Bible study one
Isaiah 60.1-7, 17-22
Paul Minear
We look first at a line in v. 18: You shall call your walls "Salvation" and your gates "Praise". Consider these walls and these gates. An archaeologist often studies an aerial photograph to locate the site of an ancient city. There on the photograph he discerns a faint straight ridge where later soil has now covered the ancient wall; there he sees a slight dip in the ridge where the ancient gates stood. Without those walls, an ancient city would have been helpless before any invader; with them the enemy could be repelled. In passing through those gates citizens passed from danger to security, from violence to peace, from fear to confidence. As the hymn-writer sings: "With salvation's walls surrounded, thou mayst smile at all thy foes". To build Jerusalem's wall was to make her immune to destruction (Psa. 51:18); to level the wall of Babylon was to destroy her power (Jer. 51:58). By calling her walls Salvation, Zion would find her only security in God's power. By calling her gates Praise, Zion would escape devastation by entering those gates. Only by praise, could security be found. Implicit in this verse, then, is the Psalmist's call: "Enter his gates with thanksgiving" (100:4). Our prophet is a poet, a graphic artist, using a gallery of moving pictures to describe the indescribable in unforgettable terms. Each picture describes what happens when the community enters those walls by those gates.
Here are some of those moving pictures:
- in v. 17 God is visualized as an alchemist transmuting bronze into gold, iron into silver, wood into bronze, stones into iron...
- the same miracle worker transforms the cruelty of slave-drivers into peace and the brutality of owners into justice...
- In v. 22 a lone, weak individual becomes a large clan, secure in its possession of the land...
- In v. 3 mighty nations come to beg favors of a tiny city, and tyrants come as suppliants...
- In v. 4 estranged and scattered children and grandchildren return for a happy homecoming with their parents and grandparents...
- In v. 6, 7 herds of camels and flocks of sheep come to replenish the resources of starving herdsmen...
What a gallery of pictures! What a fertile imagination! How impossible and incredible! Yet all of them are designed to emphasize a single overwhelming miracle. And this miracle is nothing other than the promise with which we began: you shall call your walls "Salvation" and your gates "Praise". Life in such a city is the only ultimate security; the people can enter this security only by way of the praise of God. We could multiply the analogies a hundred-fold, but the miracle would remain the same single experience: security in a hostile world, gained by a community that praises the wisdom and power of its redeemer. So we may summarize our study thus far by itemizing three convictions of the poet:
- No security is so desirable as life within these walls...
- No activity is more decisive than this work of praising God...
- The theological word "Salvation" and the liturgical word "Praise" are intended to embrace a hundred non-theological and non-liturgical activities.
Let me call your attention to six lines in vv. 19, 20 in which this poet as a prophet seeks to disclose
the ultimate significance of entering this city by these gates. First, these three lines:
The sun shall be no more your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon give light to you by night,
but the Lord will be your everlasting light...
In these lines the author calls his readers to remember the Genesis story of creation. The cessation of the sun's light in the present is a return to the situation before the fourth day of creation. It was only during the evening and the morning of the fourth day that God had created the sun and the moon. By contrast the creation of light and darkness had come on the very first day (Gen. 1:3 f., 14 f.). The very first word of God in dealing with the darkness that layover the face of the deep had been "Let there be light". Isaiah knows that this primal light antedated the creation of the sun. In speaking of the failure of the sun's light, he appeals to the beginning before all beginnings, that aboriginal creative light in which God himself dwells. Not for Isaiah the agnostic lines from the Indian Veda:
What man has ever had the wit
To learn creation's origin?
The gods themselves came after it,
So who knows where it could begin?
For this prophet the light that shines within the walls called "Salvation" is the light of all lights. Heaven and earth may pass away but not this God, this light, this city. Devastation may extend throughout the solar and lunar landscape, it will not invade these walls through these gates. Nothing could be more primal, more deeply grounded in the origin of all things, than the city that lives by this light.
Now notice how the three lines of. 20 run precisely parallel:
Your sun will no more go down
nor your moon withdraw itself
for the Lord will be your everlasting light...
The third line is the same as in the preceding verse: "The Lord will be your everlasting light". But the two previous lines are designed to bring out two contrasts. Of the one sun the author writes: it "shall be no more"; of the other sun he writes: it will "no more go down". How can this be? The second sun, which will never set, is God himself. He has become "your sun". The same thing is true of your moon. All this is to place the strongest possible emphasis upon the presence of your God as eternal light. As there is nothing more prima], so there is nothing more final than this light, shining within these walls, over these gates. This is another way of saying "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away". What the technical theologian calls protology and eschatology meet here in the community's activity of praise. A poem of e.e. cummings expresses a similar awareness:
I thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth).
