Isaiah 2

Sunday, March 17, 2013
Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Isaiah 2

I have often heard these two Bible verses - actually, taking a closer look, it's one verse split into two poetic lines - separated.  I never knew one followed the other directly.  That...changes everything.

"4 He shall judge between the nations, / and impose terms on many peoples. / They shall beat their swords into plowshares / and their spears into pruning hooks."

 I know elsewhere in the Bible they say that God will sit in judgment and they mean individual judgment of His people, and I know that elsewhere God punishes those who have strayed from Him, but this feels so amazingly different.

This is saying that what God will do when He comes down in judgment is...fix everything.  Have fairness and justice in the world - so that we no longer decide our conflicts by who has the nuclear missiles (the modern version of who carries the biggest stick).  We will grow things and create with what we now fight with.

And somehow, beating our swords into plowshares doesn't seem to have the right interpretation away from the first part of the verse either.  We think of it as a hippy compound (or I do, I suppose I shouldn't speak for everyone).  We think of it as an individual choice or something that will be nice once the swords are no longer necessary.

That's a decision we could make now, by the way, if we all set them down or beat them into plowshares at once, but I digress.

Because it's not an individual turning away from war.  It's nations on whom God will "impose terms" in order to stop the fighting.  It's God coming down and telling us to stop being homicidal jerks.  That's His judgment.  Not individual weighing of the scales, not tossing cities and nations whole hog into the fires like Sodom and Gommorah.

Indeed, not an individual thing or a punishment thing.  It is everyone suddenly being forced to, all at once, set the weapons aside forever.  A common call to the peace that we're all afraid to be the first to take step toward.  That's what we've been promised.

That is so much more powerful than how those two halves of the verse are commonly used.