Isaiah 53:1 - Faith and Election

Who has believed our message?

With these words we enter the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, which really should have begun at verse 13 of the 52nd chapter, as Calvin wryly notes:

"This division, or rather dismemberment, of the chapter, ought to be disregarded; for it ought to have begun with the thirteenth verse of the former chapter, and these words ought to be connected with what goes before." (from Calvin's Commentary)

And we will treat it thus.

Here our thoughts are directed to the pertinent question: who has faith? Who has believed the Word of God through His prophets? Who trusts in Him? Who takes His words to heart?

The stunning revelation of Christ's Person and work was, to human thinking, unbelievable. Apart from divine help, man cannot believe the truth of the Gospel. He cannot because he will not. And this stubborn unwillingness is incurable apart from the intervention of God.

Background Study

The 17th Century English theologian, Matthew Poole, rightly describes the meaning of this phrase:

"Who, not only of the Gentiles, but even of the Jews, will believe the truth of what I have said and must say? Few or none. The generality of them will never receive nor believe in such a Messias as this. Thus this place is expounded by Christ himself, John 12:38, and by Paul, Romans 10:16. And this premonition was highly necessary, both to caution the Jews that they should not stumble at this stone, and to instruct the Gentiles that they should not be surprised, nor scandalized, nor seduced with their example." (from Matthew Poole's Commentary)

NOTE: Although Poole's sentiments are correct, he misses the fact that it is John who is speaking in 12:38, not Christ (the verse is quoted below). But ALL the Word of God is Christ's teaching. And from Whom did John learn these things in the first place?

John applies this verse in a remarkable way, not simply as asking who will believe, but as predicting the unbelief of Israel . . .

John 12:36b-40 These things Jesus spoke, and He went away and hid Himself from them. But though He had performed so many signs before them, yet they were not believing in Him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet which he spoke: “LORD, WHO HAS BELIEVED OUR REPORT? AND TO WHOM HAS THE ARM OF THE LORD BEEN REVEALED?” For this reason they could not believe, for Isaiah said again, “HE HAS BLINDED THEIR EYES AND HE HARDENED THEIR HEART, SO THAT THEY WOULD NOT SEE WITH THEIR EYES AND PERCEIVE WITH THEIR HEART, AND BE CONVERTED AND I HEAL THEM.” These things Isaiah said because he saw His glory, and he spoke of Him.

John is reminding us that the tragic unbelief of the Jewish nation was not a surprise to God. In this he agrees perfectly with Paul's description of Jewish unbelief as the very means by which God opened the door to the Gentiles (more on this below). But first . . .

The BIG QUESTION

What is meant by all of this blinding and hardening? (You may want to refer to my series called "Hardened Hearts and Human Choices" for a discussion of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart). On the surface, I see two major (and inter-related) theological problems in this text. On an initial reading, this passage appears to contain an affirmation of a certain type of imbalanced Calvinism, but also a defeater for all Calvinsim. The seeming contradiction is enough to leave one entirely baffled. But we are going to look at this in light of the whole Biblical balance and a study of the related texts, and thereby discover the TRUTH of the matter, which is hidden just under the surface.

The thrust of the passage is that God was sovereignly at work in the hardening of the reprobate within Israel. This shows the sovereignty of God in man's salvation, and that's the essence of Calvinism, plain and simple. No problems with this generality, but what about the particulars?

The Theological Trouble Begins Here

What indeed shall we do with this: God is said to harden and blind people who, according to the doctrines of grace, are already hardened and already blind! If everyone is totally depraved, there is no need for God to actively harden the reprobate. All He has to do is leave sinners in their natural condition, for their eyes are indeed blind and their hearts are already hardened. So, all at once we have an apparent and implied denial of total depravity (a sure defeater to all Calvinism) and an apparent affirmation of active reprobation (a necessary tenet in the more hyper brands of Calvinism). Worst of all, God appears malevolent, as though people are trying to believe, ready to have their eyes opened, but He isn't letting them simply because He wants to bring them to destruction. It seems we may have to completely re-work our understanding of soteriology (the Biblical doctrine of how God saves people) to make sense out of this passage. Perhaps we will be forced into some sort of hybrid that includes elements of both Pelagianism and Hyper-Calvinism! But at the same time we would find ourselves fighting other Scriptural truths - such as total depravity (which is clearly taught), and the ultra-foundational issue of the sheer goodness/kindness/benevolence of God. What to do? What to do!?

