Each week as we gather, it is my job to help us understand God’s Word, and relate it to our current lives. What I don’t do that a lot of pastors do do, is to provide an application of God’s Word. I try to show how it relates to our current situation, but I can only apply it to my own life, as you must apply God’s Word to your life. I can’t apply it to your individual lives appropriately because I don’t know the intimate details of your lives. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit. And when people try to apply God’s Word to the lives of other people, they overstep their authority, responsibility, and ability.
Christianity cannot be imposed on others, which means that I cannot impose my understanding of the Bible on you. All I can do is to share my understanding with others and engage them in conversation about God’s Word trusting that God’s Holy Spirit will lead us all to a better, richer, fuller understanding that will help us to apply His Word more faithfully to our own lives. I can’t do it for you. You can’t do it for your children. We all have different callings, different skills, different situations that require unique applications.
How you live your faith is between you and God. I hope I can help, and my job as pastor is to help. But there is a difference between help and imposition. We are in this thing called God’s church together, but none of us can impose our understanding on anyone else. Yet how we respond to God does affect other people. …
The most amazing thing about this is that Israel put this scathing self-condemnation in their history. From a marketing or public relations perspective this was a dumb thing to do because it doesn’t portray Israel in a very good light. It is a harsh criticism against themselves, yet they preserved it because at some level they believed that it was true. They believed that it accurately applied to them. So God preserved it in His Word because it provides an important model for all of God’s people. God’s people must be willing to hear and accept honest criticism.
For us Christians, it means that we must be willing to admit our own sinfulness, our failures to be what God has called us to be. God told Isaiah what He wanted. God didn’t want empty liturgy, where liturgy was what the people of Israel had been doing in the Temple—sacrificing animals and giving burnt offerings. Temple liturgy served as an analogy of what God’s people should do. It was a graphic picture of what God wanted, but a picture is not the reality it depicts. A picture is a model, a representation. Isaiah’s people, the Temple establishment, mistook the picture to be the real thing. They mistook the letter of the law for the spirit of the law.
And initially Israel needed that kind of instruction. God’s demand for sacrifices and offerings helped Israel to understand the seriousness of God’s Word. They were just beginning to learn how to read. They were in the infancy of written human language, so they took God’s Word literally, as all beginning readers do. And that was not wrong at the time. It was a necessary part of learning to read, learning to understand the seriousness of God’s Word. First we read a story to learn the moral of a story. Then we apply the moral. However, the reading of the story is not the application of the moral. Isaiah’s criticism, then, provided a message that there is more to God’s Word than the literal understanding.
They thought that engaging the liturgical activities of Temple worship satisfied God’s demand of faithfulness. So they went through the motions by doing the liturgy, making the animal sacrifices and bringing the offerings. Does any of this have application to us today? …
