Pastor Ostella
8-30-98
Introduction
The Russian novelist, Dostoyevsky, wrote a story of a man who was falsely accused of murder. He was actually framed by a thief. This innocent person was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to prison for life. Many long, long years later, the thief and the innocent man crossed paths in prison and the true story was finally told. To me one of the most striking lines in the heart wrenching narrative is this statement: "God sees the truth but waits." He sees, He knows, He waits. We are dumbfounded and lose ourselves in the profound little word, "why?" Why me, why this, why him, why her, why now? So to keep from losing it altogether we need passages like Isaiah 55:8-9. We have to remind ourselves that God is at work. He knows what He is doing. He has a purpose that is for His glory and thus for our good if we love God and are called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). His purpose centers in Jesus Christ who came into the world to give spiritual food to starving sinners. By faith in Christ, we receive eternal life. Jesus said, "I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly" (Jn. 10:10) and "I am the resurrection and the life, He who believes in me….shall never die" (Jn. 11:25-26).
This Isaiah passage has some unusual language with a play on words. Look at 55:1, how do you buy something, pay for it, "without money and without cost"? On the cost side, we might say it means "without any cost to you." But how do you buy something with no money? This is not a contradiction but it looks like one on the surface. This is the language of paradox. So today I want tie together our hope, our answer giving and the rich, but sometimes difficult, notion of paradox.
1A. An explanation of paradox
As we enter the domain of paradoxical thinking, let me begin with a definition. A paradox is an apparent contradiction. It is built around the notion of a contradiction, which in the history of Western philosophy is almost universally acknowledged as wrong. Outside of the kind of thinking we have inherited in our culture, some people try to make sense of statements like "you are to meditate on one hand clapping." But this example shows that one of the reasons that contradiction is wrong is that it is meaningless and blocks communication. You cannot make sense of "one hand clapping." Try to clap with only one hand; it becomes "one hand waving." It is ambiguous (you can "clap" one hand against something) but what is meant is "clap your hands together but only use one hand" (trying it I cannot even keep my left hand still!). That is contradiction. It breaks down communication; very often it breaks down honest communication. However, no one is allowed contradiction. It is ethically wrong. Simply put: we are to be like God as His image and likeness in the wholeness of what makes us tick as human beings, created in His image, male and female. God is logical because He is truth. If there were contradictions in God's knowledge then some of His knowledge would be false, He would not be the truth, and He would not be God.
So, to fulfill our role on earth receiving God's communication to us in nature and in Christ, we ought to be logical, consistent, and non-contradictory in our thinking. It is an ought, an ethical ought. As I like to tell my students, being logical is being godly. It is God-like. It is good and proper. It is required of us not only academically or intellectually but also morally and spiritually. Granted, not everyone has the same mental taste buds for logic due to their inherited predisposition and to their training. But we all use it everyday. If we did not use it at all, then we would not make sense to ourselves or to others in anything we said or did (I'm going to the store = you take a nap). Here is an important rub: we can all improve our reasoning skills. And we ought to improve our reasoning skills where it is possible. It is one thing to have poor logic, it is another to have a poor interest in improvement (I have discouraged students from going into law as a career not simply because they showed poor skill in logic but because they showed poor interest in improving their logical skill).
To live by Scripture as God's image bearers, it is necessary that we improve our reasoning skills whatever way we can. How else are we going to obey the Lord when He says "come now let us reason together"? To place a healthy emphasis on logical and critical thinking is a hurdle all its own. But once we jump this obstacle, we face other ones. This is not an end; it is a beginning. This brings us back to apparent contradictions. Note the key word, apparent. We are not allowed contradictions but we are allowed, we must come to terms with, apparent contradictions. These are beliefs or claims that seem to be inconsistent with one another but we know that they are not because God has given them to us in the Bible. Because it is God's word, the Bible has no contradictions.
There are a number of ingredients in the paradox pie. How do we know something is a paradox? Here are some general ingredients (perhaps both ingredients and baking instructions). 1) There are two claims or beliefs. Let's call them threads. 2) Both are taught in Scripture; they are threads of biblical teaching, threads of truth. 3) They seem to contradict each other. This means we have difficulty seeing how these threads fit together in the whole fabric of Bible truth. It means that human reason has trouble accepting one of the teachings. 4) The imminent danger, in our analogy a baking danger, is that we will tend in various ways to do damage to one thread or the other by our reasoning. Our logic may inform us that A contradicts B so both cannot be true. Then we will try to eliminate one or the other. We may take a biblical truth and use it to deny another biblical truth! It is like saying bake at 350 and at 600 degrees. 5) Failure in the handling of paradoxes shows up in the twisting of words and the forcing of passages beyond clear contextual warrant.
Sometimes we will have to debate about what is clear. What may seem clear to me may not seem clear to you. But in a rough and ready way, we can say that one thing is critical to clarity in reading a passage. The flow of a given context is super-important. We must saturate ourselves with a passage by prayerful meditation and reflection in order to absorb the pattern of thought. We must work hard at the writer's purpose in a verse within a paragraph within a book within the NT, within the Bible, within the history of redemption, remembering the ultimate author is the Holy Spirit. This is saying that context is king, especially the immediate flow of thought. We might illustrate this by reference to the gears in a mechanical clock. Taking a word or phrase out of context is like removing a gear from a clock. When this happens, things will not mesh together properly and you will not be able to read the proper time. "Taking away" or "adding in" both mess up the mechanism.
