Old Sandals

For he [Ahaz] walked in the ways of the kings of Israel, and made molded images for the Baals.  He burned incense in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, and burned his children in the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. And he sacrificed and burned incense on the high places, on the hills, and under every green tree.

Ahaz, whose father and grandfather were godly men, was a very wicked king in Judah, rivaling the wickedness of the kings of Israel. He was, assumedly, “brought up in the faith”, but then turned away from it. It is not how one starts, but how one finishes. God is gracious, and will help us to run the race, but we have to stay on the track.

And he [Jotham] did  what was  right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father Uzziah had done (although he did not enter the temple of the Lord)….So Jotham became mighty, because he prepared his ways before the Lord his God.

He prepared his ways. He gave his mind and heart to it. He took it seriously. He set the Lord always before him. He daily pressed on the upward way. However you want to say it, fine. It’s the doing it that counts.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His  robe  filled the temple. Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said: Holy, holy, holy  is  the Lord of hosts; The whole earth  is  full of His glory! And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty! Thrice-holy. Holy unlike us. Wholly unlike us. And yet we are made in His image, and retain that image even after the fall, although we have lost His likeness. The restoration of that divine likeness in us is the essence of our salvation.

Now I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a rich and fertile hill. He plowed the land, cleared its stones and planted it with the best vines. In the middle he built a watchtower and carved a winepress in the nearby rocks. Then he waited for a harvest of sweet grapes, but the grapes that grew were bitter. Now, you people of Jerusalem and Judah, you judge between me and my vineyard. What more could I have done for my vineyard that I have not already done?  When I expected sweet grapes, why did my vineyard give me bitter grapes?

What a tender story about the Lord’s love for His people, His vineyard. What does He expect from me?

The Lord will wash the filth from beautiful Zion and cleanse Jerusalem of its bloodstains with the hot breath of fiery judgment. Then the LORD will provide shade for Mount Zion and all who assemble there. He will provide a canopy of cloud during the day and smoke and flaming fire at night,
covering the glorious land. It will be a shelter from daytime heat and a hiding place from storms and rain.

The Lord will judge Jerusalem, His people. But not so as to destroy them completely, but rather to cleanse them.  The judgement of the Lord is not retributive, but remedial.  His judgement is like a fire, but a refining fire.

The people will be oppressed,  evry one by another and every one by his neighbor.  The child will be insolent toward the elder, and the base toward the honorable.

“Gather ’round, kids, let me ask you a question.  Did you ever wonder why things are the way they are?  Why there is death in the world?  Sickness?  Why a lot of kids, especially those in foreign countries, go to bed hungry every night?  Why you lose your temper?  Why you act up just so you can get your own way?  Why your parents fight sometimes?

It wasn’t always like this.  To find out why, we have to go a long way back in history —back to the beginning.  The beginning story is recorded for us in the Bible.  God made the first two human beings ever, and He put them in an amazing paradise.  Think of your very favorite place in all the world; this paradise was a thousand times better.

God gave them everything they could ask for.  A beautiful place where they could live forever.  No death. No sickness. No fighting.  No selfishness at all. Just love, joy and peace.  Along with all of this God also gave them a choice.  The choice was simple.  “Just choose every day to acknowledge that I am your God, I am the One who has blessed you with all that you have.  Listen to me, now.  There is a certain tree in the center of the garden, but you need to stay away from it.  Don’t eat from it.  Every other tree is ok.  Just not that one, got it?”

Well, it was fine for awhile.  The two went about their business and ignored the tree.  One day they stopped to look at the tree and wondered how it might be to taste the fruit.  God wouldn’t really mind, would He? They quickly put that thought out of their minds and moved on.  But more and more as the days passed, they walked by the tree and wondered, “What does God have to do with this tree anyway?  It looks perfectly ok to us.  Is God holding something back from us?  Shouldn’t this be our decision to make? We don’t need God to telling us what to do.  In fact, we’re beginning to think we can make it just fine without Him.  And so one day, when they thought no one was looking, they grabbed the fruit from the tree and ate it.

But God was looking.  And He was saddened too, because there were grave consequences that came with their decision.  The paradise was somehow no longer a paradise. The love, joy and peace they had enjoyed with God—the God of the universe—it was somehow all different now. Now the rose bushes had thorns on them. Now there was strife and hatred in the world. Their firstborn son murdered his younger brother for no good reason.

This is the world you and I were born into. God could have just left us alone, but He did not. He decided the only way to fix things was to become a human being himself, to rescue us from our self-centeredness, our sinfulness. And so He did, that’s who Jesus was. But fixing things proved to be much harder than anyone could have imagined. Not only did God become a man, but the man he became was despised and rejected by other men, the very men He himself had created…”

The loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be brought low. The Lord alone will be exalted in that day, but the idols He shall utterly abolish.  They shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth,  from the terror of the Lord and the glory of His majesty, when He arises to shake the earth mightily.

“God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else – something it never entered your head to conceive – comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.”

C.S. Lewis

Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom. Give ear to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah.  “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?”, says the Lord. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs or goats. When you come to appear before Me, who has required this from your hand, to trample My courts? Bring no more futile sacrifices. Incense is an abomination to Me.”

Reality check. The Lord was not impressed with the multitude of sacrifices offered to Him, especially if they were offered by people whose hearts were far estranged. It is no different today. The true sacrifice involves a broken and contrite heart. Any other kind is futile.

But when he was strong his heart was lifted up, to  his  destruction, for he transgressed against the Lord his God by entering the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. So Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him were eighty priests of the Lord, valiant men. And they withstood King Uzziah, and said to him,  It is not for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense. Get out of the sanctuary, for you have trespassed! You  shall have  no honor from the Lord God. Then Uzziah became furious; and he  had  a censer in his hand to burn incense. And while he was angry with the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead, before the priests in the house of the Lord, beside the incense altar. And Azariah the chief priest and all the priests looked at him, and there, on his forehead, he  was  leprous; so they thrust him out of that place. Indeed he also hurried to get out, because the Lord had struck him. King Uzziah was a leper until the day of his death.

This is an all too familiar story of God’s blessing, man’s pride and resulting judgement. King Uzziah thought too highly of himself, and too little regarded the holiness of his God.

But Amaziah would not heed,  for it came from God, that He might give them into the hand of their enemies,  because they sought the gods of Edom.

Some might read this verse and conclude that Amaziah did not have anything to do with his rebellious attitude.  Amaziah was just a puppet, so to speak, for “it came from God.” By extension then, none of us are really choosing for or against God.  It only seems that we are.  Just how it is that we can be held responsible for choices that we, in fact, did not make is an unexplainable mystery.

But such a conclusion must be faulty, because it drives us into a theological ditch.  The Bible holds out two truths – God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility.  These two truths must be understood incarnationally, i.e., in the same way we understand that Jesus Christ was fully human, and that he was also fully God.

Amaziah’s heart turned against the Lord. But his rebellion did not take the Lord by surprise.  The Lord is longsuffering, but there came a point where the Lord said, “Enough!”, and locked in Amaziah’s rebellion, so to speak, in order that the judgement of God of might fall on His wayward people.