Isaiah 12:1b The Song of the Redeemed
“I will give thanks to you,
O YHWH,
For though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
And you comfort me.”
This verse is a wonderful poetic summary of chapter 6:1-7. Much in the way that Isaiah had seen God, recognized his guilt, and been cleansed by God in the temple, this man is thankful because God’s anger towards him has been turned away, and God now gives him comfort.
This is an important take away for us:
(1) We should be ever thankful that God delivered us from his anger to the comfort of his forgiveness. (Compassion.)
In Chapter 6 we see Isaiah’s salvation experience.
This is a great example of the salvation experience every believer goes through. We recognize God for who He is. The creator, the all-powerful, the holy God of the universe. And, in comparison to that recognition of God, we see ourselves in our broken, sinful, rebellious condition, and we see that we are lost and without hope. We cannot fix ourselves. We do not deserve to be in a relationship with God. We confess our inadequacy. At that moment of honesty and confession, God comes to us with a solution. We can’t fix our problem, but God can, and offers to do so.
This is something Isaiah tells us about in another song, the fourth of his “Servant” songs, in chapters 52 and 53.
Jesus is the fulfilment of this and all of Isaiah’s Messianic prophecies. It is a good thing that we remember and repeatedly hear the story/song of what God has done for us through Jesus.
There is a danger with grace, and that is that we become forgetful. We start out aware of our sin and guilt and so very thankful for the forgiveness we do not deserve. After a while, walking with God, we are in danger of beginning to think that we are, after all, good. That we deserve the love of God.
The real problem with all of this, of course, is that we forget the compassion that God showed us, and we fail to see others with the same compassion. We are always in danger of becoming the unmerciful servant. (Matthew 18:21-25) This is a real problem today with our polarized, tribal culture. Even among the people of God in the church, we are always in danger of looking at those “evil sinners” and condemning them for their sins. As if we were any better when God looked upon us with compassion and forgave us!
A key characteristic of the saved person is their capacity for compassion!
This problem is exacerbated today with the fear and hate mongers trying to whip us up into a frenzy of anxiety so that they can control us.
Politicians and advertisers are masters at capitalizing our fears. Barry Glassner, a sociologist at Lewis & Clark College and the author of The Culture of Fear is quoted as describing one particular politician recently,
“He is a master at it to a degree that I haven’t seen. His formula is very clean and uncomplicated: Be very, very afraid. And I am the cure.”
Unfortunately, we protestant believers as a group tend towards being particularly vulnerable to this temptation towards fear that the world offers; the temptation to turn to strong leaders who promise to protect us and the church from the evils of the world. Perhaps it is irony that we rejected the idolatrous demand to follow papal leadership in blind faith, but hear that siren call in other forms.
James Hawes, in his book The Shortest History of Germany has this interesting revelation:
“Who voted for Hitler?
Let’s imagine that you are shown the blank back of a photograph. This photo is of a random German of voting age in 1928. Your task, for a large prize, is to guess whether this person will switch to the Nazis by 1933.
By just guessing no, you’d have a slightly better than 50/50 chance, because the Nazi vote in 1933 was about 43.9%. But you are allowed to ask a single yes/no question to improve your odds.
So, what will you ask? Will you try to narrow down their age, their class, their gender, their education, their job?”
He then goes on to reference German historian Jurgen W. Falter’s conclusions based on pages of tables and statistics and concludes.
“It is worth hammering this point home: if you’re trying to forecast whether a random German voter from 1928 will switch to Hitler, asking whether they are rich or poor, town or country, educated or not, man or woman and so on will scarcely help at all. The only question really worth asking is whether they are Catholic or Protestant.”
Now, to be fair, there is a geographical nature to Hawes’ thesis. In the whole book he is arguing effectively that there has always been an east-west divide in the German world, long before the Iron Curtain was erected. However, the Protestant Catholic divide has been a big part of the East-West (or Southewest-Northeast) divide for the past 500 years.
The bottom line is that we the saved have no business entertaining such temptations to fear that drown out our call to be compassionate.
