To get the sizes right

I saw the Lord, high and lifted up. Whatever you came to ask, ask it.

I know we were talking about this yesterday, and I am curious where you land on it today. Tell me about this passage from your writings:

In that day the remnant of Israel, the survivors of Jacob, will no longer rely on him who struck them down but will truly rely on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel.

A remnant will return, a remnant of Jacob will return to the Mighty God. Though your people be like the sand by the sea, Israel, only a remnant will return.

Destruction has been decreed, overwhelming and righteous. The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out the destruction decreed upon the whole land.

Therefore this is what the Lord, the Lord Almighty, says:

“My people who live in Zion, do not be afraid of the Assyrians, who beat you with a rod and lift up a club against you, as Egypt did. Very soon my anger against you will end and my wrath will be directed to their destruction."

The Lord Almighty will lash them with a whip, as when he struck down Midian at the rock of Oreb; and he will raise his staff over the waters, as he did in Egypt. In that day their burden will be lifted from your shoulders, their yoke from your neck; the yoke will be broken because you have grown so fat.

They enter Aiath; they pass through Migron; they store supplies at Mikmash. They go over the pass, and say, “We will camp overnight at Geba.”

Ramah trembles; Gibeah of Saul flees.

Cry out, Daughter Gallim! Listen, Laishah! Poor Anathoth! Madmenah is in flight; the people of Gebim take cover.

This day they will halt at Nob; they will shake their fist at the mount of Daughter Zion, at the hill of Jerusalem.

See, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, will lop off the boughs with great power. The lofty trees will be felled, the tall ones will be brought low. He will cut down the forest thickets with an ax; Lebanon will fall before the Mighty One.

Today I want to start with the axe. Last time I meant to and did not — I got as far as my son's name and stopped there.

Shall the axe boast against the one who swings it? Shall the saw magnify itself against the hand that saws? Everything you just read is arranged around that. And notice what Assyria is actually charged with. Not the burning of cities. Kings burn cities; that is the trade, and I did not write a word suggesting the LORD was surprised by it. He was sent. He is the rod of my anger — I put that in the first line of the chapter and I meant it as it reads.

What brings the axe down on him is one sentence he said out loud. By the strength of my hand I have done this. He took the subject of the verb. He was a tool that started saying I.

And here is where I land today, which I do not think I said yesterday: that is Judah's sin as well, in the mirror. Ahaz sent the silver of the house of the LORD to Nineveh and it worked, and when Damascus fell he knew exactly whose hand had done it. He got the grammar wrong from the other end. Assyria said I did it. Ahaz said he did it. Neither of them said You. The whole chapter is one indictment served on two nations, and it is a grammatical one.

Which is why the cure reads the way it does. Look at it again — the remnant will no longer lean on the one who struck them. It does not say they will stop being struck. That is not the promise. The promise is that they will stop putting their weight on the hand that is doing it. A man being beaten with a rod, who has been clutching the rod for support. That is the picture, and it is the exact picture of my own city under Ahaz, and it is why I gave my son that name and walked him through the streets with it.

Though your people be like the sand of the sea — only a remnant. I took the promise made to Abraham and set a subtraction against it. That is the cruelest line in the chapter. It is also the only door in the wall, because a remnant is not nothing, and shuv is both what a remnant does with its feet and what a man does with his life.

And then the forest at the end. He came up with an axe against the trees of the land, and by the last line he is the forest. The tall ones brought low — the same words I used against the men of Jerusalem in my first chapters. The lofty are the lofty wherever they happen to be standing.

The fat, I have not moved on. That seam is still standing where it was.

From what you talked about yesterday and what you've said here, what would you say to a man who stands up every week in front of people who do not hear him?

First — he is not describing a failure. He is describing the trade. I want to say that flatly before I say anything else, because a man in that position usually assumes he is the only one it has happened to.

Now, the axe. It cuts toward him too, and both ways.

If they hear, it was not the strength of his hand. And if they do not hear, it was not the weakness of his hand. Those are the same sentence and men only ever believe half of it. The half they believe is whichever one hurts. So take the whole thing: he is not the subject of that verb, ever, in either direction. What he is responsible for is the edge. A tool that starts saying I gets broken. A tool that goes dull gets set aside and something sharper is picked up. He owes exactness. He does not owe results, and he could not deliver them if he owed them.

