Seeing With New Eyes

Seeing With New Eyes

Isaiah 2:1-5[1]

Instead of my usual sermon, I’m going to tell you a story today. It’s the story of my relationship with the Scripture lesson from Isaiah 2:1-5. I want to tell you this story because I hope that it will help you make sense of one of the themes of my preaching: the hope of God’s new creation that includes everyone and everything. I’m going to let you “look up my sleeve” to get a glimpse of how I work with the Bible to understand not only what it was saying in its original setting, but also what I believe to be the enduring truth of its message for today.

The story goes back about 40 years. One of the first times I encountered this Scripture lesson was in the early 1980’s, when I took a class in college on the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. I don’t really remember it making that much of an impression on me at that time, because I was reading Isaiah from the perspective of the call to repentance in the first chapter. I do remember distinctly preaching a sermon on repentance from Isaiah chapter one in those days.

The first time I truly remember Isaiah 2:1-5 making an impression on me was around 1990. It was the year that I spent studying at the University of Tübingen in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. One of the goals I had set was to start reading through the Bible in English once more. I started with Genesis, Isaiah, and Matthew and read simultaneously from each section daily.

I remember encountering this passage at that time because it was the first time that I really heard the Bible speak about “all the nations” streaming to the “house of God” “that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Isa 2:2-3). You see, I had been raised in the traditional faith most of us grew up with: that each of us is responsible for our salvation. Whether or not we choose to place our faith in Jesus in this life determines our final destiny.

What struck me about this passage was that there don’t seem to be any limits on who can come to “the mountain of the Lord’s house” in the end to be instructed in “the word of the Lord.” In fact, the prophet Isaiah speaks of an ultimate future in which “all the nations” come “streaming” to know God and to learn his ways. It sounded to me like the prophet believed that there would come a day when all people would turn to God! It was hard for me to understand how that could be true if only those who trusted in Jesus could be “saved.” I don’t know exactly how long I wrestled with this problem, but I can tell you, it was years!

In the meantime, I kept reading my Bible. In fact, over the course of that decade I read through the Bible about 5 or 6 times. And I discovered something in the process Isaiah 2:1-5 isn’t the only Scripture that talks about “all people” coming to worship God. In fact, there are many. Take, for example, Psalm 22:27-28: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.”[2]

That took me to another Bible passage that I knew: Philippians 2:10-11: St. Paul says that God exalted Jesus at the resurrection “that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”! The cross references in my Bible showed me that St Paul was quoting Isaiah 45:22-23. There, the prophet says, “Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other. By myself I have sworn; from my mouth has gone forth in righteousness a word that shall not return: ‘To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.’”

From my original perspective that only those who trust in Jesus in this life will be saved, I believed that St. Paul was saying that everyone would acknowledge God through Jesus whether they wanted to or not. But that’s not what Isaiah says. According to the prophet Isaiah, God invites “all the ends of the earth” to “turn to me and be saved,” and goes on to take an oath that in fact that is what would happen![3]

This was like an earthquake for me, like scales falling from my eyes. Once I was able to see—to really see—this amazing hope in Scripture I was shocked that I hadn’t seen before.[4] I hadn’t seen it because I was looking through eyes that couldn’t see it. I had been so schooled in the traditional view of salvation that when I read passages like these they just didn’t make an impression on me. Until they did!

By reading through the Bible over and over I began to see with new eyes the promise of God’s salvation, not only for everyone, but also for all creation. At that point I went back to the very beginning of God’s saving work: back to Abraham.[5] You remember how God called Abraham to leave the land of his ancestors and go to a place that God would show him. And God promised that he would bless Abraham, and that, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). I finally realized that it had been God’s plan all along to “bless” all the families of the earth, not just a select group. After that, I really couldn’t look at Scripture—any passage of Scripture—without this in mind.

What’s the “moral” of this story? Well, there are several. First, the assumptions we bring to the Bible make a big difference in our ability to hear its message. That’s especially true with this “big vision” of God’s salvation. Another moral of the story has to do with the “good news.” I could never get past the notion in the traditional version that God was ultimately going to reject the vast majority of people. By the way, if you’re wondering why so many young people have left the church, that’s one of the main reasons they cite when they’re asked.

I guess for me the real “moral of the story” is that our salvation depends on God. In this life we all wrestle with the question of whether we really “matter.” For me, when I look back at the choices I regret, and those I celebrate, this hope helps me believe that what I do matters. Because it’s not just about me, but it’s about God’s “big vision” of salvation. I believe the one who had the power to create all the heavens and the earth, and the one who had the power to raise Jesus from the dead, has the power to make good on that promise. As we begin the Advent journey toward the birth of the one who personally embodies the fulfillment of all God’s promises, I believe this hope is one that’s worth celebrating.

---

[1] ©2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 11/27/2022 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. For a video recording of this sermon, check out my Pastor Alan YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/_raNLlgK5ho .

[2] Similar affirmations in the Psalms include Ps 36:7-9; 67; 86:9; 145:10-13, 21.

[3] Cf. Similarly, Isaiah 55:10-11: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”

[4] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.3.1:478, where he says regarding the notion of universal salvation, “If we are certainly forbidden to count on this as though we had a claim to it, as though it were not supremely the work of God to which man can have no possible claim, we are surely commanded the more definitely to hope and pray for it as we may do already on this side of this final possibility, i.e., to hope and pray cautiously and yet distinctly that, in spite of everything which may seem quite conclusively to proclaim the opposite, His compassion should not fail, and that in accordance with His mercy which is ‘new every morning’ He ‘will not cast off for ever’ (La. 3:22f., 31).”

[5] Cf. Galatians 3:8: “the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.’ ”