel feels this way. No, they know why they are in exile. They know why they live in a land, not of their own choosing. They know, alright, but they wish it weren't so, just the same.
Beginning back in chapter 63, they've begun to call out to God for help. Their pleadings have taken the form of a communal lament. A lament is a song of sorrow, confession, mourning, and longing.
Show Yourself! Or, You, You, You!
Israel's longing, of course, is centered on their desire that God would intervene in their hopeless situation. Their hope, prayer, the desperate cry of their heart is that God would break forth as God has done in the past. They don't wish God to do so quietly, either. While God often speaks to us in a still, small whisper, Israel longs for God to tear open the heavens. They want the mountains to quake!
Israel's hope for God to show up in a mighty way is not without precedent in their story. Mountains quaking, fire, water, and nations trembling at the presence of God are images that take us back to God's intervention on behalf of Israel through the Exodus.
Yes, through plagues, fire, smoke, and water, God leads Israel out of Egypt. The mountains quake as Moses receives the Law. Nations tremble as God's people make their way into the Promised Land. Never, even in their wildest imaginations, could Abraham, Issac, Jacob, or Moses have foreseen the wild and unexpected ways that God worked on Israel’s behalf for their salvation.
No one, past or present, has seen a God like Israel's God. No god has done the things that Israel's God has done. And now, Israel is calling on God to do what God has done in the past because Israel finds itself in bondage again. In verses 1-5, you'll notice 12 "you" or "your."
Obviously, those "you" all refer to God. Israel understands that their existence, the "we" we will hear in the next section, would never have existed without God's presence. Israel needs God to be with them again as God had been in the past, or they will cease to exist as a people. There can be no "we" for Israel or for us without God's divine "you."
Most of the time, especially in laments like this one, placing ourselves inside the text is appropriate so that Israel's "we" becomes our "we," too. This lament was a dialogue between Israel and God, and it can now be the same for us.
It’s All Our Fault! Or, Us, Us, Us!
Then, right in the middle of verse 5, the language shifts from God's divine "you" to the beleaguered and distressed "we." The lament turns from calling on God to decisively intervene as God has in the past, to a cooperate confession.
The confession begins by stating the obvious: God’s presence is available for those who remember God’s ways and do right. But, Israel confesses, they have sinned and have not had the privilege of God’s constant companionship. The NRSV translates the second half of verse 5 as, “But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.”
At first glance, it might seem that Israel's confession is backhanded, blaming God for her sins. This is not the case. Israel is fully aware of its infidelities. Israel understands that as they sinned, God withdrew God's presence.
In the absence of God’s loving presence, the people sinned even more, relying on anything other than God for help. The prophet speaks of the truth we often experience: we sin, and then our relationship with God begins to fade. The more our closeness to God fades, the more we sin. It can be a vicious cycle.
You likely know this to be true. If you think about your life and the sin that you've committed, you'll likely see how those actions of yours have driven a wedge between you and someone else and between you and God. Sin causes cycles of alienation.
The more we sin, the further we feel away from God. It can go on for so long that we feel God has completely abandoned us. But the truth is that God has not abandoned us; it is we who have abandoned God.
Israel goes on, "in our sins we have been a long time, and shall we be saved?" This question seems to be the center of the passage. It is a question of hope, hopelessness, confession, and longing for redemption. Not only has Israel sinned, causing a great rift between God and people, but also they have been at it for a long time! They are thoroughly and completely steeped in their own filth.
In verse 6, the confession continues with the plural language. Israel is unclean, all of them. There's no one who is innocent. Israel is unclean because of their failure to set right the injustices in their land. They are unclean because they have not cared for the orphan, the widow, the poor, the outcast, and the stranger in their lands. They are unclean because they have trusted in everyone and everything other than God!
Their uncleanliness makes all their righteous deeds the good things they were supposed to do, like filthy clothes. Literally, "filthy cloth" is a cloth used by women during menstruation.
Any discharge of blood would have made an Israelite person ceremonially unclean. Without demeaning the normal physical cycles of women, this type of uncleanliness, for Israel, was some of the worst sort. What is not to be missed is the seriousness with which Israel views their uncleanliness. This is serious stuff, and Israel feels as if they have nowhere to go.
Indeed, Israel goes on to wallow in their worthlessness a little longer. They are like leaves blown away by the wind of their sin and iniquity. Here, the very real consequences of Israel's unfaithfulness come to the forefront. They have no one else to blame but their own sinfulness. At the same time, however, they acknowledge that their sinfulness has caused God to hide God's face from them.
