by Rev. K. D. MacLeod, South Harris
Some thoughts on Isaiah 40: 6-8. “The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it; surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”
Our generation, perhaps more than any other in history, has been conscious of change. Change in so many spheres has reached a faster pace than ever before. At one time nations could generally take refuge in the unchanging nature of their religion. Whatever else was changing — for one generation was all the time passing away and giving place to another — yet when they looked around for something that was permanent they could usually find security in the fact that their’s was the same religion as that of many previous generations. But our generation, by and large, does not have even that refuge and has therefore become all the more conscious of how impermanent everything is. Change, purely for the sake of change, has so often become the order of the day.
However, we all look for something unchanging, even in a changing world. Where can we get that? The one answer to that question is the answer which Isaiah got when he asked, “What shall I cry?” — “The Word of our God shall stand for ever”.
When the voice of God came to Isaiah, calling on him to give a message to his people, his immediate reaction was to ask in return, “What shall I cry?” He was very conscious that he needed to get his message from God; he could not trust his own religious thoughts if he was to say something that would be useful to the souls of his fellow-creatures and relevant to their spiritual needs.
If Isaiah had been a present-day theologian, who had been commanded to give a message to his fellow-countrymen, he might have spent the rest of the day working out his past religious experiences, his past thoughts of God, together with his knowledge of the spiritual life of mankind generally and of the various other religions he had encountered personally. We would expect him to give special place to the way in which Jehovah was worshipped in Israel, but he would take what he considered to be best in all religions and pass on his considered opinions to his hearers. But Isaiah could not thus trust his own mind; he could not trust his own religious thoughts, or the religious thoughts of any other individual or group of people. He knew that he had to ask for a revelation direct from God.
It was because Paul had the same consciousness of the insufficiency of his own intellect that he declared, “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ” (2 Cor. 5: 20). An ambassador is fundamentally no more than a messenger who goes from one country to another to say exactly what he is instructed to say. That is how both Isaiah and Paul saw themselves, and that is how every minister of the gospel should see himself. The fact is that no man — however religious he may be — can have any genuine knowledge of God apart from revelation. God has a perfect understanding of how man thinks, and so He declares, “The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man that they are vain” (Ps. 94: 11). Man unaided — the man who has not been taught by God — can therefore never be relied on to think correctly in the spiritual realm.
Man does have considerable power of thought; he is perfectly capable of grasping many things about distant stars, for instance, and about the minute particles which make up the atom. But it is an altogether different matter when even the most brilliant mind attempts to understand spiritual truths, apart from a revelation from God. What lies at the bottom of this difficulty is the vitally important fact of sin. Man is a sinner; sin affects every part of his being, but never is he more seriously affected by sin than when he thinks religiously. It is not that today’s preachers, or anyone else, is to expect fresh revelations from God — the time for that is over, but they are unfailingly to use that perfect source of religious knowledge that He has already given — His revelation in the inspired Scriptures.
This is the attitude that everyone should have when they come to think about spiritual things, and to think about spiritual things is an absolute necessity if we are to be safe for eternity. God has given us our minds, not that they should be wasted, or that they should be confined to the things which are seen and temporal, but that they should be used, more than for anything else, to think of spiritual realities. And, when we realise that God is calling on us to think, what is to be our response? Must we not reply, somewhat as Isaiah did, What shall I think? To which question the answer must be, in Augustine’s expression, To think God’s thoughts after Him.
Religion should be the controlling factor in every part of our lives. But what kind of religion will that be? Our religion must have a sure foundation, and that foundation will be positively insecure unless it is the revelation that God has given in the Bible. God is so much higher, infinitely higher, than we, His creatures, are. How then can we be sure of anything we might think about Him unless He has revealed it to us? Besides, we must acknowledge the natural sinfulness of our minds, for “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2: 14). Even when we have a revelation from God we will not submit to it unless the Holy Spirit will apply it to us. No one will receive what the Spirit of God has revealed in the Scriptures, unless the same Spirit will make him spiritually alive. No one needs any kind of spiritual knowledge except what has been revealed in the Word of God, but we do need that God would apply it to us.
Surely it was the consciousness that Isaiah and the other prophets had of their need to get a revelation from above that made them so often introduce what they had to say with the words, “Thus saith the Lord”. It was as if they were saying, “I do not come with my own message; I do not come with those thoughts that I have worked out myself. I come with what the Lord God has said; He has revealed it to me, and I am passing it on as His ambassador.” So it should be with all who preach the gospel; everything that they say should be exactly in line with God’s revelation in the Bible, for it is the only source of reliable knowledge in religion. That makes it all the sadder when professedly Christian ministers acknowledge a debt to other religions, and hold inter-faith services involving participants from a number of different religions. We must be absolutely clear on the fact that truth in religion is only to be found in a revelation from God, and we must be equally clear that such a revelation is only to be found in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, which from beginning to end are absolutely without error, and so totally reliable.
