I can’t remember where or when I first heard this story. A man and a boy were leading a donkey down the road. A passer-by said it was silly for the dad and the boy to walk and that one should ride the donkey. So the father put the son on the donkey, but when they were further down the road another passer-by said it was disrespectful for the boy to ride, thus making his poor old dad walk. So they changed positions but sometime later someone else criticized the father for riding, thus making the boy to walk. So they both got on the donkey but another observer criticized them for overloading the donkey! A man went home to his wife that night and remarked how he had seen a strange sight on the road that day – a man and a boy carrying a donkey!
This fable is usually meant to teach the lesson you can’t please everybody, but it does conjure a picture that is very akin to a picture found in Isa. 46:1,2: Bel bows down, Nebo stoops, their idols were upon the beasts, and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy laden, they are a burden to the weary beast. They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the burden, but themselves are gone into captivity.
Who is Bel and who is Nebo? Idols. Why are they important? They were the chief gods of Babylon: Bel= Lord or chief god. Nebo=god of learning and truth. You see the names of these gods in the names of people like Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar. Here they are being carried out of town on creaking carts and labouring donkeys and oxen – obviously they failed to protect Babylon and can’t even help themselves! We need to back up a little: the children of Israel are going into captivity in Babylon. Isaiah prophesied so around 750-700B.C. He wrote about the Babylonian captivity long before it ever happened and ironically this would have been one of the books they took into captivity with them. How they would have read and lamented “If only we had taken notice?” That will be a refrain for a lot of people in eternity. The ‘servant passages’ in Isaiah run from 41:8 through to the end of Ch.53. It’s not always easy to know who the servant is: sometimes it’s Israel as a whole, other times its a faithful group within Israel and sometimes it’s the epitome of servanthood, Jesus Christ. Perhaps this is why the eunuch asked “Of whom speaks the prophet – himself or some other man?” (Acts 8).
Also in this list of servants is a Gentile named Cyrus (44:28-45:1-3). What the Jews thought about this I do not know, but incredulous is a word that comes to mind. But God can use any person as a servant (cf. Isa. 10:5ff; 1 Cor. 7:14), because he is God. History is not happenstance. The evolutionary view of history is pure happenstance – we got here by accident and there is no mind behind the unfolding of history. Some still talk about the development of a superman and a utopia, but what would give us such optimism if all is blind chance? And it’s too bad for those who have lived and died before the utopia arrives and medical science can give ongoing life. God is in control of the whole shebang and Eph. 1:11 says He works all things after the counsel of his own will.
Isaiah (amongst others) had warned them of the coming captivity and of the deliverance by Cyrus, but there would have been many questions in their minds. In 49:24 we have a doubt expressed in these words; shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? After all Babylon was a superpower! God assures them they will be delivered (v.25) but if God is strong enough to do that then surely He is strong enough to not let them be delivered to Babylon in the first place! The answer lies in the terms of the divorce. God had not forsaken Judah (49:14-16). Under the Mosaic code when a man divorced his wife by giving her a writing of divorcement, he was not able to take her back (Deut. 24:4). The other occasion for divorce, per see, was for adultery. No writing of divorce was necessary. Remember Joseph thought about putting Mary away “privily”? God challenges them to produce the writing of divorcement to prove He had divorced them. And neither had God chosen to sell His children to a creditor (cf. Ex.21:7 forbade the selling of the daughters of Israel to foreigners). He had taken no money for them and, besides, does God really have any creditors? Would God get any richer (Ps.44:12)? No one could have wrestled Israel from God, and the Babylonians do not own God’s children. God is trying to encourage them with words of comfort, but many would have had a question for God – okay, but why the separation? Their sin had caused the separation (59:1,2). They found fault with God and they forgot they served a holy God who cannot deny His holiness. Man has always put his selective interpretation on facts.
In 1976 T.B.Warren debated an atheist Anthony Flew. Flew was famous for his parable of the “invisible Gardner”, which went like this: Two explorers come to a clearing in the middle of the jungle. One believes the garden is evidence of a Gardener, but his skeptical partner disagrees. They wait for some time but no one turns up. They use bloodhounds and electric fences but no response. The Gardener, says the believer, is invisible, intangible and insensitive to electrical currents. His friend asks; “Just how does your elusive Gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” Flew then makes his application. “God has a plan” runs contrary to our observation of world events: “God loves like a father” runs contrary to the suffering of those who serve Him and of those He created, and so on…. So, he reasons, a God who has a plan but permits incredible chaos is really no different from an imaginary God or no God at all.
His illustration falls down in a number of ways. Gardens don’t make themselves and neither do they keep themselves: even the garden of Eden needed Adam to tend it (Gen. 2:15), and that was before the fall which brought on the proliferation of weeds, thistles and thorns. But besides that, in his parable the gardener never arrives, but in reality, the Gardner of this world came in the person of Jesus Christ and gave positive proof that He came in a life lived, deeds done, words spoken, a death died and a life taken again. Life can be perplexing; life can take some amazing twists and turns, but whatever happens we have something to measure things by so that in dire need we can be assured of the love of God.
