 Vol. 17, No. 4, July - Aug. 1988 |
CALLED BY NAME
John H. Paterson
Fear not; for I have redeemed thee,
I have called thee by thy name;
thou art mine. Isaiah 43:1
GOD calls His own, and knows His own by name. This is true when He calls them as individuals: it is also true when, as here, He was addressing a whole nation. And for those He knows He will do anything. He will go to any lengths to bring them through their trials, regardless of what He has to do to deliver them. He will see to it that nothing overwhelms them -- neither fire nor water (Isaiah 43:2).
These are words of wonderful encouragement for any of God's people who are struggling with opposition or defeat. And when we say that God will go to any lengths for them, notice the lengths to which this forty-third chapter of Isaiah says that He did go. He says (vs.3), "I gave Egypt for thy ransom". Have you ever stopped to consider what was the state of Egypt by the time God had completed His people's release from slavery? The country was absolutely devastated: the crops and herds ruined, with no immediate possibility of recovery; the firstborn of every family was dead -- the next generation upon which the country would depend -- and the army was wiped out, drowned in the Red Sea. And why all this? Verse 4 tells us: "Thou wast precious in my sight ... and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men for thee, and people for thy life."
That, then, is the measure of what it means that He knows us by name! But surely, we are tempted to say, that kind of privileged treatment only applies in very special cases, to very special people? To stand so high in God's favour that others are left in the dust behind us must demand a uniquely high standing on our part?
On the contrary! Notice the circumstances in which Isaiah's words from the Lord were spoken. This Jacob, this Israel whom He knew by name was a nation in exile, and it was in exile because of its constant, apparently inveterate habits of disobedience and disloyalty to the Lord who was speaking. Far from having merited the kind of reassurances offered to them in this chapter, Israel had done everything imaginable to anger the Lord and undermine His love. That is the context of the chapter, and it is significant, I think, that the first word God gave His people was a word that recalled their waywardness: "Fear not: for I have redeemed thee." That was the first thing He had to do, before He could make any progress at all.
How great this is: how reassuring -- that in the depths of their disobedience and disgrace He still knew them by name; that He did not disown them! But now let us read on in the chapter, and notice two other points that follow from this great declaration of God's personal relationship with His people.
The first of these is that Israel's God took a personal interest in them because He is a personal God. Read again this forty-third chapter of Isaiah and notice, if you will, the drumbeat of personal pronouns: I, me, mine.
I have declared, and have saved, and I have shewed ...
Yea, before the day was I am he; I will work and who
shall turn it back? (43:11-13).
There may seem to us nothing remarkable about this: it is in keeping with our idea of God. But in the context of Isaiah's day it was something [67/68] that needed emphasising. The surrounding peoples, including Israel's captors, worshipped idols. Did they know people's names, those blocks of stone, or wood, or metal? Could they call, or hear, or act? Of all those peoples Israel was the only one who could say with confidence, "There is somebody there! Our God is a God who is alive; who acts; who knows; in fact, who knows me".
That is a tremendous claim: He knows me. But of course it leads us straight on to the question: do I know Him? As He called His people, so they were always being urged to call upon Him. That they seldom did so, and then only when they were in the greatest trouble, showed that they had little or no knowledge of Him. For long periods of their history, they did not even know how to call upon Him, let alone what to ask for: they relied on men like Moses and Samuel to do the necessary calling for them.
The Children of Israel did not know their God very well; otherwise they would not have behaved as they consistently did. Prophet after prophet was sent to warn them that they had misunderstood Him and His character; that disaster and judgement were inevitable if they persisted in their waywardness, but in the end they were scattered, and the remains of a once-proud nation were led away into exile. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:6).
So, that is the first challenge of this chapter: He knows me, but do I know Him? The second is this: that He calls His people by name because He wants to make use of them. The next section of the chapter focuses on this thought: "Ye are my witnesses" (vv.10, 12). But witnesses to what?
Let us again remind ourselves of the context. Among the nations of the ancient East, there were innumerable gods. Some groups or peoples had dozens of them, each supposedly responsible for a particular aspect of life. Furthermore, these gods were generally represented by images, statues and shrines, and these were for the most part not merely visible but intrusive. Nobody, for example, was allowed to disregard the image which Nebuchadnezzar erected near Babylon (Daniel 3); Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace for doing so.