When Jonah was sent to Nineveh he was given very clear-cut instructions: “Preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee” (Jon. 3: 2). God’s messengers today are also under obligation to obey these same instructions. God has given the Bible to us as something that is absolutely relevant to the needs of every generation. If this Book had been the product of a creature’s thoughts, the product of the thoughts of even the most brilliant of men, it would have been altogether inadequate to give any light in the religious sphere. In particular, we could get no answer to that most basic of questions, How may sinners be received into favour by the God against whom they have rebelled?
If preachers have an obligation to take all their ideas from the Scriptures, their hearers have a corresponding obligation, to say from the heart, “I will hear what God the Lord will speak” (Ps. 85: 8). Hearers are to say, “I will listen to the preacher, but if his ideas are not moulded by the Scriptures then there is something wrong. What I must hear is what God the Lord will speak.” That is why the people of Berea were praised, when Paul came to them claiming to preach the truth about Jesus, they “searched the Scriptures daily whether these things were so” (Acts 17: 11). They directed their minds “to the law and to the testimony”. That is how they were minded to determine whether or not Paul was speaking the truth. They soon found out that Paul’s message was in perfect agreement with the Old Testament Scriptures, and they concluded that what he said was the truth. As a result they got a blessing for their souls, for many of them were given grace to believe. So if we know that it is the truth that we are hearing then it is our bounden duty to give up all resistance to it, and to submit to the truth of God as it is being declared to us, resolving, By the grace of God I will hear what God the Lord will speak.
It was a worthwhile activity for Isaiah to write down God’s message, because he was assured at this very time, “The Word of our God shall stand for ever”. It is therefore not a case of one message for Isaiah’s generation and another for our’s, for the truth of God never changes, and never will. Modern man may say that Isaiah’s doctrines probably had some relevance for his generation, but that twentieth-century man is far too sophisticated for a message like his. Such is the pride of modern man, but the reality is different. The Bible as it was originally given, and as it has been so wonderfully preserved in the providence of God, is perfectly accurate; it is absolute truth and permanent truth.
Modern man will not believe in the infallibility of Scripture, he prefers to think that it is more or less inaccurate. And, sadly, far too much of the so-called evangelical world is thoroughly modern in this respect; while agreeing that the Bible can be relied on when it speaks of doctrine, there is a refusal to accept that it is dependable when it speaks about geography or science, for instance. Thus, most conspicuously, there is a willingness to accept some form of the theory of evolution in opposition to the Scriptural account of creation. It is, however, impossible to divide up Scripture in this way into separate watertight compartments; the idea that man came into existence by some process of evolution cannot be squared with the history of Adam’s creation given in Genesis, and in turn it is in conflict with the Biblical doctrine of the fall. Any departure from the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible is positively dangerous and at once undermines other doctrines, leaving us with no sure foundation.
What lies behind the infallibility of the Bible is the work of the Holy Spirit in inspiration, for “all Scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Tim. 3: 16). This is an inspiration altogether higher than the inspiration with which a poet, say, is credited, when his work is of such a quality that it still attracts attention centuries after it was first written. We can certainly speak without qualification about the high literary quality of the Bible, but there is far, far more to be said than that, for what is meant by Scripture being inspired is that it is God-breathed.
Often what Isaiah and the other prophets recorded was the very words of God, and when they wrote them down they did so with perfect accuracy, because they wrote under the influence of the Holy Spirit. And when, on the other hand, Isaiah wrote the history of the siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib, or some other historical event, the record is just as inspired, and it is just as accurate. For, when Isaiah used the powers of his own mind in writing down the account of these various incidents, God the Holy Spirit was guiding him supernaturally. What Isaiah recorded was exactly what God wished him to record, and it was therefore perfectly accurate.
This is true of the whole of Scripture. No part of Scripture therefore can possibly become dated; no part of it will ever lose its relevance. Thus the Word of God always has a claim on us. Because it will stand for ever it will have a claim even on those who will live at the very last moments of this world’s existence. It will still be perfect truth then, and it will still be perfectly relevant to man’s spiritual needs. Never will God’s Word become less useful to man’s spiritual needs than once it was. That is why, at the very close of the Bible, God gives such a solemn warning against adding to it, or taking away from it: “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life and out of the holy city and from the things which are written in this book” (Rev. 22: 18f). And we can safely take it that this warning applies not only to the Book of Revelation, but to all 66 books of the Bible.
