Isaiah 58: Restore the Breach

 

Isaiah 58

The Hebrews in Isaiah's day are engaged in the ceremonial duties like fasting but without the humility. They care for themselves at the expense of their neighbors but still manage their routines and sacraments. 

I’ve come to loathe the word tolerance. In our modern usage it means ignoring destructive behavior until it overwhelms you. We are tolerant about drugs among other things. Oregon just became the first state to decriminalize possession of hard drugs. This article calls them a pioneer. This was unthinkable 20 years ago but it started with loosening marijuana laws and then finally full legalization.

I’m convinced that all we’ve done is create additional problems that play out in our crowded homeless population. I used to take a more libertarian approach to these things, it isn’t my business what anyone does in their free time. But it becomes our business when our addiction starts costing society in other ways. Families split first and then communities fracture. Cities eventually get overrun with tent cities and violent crime. How much do we spend on recovery programs, counselling, incarceration?

Tolerance starts to look like avoidance.   

There are Christian organizations that get it. Plenty are doing hard work, clothing and feeding the desperate and providing counseling. An immoral society will eventually get overrun with zombies no matter what the law says. People are responsible for their choices in life and strong resistance to truth produces it’s own hell.

Isaiah writes this from the position of God talking to His people. “Why have we fasted, they say, and You have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?’ (verse 3)

Another way to say this might be, we’re doing the stuff from the law and not being blessed, what gives? Americans might say why is all this destruction and waste filling up our cities like a landfill? I’ve never seen so many churches around the country, there hasn’t been a time with easier access to the best teachings, sermons, classrooms, and communities with the purpose of growing in Christ. Teachers of the Word offer their material for free online. Why are we not in a renaissance of growth and freedom and Godly wisdom?

The answer isn’t as one dimensional as we might think, but at the core is our ability to put ourselves first. Nothing is wrong with money and increasing wealth, our families and communities depend on it. It’s such a blessing to live in a country where wealth is possible and even likely for so many.

But we’ve shoveled off our spiritual responsibility for the desperate.

 The government takes care of the street dwellers we figure, so let them run the shelters and the recovery programs. Also the spiritually homeless are all around us and they need our direct influence. Too often we pass them up, even people in church, and get on with our lives. It takes time so we don’t bother. We are busy and investing in others takes time, it’s miserable and often not appreciated. It’s easier to let others do it, or not do it.

We do fast though. We call for God’s mercy. We call for God’s blessing. We ask Him for healing and deliverance and restoration. He answers us. But it feels like we aren’t seeing the real sweeping revival we’d like. We are too satisfied with promotions at work and financial increase, all good things.

Maybe the Heavenly Father is saying stop going through the motions. Begin to honor me with your time and money and efforts. Bear the burdens of the lost and addicted and lonely. Restore the broken and set them free from the mental restraints of depression. God answered the children of Israel in much this same way.

“If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.” (verse 10-11)

That sounds a lot better doesn’t it? The wreckage and misery I see all around is the result of bad politics to be sure. But politics are a result of a culture that doesn’t think much of human life. It ignores what we’ve known about human nature since the Garden of Eden, man is a sinful being whose only path to redemption is through Christ. Because of this we need restraints that reinforce ideas about fallen man. A society that throws off restraint opens itself to ruin.

The promise from God is the same as it was during Isaiah’s time, honor Me with your lives and I’ll take care of the rest. “Those from among you shall build the old waste places; You shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.” (verse 12)

Our streets need some restoration. There isn’t a city in America that doesn’t have problems with homelessness and it isn’t because we are in a famine. It’s because we tolerate and ignore, instead of caring and restricting.