Before we abandon reason and Biblical faith to go off on a wild theological goose chase that might lead us to a "newer" and "better" theology, let's spend a little more time (and effort) examining the Scriptures. Too many have used just such cases as this to justify their departure from orthodoxy. Sadly, this only reveals the very type of unbelief John is warning us against.

NOTE: Arminianism offers us no help here. Total depravity is the ONE tenet of Calvinism that is affirmed in classical Arminianism. And if one seeks refuge in "open theism," that is also defeated by God's blinding and hardening of the reprobate. All man-centered theology falls flat if God has ANY REAL sovereignty at all in the matter of salvation. The question here is, how can we maintain the Biblical doctrine of divine sovereignty without painting God as unloving, unkind, capricious or unjust? I will argue that a Biblically balanced Calvinism best explains all of the Biblical data.

Who Hardened Whose Heart?

After quoting Isaiah 53:1, John mentions the following passage from Isaiah 6 . . .

Isaiah 6:8-13 Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘keep on listening, but do not perceive; keep on looking, but do not understand.’ Render the hearts of this people insensitive, their ears dull, and their eyes dim, otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and return and be healed.” Then I said, “Lord, how long?” And He answered, “Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant, houses are without people and the land is utterly desolate, the LORD has removed men far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. Yet there will be a tenth portion in it, and it will again be subject to burning, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.”

Read this through a couple of times, and let the meaning sink in. This is God's response to "seeker sensitive ministry." God notes that people aren't looking for Him, rather they are rejecting Him. Unrepentant sinners can pretend to be looking and listening, and "searching," but apart from real repentance, real spiritual sight, a real hearing and taking to heart of the Word of God, all of the preaching and teaching is only making them more resistant to divine overtures.

Notice that the passage is not phrased the way John puts it. John says God hardened the hearts of the people, but in the original passage God told Isaiah to harden their hearts. Rather than seeing this as a contradiction, we should recognize John's intent: to magnify the sovereignty of God. Though people chose freely and voluntarily to harden their hearts, God's sovereignty was nonetheless entirely in control of the situation. What He did through Isaiah, HE did. The prophet was His instrument, but the ends achieved were God's Own ends.

How did God achieve these ends? Here we come to the heart of the matter. The means by which Isaiah was to harden the hearts of Israel was the preaching of God's Word. The same message that effectually draws out the elect for salvation also hardens the reprobate into a more settled state of unbelief. Like Pharaoh, the people of Israel had already hardened their hearts and closed their eyes. Because they lacked faith, God's commands to them through the prophet only served to deepen the conditions that already existed in them. So Isaiah is making hard hearts even more stubborn simply by proclaiming the truth. Here we see the terrible reality of total depravity: apart from electing grace, sinful man can get worse, but not better. Apart from faith, the Word is always unprofitable to us. This is not due to a lack of grace in God, but man's ongoing choice to reject the grace that is offered. It is not that man is seeking God and sincerely looking for Him, but is being prevented by a hateful Deity. No, no, no! Man has utterly rebelled against the Sovereign One, though God has given him - and continues to give him - every reason to repent. The passage is not presenting a defeater to total depravity, but instead is radically affirming it! Thus we conclude that sinful man is all at once totally depraved and fully responsible and choosing freely and unable to do otherwise without help from God. These are sensible paradoxes, but to the fallen mind they are loathesome.