But Israel was different. Its people had a single God, and they were forbidden to make images of Him. They had a sort of shrine, admittedly -- a single shrine -- but it contained no image. Its most sacred feature was an empty space over the lid of a box -- the mercy seat above the ark!
If, therefore, any question arose as to what Israel's God was like, or how their God compared with the deity of some other tribe, they had little or nothing to show. They did not have an image larger or more costly than other images and their shrine, at least in the days before Solomon's temple, was modest enough in its essentials. There were, in fact, only two ways in which a comparison could be made. One was to compare the records of two or more of these "gods", and the other was to compare the character of their worshippers.
What I have just called the record -- the performance -- of these tribal gods was constantly being assessed, and the Scriptures contain many examples. The confrontation between Jehovah and Baal which Elijah staged on Mount Carmel was only the most dramatic of these. The comparison was extended to individual capacities of these gods. We can recall such incidents as the Syrian argument (1 Kings 20:23) that Israel's God was a God of the hills, but that Israel could be defeated in a battle fought in the plains. Between these tribal gods, there was a sense of rivalry, an accounting of wins and losses which we shall be nether fanciful nor irreverent if we liken to the modem assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of football teams.
As to the character of each god's worshippers, you will certainly recall the Old Testament's stress on this factor. The characteristic Bible word for the practices of other tribes is "abomination": it is one of the commonest of Scripture words, although I doubt if many sermons nowadays are preached about it! All it represents is an abhorrence of the character induced by the worship of these other gods, and a warning to God's people against endangering their own character by following the example of others.
Well, there were the two kinds of evidence and God said to His people, "You are my witnesses." As far as the first kind of evidence was concerned, [68/69] no wonder that He recalled to them the great days of deliverance from Egypt! A people defeated in battle after battle, and finally dragged off into exile, had no recent "record" to boast about! Their history had in recent years been one of disaster. But back in the great days their God had proved Himself to be invincible on their behalf. Under Moses and Joshua, the fear of Israel and their God had spread far and wide (cf. Joshua 2:9-11). Their successes -- their very survival -- were His. They might be slaves and in exile, but their very existence, after centuries of living among more powerful neighbors, was evidence of the ability of their God to keep and bless. "You are my witnesses."
So, there in exile, it was the second type of evidence -- the evidence of character -- upon which their witness would depend. And here they had to be made to realise that it was not their own reputation which was at stake -- for as slaves they had no reputation as such -- but it was God's. They might be inclined in captivity to feel, "Well, we've lost. You win some; you lose some. We'll just have to make the best of it." But that was not at all how God felt about it! His words were: "I have created him for my glory ... This people have I formed for myself; they shall show forth my praise" (43:7, 21). They were still His witnesses; He still needed them to fulfil that role.
And notice, if you will, His insistence that He alone is God. (vv.10-12). Other peoples, as we know, had many gods: if something favourable happened, there would be a clamour of rival voices, each claiming that their particular god was responsible. With Israel, there was only one God to be praised. His position admitted of nether rivalry nor excuse: "there was no strange god among you." As He had already told them (Isaiah 42:8; cf. 48:11), "My glory will I not give to another."
God chose Israel as His witnesses. It sometimes worries believers that God would play favourites in this way, helping Israel but smashing Egypt; giving "people for thy life" (vs.4). But what God chose was, of course, an agent and not a favourite: he chose a means and not an end. The end was to be a light to draw all the nations; Israel was to be the light and the nations were to come to it:
and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee,/pr>
and give thee for a covenant of the people,
for a light of the Gentiles. (Isaiah 42:6)
So, God recalls to Israel all the way He led them, and then reminds them that these events are evidence: that they are evidence, and that they must live accordingly among their neighbours in order to uphold His name and glory.
As Isaiah 43 unfolds, there is a further reassurance for His exiled people. None of us would covet the task these exiles had, of defending as wonderful a record, a history, that had ceased to be wonderful many years ago! But the Lord has a promise for them: the record will be updated! He tells them that they need not look back any more, for the future is going to be wonderful, too -- and we today know that, in His goodness, His promise was fulfilled:
Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?
I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:18-19)
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