We can thus be sure that if we take religious ideas from any source except the Bible we are guaranteed to go wrong, and guaranteed to go seriously wrong. We must not accept anyone’s claim to a fresh revelation, for God has already declared in the Scriptures everything that anyone needs to know to get safely through this life, and safely into heaven. We all need to learn more of, and to understand better, what God has already revealed, but there can be no safety in giving the least authority to any other possible source of religious knowledge, Roman Catholic tradition and the teachings of Charismatic prophets included.
In particular, the Bible stands true today when it makes it clear that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3: 23), and when it makes clear that sin is man’s basic problem. Whatever problems there are in today’s world — and there are uncountable multitudes of them — they are all, in one way or another, the result of sin. This is just as true today as when Paul first wrote these words, for we, individually, have sinned and come short of the glory of God. God has revealed this to us so that we might take notice of this solemn fact, and be convinced in our souls of the seriousness of our natural condition as rebels against God. So too has God given a revelation of the seriousness of the consequences of sin, for He warns that “the wicked shall be turned into hell” (Ps. 10: 17). If God has given us minds so that we might use them then, when He speaks about sin in particular, we are under obligation to submit to Him and say, “I will hear what God the Lord will speak” when He is speaking to me about my sin and its consequences.
It has been revealed with equal certainty that “it is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim. 1: 15). The person who wrote these words, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, was someone who had taken seriously what God has revealed about sin, for he immediately adds: “Of whom I am chief.” God spoke to Paul about his sin, and Paul listened. He not only accepted it as a general truth that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” but he accepted it as something which spoke about himself and his relationship to God. And, just as he took seriously God’s revelation about sin and about the one and only remedy for sin, so he would have others take these things seriously also; he wished that others would close in with the great and gracious and glorious faithful saying that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”.
God ordered it that that particular expression of Paul’s thinking should be preserved for us so that we too, to whom it comes almost at the end of the twentieth century, might close in with Christ as the one Saviour of sinners. His statement is still as true, and it is as relevant, as ever it was — not so much because Paul said it, but because it is a perfectly accurate expression of truth as revealed by God — and therefore it demands our supreme attention. There is equally good ground for our being assured of the truth of the statement, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life” (Jn. 6: 47). It was the Son of God that made the statement, and it has been recorded with absolute accuracy. We can be perfectly sure of the eternal security of everyone who believes in Christ.
We can be just as sure of the authority and accuracy of all the doctrines revealed in Scripture, but what is central to the message given to Isaiah is a vivid statement of the fact that man’s time on earth is short in the extreme. No one needs to be told that everyone else must die. That is not what we forget; what we forget is that we ourselves must die. What we need is to apply this truth to ourselves, and to follow out its consequences.
On a summer’s day we see the grass alive and green, and the flowers bright and colourful. But we saw the grass and the flowers just as attractive as that in previous years also, and then autumn came, and winter after it. The grass withered, the flowers soon faded. And what we are to learn is that “all flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field; the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it, surely the people is grass.” The wind in a hot country, which like everything else in providence is under the control of God, dries up the grass and the flowers and makes them wither. So when God touches a person’s life it is at an end. Thus the question is asked: “For what is your life?” And the inspired answer is, “It is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away” (Jas. 4: 14). We are assured also that “there is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit, neither hath he power in the day of death; and there is no discharge in that war” (Ecc. 8: 8).
The grass will wither this year also, and even the most beautiful of flowers will wither with it. So it is not only the common man that must die, but even the most accomplished of his fellow creatures, the most brilliant of scientists and political leaders, for instance. They may have made good use of the natural powers which God has given them, it may be that they have been extremely conscientious in discharging their duties, but none of them can have power over his spirit to retain his spirit when God’s time comes to remove him from this world. The most successful men of the world are no less subject to the power of death than are others. Neither can great possessions keep anyone in the world — “the rich . . . as the flower of the grass he shall pass away” (Jas. 1: 10).
There is only one distinction that will matter at the end of the day; it is this: Do we, or do we not, have a new heart? Have we, or have we not, closed in with the great and gracious and glorious faithful saying that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”? They are commended who “confessed that they were pilgrims and strangers on the earth” (Heb. 11: 13). That was because they sought a better country, heaven, and they did so because they were persuaded in their inmost souls that what God had revealed to them was truth, truth that would stand for ever. That race of people is not yet off the earth; they still give the first place to the things that are unseen and eternal.
All the glory of this world is passing. Where can we find something secure, something unchanging in this changing world? God has given the only dependable answer in what he told Isaiah to proclaim; the one thing that is unchanging in a changing world is the Word of our God, which shall stand for ever.