In the previous chapter, we read about true and false fasting, where God’s people were called to task for their surface level worship - we continue on here in Chapter 59 looking at the problem of sin, as God’s people express their grief and suffering. Read 59:1-13.
This study will focus on sin. It is a heavy but important topic for all to understand, even Christians. A lot of things hinge on our understanding of sin. If we come to understand sin as the Bible speaks about it, we will see how glorious it is then, that Christ has come to save us!
(A) Sin Described: Peaceless lives overrun with evil that lead to separation from God (Isa 59:1-8)
The chapter opens with Isaiah shedding light on what the problem is and is not. Isaiah 59:1-2 is in response to Isaiah 58:3 — “Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?”. We hear a continued cry out from God’s people in exile but there doesn’t seem to be any deliverance.
Isaiah quickly addresses this in Isaiah 59:1-2. Isaiah says that the reason for their pain and suffering is not that God is weak, or somehow dulled or incapable of saving. God is not the problem.
What then, is the problem? Their iniquities have made a separation between them and their God. Their sins have hidden His face from them. The problem here is their (your) sin, and the result of that problem is that God’s people are separated from God.
These verses contrast Exodus 2:24–25 — “Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.”
God is a God who sees and knows His people’s suffering. Rather, God’s people had forgotten their history, and they had forgotten their God and who He is. God is not too weak that He is unable to save them from their pain and suffering. Their sin has separated them from God.
The immediate effect of sin is that we are driven away from God — much like we saw in the garden of Eden. Where God designed for us to dwell with Him in the garden, the sin came into the world and caused everything to fall apart. On a cosmic level, this is the problem and consequence of sin - that sin drives us away from God, and that a holy God cannot dwell with a sinful people.
This is a simple but important answer to a fundamental question of theology. We see variations of this same claim against God in our world today — if God is so mighty and good and perfect, why is there suffering in this world? The implication here being that the presence of suffering points to a God who is not there, or a God who does not care, or a God who is incapable of caring. Is God deficient?
While we perhaps fumble with that answer, Isaiah gives us a short and clear truth to hold out and abide by — the problem with the world is not God, but our sin.
Do these first two verses challenge some of us - all too often we encounter thoughts and questions like these in our own lives don’t we? “Why me, God?”, or a personal young adult favourite - “Is God really good?” It is easy for us to have such thoughts when we look around and there’s pain and suffering and conflict everywhere we look, both on a global and a personal scale. Perhaps what we need to hear most though, is Isaiah’s resounding call here — God’s hand is not shortened, and the problem with the world is our sin.
Isaiah lays out a detailed description of their sin in the next few verses. First, Isaiah speaks to God’s people (“your”) about blood in Isaiah 59:3. The blood here — perhaps of violence and murder, perhaps a reference also to blood of futile offerings and prayers (Isa 1:15), blood that was supposed to cleanse now defiles. Their fingers are defiled with iniquity — every corner and crevice. Isaiah 59:3b continues this picture of brokenness and sin — lies and wickedness fill our mouths, nothing good comes from our hands and lips. No list of sins I have not done — what else is there to do or say?
Isaiah goes on to talk about justice (Isa 59:4). This verse uses legal language. No one is just, no one is honest. Their defence before the judge is based on lies and empty please, there is no substance or inkling of truth or justification for us to stand on in the courtroom. There is no hope of getting justice and it provides a skeptical and cynical view of society. There is no truth or justice and everyone is just seeking to benefit from the system. How scary is that? We may have no experience of a courtroom, but do we have experiences of standing on a lie? Building an argument on falsehood, and having to lie on top of the previous lie to keep the lies from spilling over? Their entire beings are unjust and sinful, to the point that everything they produce is sin — they conceive mischief and give birth to iniquity. V5-6 gives us a bit more colour there.
Isaiah also speaks about their iniquities (Isa 59:5-6). This picture of snakes (adders) and spiders are meant to point us to evil abounding. They conceive evil and bring forth iniquity, as if they were snakes giving birth to more evil snakes, bringing nothing but evil and death (he who eats of their eggs dies) and more evil (from one that is crushed a viper is hatched).
The picture of spiders in particular — one commentator made a point about the weaving of webs, plotting, scheming, laying traps for others as a spider weaves a web to trap and devour its prey. Yet that’s all this web is good for — it will not cover them or their sins. This is similar to Adam and Eve in Eden trying to cover themselves with flimsy leaves.
Finally, Isaiah addresses evil in Isaiah 59:7-8. This is a culmination of the previous verses. Again, sin is not an accident. It is considered, thoughtful, what we prefer, all we know. It comes from within us. Sin is not just a little mistake. Neither is it what someone told us to do. We like it and we chose it, for it comes naturally to us.
Do we treat sin way too lightly? These verses call us to see sin as it really is! These verses are also quoted in Rom 3:15-17 when describing the sin of all mankind. Evil comes naturally to them, they are eager to sin, they are only capable of sin, they can only think of sin, and as a result destruction follows fast. This is quite the opposite of similar pictures used before in Isaiah 40:3–4. “A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.””
Sin is evil, and its effects are felt not just on a cosmic level but on a personal level -- listen to Isaiah. They do not know peace, they do not know justice. The roads are crooked, there is no justice, and they know no peace. Those who live in sin live peaceless lives, forever and ever.