God has given them over to their sins and iniquities, and therefore, they have no strength or even right to call on the name of God. Without some intervention by the hand of God, Israel's existence will be in the hands of the political powers of the day, powers who care nothing for her or her place as God's chosen people.
Yet!
The deep longing and sorrow of verses 1-7 are not the end of the story. The "yet" of verse 8 proves to be a turning point toward a great hope that God will act on Israel's behalf as before. "Yet, O Lord, you are our Father…”
While these verses are still Israel’s confession, they are now no longer a confession of wrongdoing but a confession of their lostness in relationship to God. Israel confesses that God is their Father. Israel confesses that God is their potter.
The confession is not just that God is a potter who happens to come along but that God is "our" potter. God is their original potter. God is our original potter. The one who shaped them and us in the first place and will be the one who will reshape us, smoothing out the lumps, healing the cracks, and replacing the broken pieces.
Israel is expressing their hope that God will come again to Israel to heal and bind their wounds. God will do this precisely because God has made us God's people, and our iniquity will not be remembered forever. God never abandons us! Christ is coming! Salvation is coming!
Waiting for God…Advent
This may seem like a strange passage to read for the first week of Advent. As a season, though, Advent helps prepare us for the coming of Jesus, whose birth we celebrate on Christmas Day. Of course, the coming of Jesus is God's fullest and greatest act of salvation for his creation. Each year, we hopefully and expectantly wait for Jesus' birth because we are all, and I do mean all, in need of salvation. Jesus' birth is the beginning of our salvation.
So, in Advent, we begin, re-telling the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus, though, doesn't begin in Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John; the story of Jesus begins with and encompasses the entire Old Testament story. Indeed, we study the Old Testament to better understand what God is doing through Jesus in the New Testament.
But if Advent is a time of preparing ourselves, really even a time of longing and calling out to God to intervene in our broken lives and world, well, this is a perfect passage.
We are invited into this lament. Amid our broken world, we are invited to call for God to make the mountains quake, to do the unexpected works of salvation that God has done in the past. We are invited to confess our sins, which have angered God and driven us away from God. We are invited to call out to God our Father and our Potter to reshape us into the people we were created to be in the first place.
We're invited into this lament during Advent because, like Israel, we have been in our sins a long time, and we have no power, no ability to save ourselves. As Israel needed God to bring them home from exile, you and I require the same thing; only our exile is our own sin and the death we experience because of it.
Before God came, though, Israel needed to prepare themselves. They needed to confess. They needed to lament so that when God did come to rescue them, they were ready. We need to do the same thing. I think the pattern we find here in Isaiah 64 is good for preparing ourselves for the coming of Jesus at Christmas.
First, as Israel did, we remember the mighty ways God acted on our behalf in the past. Testify to the truth of God's past faithfulness and call on God to intervene in our lives in new and unexpected ways.
Then, we confess that we have been in our sin for a long time and cannot save ourselves. We confess that we are dirty and covered by an uncleanliness of our own making. The good that we might do is covered by our own filth. We confess that we are held captive in a prison of our own making.
But then, we must confess that the only one who can save us is God through Jesus. When we declare that God is our Father, that we are only a lump of misshapen clay, we make ourselves available to be reshaped by our potter's loving and caring hands.
As we journey together toward our celebration of Jesus' birth, I'd like us to move through these steps. Maybe you do them daily? I've included some questions in your bulletin to help you do this. Make these questions a part of your prayer/study time each day. Ponder one or two of the questions each day.
Israel's lament wasn't an individual thing. It was a song they sang together. As we gather together, let us prepare ourselves for Jesus’ birth through worship and confession to help each other grow closer to the God who wants to shape us into his image even now.
Discussion Questions
Read the text aloud. Then, read the text to yourself quietly. Read it slowly, as if you were very unfamiliar with the story.
Recount a time when it felt like God was far away. What were your thoughts and feelings as you longed for God to make himself known in that situation?
In the context of our community of faith, what might it look like for God to “tear open the heavens and come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence?”
As a family or with a group of friends, spend some time recounting the wondrous deeds that God has done. How has God worked in your life and in the life of our church in the past?
Confess your sinfulness to God. Rest in the fact that you have been forgiven. Pray that you have the strength to resist those sins in the future.
From what kind of situations have you wondered if you could be saved?
Verse 8 declares that God is our Father, the potter who has shaped us. What are some of the concrete ways in which God has shaped us as a community of faith?
What does it mean to be the work of God’s hands here in our local community?
How does this passage help us be prepared for Christ’s coming at Christmas?