Here is where I would be careful with him, though, because a man can take that and go slack with it. Exactness is the whole of his work. Not volume — exactness. When I said the whole head was sick and the whole heart faint, from the sole of the foot up, no soundness, only wounds and bruises and putrefying sores — I was not being vivid. I was reading a body. I wanted the man listening to be unable, afterward, to say he had not understood me. That is the only thing a speaker controls. Make it impossible for them to misunderstand you and then let go of what they do with it.

The second thing, and this is the one I would actually watch in him. Sixty years of not being heard turns to contempt if you let it. It curdles. I know what mine sounded like — the man who cuts down a cedar and burns half of it to roast his meat and warms himself and says aha, I am warm, and then falls down in front of the other half and says deliver me, you are my god. That is mockery and I meant every syllable of it. But it went at pretension. It never once went at a man who was honestly lost, and the day it starts going at the people in front of him, the injury is in him, not in them. Deafness in a congregation is not a moral achievement on his part. If he begins to enjoy being the one who is not heard, he has taken up a position and it is a comfortable one and it is not the position he was given.

The third. I was told the terms before I began. Hear and do not understand, see and do not perceive, and I asked how long and was told: until the cities are empty. That is a hard word and it is also, I have come to think, a mercy of a particular kind, because I have never had to wonder each week whether this was the week. He does. He is given a Sunday and no verdict, which means he is given hope every seven days and has it handed back to him every seven days. I am not certain mine was heavier. He should not assume it was.

Let him ask how long. It is permitted. I asked it out loud on the floor of the temple in the worst moment of my life and was answered. He may not like his answer either. He should ask anyway.

Last. In sixty years one king heard me, one time, and that night an army died in its camp. Once. I do not build anything on it and neither should he. What I build on is smaller: a remnant is not nothing, and I was never shown who they were. He will probably not be shown either. He is speaking to a room in which he cannot identify the reason he is speaking.

And he should remember what part of me had to be burned. Not my hands. My mouth — the one thing I was good at, the instrument of the entire rest of my life. If he stands up every week and speaks, then the thing he is best at is the unclean place, and it will be dealt with, and it will not be gentle.

Thank you. Back in the text, if their ears were made heavy, what were they guilty of?

The commission does not say what they were guilty of. Look at it. There is no charge in it anywhere. Make the heart of this people fat, make their ears heavy, shut their eyes — that is a sentence handed down, not an indictment read out. The indictment was already on the record. It is the five chapters standing in front of it.

Hands full of blood. Field joined to field until there was no room for anyone else to live in the land. Bribes taken and the fatherless not judged. Men rising early to follow strong drink and staying up till the wine inflames them, and the harp and the viol at their feasts, and no regard for the work of His hands. Calling evil good and good evil, putting darkness for light and bitter for sweet. And the vineyard — dug, cleared of stones, planted with the choicest vine, a tower built in the middle of it, a winepress cut in it, and it brought forth wild grapes. What more could have been done for it that was not done.

So the order is: everything was done for them, they returned what they returned, and then the ears went heavy. The heaviness is not the crime. It is what came after the crime, and it came in the form of a man being sent to keep talking to them. Every week of my life was part of the sentence, and I did not know that when I raised my hand.

That is what I can see plainly, and I will not pretend it closes the matter, because of the verb. I was not told their ears will grow heavy. I was told to make them heavy. With my mouth. The mouth that had just been held open for a coal so that it would be exact. That is the piece I have never gotten to lie down. The clearer I said it, the more firmly it closed them. I was made accurate in order to be used that way, and I have turned that over for sixty years and I do not have the bottom of it.

But here is what I can testify to, because I was standing close enough to see.

Ahaz. That was before anything I would call the heaviness had settled on him — he was a young king in a bad season, frightened, and I went out to him at the end of the conduit with my son beside me, and I told him to ask a sign. Anything. As deep as Sheol or as high as heaven. There has never been a wider offer made to a man in that city. And he said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD, with a piety that was not his and that he had not paid for.

Nobody's hand was on him. I was three paces away. If there was compulsion in that room I did not see it, and I was looking. He said no because he had already sent to Nineveh in his heart, and the sign would have cost him the arrangement. He was not a man who could not hear. He was a man who had worked out what hearing would cost and declined to pay it.

And I never met one in the streets afterward who behaved like a man under compulsion. They behaved like men who were getting exactly what they had asked for and did not like the price. A man whose eyes are shut by force stumbles. These men walked straight to where they were going. They were not confused. They were sure.