So after God challenges them to produce the bill of divorcement He goes on to say why the temporary separation occurred. In 49:1-3 He explains that when He came (through the prophets) no one answered (cf. 2 Chron. 36:16,17). Last of all He sent His Son. God can deliver – remember Egypt (Ps. 105:28,29)? Remember the dead fish and the thick darkness? They said of Jesus this man cannot save us for he cannot save himself! That was the wrong interpretation to put on it – rather, He spared not Himself, but offered Himself as a ransom for all!
We are heartened when a celebrity puts in a good word for God. It might be Senator Haradine opposing abortion or President Bush lamenting the Mass. Court for legalising same-sex marriages. So good people should. But we can over-estimate these things. It’s as if we think that God gets to live another day. We get dismayed when we hear of the triumph of evil (Prov. 28:28), such as John Howard legalising the use of embryos for stem-cell research etc. Now we ought to speak for God, and be jealous for God in such matters, and it’s even appropriate to be saddened by such things, but we don’t have to worry about God! We don’t have to carry God. He can take care of Himself (Ps. 92:7,8). The flourishing of the wicked will not overpower God (Ps. 2). We don’t have to carry God. It is He who promises to carry us! (Isa. 46:3ff Matt.16:18: 28:20)
We will end up carrying false gods though. Take us back to Isa. 46:1,2. I have seen men carrying gods through the streets of India. Usually someone playing an instrument goes in front to herald the god and then they pay a visit to roadside stalls and the stall-operators are expected to make a contribution. They usually don’t look too enthusiastic about it – culture or no culture there’s something incongruous about a god having to be carried by men because it cannot carry itself. We would not tolerate that in our streets in Australia because we are not idolaters! Really?!
The vanities that promise so much shall betray us. Men seek to bless themselves with idols, expect to be carried by them, and end up staggering under their weight, blinded and misled by them, betrayed and ruined by them. When do things fail? When you have most need of them! Got a fault in your motor? It may be something as simple as a faulty plug lead but it will start missing as soon as you start to climb a hill and you want that extra power. It’s the same with idols. And the glory of them makes them all the heavier to carry (eg. Bel and Nebo were made of gold). Hideyoshi, a Japanese warlord who ruled over Japan in the late 1500’s commissioned a colossal statue of Buddha for a shrine in Kyoto. It took 50,000 men 5 years to build, but the works had scarcely been completed when the earthquake of 1596 brought the roof of the shrine crashing down, wrecking the statue. In a rage Hideyoshi shot an arrow at the fallen colossus, I put you here at great expense, he shouted, and you can’t even look after your own temple! Shades of 1 Sam. 5 and Dagon, the Philistine idol.
Isa 44:9ff is to my mind the best piece of writing on the foolishness of idolatry – a man fells a tree, burns part of it to warm himself, burns part of it to cook with and with the residue he carves a god! We say how stupid! Yet, covetousness is idolatry (Col.3:5). Money will fail us! You and I have read stories of people diving out of windows of high buildings on Wall St. when the stock market crashed in the great Depression. Men who were rich one moment were paupers the next – it was wealth only on paper. And when it was worth no more than paper they had no god but paper – and it couldn’t carry them or give them the security they wanted and so suicide was the answer. Money is no good on the day of Judgment – it cannot buy favour – it can’t even be brought to the courtroom. We brought nothing into this world and we shall carry nothing out. The atheist Voltaire was right when he said the man who leaves to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him. Along the way it leaves a trail of destruction as recent newspaper articles testify about the covetousness which is gambling.
The god Bacchus is alive and well: have you seen the finished product of the one who is a zealous adherent to this god? A scene that will remain in my memory till I die is of a naked alcoholic, soiled in his own waste, crawling after me as I took the last flagon of wine from his bedside (there were six empty flagons there). I was taking his god away. The gods of Adonis and Narcissus are also alive and well: the book, Looking Good But Feeling Bad, begins with this. There is a new god in town; the god of physical perfection. Being beautiful and thin or handsome and muscular promotes love, happiness, and acceptance. This new god offers a myriad of self-help paths: diets, cosmetic surgery, magical creams, exercise…the god of physical perfection also promotes greater self-worth…But we worship an illusive ideal, one which we can never seem to attain. Beauty is just always out of reach. The new god is a liar….Why does all this frenetic effort and determination so frequently fail to produce the promised contentment? Our problem is an internal one, while this new god offers an external cure. The god of physical perfection promises that the achievement of outer goals will fix what ails inside. Some years ago I talked to a young man whose life was his fit body. I asked him what would happen if he got sick or injured and he said, I don’t want to think about that. I suggested he might need to. The girls stricken with anorexia nervosa and Bulimia are testimony to the impotence of this god. There’s nothing more tragic than mutton dressed up as lamb. In the end, old age, corruption and gravity win. Only the God who conquered the grave can handle that!
Who’s carrying who? Remember it is God who said in Isa. 46:4 And even to your old age I am He, and even to hoary hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear, even I will carry, and I will deliver you.