Isaiah 55
Isaiah 55:1:
“Ho! Everyone who thirsts, Come to the waters; And you who have no money, Come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk Without money and without price. |
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Isaiah 55:2:
Why do you spend money for what is not bread, And your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, And let your soul delight itself in abundance. |
“Spend.” This word literally means “weigh.” It referred to the counting out and weighing of silver or gold as the price paid for something.
“For something that will not nourish you.” Literally, the Hebrew says, “why do you weigh out money for the not-bread.” This is emphatic and dramatic. Bread is emblematic of the support of life or of whatever contributes to man’s support, happiness, and comfort. But in this regard, what man finds is really not-bread, it is futility. |
Isaiah 55: 8-9:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. 9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. |
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The practice of theology requires careful attention to reading and meditating, and then to applying the word of God, while at the same time refusing to be speculative by going beyond what is actually written. Our limited human understanding is both suspicious and fearful and either limits God or creates Him too much like a Divine Super Hero. Job is a good example of this. Throughout all his tribulations, he was confronted head on with all kinds of theologies, and religious applications of which might have originally brought him some comfort, only to find out most of them were not even true. Can God be theologized? No. Some of our ideas and cliches create more separation than union. "For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. " 1Corinthians 1:21
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What if God created humanity for its obedience instead of its ability to comprehend the mechanics of a world that cultivated such obedience?
If God is on a higher ontological level than humanity (Isa. 55:9), then it makes sense for his sovereign purposes to be incomprehensible to us. For to explain evil in an exhaustive sense, so as to see the big picture behind all the facets and details, is to rise to the level of God, which is impossible for finite beings anyway. The crux, it seems, is not with evil or God, but with our limitations and assumptions about the issue. We often assume we can find an answer to it, and we assume God ought to explain himself for the things he does (see Job 38:1-41:34; Rom. 11:33-35). These are dangerous assumptions, for they distort a multifaceted issue into over-simplistic parameters. When the first humans listened to the serpent (Gen. 3:1-7), they submitted themselves to the Creation instead of the Creator, resulting in an upheaval of God’s good world (1:31; Rom. 5:12). Humanity as a whole is thus faced with an intolerable dilemma: we can conceive God’s mysteries, but we cannot comprehend them (see Eccl. 3:11). -Alex Aili |