For though you were angry with me,
your anger turned away,
And you comfort me.”
This verse is a wonderful poetic summary of chapter 6:1-7. Much in the way that Isaiah had seen God, recognized his guilt, and been cleansed by God in the temple, this man is thankful because God’s anger towards him has been turned away, and God now gives him comfort.
This is an important take away for us:
(1) We should be ever thankful that God delivered us from his anger to the comfort of his forgiveness. (Compassion.)
In Chapter 6 we see Isaiah’s salvation experience.
This is a great example of the salvation experience every believer goes through. We recognize God for who He is. The creator, the all-powerful, the holy God of the universe. And, in comparison to that recognition of God, we see ourselves in our broken, sinful, rebellious condition, and we see that we are lost and without hope. We cannot fix ourselves. We do not deserve to be in a relationship with God. We confess our inadequacy. At that moment of honesty and confession, God comes to us with a solution. We can’t fix our problem, but God can, and offers to do so.
This is something Isaiah tells us about in another song, the fourth of his “Servant” songs, in chapters 52 and 53.
Jesus is the fulfilment of this and all of Isaiah’s Messianic prophecies. It is a good thing that we remember and repeatedly hear the story/song of what God has done for us through Jesus.
There is a danger with grace, and that is that we become forgetful. We start out aware of our sin and guilt and so very thankful for the forgiveness we do not deserve. After a while, walking with God, we are in danger of beginning to think that we are, after all, good. That we deserve the love of God.
The real problem with all of this, of course, is that we forget the compassion that God showed us, and we fail to see others with the same compassion. We are always in danger of becoming the unmerciful servant. (Matthew 18:21-25) This is a real problem today with our polarized, tribal culture. Even among the people of God in the church, we are always in danger of looking at those “evil sinners” and condemning them for their sins. As if we were any better when God looked upon us with compassion and forgave us!
A key characteristic of the saved person is their capacity for compassion!
This problem is exacerbated today with the fear and hate mongers trying to whip us up into a frenzy of anxiety so that they can control us.
Politicians and advertisers are masters at capitalizing our fears. Barry Glassner, a sociologist at Lewis & Clark College and the author of The Culture of Fear is quoted as describing one particular politician recently,
“He is a master at it to a degree that I haven’t seen. His formula is very clean and uncomplicated: Be very, very afraid. And I am the cure.”
Unfortunately, we protestant believers as a group tend towards being particularly vulnerable to this temptation towards fear that the world offers; the temptation to turn to strong leaders who promise to protect us and the church from the evils of the world. Perhaps it is irony that we rejected the idolatrous demand to follow papal leadership in blind faith, but hear that siren call in other forms.
James Hawes, in his book The Shortest History of Germany has this interesting revelation:
“Who voted for Hitler?
Let’s imagine that you are shown the blank back of a photograph. This photo is of a random German of voting age in 1928. Your task, for a large prize, is to guess whether this person will switch to the Nazis by 1933.
By just guessing no, you’d have a slightly better than 50/50 chance, because the Nazi vote in 1933 was about 43.9%. But you are allowed to ask a single yes/no question to improve your odds.
So, what will you ask? Will you try to narrow down their age, their class, their gender, their education, their job?”
He then goes on to reference German historian Jurgen W. Falter’s conclusions based on pages of tables and statistics and concludes.
“It is worth hammering this point home: if you’re trying to forecast whether a random German voter from 1928 will switch to Hitler, asking whether they are rich or poor, town or country, educated or not, man or woman and so on will scarcely help at all. The only question really worth asking is whether they are Catholic or Protestant.”
Now, to be fair, there is a geographical nature to Hawes’ thesis. In the whole book he is arguing effectively that there has always been an east-west divide in the German world, long before the Iron Curtain was erected. However, the Protestant Catholic divide has been a big part of the East-West (or Southewest-Northeast) divide for the past 500 years.
The bottom line is that we the saved have no business entertaining such temptations to fear that drown out our call to be compassionate.
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