What are we to do with this picture? Perhaps we can make some observations here. It is easy to hold this ugly and frightening picture of sin at arms length. It is even easier to put that aside now that we have described it. This is easily a description of ourselves too. What would it look like if we went through our lives with a fine-toothed comb, going frame by frame and compared that to this picture? Just today - what if we went frame by frame, thought by thought, deed by deed and analysed everything? What would we see? Our tendency is to compare down — “we’re not that bad” — friends, yes we are. How easily do we come before God with defiled hands? How often do we pray with lies on our lips? How flippantly do we lie for our benefit? How easily do we think selfishly, sacrifice others, put ourselves first, protect our interests? This picture is meant to be a mirror for us — do we see the sin in our own lives, and how quickly do we blame God and everyone but ourselves?
We see how sin is described primarily as evil, and look at its self-centred nature here — the violence and shedding of innocent blood, the lies against others, the dishonesty against and about one another, the plotting for self-preservation. Sin turns us in on ourselves, away from God and away from others. Sin breaks the vertical relationship with God, and breaks our horizontal relationships with each other. That’s telling for us isn’t it? What relational breakdowns have we run into, and where is our sin there?
These verses also describe a people who do not know the way of peace. Whether a relational peace, a peace with your conscience, a peace in knowing and trusting who God is. Do we know such peace? If not, what does that say of us? What does that say of our sin, and how we stand before God?
(B) Sin Identified: Darkened hearts that lead away from justice, righteousness and salvation (Isa 59:9-11)
There is a shift in tone and position here in Isaiah 59:9 compared to Isaiah 59:1. Having presented the case, Isaiah brings the charge home. Isaiah shifts from them to us, from their to we. “Therefore" is perhaps the most important word in this passage. On it hinges recognition and personal ownership of the sin described so far. It is because of our actions and our iniquities and our sin and our evil that justice and righteousness are far from us. This is a distinct difference from the blame shifting alluded to in Isaiah 59:1, where it was everyone else’s fault and even God’s fault, not theirs. We see personal ownership - Isaiah is connecting the dots for us.
It is not enough for us to simply describe sin - we need to identify the sin in our own lives. No more protesting, no more self-righteousness, but looking in to see how we too have sinned. That’s what we did while looking at the earlier verses. It is important for us to do this everyday, and move beyond the mental exercise of just describing sin. Christians have a term for this process - confession.
Isaiah 59:10-11 helps us understand the effects of sin. The image and picture here also draws from other parts of the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 28:29 speaks also about grouping at noonday and in darkness, such that they do not prosper. Similarly, in Job 5:14, they meet with darkness in the daytime and grope at noonday as in the night.
Later, Paul also speaks about sin in Romans 1:28 — “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.”
Two observations about sin from these verses. Firstly, sin darkens our hearts and minds. We are a groping blind mess, growling and moaning like animals, stumbling around as good as dead men. We do not know how to save ourselves, for we cannot. Romans shows us the full effects of that — cycles of sin and suffering and pain and tears. What a terrifying warning — to have the light removed from us.
Secondly, We live in tension. We hope for light but have none, we have eyes but cannot see, we are alive but may as well be dead men, we hope for justice but there is none, we long for salvation but it is far from us.
Sin is suffering. That’s the title and focus of our study, but it is also the reality that we live in — we know what we feel, and everything points us to the problem of sin. It is one thing to live blind — but friends, to have eyes but not see? To live in the tension of hoping but never having? Sin is such suffering — there is a reason we all feel like this. Open the papers, look around you and live knowing that things are not what they are supposed to be. Sin darkens our hearts and leads us away from justice, righteousness and salvation. Yet there is still hope — Isaiah is not done.
(C) Sin Confessed: Accepting and turning back to God, ready for judgement and redemption (Isa 59:12-13)
Isaiah helps us see that sin is denying the LORD — forgetting or not caring about His promises made and kept, it is the turning away from Him, not following Him, revolting against Him (Isa 59:13). It is a rebellion against our creator, a rejection of who He is. As Don Carson said, the heart of sin is the very de-godding of God.
This is what we’ve been talking about all along — the external behaviours, the struggles and suffering - all of that is a result of our fundamental denial of who God is. That’s the reason for the tension we live in, that’s the reason for the blindness and the stumbling. Instead of confessing that God is God and we are not, we desire to be our own gods, calling the shots in our own lives.
This survey of sin and suffering is meant to point us not to ourselves, but to God. Seeing sin for what it is and seeing its effects brings us to the end of ourselves — it is not good for us to be our own gods, we cannot save ourselves, and left to ourselves we are a mess and will continue making a mess. Nothing we do and nothing we bring can save us. It is not good for us to be our own gods. What then, does confession begin with?
Isaiah 59:12 might sound like a factual statement, but Isaiah is laying sin out before God. Confession of our sins begins with admission of guilt, accepting who God is and who we are as sinners, and putting down any sense of self-righteousness we might think we have. Confession looks like laying down everything — our good and bad deeds, and standing before our righteous and holy judge who brings judgement. It involves laying down any good that we think we have and also our sins.
Here we stand, with all our sin, rightfully accused and judged, without any lies or empty pleas of innocence like we saw earlier. Here we stand, ready for judgement and redemption.
This study will end with a sort of cliffhanger, and as we conclude, we are at the cliff. Before a holy judge, our sins on their own stay unpunished and unresolved. Before a holy God, we are rightly deserving of death and judgement. Because of this, we are still separated from our Holy God.
Do not skip over this too quickly!
We will finish here with a glimpse of salvation, which we will talk about more in the next set of verses. But if we read Romans 3:21-26, we will learn of how the tension of unpunished sin and a holy God is resolved at the cross where Jesus died — where once God’s face was hidden from us, Jesus cried out my God, my God, why have you forsaken me — on the cross our sin was paid for, by Christ’s death we were redeemed, and God’s wrath was fully propitiated. Praise God He has not left us to ourselves.