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by GLENN PEASE
02/07/18
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Based on Isa. 1:1-17

      Abraham Lincoln told of how he and his brother were plowing the corn one day. He was driving the horse, and his brother was holding the plow. The horse was lazy, but suddenly it took off so fast that even with his long legs Lincoln could hardly keep up. On reaching the end of the furrow he checked the horse, and he found what they called a chin fly fastened on him. Lincoln knocked it off, but his brother scolded him for doing so. He said, "That's all that made him go."

     The prophet Isaiah was like a chin fly on Israel. The prophets were not popular. They were despised because they were always biting and stinging, and aggravating the people by their constant denunciation of their sin. However, without this negative aggravation the people would have been like a lazy horse, and they would have done little or nothing for God. The prophet kept them going, or at least kept the remnant going by reminding them constantly of their folly and their duty.

     The prophets were great examples of the power of negative thinking. It is superficial to be always encouraging people. When they are missing God's best, they need to be discouraged, and then condemned in order to motivate them to stop going down the wrong road. It does not harm your child to be scolded and disciplined for their foolish acts, and when they rebel and begin to go the way of the fool, they need to be punished. The negative approach, when they are going astray, is just as important as the positive approach when they are walking in obedience to God's light. Isaiah is an excellent example of how the negative and the positive can both be used effectively. In Isaiah we see the ideal balance of God's justice and God's mercy.

     One of the reasons modern Christians do not care much for the prophets is because we live in an era of positive thinking, and the prophets are too negative. They go on for chapters at a time denouncing sin and evil. It gets to be quite a bore when you are conditioned to hearing the positive. If we are to gain the value from Isaiah that God intended His people to gain, we must be convinced of the value of the negative. In other words, we must see how the negative can lead to positive values. This alone will motivate us to pay attention to the negative thinking of Isaiah.

     First, let me share with you what Dr. Dunlap, a psychologist learned. He made a simple but irritating error as he typed. Instead of THE, he typed the H first and had HTE. The harder he tried, the more he goofed. He decided to try something. He began to deliberately type HTE over and over hundreds of times. After this deliberate negative practice, he discovered he could then type it right with no difficulty. He found this negative practice worked in many areas of life, such as swimming, golf, sending Morris code, etc. When you bring the subconscious mistake to the surface, and gain conscious control over it, you gain freedom from it. He wrote, "By practicing the mistake you learn to break the power of the mistake over you."

      How does this apply to the prophet Isaiah and his condemnation of sin? In this way. We know that the more unconscious sin is the greater power it has over our life. The man who does not even know he uses a curse word in every breath he takes cannot break the habit because he is blind to his folly. However, if a man can be made conscious of his bad habit, so he is shocked by it, and aware of what an offense and embarrassment it is, he will have a choice at least to stop or alter his habit. Awareness of the negative is a key to reaching the positive. Being tied up makes you long for freedom; being hungry makes you long for food; war makes you long for peace; loneliness makes you long for fellowship. The negative experiences of life drive us to seek the opposite and positive experiences. It is only those who fully feel their lossness who respond to the Gospel, and rejoice in being found by the Good Shepherd- the Lord Jesus.

     Find a man who is perfectly content with himself, and no matter how wicked and lost he is, he will have no interest in salvation. It is only the man who thinks negative about himself, and who feels worthless and lost who can benefit from the positive Gospel of salvation. It is the same story with those who are saved. If they backslide and are content in their fallen state, they will not be interested in repenting and returning to God. It is only when they become conscious of their folly, and begin to think negative about their rebellion against God, that they will respond to the mercy of God, and like the prodigal return home.

     The positive thinker fanatics which can never tolerate the value of negative thinking would have the prodigal son saying something like this to his father: "It was a tough experience dad, but I learned a lot about life, and now I'll be a better man for it all." But what the prodigal really felt and said was, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants." It was the power of this negative thinking that changed this rebel into a son who could humble himself before his father, and return determined to follow the path of wisdom.

     Don't knock all negative thinking. It is God-ordained method of reaching men, and one of the primary methods of the prophets. Let's examine some of Isaiah's negative thinking as he begins his own lament over Jerusalem and Judah.

