In the Path of Your Judgments

Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a former co-worker about a friend who had just passed away. The Lord gave me the opportunity to share with her how he came to faith.

For years, his family prayed for his salvation, but he was a decent fellow with morals and principles and couldn’t see what all their concern for his soul was about. Looking at the way other people lived, he estimated that if God existed and he found himself standing before him one day, he would probably make out okay. Despite attending church regularly with his family and despite seeing the changes in their lives, he felt no particular personal need of Christ or his salvation.

Then one day on his way to work, he was involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Sometimes Things Just Happen

As his vehicle tumbled and bounced at 120 kph, he cried out to a God he wasn’t yet sure he believed in. Miraculously, despite the car being a total write-off, he not only survived but walked away basically uninjured. He also walked away believing that the God his family had prayed to for so many years on his behalf was responsible for answering his split-second prayer, and he reordered everything about the way he lived accordingly. He became a faithful servant of the Lord until the day he died.

My co-worker listened attentively as I told the story, then shook her head. “He was fooling himself,” she said firmly. “Sometimes things just happen.”

She was not entirely wrong. I believe that too. Sometimes things do just happen. If every moment of every life were immutable, divinely foreordained from the foundation of the world, we wouldn’t need to pray. There wouldn’t be any point. But she wasn’t right either. Not in my estimation. There are times something much bigger than fate, luck or randomness is going on. Prayer has genuine power. Perhaps her Roman Catholic god was uninterested in my friend’s emergency, but my God was very interested indeed.

Thankfully, my friend saw the hand of God in his circumstances. Sadly, my co-worker saw only a fortunate coincidence, an out-of-control vehicle making contact with earth at exactly the right angle and velocity, against all odds.

The Just and the Unjust

The Bible paints a picture for us of a God who sends rain on the just and the unjust, sometimes granting blessings to men and women who don’t deserve it. But he doesn’t do such things indiscriminately or automatically. He does them with great personal investment, consideration and ultimate purpose.

Isaiah contrasts how believers and unbelievers process the circumstances we encounter. In doing so, he reminds us that the daily mercies believers experience in walking with the Lord Jesus and relating to our heavenly Father are not ends in themselves. Their purpose is to encourage the believer to greater appreciation, growth and dependence.

In Isaiah 26, the prophet first speaks about the righteous, those who love and please God. He writes, “The path of the righteous is level; you make level the way of the righteous.” When things are going well for the believer, it is no accident. Our loving Father is behind it. The road is level because he smooths it for us. The response of the believer should be to acknowledge God’s hand in our circumstances and be grateful for it.

The Path of Your Judgments

Isaiah continues:

“In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.”

I don’t think he’s talking about tough times there. Not necessarily. These may certainly come, and the use of the word “judgments” in some of our English translations may lead the reader to think of God’s parental discipline or perhaps even his wrath. In fact, the Hebrew word Isaiah uses simply refers to decision-making generally. It’s the same word used of the Israelite high priest’s breastplate, which contained the Urim and Thummim. We don’t know exactly what these Hebrew words mean, but context shows us the leaders of Israel used Urim and Thummim to make big decisions whenever they came to a fork in the road and had to choose which way to go. They may have been precious stones that the priest would throw like dice. When Joshua needed direction for Israel, Moses instructed him to consult them. Saul tried to use them after the Lord rejected him as king, but got no answer.

Life is “the path of your judgments”, an elaborate succession of moments, some divinely contrived from the foundation of the world and some in which God graciously and unexpectedly steps into time to act on behalf of those servants who pray according to his will. Isaiah is not describing a distant, uninterested God, but one deeply connected to humanity, a God who wants men and women to seek his mind and desires, and provides ways for us to find them. Our path in life is “the path of your judgments, O Lord”. The way that we walk in this world is a series of events laid out for us by our heavenly Father, not a spate of random occurrences in which he has no personal investment.

Thrown a Curve

Naturally, that does not mean all the decisions the Lord makes about what you and I will encounter next in life are instantly pleasing to us. Abraham got up one morning to find the Lord had thrown him a curve. “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love,” said the Lord, and you can bet Abraham’s heart sank a bit. At first. We too may well turn a corner and run into something that comes as a rather undesirable surprise. I have certainly had those, and you will too, if you haven’t already. But we can be confident as we wait on the Lord that the events of our lives are not merely chips falling where they may. They come from a God of meaning and purpose. Abraham worked that out in short order, reasoning by faith that God could raise the dead if necessary.

I think what Isaiah is saying here is that the believer gets closer to God in the process of seeking his will. He waits for understanding from God rather than charging ahead and simply doing whatever pleases him. He earnestly seeks the mind of the Lord because his entire being is focused on understanding God better. “Your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul.”

The context in Isaiah is very much a Jewish one, but I’m sure you can relate. The Lord has always worked this way with those who loved him, whether the recipient of his guidance was Abraham or the apostle Paul. Those who seek his mind and will in all things know the pleasure and joy of watching him work in our lives to level the road ahead of us.

Favor to the Wicked

Not so the wicked, says Isaiah. “If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the Lord.” He goes on, “O Lord, your hand is lifted up, but they do not see it.”

It’s not just the overtly wicked who miss the lesson of God’s unmerited favor. Any man or woman who does not know Christ and does not seek God is equally in the dark. The unregenerate cannot perceive God’s lifted hand, whether it is lifted to bless or to strike.

Few would call my former co-worker wicked. She’s a principled woman who has done a fair bit of good in her time, not least to me. Oddly, she’s a lot like my late friend before he had his dealings with the Lord on the highway, much more than she knows. But she lives her life largely without reference to God, oblivious to the spiritual realities around her. In the years I’ve known her, the Lord has spared her own life at least three times, maybe more. On one occasion, I sat at the foot of her bed in the emergency room watching her blood pressure drop as another woman went into eternity right beside us. If her own amazing recovery hours later did not inspire her to give glory to God, how could she see his hand in a frantic choice made by a man she did not know mid-car-accident?

Blind as Bats

Of course, we cannot prove any individual circumstance, good or bad, that occurs in our lives is definitively an act of God. Unless the determinists are correct and God does absolutely everything, both good and evil, how could we know for sure? But if the God Isaiah describes for us here is real, then he can only be known and understood by those who have already set their hearts on seeking him and doing his will. Those who have not done so, the prophet teaches, will remain as blind as bats to what is going on all around them and why it is happening.

Unsurprisingly, that is precisely how we find them behaving.