Fading Oak
“You will be ashamed because of the sacred oaks in which you have delighted; you will be disgraced because of the gardens that you have chosen.
You will be like an oak with fading leaves,
like a garden without water.— Isaiah 1:29–30 (NIV)
In the opening of words of the ancient prophet Isaiah, we see God level some very harsh words at Israel, his people.
Groves of trees and gardens were used for perversely sexual pagan rituals that centered around the worshipping of pagan idols, false gods. The words here sound like the provoked words of a jealous lover. Fill with anguish and bitterness.
It is sobering when you consider the absolute majesty of God and his intolerance of his people pursuing other lovers.
The storyline that the Bible traces of sin and idolatry is not something isolated to Israel.
To modernize this a bit one doesn’t need to worship an actual, physical idol to fall into the same camp as those that became the recipients of God’s “seemingly cold” judgment in the Scripture passage above.
We are all prone to idolatry which expresses itself in sin. At the root of all sin is the self and its desire. Overt idolatry is easy to diagnose and is characterized by public sin and participation that anyone can observe.
Private idolatry often expresses itself first and most often in the recesses of our hearts and is only visible when something causes it to spill over. A heated discussion. A missed opportunity. A pointed failure. There are numerous things that can cause the recesses of our heart to pour out with sinful action that was previously hidden in our hearts as idolatry, sin.
The heart is a very curious thing. We can tend it and look inside regularly and take stock of its contents, but leave it for a moment to its own suicidal devices and it will give birth at once to the most wretched sin.
I’m writing this piece because I feel broken. I don’t know why. The words “you will be an oak with fading leaves, like a garden without water” haunt me. But I really don’t know why.
I know I have sin in my heart. We all do. But I don’t know if this brokenness I feel like a weight is because of any specific sin or failure but more a symptom of living and moving in a broken world amidst the heartache of brokenness, post-Eden.
I don’t have the depth to discern the cause of my distress. I’m at the mercy of a God who is good but doesn’t feel good or close or present. I know He is all those things. But I don’t feel them to be true in my heart.
Something else haunts me.
I feel a deep sadness stirring when I think about Israel being far away from God and disconnected from His heart.
I think I have an echo in that sadness because I feel far away and disconnected from Him.
Whatever it is that disconnects, the feeling of being cut-off from the only source of true life is suffocating and disorienting. Even the way Isaiah describes the “fading leaves” and “garden without water” it conjures up this image of death, suffocation, and starvation.
It reminds me of when Jesus diagnosed the woman at the well in John 4 as finding her life in many places other than Himself, the true source of Living Water.
Even though I know God is a good, loving, and living Being full of infinite life, wisdom, creativity, and worth it is all-too-easy for me to picture Him as a nameless, faceless, empty void.
In contrast, when I look at Jesus I see something human and tangible. Dragging his hands through the mud and clay (mingled with his own spit) to heal a blind man’s eyes. Placing his hands in a person’s ears. Stooping to care for a human being created in his image. Sleeping in a boat during a storm. Or crying when one of his best friends dies.
The fully-human (and yet also fully God) Jesus gives us a picture unlike any other of what God is really like.
No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. (John 1:18, NIV)
The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. (Hebrews 1:3, NIV)
Maybe part of my problem is that I need to adjust my picture of God and what He is like. I all too easily project the distortions of a broken world or my own sinful distortions on a perfect God and I wonder why I end up in such a confusing mess.
We truly do “see in a mirror dimly” as the Scriptures say (in 1 Corinthians 13:12). We are surrounded by a confusing fog of our sin and brokenness and the sin and brokenness of the world and the ones we love around us. But amidst this fog, there is hope.
“And — supposing someone came forward out of the fog to meet us?” (N.T. Wright from Surprised by Hope)
The great Christian hope is that we having a Living God who meets us in the deep, dark spaces of our lives and who will never, ever let us go. His resurrection was real and physical. Our new birth is real and spiritual and will one day but fully physical like his. Death will gone. Forever,
This is something that we can stand on as we press forward into the unknown whys of life holding on to a known Who.
