More than almost anything else, daily Bible reading is the mark of the Christadelphian It is this which gives us all a treasured familiarity with the text of scripture.
Yet this frequent reading of the Bible can be accompanied with a problem When we read a passage for the tenth or the hundredth time, it is all too easy for the eye to pass over the familiar words without our grasping what they are saying For example, take this portion of Isaiah 6.
“Then I heard the voice of the LORD saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I Send me 1’ He said, ‘Go and tell this people ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding, be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
‘”Make the heart of this people calloused, make their ears dull and close their eyes Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn and be healed’ (Isa 6 8-10 NIV as other quotes)
The punctuation of the NIV makes it easier to grasp the apparent meaning of this passage God needs somebody to deliver a message, and Isaiah volunteers for the job He is told to tell Israel that none of them will be able to understand his words, because God has made it impossible for them to do so.
This would be quite a strange saying What would be the point of giving people a message to which they cannot possibly respond? Does this passage really mean what it appears to say? Or is there more in this than meets the eye? We need to dig a little deeper m search of an answer.
Christ’s quotation of Isaiah 6
The Lord Jesus quoted Isaiah’s enigmatic words in Mark 4 10-12 When he was alone, the twelve and others around him asked him about the parables He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you But to those on the outside everything is said m parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding, otherwise they might turn and be forgiven”
This looks as if Christ really did take Isaiah’s statement at its face value Moreover, he seems to have seen his own position as similar to Isaiah, and his own message to be like Isaiah’s something that most people must be kept from understanding.
But if we take that conclusion, we only create another difficulty parables are not like that. With a few exceptions (notably, The Rich Man and Lazarus) parables make the Lord’s message easier to grasp, not harder!
Ask any Sunday School teacher Does anybody, whether child or adult, have any problem in seeing The Good Samaritan is about love, or The Prodigal Son about forgiveness, or The Importunate Widow about not giving up easily? Whatever Christ meant by quoting Isaiah 6, he can hardly have meant that the purpose of parables is to make it impossible for most people to understand his teaching.
Once again, it is evident that further investigation is needed
An apparent contradiction
There is an even bigger obstacle in the way of taking those passages literally To do so would bring them into head-on conflict with a long list of scriptures which tell us that God freely offers salvation to anybody (Most people refuse to accept ft, of course, but that is not God’s fault ) There are many such passages, of which the following are a selection.
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters, and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare Give ear and come to me, hear me, that your soul may live” (Isa 55:1-3)
“Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? For I take no pleasure m the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord Repent and liver (Ezk 18 23,32).
“[God] wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (I Tim 2:4).
“[The Lord] is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (II Pet 3 9)
These passages (and others) tell us clearly that God wants all humans to repent and walk in the way of salvation Because of this clear teaching, we must look for a different understanding of Isaiah 6 and Mark 4
It is worth remembering that this is a time-honored Christadelphian way of resolving apparent contradictions For instance, although there are quite a number of passages that speak of everlasting torment for the wicked, we know the dead are unconscious and that a God of love would not impose such an appallingly cruel punishment So we look for a different understanding of the everlasting torment passages And we follow the same line with many other passages, including those that speak of our Lord as existing before his birth.
Chnstadelphians, of all people, cannot afford to follow the bad example of those fundamentalists who often insist that every statement in the English Bible must be taken literally How wrong they are’
Allowing for Hebrew idiom
There is good evidence Hebrew is a more figurative and idiomatic language than English and that even the Jewish writers of the New Testament have inserted a great deal of Hebrew idiom m their Greek In particular, sources I have consulted all insist that the only way to understand Isaiah 6 and Mark 4 is to take account of a widely-used Hebrew idiom.
F F Bruce, in The Hard Sayings of Jesus, warns us when we read Mark 4 to “remember that in the idiom of Jesus and his contemporaries a result might be expressed as though it were a purpose” (p 102) In other words, a Hebrew writer will say that God caused people to act in a certain way, when all he means is that God foresaw the way they would act of their own accord.
Bruce goes on to quote an earlier writer, T W Manson, who said about Mark 4 “As in its original setting the book of Isaiah, so here, it is most naturally taken as an arresting, hyperbolical, oriental way of saying, ‘Alas, many will be obdurate.
Another explanation, which amounts to the same thing put in different words, is that given by E W Bullinger in Figures of Speech Used in the Bible He tells us that “active verbs were [sometimes] used by the Hebrews to express, not the doing of the thing, but the permission of the thing which the agent is said to do” (p 823) He then lists 15 passages from nine books which illustrate this figure Four of these are especially helpful in proving Bullinger’s point
- Moses said, “0 LORD, why have you brought trouble upon this people?” (Ex 5 22) He obviously meant, “Why have you permitted Pharaoh to cause us this trouble?”
- Jeremiah said, “Ah, Sovereign LORD, how completely you have deceived this people and Jerusalem by saying, ‘You will have peace,’ when the sword is at our throats” (Jer 4 10) Taken literally, this was the very opposite of the truth God was constantly telling Israel through Jeremiah they would not have peace, but military catastrophe, death and slavery It was Jeremiah’s opponents, the false prophets, who prophesied peace Jeremiah’s complaint was that God had permitted the false prophets to deceive God’s people, instead of stopping their mouths.
- Ezekiel 14 9-10 “If the [false] prophet is persuaded to utter a prophecy, I the Lord have persuaded that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him the prophet will be as guilty as the one who consults him” In effect, God declares, “I will permit wicked prophets the freedom to prophesy lies if they so wish”
- Regarding the Lord’s prayer, a sarcastic atheist once asked me, “Why do you Christians pray, ‘Lead us not into temptation’? Do you expect Him to?” At that time I had no answer But now it is good to know that to a first-century Jew, the saying really meant, “Do not permit me to be led into temptation” Notice how well that understanding fits the words that follow,” but deliver us from evil” A perfect Hebrew parallelism
Christ and Isaiah again
Using Bullinger’s approach, the passage from Isaiah 6 that Jesus quoted can fairly be paraphrased in the following way.
“I am sending Isaiah to give you another chance to repent, to do good for a change, and so to find salvation But I know very well that most of you won’t take any notice of Isaiah’s words, but will turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to them”
Confirmation that this is indeed the sense of Isaiah’s message is found in Acts 28 26,27 Here Luke quotes from the interpretative Septuagint (Greek) version of Isaiah, which puts the blame of Israel’s blindness on the people, not on God “They have closed their eyes,” it says
The Lord Jesus used the same version when he quoted Isaiah 6 in Matthew 13 Clearly he viewed Israel’s blindness as their own fault.
So then, although the Lord’s words might seem to us to imply that he used parables to baffle people, they would not have been taken that way by his first-century Hebrew listeners They would have known he meant, “Although parables are a great help to people like you who want to learn, the rebellious majority will only use them as an excuse for not believing my words.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One