Kicked Out for Good Reason
Sometimes going on a mission trip feels more like you’re just getting kicked out of the house.
The writer in Isaiah 61 is depicting a nation of exiles, with some who have returned back to Jerusalem, and most others who have decided they will stay spread across the lands. Â The writer is grappling with the changing definitions of what it means to be “God’s people” and it is slowly becoming more inevitable that we are never going back to “those old glory days where everyone is home in Zion” ever again.
We long for what we had – we seem to only appreciate something or someone once they are gone. Â And yet, the 5th Century prophet in this chapter is careful not to exclude the Diaspora Jews from the grand narrative God is weaving. Â He seems to have an assurance that they still have a vital role to play. Â The prophet is reminded of a promise God made to an ancient ancestor…”back in the glory days”… when he spoke to Abraham in Genesis, he made it explicitly clear that Abraham would be blessed, and that through Abraham all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
This was spinning through the prophet’s mind as he wrote Isaiah 61.  In trying to reorient  his faith to the changing circumstances, in lamenting the hundreds of thousands of Jews that could not or chose not to return, what was to become of God’s people?  God’s promise to Abraham?
Maybe this was exactly what God wanted.
This “exile” – this humiliation and defeat – was exactly what God needed to propel the Jews out into every town and village and empire on earth. Like blowing on the head of a dandelion, the exile kicked the Jews out of the house, and put them unknowingly on a mission trip!
How did that mission go? Â Well – with no Temple to worship at, Jews began meeting in their homes for prayer and began studying the Torah as households. Â Soon, they began setting aside parts of their house and then whole houses for prayer – they called these synagogues (Hebrew for “gathering together”). Â They were public discussion forums on fearing God, and living a holy life.
A few hundred years later, their Messiah came – but he came to the local region of Judea, and not all the exiled Jews had a chance to learn about the new age of grace – so more Jews, now committed to Jesus the Messiah, hit the Roman roads and traveled across the globe to tell Jews…and the rest of us… about this new Messiah King. Â We are still on that project today!
In the middle of what seemed like defeat, the writer of Isaiah 61 understood that there was a needed reorientation of his faith to understand God’s next chapter.
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Could you do the same? Is your faith strong enough in God’s promises that even a disaster would not shake them? Â Would you fight to get things back to the way they were, or would you reinterpret what God’s promises really meant in light of the latest circumstance?
If this prophet had demanded a hard line drawn between the remnant who returned home and those who remained abroad, we may not have had the infrastructure of prayer homes and synagogues ready for a the Gospel message to be shared across the Roman Empire.
Keep your thoughts on the promises of God, not on “the glory days” which are always slipping away. Â You’ll find his promises stick.