(Now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened).
Returning from the modem to the ancient poet, we notice that in these two stanzas there is a fourth parallel line. The climax of the first stanza is reached in the words: "Your God will be your glory". A similar climax in the second stanza is intended to carry a synonymous force": "Your days of mourning shall be ended". Do you see the force of this parallel construction?
God's glory coincides with the end of Zion's mourning. All mourning is ultimately due to separation from God's glory. When God again says "Let there be light", all mourning is ended. The community stands again with its God at the very beginning of creation... and this vision of God's glory is the final redemption. "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end"... It is this cosmic range of the prophet's vision that enables us to grasp the seriousness with which he uses all the pictures of Israel's mourning: dispersion, poverty, shame, helplessness, slavery, violence, darkness... The cosmic range also is implicit in the vision of the end of these days of mourning - the miracle of God's transmutation of the baser metals into gold and silver, the appearance of camel trains, the advent of nations and kings as suppliants of this city, the cessation of violence and ruin... When God's people, on his invitation, enter through the gates of praise within the walls of salvation, the very purpose of creation is accomplished. "Your God will be your glory".
But this prophet is more than a poet, more than a linguistic artist playing with images of dereliction and delight. He is more than a seer who sees in the turmoil of present events the beginning and end of all things. This prophet is a spokesman of God, a bullhorn in God's hands. Probably we should read the whole of this chapter as the words of God himself. A dozen times we hear God speak in the first person: "I am the Lord; in its time I will hasten it". (v. 22). What then is the command of this Speaker? What does he require of his people?
Implicitly the imperative is hidden in the image of the gates: God's people are commanded to praise him. Explicitly, the imperative explodes in the first verse of the vision: "Arise. Shine". The darker the night, the more emphatic this command. And what is darker than the darkness that covers the earth? (v. 2).
Verse I is carefully constructed to make each command correspond to a declaration: Your light has come... Shine. The glory of the Lord has arisen... Arise. Don't forget the context of Genesis. This light that now shines is the same light that appeared on the first day of creation. The command "Shine" becomes the echo of God's first word: "Let there be light". His glory has arisen... Arise. This command comes with all the force of the Creator of the heavens and the earth. Verse 2 continues the allusions to Genesis. The same darkness that had then covered the face of the deep (Gen. 1.2) now covers the earth. So the community that obeys his command to shine will attract the nations and their kings to the brightness of God's arising. Every aspect of the first day of creation recurs on this latter day when the word of the Lord goes forth. It has power over every kind of darkness. His command to shine makes his people participants in that same work of creation. His light is their light; his glory is theirs. The command c, Arise" is nothing less than the eternal vocation of this people, this city, those who enter the gates of praise.
This being so, it is important to ask what this command entails by way of specific communal duties. By what kind of behavior does this community arise from its sleep? The chapter may not give an answer to this question. It may take for granted the moral sins which have previously been attacked in chapter 59, and the social duties which are spelled out in chapter 61; even so the specific meaning of "Arise" appears to be missing from chapter 60. And yet, a central definition of the basic duty may be found in v. 4. What does this Lord now require of his people?
"Lift up your eyes... see... look..."
The community is called above all else to see the same vision of its world which the prophet has seen. Only if people awaken can they see it. And everything else hangs upon whether or not they see it.
Do they see God's intention: "I will glorify my glorious house." (v. 7). Do they see as they look "round about" the truth of this statement: "I have had mercy on you..." "He has glorified you" (vv. 9, 10). As they enter the gates of Praise, do they see that "your God will be your glory" (v. 19)? Failing to see it, the world remains the worst of all possible worlds. Seeing it, the same world becomes the best of all possible worlds, the world that lives within God's light. So, the command to arise is defined by the command to see.
How far is it between these two worlds? The modern reader is bound to ask whether Isaiah was speaking of the present or the future glory. For Isaiah that was surely the wrong question. For him, the walls and gates were entirely present. The only question was whether or not to enter. To Isaiah, the whole community was only a gate-breadth away from Salvation. Therefore the command: Lift up your eyes... Look."
One who heard him and who obeyed his command was the prophet on Patmos. He saw that God had chosen to dwell with men in a city that had a great high wall and twelve gates, inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. Those gates are never shut, for the days of mourning have ended. That city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb (Rev 21. 12-27). But for us, especially for us, Isaiah's command is still the word of the Lord: "Open your eyes... Look."