2A. A paradox list
With each we tend to do injustice to one claim because of another. We have difficulty seeing how both are true. There is much we cannot resolve. Reason, reasoning man, must humbly bow to God speaking in Scripture.
1B. The Bible: God's Word and man's word
We want to say "if God's thoughts are not our thoughts, then if its His word it is not man's word." But He tells us that the Bible is His speech and He tells us that it is the word of Isaiah, Peter and Paul.
2B. Jesus: God and man
If He is God how can He be a man? If a man, how can He be God? Scripture teaches both; they do not contradict but they may appear to contradict.
3B. Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility
Sovereignty refers to kingship and rule of God over all that He created and made. He is in control of all things. Nothing is outside of His control. He has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass in time. Then we ask, if this is so how can man be responsible? Does this not make man a puppet on a string? No, it is true, He has planned and controls all things, and God tells us that man is responsible; he is not a puppet on a string. Both are true and we strain to grasp how it can be.
4B. God's Decree and God's Desire
God tells us of His decree or plan to save particular sinners out of the fallen human family. He elects some to be saved and passes over others. To raise a question of justice here is different from a paradox. God is not unjust for no one deserves to be saved. But paradox enters the picture here when we find that the Bible also tells us that God desires that all people come to repentance and be saved. So we tend to think, if there really is an unconditional election then this desire cannot be true or if this desire is true, then there can be no unconditional election. But, as we will see, both are true. They appear to be contradictory but we must accept both and live by both because both are taught in the word of God.
All the above paradoxes challenge us to a remarkable depth. They challenge the very place of reason in giving a reason. Our approach must be governed by at least three relevant biblical principles.
Note the two areas of difficulty (1, 3) with great promise sandwiched in between (2). So we need a balanced approach as put well by Calvin: "Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing is omitted that is both necessary and useful to know, so nothing is taught but what is expedient to know. Therefore we must guard against depriving believers of anything disclosed …. in Scripture, lest we seem either wickedly to defraud them of the blessing of their God or to accuse and scoff at the Holy Spirit for having published what it is in any way profitable to suppress."
Calvin then gives the following exhortation: "Let us, I say, permit the Christian man to open his mind and ears to every utterance of God directed to him, provided it be with such restraint that when the Lord closes his holy lips, he also shall at once close the way to inquiry." We are to "follow God's lead always" and "not investigate what the Lord has left hidden in secret, that we should not neglect what he has brought into the open, so that we may not be convicted of excessive curiosity on the one hand, or of excessive ingratitude on the other" (Institutes, III, xxi, 3-4).
4A. The paradox language in Isaiah 55. (cf. desire and decree interwoven).
There is a literary paradox. There is apparent contradiction between buying food with no money. It means that something is going to be obtained as your own in some unusual way. What is obtained? It is mercy and pardon (55:6-7). The way is by seeking, calling, forsaking, and turning. This is how you quench your thirst of soul. This is how you fill the emptiness. This is how spiritual famine is overcome with abundance. This is where true riches are found (v. 2). This is where your soul may live (v. 3). But we have no money and we are wicked and we are evil. He still says, "Come, turn to the Lord and to our God" (v. 1, 7b). This is how God works. In ways we cannot anticipate that express thoughts very different from what we might expect. God and us are on such different planes of thought and action as to be mutually exclusive in some fundamental sense. "You do not think my thoughts and I do not adopt your ways of doing things," the Lord says (55:8). God tells us that His ways and thoughts are not only different from ours, they are higher like the heavens are higher than the earth (55:9).
This is grace. It is astounding to think honestly of what sinners we are before a holy God and to still know and be assured that we are His children, that He is our father, that we belong to Him in life and death. This is well expressed in an old catechism from Germany called the Heidelberg Catechism that asks "what is your only comfort in life and death?" The answer goes like this: "That I belong-body and soul, in life and in death-not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of His own blood has fully paid for all my sins" (Q. 1).
Furthermore, this is powerful, effectual, saving grace. Picture in your minds what happens when the rain and snow come down from the heavens to the earth. The water does not immediately evaporate back to the clouds. No, it waters the ground for buds, seeds and food (55:10). God tells us that His word is like that natural cycle that He has created and that He sustains. He gives a spiritual watering to the dry and parched heart. He makes it bud and grow. He causes spiritual life to germinate and flourish.
This is an awesome thought. We would not expect grace in the first place when we consider our sins. And then given our our destitute condition with no money, no food, no life, no heart for the things of God, we would not expect Him to do it all and make His word bud and flourish in the hearts of sinners. But that he does. Look at 55:11. It is His delight to accomplish and achieve exactly what He purposes. The implication is solid: everyone He sets out to save will in fact be saved. He will not fail. Jesus never fails. The Heidelberg Catechism speaks powerfully to this point also on comfort in life and death: "indeed... everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him (Q. 1)."
This encourages us to come and buy and eat of the gospel feast knowing that the salvation offered here depends totally on God and not at all on us. If it depended on us in any way shape or form, it would be a tainted gospel and no longer good news. We know ourselves well enough to know that a salvation that depends on us is no real hope. It is all of God, so look away from yourself, turn from trusting in yourself. Come. Buy. Eat. In the face of the paradoxes of life, listen, give ear, seek the Lord, forsake the pathway you are now on, turn to the Lord and to our God for He will have mercy and freely pardon!