A Few Survivors

Being spared was never a compliment...

Today, the Tuesday class at Cornerstone begins again. Over the fall, winter, and spring we’re taking an indepth look at the book of Isaiah. The class meets each week at 10 AM in the office conference room. Here are some of my reflections on Isaiah 1 — as we look to Christ.

Ask someone who has survived a disaster why they made it. Sooner or later, the answer turns inward. There must have been a reason. Something about the timing, or the choices, or the kind of person they are. Most of us read our survival as a verdict on our worth.

Isaiah, some twenty-seven centuries ago, saw it differently. The first chapter of his book opens with God taking His own people to court, and the land outside the courtroom is already stripped. Cities had been burned. Foreigners ate the fields while the owners stood and watched. Only one city was left, and Isaiah says it looked like a shelter in a vineyard, like a shack in a cucumber field, Isaiah 1:8. A lean-to of branches in a picked field. That was Jerusalem.

Then Isaiah explains why anything was left standing at all.

If the LORD of Armies had not left us a few survivors, we would be like Sodom, we would resemble Gomorrah, Isaiah 1:9.

Notice the pronoun

Us. Isaiah is the prophet, and he does not step outside the guilty nation to deliver the charge against it. He is one of the survivors, and he says so in the same breath in which he says the nation deserved the same ending Sodom received.

So, what was the difference between Jerusalem and Sodom? God left survivors in one city and none in the other. That is the whole of it. Isaiah does not say Judah behaved better, and what we read in chapter 1 makes that impossible to argue. Her worship was busy, and her hands were bloody. Her rulers loved graft and would not hear a widow’s case. The comparison to Sodom is not softened anywhere in the paragraph.

The Sodom picture carries its own weight. Abraham had bargained God down to ten righteous men, and God agreed to spare the city for ten, Genesis 18:32. There were not ten. When the angels came for the one family that got out, Lot dragged his feet, and Moses records what happened next: because of the LORD’s compassion for him, the men grabbed his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters, and they brought him out, Genesis 19:16. He was carried out by the wrist. A few verses later, the reason is given in simple terms. God remembered Abraham, Genesis 19:29.

Even at Sodom, the survivor survived on mercy.

Spared, and still called Sodom

Read the next verse without a break, because Isaiah did not put one there.

Hear the word of the LORD, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the instruction of our God, you people of Gomorrah! Isaiah 1:10.

He has just told them they were not destroyed like Sodom. Now he addresses them by Sodom’s name. In the ruins the comparison was near; in the wickedness it is exact. The people God spared are called after the city God did not spare, and they are called that in the sentence right after they are told mercy is the only reason they are breathing.

Being spared was a door held open. Verse 10 is God’s voice through that door, telling them to listen while it is still open.

Paul builds on this verse

Centuries later, Paul faced a hard question. Most of Israel had not believed in Israel’s Messiah. Had God’s word failed? He answers in Romans 9.

It is not as though the word of God has failed, Romans 9:6. Then he goes to the prophets to prove it, and one of the two verses he uses is this one. And just as Isaiah predicted: If the Lord of Armies had not left us offspring, we would have become like Sodom, and we would have been made like Gomorrah, Romans 9:29. Two verses earlier, he had already quoted Isaiah on the same theme: only the remnant will be saved, Romans 9:27.

Paul did not invent this pattern. He found it in Isaiah. God has always dealt with Israel by preserving a remnant, and that remnant lives on mercy. That is exactly what Isaiah 1:9 says. It is also what Paul says in his own words two chapters later: there is also at the present time a remnant chosen by grace. Now if by grace, then it is not by works; otherwise grace ceases to be grace, Romans 11:5–6.

Notice what the remnant doctrine does to our pride. A remnant is small, and that stings. A remnant is also spared, and the sparing has nothing to do with being the best of a bad crop. God does not survey a collapsing nation and keep the top two percent. He leaves a seed because He is merciful.

Look to Jesus

What Paul quotes is worth a second look. Isaiah wrote survivors. The Greek translation Paul used reads offspring, a word that means seed. That seed language runs throughout Isaiah and culminates in one figure. Of the suffering Servant, it is promised that he will see his seed and prolong his days, Isaiah 53:10.

The remnant narrows across Isaiah’s book until it comes down to one man. And that man is the one God gives up.

Paul says it that way himself. He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, Romans 8:32. Follow the word spare through three scenes. Sodom was not spared and had no survivors. Jerusalem was spared and had a few. Calvary is where God declined to spare the only one who deserved to be, and that is the ground every survivor has stood on since.

What this asks of you

If you have come through something, resist the instinct to explain it by pointing at yourself. The house that did not burn. The test that came back clean. The marriage that held. None of it is a scorecard, and reading it as one will make you insufferable to the people whose story went the other way. Isaiah stood in a stripped country and gave credit in one direction.

And do not mistake being spared for being approved. That is what verse 10 is for. Judah was still keeping the calendar and still filling the temple courts, and God said He could not stand it. The same mercy that left them alive called them to wash, to stop, to learn, and to defend the widow (Isaiah 1:16–17).

So take the mercy without flinching, and let it do its work. God did not leave the survivors of Isaiah 1 alive to keep them as they were. Read twenty verses further, and you find what He had in mind for them: Afterward you will be called the Righteous City, a Faithful Town, Isaiah 1:26. The hand that spared the city is the hand that remakes it, and Isaiah puts both in the same chapter.

He still works that way. Everything good in your life came to you on the terms the survivors got, and those terms are a starting line.

I am sure of this, that he who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus, Philippians 1:6.

So live this week like someone who has been spared and knows it, and let that show in how you treat the people still standing beside you.