Isaiah 4 begins with glory. But this future day of glory will be preceded by a time of judgment: "Whoever is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy, everyone who has been recorded for life in Jerusalem, once the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from its midst by a spirit of judgment and by a spirit of burning." (v. 3-4)
Commentator George Adam Smith thinks that Isaiah has realized the truth that all reformers must come to: that justice needs a judgment. We all start out as idealists who can picture a world of peace but are naïve about how hard that will be: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." (Isaiah 2:4) For a people yearning for peace, you could hardly pick a better slogan from somewhere in the Bible.
But our idealistic pictures of a peaceful society do not in themselves regenerate society. They only reveal the work we have to do. "It will only reveal social corruption, and sicken the heart of the reformer himself. For the possession of a great ideal does not mean, as so many fondly imagine, work accomplished; it means work revealed - work revealed so vast, often so impossible, that faith and hope die down, and the enthusiast of yesterday becomes the cynic of tomorrow." (Smith, The Book of Isaiah, 31).
We can't be healed until we are properly diagnosed. As Father Brown said, "No man's really good till he knows how bad he is, or might be". We can only reach the glorious future God has for us through judgment.
We think a loving God wouldn't judge. When we think of his judgment, we must keep it wed to his love. God's judgment comes from a merciful desire to restore, rather than a vengeful anger to destroy. George MacDonald wrote: "Nothing can satisfy the justice of God but justice in his creature. The justice of God is the love of what is right, and the doing of what is right. Eternal misery in the name of justice could satisfy none but a demon whose bad laws had been broken." (Unspoken Sermons, quoted from Baptized Imagination, 106)
God isn't a bad sport, pouting up in the attic of the universe, refusing to play. His judgment is a manifestation of his love. And because God is our loving judge, we enter into work of faith, labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thess. 1:3). Jerry Sittser writes about how the early church's expectation of God's day of judgment helped them to live simple, hard-working lives of love: "(Athenagoras) also believed that Christian moral excellence was directly attributable to the Christian belief in the last judgment. "If we did not think that a God ruled over the human race, would we live in such purity? The idea is impossible. But since we are persuaded that we must give an account of all our life here to God who made us and the world, we adopt a temperate, generous, and despised way of life." (Water from a Deep Well, 59)
What we find is that judgment wed to love does not drive us away from God; it focuses us. "There is but one way of escape, and that is Isaiah's. It is to believe in God Himself; it is to believe that He is at work, that His purposes for man are saving purposes, and that with Him there is an inexhaustible source of mercy and virtue. So from the blackest pessimism shall arise new hope and faith." (Smith, 31-32)
Our hope is not that salvation will be easy. Our hope is that no matter how hard it gets, we can still hope in God.
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