NOTE: here's some gasoline to throw on the fire: II Corinthians 4:4 says the "god of this world" (i.e., satan) has "blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God." The paradoxes only deepen when we realize satan has his own evil role in the process of reprobation, yet God is still fully sovereign and man is still responsibly choosing.

Looking Through the Eyes of our Hearts

On to the NEXT BIG QUESTION: why would God NOT elect many of the individuals within His chosen nation? Why would some in Israel be left hardened and blinded? For the answer, we must turn to Paul's lengthy discussion in Romans 9 through 11. We must be careful not to approach this question with our native human logic at the forefront. We can only understand these matters by grace, through faith, and without our humanistic, limited, earth-bound "reasoning" fogging up the glass. Our false, natural ideas are constantly breathing over the surface of our hearts, which function as a spiritual lens, as it were. Because of this fog, we're not going to see eternal things as clearly as God does. But we can see them to some extent, and in fact we must grasp the basics if we are to get any rest for our troubled minds when it comes to this matter of divine election and the fate of the non-elect.

Extending the heart-lens analogy a little further, we might say that Arminians and Hyper-Calvinists tend to demand hard human logic, which is the equivalent of purposely breathing all over the glass and then using one's fingers to draw out 2-dimensional mathematical equations. Voila, they say, it's sooooo simple! Sure, it's simple if you refuse to examine the balance of Scripture, and if you never gaze into the dimensions of eternity where human reasoning starts to disintegrate and God's transcendent TRUTH comes into focus - knowable, but beyond the grasp of human minds. Yes, TRUTH is bigger than the mind of man. Let's clear off the glass and look beyond the human logic (and above it) to discover the thoughts of God. Our approach is to STOP BREATHING, hold our breath for a moment, and gaze through with eyes of faith, folding our hands together, calming our hearts before God, and keeping our grubby fingers out of the way. Anyhow, this is the aim. And in this posture, what do we see?

Paul's Answer: God is Sovereign Over All

Paul says: "So then, it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy (Romans 9:16) . . . So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires (Romans 9:18) . . . Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles (Romans 9:21-24) . . . Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, 'though the number of the sons of Israel be like the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved.' (Romans 9:27) . . . However, they did not all heed the good news; for Isaiah says, 'Lord, who has believed our report?' So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:16-17) . . . But as for Israel He says, 'All the day long I have stretched out My hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.' (Romans 10:21) . . . I say then, God has not rejected His people, has he? May it never be! (Romans 11:1) . . . God has not rejected His people, whom He foreknew (Romans 11:2) . . . there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God's gracious choice (Romans 11:5) . . . What then? What Israel was seeking it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened; just as it is written, 'God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes to see not and ears to hear not, down to this very day.' And David says, 'Let their table become a snare and a trap, and a stumbling block and a retribution to them. Let their eyes be darkened to see not, and bend their backs forever.' I say then, they did not stumble so as to fall, did they? May it never be! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles . . . (Romans 11:7-13)

Notice that God's intention in hardening and blinding the reprobate is not so much to destroy the reprobate as it is to "make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy." Notice that this hardening is actually an expression of His patience, not a manifestation of His wrath!

In the Biblical picture we see GOD, saving, BY GRACE, a people of HIS OWN CHOOSING, for HIS OWN GLORY, and bringing about a beautiful work by redeeming believing sinners. We see the fruit of Christ's work on the cross! We see God's infinite goodness in action! We catch sight of His eternal glory! And this glory is magnified by two things:

1. God's JUSTICE in bringing wrath on the unbelieving.
2. God's MERCY in saving His elect.

He is stretching out his hands toward the elect and the non-elect ALL THE DAY LONG, drawing all men to Himself - even though most continue steadfastly in their refusal of His mercy.

It's Just Plain Bible-ism

This isn't just Calvinism, it's Paul-ism, and it's John-ism, and it's Isaiah-ism, and it's Jesus-Christ-ism, and it's Bible-ism. Who has believed their message? Do you believe it?

I do not ask if you can explain it (I am fairly sure you can't), but only if you believe . . .