Can I Get a Witness (Part 4)?

Novotni and Petersen say it well.  “To cry out to God in the face of injustice and human misery is not a lack of faith.  It is the very essence of faith.  We cannot bury the hard questions under the topsoil of too-easy Bible texts.  We must take the hard questions to the only one who can possibly answer them” (Angry with God, page 42).

Perhaps this line of discussion gives us a clue about the original setting of the book of Job as we have it now.  Isaiah 64 opens with a powerful and terrifying image.

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

so that the mountains would quake at your presence—

as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—

to make your name known to your adversaries,

so that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

(Isaiah 64:1-2)

The Babylonian Exile is physically in the past.  The remnant has returned home to Zion.  Yet, the nations (the Gentiles) still control the Promised Land and the Temple precincts.  The real exile, as N. T. Wright points out, is not over—not by a long shot.  Here in what many scholars refer to as “Third” Isaiah, the prophet pleads with the Lord to intervene as in days of old.  The prophet remembers the days when the Lord made the mountains shake:

“When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect,

you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.”

(Isaiah 64:3)

Commentators suggest that the prophet is remembering, for example, the experience of God’s people in the wilderness of Sinai, at the foot of the mountain.  As Moses prepared to go up the mountain, it was wrapped in thunder and lightning, and veiled with clouds of smoke and ash.  The Exodus writer describes the eruption as “a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled” (Exodus 19:16).  News images of volcanic eruptions from Washington to Hawaii to Iceland can give us a small sense of this image.  

In the face of that earth-shaking display of power, “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God” (Exodus 19:17).  I suspect that this is the part of the story that attracts Third Isaiah the most.  O Lord, could we meet you face to face again in the shaking and quaking as did our ancestors in the wilderness?  In that moment, they received a new covenant from you.  Perhaps the prophet longs for an encounter and a gift like that in his time.

Followers of Jesus point to a time when such an event took place.  Mark’s Gospel describes it best.  At Jesus’ baptism, the heavens are “torn open” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus.  Mark uses the violent Greek verb, “schizo,” to describe what happens to the heavens at the moment Jesus enters the water (see Mark 1;11).  

O that you would tear open the heavens, Lord, and come down!  That is what the Lord does in beginning the New Covenant that produces the New Creation.  Come, Lord Jesus!  “What the Gospels offer,” notes N. T. Wright, “is not a philosophical explanation of evil, what it is or why it’s there, nor a set of suggestions for how we might adjust our lifestyles so that evil will mysteriously disappear from the world, but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it” (Evil and the Justice of God, page 93).