Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” He said, “Go, and tell this people:
Legacy Standard Bible
‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand;
Keep on seeing, but do not know.’
Render the hearts of this people insensitive,
Their ears dull,
And their eyes dim,
Lest they see with their eyes,
And hear with their ears,
And understand with their hearts,
And return and be healed.”
Then I said, “Lord, how long?” And He said,
“Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant,
Houses are without people,
And the land is devastated to desolation,
And Yahweh has removed men far away,
And the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
— Isaiah 6:8-12
God seems to be giving Isaiah, which means “Yahweh Saves,” a harsh responsibility. He is issuing the command to preach and even to “render the hearts of this people insensitive.” He is commanding Isaiah to tell the people to go on hearing, but do not understand. This is a very harsh reality. It is a very heavy message to preach.
I think it resonates with this current generation in our own time. People take in misinformation, and they balk at the preacher from local pulpits unless they advertise themselves as the type of positive influencer that they want. Someone like Isaiah who stands up and preaches judgmentally to “go on hearing, but do not understand. Keep on seeing, but do not know,” is unheard of today. The insinuation at the time was that their spiritual ears and eyes are dim. They are dense in spite of their opposite self-assessment that they are open-minded. Our generation would hate such a preacher, and I can say that the faithful preachers of our day are hated.
Even king Ahaz Himself is about to receive the offer of a sign from God in the following chapter that affirms God’s divine presence with Judah and its people in spite of the coming Assyrian offensive, but Ahaz simply turns a cold shoulder to the prophet saying that “he will not put the Lord to the test.” That is the kind of false piety that eviscerates sincere change. Dr. Gary Smith writes about God’s commissioning of Isaiah:
God warns Isaiah that there will be no positive results in the hearts of many who will listen to what Isaiah says. Instead of bringing conviction, humility, and confession of sins, Isaiah’s divine messages will have the primary effect of hardening people or confirming their hardened unwillingness to respond positively to God. Hearing God’s word from Isaiah will make their hearts calloused (lit. “fat” hašmēn, 6:10), their ears dull (lit. “heavy” hakbēd), and their eyes closed to the truth. Why will this happen? It seems that these people have repeatedly chosen to refuse to follow God; therefore, God has decided that this is the appropriate time to punish these hardened people. For most of them it is past the time of repentance; the time of judgment is at hand. Now is not the time for them to see, understand, and be healed—that opportunity was offered but is now passed. Now judgment will happen.1
Related to this, Dr. Thomas identifies the Hebrew word for idol, used three times in the chapters of Isaiah leading up to this one, as אֱלִיל elil (47b), which means “insufficiency” or “worthlessness,” as in futility, idols, images, or worthless.2 Actually, this word is used 25 times in Isaiah as a whole.
The consistency of the scriptures show that one of the key effects of idolatry is that you become like that which you worship. The frightening fact is that we see this tangibly in pornography where consumers’ brain chemistry is demonstrably altered by their addiction. We see it in the mass effects of misinformation in our culture. People aren’t aware of much outside of pop culture or the specific propaganda of their chosen news outlets that feed them what they already agree with and more of it per social media’s algorithms. Children in public schools are taught to be obedient and passive rather than to question and challenge politically correct facts that are said to be based on science. Social Media facilitates the stigma against free thought.
Children, for that matter, become like their parents in many ways. We otherwise become like what we reverence in principle. Likewise, when you think of Marvel and DC comics and the studios that bring us our steady diet of entertainment with its many sensual, or suggestive, and morbid, or dark themes, then you should relate that to the mythologies of the Ancient Near East which entertained its adherents in similar types of morbid and sensual, “super-human” stories.
Ancient idolatry wasn’t so simple as to just “bow down to this idol because the image itself is an actual god.” It was a practical belief, similar to our modern day religious beliefs in transubstantiation within the Catholic Church, that the bread and the wine literally become the body and the blood of Christ in a mystical not a physical sense. In like manner, the ancients saw their idols as mystically containing the essence of their worshiped deity. Similarly, there are tales today of images that shed tears in Catholic shrines as well as similar visions and stories related to images in other religions.
God is addressing this when He says that such images have ears that cannot hear or hands that cannot touch which is to say that the spirits of these people who reverence these idols have become as dense and as dumb as the images they are in fact reverencing. These people are no longer capable of hearing and seeing as they should. Their ability to believe God has passed to the point of no recovery, and where that point was, God alone knows. Isaiah indicates their time has long passed it. They are now being warned of impending judgement. Psalm 115 is actually very clear:
4But their idols are silver and gold,
Psalm 115:4-8 New International Version
made by human hands.
5 They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
6 They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
7 They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
8 Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
In observing the fact that Isaiah 6 and Psalm 115 are directly related, Dr. G.K. Beale observes the following:
The principle is this: if we worship idols, we will become like the idols, and that likeness will ruin us. Let us return to Isaiah 6 to reexamine the imagery there in the light of Psalm 115.14 We will see that the contextual function of the language describing sensory-organ malfunction in the psalm texts and Isaiah 6 are the same, which increases the possibility of a literary relationship and even points to the probability of it.
What have been some of the major concerns in the chapters of Isaiah leading up to chapter 6? Chapters 1-5 reveal that one of Israel’s major sins, not coincidentally, was idol worship. Isaiah 2:8, for example, says, “Their land is filled with idols, they worship the work of their hands, that which their fingers made.” And then Isaiah 2:18-19 says, “But the idols will vanish, the Israelites will go into the caves of the rocks and into the holes of the ground before the terror of the LORD”; verse 20: “In that day they will cast away to the moles and the bats their idols of silver and idols of gold, which they made for themselves to worship.” (Isaiah 1:29-31 also speaks to the same problem…) Earlier, we saw that Israel’s problem with idol worship also appears in the later chapters of Isaiah. Israel’s problem was idol worship, and the idea in Isaiah 6:9-10 is this: Isaiah is to tell these idolaters that they have been so unrepentant about their idol worship that God is going to make them as spiritually insensitive, as spiritually inanimate and lifeless, as the idols. God is saying through Isaiah, his prophet, “You like idols, Israel? Alright, you are going to become like an idol, and that is the judgment.” So in verse 9, through Isaiah, God commands the idolatrous people to become like the idols they have refused to stop loving…This is a paramount example of the lex talionis notion of the Old Testament—an eye for an eye. People are punished by means of their own sin.
Likewise, today, postmodern people in cultures around the globe are turning to the tenants of escapism, drugs, personal identity, sex, statism, and a conviction that God doesn’t judge them. Misinformation is so prevalent that you can find any variety of opinions or teachings online, and people just believe anything they think sounds right with less and less discriminating thought. I know people are still being saved in the minority, but the spirit of the times indicates that pride and self-absorption are upheld as virtues. They hang it all on the fact that life is meaningless, as if this is a hardened virtue due to real experience. “All I have is myself.” But they have lost their ability to believe the truth about God and replaced it with self and personal identity. What is “good for me” is the end and the means.
1 – Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39, ed. E. Ray Clendenen, The New American Commentary (Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2007), 194.
2 – Robert L. Thomas, New American Standard Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries : Updated Edition (Anaheim: Foundation Publications, Inc., 1998).
3 – G.K. Beale. We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry. (IVP Academic: Downer’s Grove, IL. 2008) p. 36
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