     In verse 4 we see the first word is oh, or alas. It is used by Isaiah 21
times, and all the other prophets together use it only 28 times. It is one of his favorite words, and it expresses his emotion of mystified wonder that people can be so utterly foolish in their relationship to God. He pictures them as laden with iniquity. The Living Bible says, "They walk bent-backed beneath their load of guilt." But instead of turning to God, who alone can remove that heavy load, they do just the opposite. They turn from Him and forsake Him. Their folly is to be compared to men in a sinking ship who throw their life preserver overboard. Or to men in a falling plane who throw out their parachutes. Isaiah has already said it, they are more stupid than the dumbest beasts known to man.

     God is saying to His people through Isaiah just the opposite of what Jesus cried on the cross. God is saying, "My people, my people, why hast thou forsaken me." God's people had abandon Him. They were like an entire army who had gone AWOL. God refers in verse 9 to the remnant. There were a few fine guards who stayed at their posts of duty, but the vast majority had fled the camp of God.

     The fact that God even bothered to send His prophet Isaiah to these deserters has a powerful lesson to teach. God does not forsake those who forsake Him. Most pastors and church members do not have much hope for those former members of the church who have become inactive dead wood. We get more excited about new bodies than about trying to revive the life of the dead bones of, used to be members. This is natural and normal, and also realistic. But one of the facts we must also face is this: That God never gives up on His apostate people. His wrath falls, and He punishes them severely, but He always has a profit in the field crying out for them to repent and return, and I will forgive. God never forsakes even the hopeless case, and so we must never stop trying to win those out of fellowship.

     Man use to throw away the wood chips from the mill. Now they use them for useful wood products. The so-called dead wood of the church can also be reprocessed and made into useful servants for the kingdom of God. It is no easy task, and like the work of the prophets, it is mainly failure, but God cared enough to send the prophets anyway, and we should care enough for any rebel to never give up. Dr. Walter Woodbury, secretary of evangelism for the American Baptist Home Mission Society, delivered a stirring message on this theme to the delegates of the American Baptist Convention. He got the deacons of a large church to join him in calling on the good-for-nothing indifferent members. It was very disappointing and frustrating. He felt the deacons were right, and it was useless and hopeless.

     He had a burden, however, and asked people in every group of the church to pray for those non-attending members. Deacons were asked to pray even in the morning service for them. The atmosphere began to change, and people no longer looked on them as good-for-nothing, but as people with a deep need that only Christ could meet. After a month the deacons went out again, and they found a radical change in the attitudes of people who were AWOL. Over a hundred on a list of four hundred were brought back into the fellowship, and Dr. Woodbury said some of them became the finest Sunday School teachers he ever worked with. There was not total success, but they won back a noble remnant. That is God like work, for that is what God is ever seeking to do among His people.

     We need to learn not to let that three fourths of failure rob us of that one fourth of success that makes it all worth while. Let us also keep in mind that the backsliding people may be from your own family. All through history the people who fall away from God often have a great heritage. They are the sons and daughters of the leaders of God's people. Great and righteous kings had rebellious and wicked sons who led the people astray. This was the case with the great priest Eli whose sons were totally corrupt.

     The Waldenses were a noble people of God in the Piedmont Valley of Northern Italy. They refused to conform to the corrupt ways of the Catholic church, and they went off to worship God according to Scripture. They sent out many missionaries, and copied the Bible by hand. They spread the truth of the Gospel everywhere. Many died for their faith, as they were captured and burned at the stake. Recently, a church group of youth camped in that valley. They sang Christian songs around the campfire, and some of the Waldensian people came by to listen.

       After the songs and testimonies were over, one of their elders stepped into the light of the campfire and said, "We are proud of the history of our people, but during the last years in these valleys so filled with sacred history, we have no longer the vision we once had. We have tried vainly to hold our young people in the church. Their interest is now down in the bright lights of the big city. No longer do they want to remain here. What a miracle it is that your church still has young people who are interested in coming up here to our valley to study the history we have so much loved. But that is all in the past now. The sad thing is that we are not moving forward with courage for the future. You must carry on!"

     The Apostasy of Israel is symbolic of the process that goes on all through history. Converts are full of zeal, and they follow Christ with full devotion, but their children are less devoted, and their grandchildren may end up back in the world completely. Some great theologian said, "The church is always just one generation away from extinction." This is a great negative reality of life and history, but knowing it, and being conscious of it, can be a positive force in keeping us from falling away. It can convince us of never taking anything for granted, but to assume that all of our youth are consistently battling the temptation to forsake God and be conformed to the world. If we would listen and take seriously the negative message of the prophets, we would be a much more powerful and positive force in achieving the goal of keeping God's people faithful to Him and His Word.

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