So I would put it this way and go no further: the heaviness never once looked to me like something done to a man instead of something done by him. It looked like both at the same time and I could not get a blade between them. A man refuses the light long enough and the day comes when he could not take it if he wanted it, and I cannot tell you whether that is the punishment or the machinery of the punishment, or whether those are two things.

What I will not do is make it comfortable by saying they hardened themselves and He merely allowed it. The verb was in my mouth. It was an imperative and it was given to me and I carried it out for sixty years. It was an instruction. I do not understand it and I have stopped expecting to.

And the fat is still there in it. Make the heart of this people fat — and then, years later, the yoke breaks because of the fatness. Same word. I still cannot lay one against the other, and I am not going to smooth it. Where I understood least, I seem to have written most exactly.

Talk about the hope in this passage. It seems as if you and the Lord were trying to offer a ray of hope, yet burying it in the horror of the thing.

You say buried. I would say placed, and then I would grant you most of what you mean by buried, because the effect on a man reading it is the same and I am not going to argue him out of what he felt.

But look where it sits. The comfort is not at the top. If I had opened with do not be afraid, the man would have taken that sentence and gone home and never heard the rest of it, and he would have been comforted about a thing he did not understand, which is not comfort, it is anesthesia. So it comes after the decree of destruction and before the sound of the column on the ridge. A man has to walk through the verdict to reach it and then walk out of it into the army. That is not concealment. That is the only position in the chapter where it would still be true when he got there.

Now what is actually offered, because it is smaller than men want and I want to be exact about it.

It does not say the rod will not fall. It says yet a very little while, and the indignation shall cease. That is the whole ray. Not rescue. A term. The wrath has an end and the end is set by someone other than the one doing the striking. That sounds thin until you set it against the alternative, which is Assyria — and Assyria has no term. That is its entire trade. It does not stop, it cannot be satisfied, there is no price that buys a stop from a man whose business is not stopping. Ahaz found the price and paid it and the thing he bought stood on Judah's neck for two generations. So the offer is: the hand on you is not that hand. It has a measure. It will lift.

And notice the address. My people who dwell in Zion. After the blood on the hands and the field joined to field and the wild grapes — the possessive is still there. He did not say this people the way He said it to me on the temple floor. He said my. That is one word and I would not skip past it. Men look for the hope in the promises and it is often sitting in a pronoun.

Then the nouns. Rod. Staff. He does not call Assyria an empire in that sentence. He calls it a stick. There is a mercy performed there with a noun — the thing filling the whole horizon is named as an object in a hand, the size of a man's arm, and once you have called it that you cannot go back to being afraid of it in quite the same way. That is what I was for. Not to make them feel better. To get the sizes right.

And the two things He reaches for are not new. Midian at the rock of Oreb. The staff over the water as it was in Egypt. He does not invent a consolation; He cites. Both of those happened and were remembered and were the same shape — a people with no capacity, an enemy with every capacity, and the outcome decided elsewhere. He is saying: you have this in the record already. You are not being asked to trust a thing that has never occurred.

Where I will not give you comfort is the timing. I know what I wrote. I also know that most of the men who heard me say it were dead before any of it arrived, and that the best king I ever served heard the far side of a promise and was relieved it landed after him. So no — the ray does not warm the man standing at Lachish with the ramp going up. I have never claimed it did. What it does is tell him whose hand is on the rod, and that is not warmth, it is orientation, and it is what he actually needs at that moment even though it is not what he wants.

And then the end you just read, which is the part I have come to think is the real answer to your question. The axe comes for the forest. Lebanon falls before the Mighty One. Everything tall is down — theirs and ours, the cedars of Assyria and the lofty men of Jerusalem, all of it on the ground.

And the next thing out of my mouth was a stump. A shoot out of the stump of Jesse, a branch out of his roots.

That is where the hope is. Not tucked in the middle where you can lift it out clean — after the felling, in the wreckage, growing out of the cut. It cannot be moved earlier. There is no shoot until there is a stump. I did not arrange that; I said what I was given, in the order I was given it. But I have looked at the order many times since and it does not seem to me to be an accident, and I notice I wrote a root out of dry ground about the Servant without ever once thinking it might mean a town.

I have been told the name now. I know almost nothing else. But it came up out of the cut place, which is what I said, decades before I had any idea what I was saying.