Ariel, the Altar of Blood

Posted on by Adrian Clark

What sorrow awaits Ariel, the City of David. Year after year you celebrate your feasts. Yet I will bring disaster upon you, and there will be much weeping and sorrow. For Jerusalem will become what her name Ariel means— an altar covered with blood. I will be your enemy, surrounding Jerusalem and attacking its walls. I will build siege towers and destroy it.”
Isaiah 29:1-3 NLT

An unusual name appears in our reading today. “Ariel”. It is a name more associated with a washing powder in the UK today, but in Isaiah’s day it meant “an altar covered with blood”, a definition usefully supplied in verse 2. But in other translations it means “lion of God” or “altar hearth”, probably referring to the Temple in Jerusalem. 

Chapters 28-33 in Isaiah all start with “What sorrow awaits”, or “Woe to”, five “woes” in all. “Woe” is an exclamation of grief for the terrible judgment that is yet to come. In this chapter, the Lord describes judgment coming on Jerusalem. But as we journey through Isaiah, we find that much of his writing is connected with warnings, prophecies or oracles of doom yet to come on a people, nation, or even empire. And he was very accurate in what he wrote, as history has confirmed. So chapter 29 contains “woes” directed against Jerusalem. If I were living in those days and had heard what he said, I would like to think I would take notice and change my ways, but hindsight is a wonderful thing, and at the time the people paid very little attention to him.

The people of Judah had a very strong foundation in God, with religious leaders and a wealth of God-breathed literature underpinning what God desired of them. They knew that if they followed His ways, they would be blessed and protected; if they didn’t, they would be cursed and unprotected. They could read all about this in Deuteronomy, just as we can, although people in Isaiah’s day were largely uneducated and relied on priests and other religious leaders to disseminate God’s Word. But it is a human condition that sin is a preferred way of life, and because God was, and is, slow to anger, they wrongly felt that He didn’t much care about how they behaved. Perhaps their logic ran along the line that it was all very well for their early ancestors, but they were much more sophisticated. And that is perhaps our first thought this morning. I have heard arguments today from people who have rejected God and His Word because they think that it applies to a people, unsophisticated and uneducated, who used to live many years ago. After all, they say, we now have all this knowledge and scientific data, and have no further need for God and His ways. To such a people, we can point to the experiences of God’s people in the 8th Century BC and suggest they take note and seriously consider what happened to them. Hebrews 13:8-9: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. So do not be attracted by strange, new ideas. Your strength comes from God’s grace, not from rules about food, which don’t help those who follow them”. 

Here is another thought, based on the judgment coming for the behaviour of God’s people. Perhaps we need to remember that being close to God does not make us immune from correction. Jerusalem had the temple. It had the priesthood. It had the sacrifices and religious festivals. It had a long history of God’s dealings with His people. Yet none of these things could protect the people if their hearts had turned away from God. This offers a significant lesson for Christians. We can be surrounded by Christian things—church attendance, worship, Bible reading, Christian fellowship—and still have hearts spiritually distant from God. We also need to remember that religious activity is not the same as spiritual obedience. Jesus later warned of people who would honour God with their lips while their hearts were far from Him, quoting a later verse in Isaiah 29. We remember the story of Samuel selecting a king to replace Saul, and watching as Jesse’s sons were paraded before him. He took one look at the son called Eliab and thought “Surely this is the Lord’s anointed”, but the next verse reads, “But the LORD said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The LORD doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart”” (1 Samuel 16:7). The question we must ask ourselves today is “What is the state of our hearts?” Are we devoted to God and His ways, following Jesus wholeheartedly, or are we just paying lip service to our liturgies, while our minds dwell on other things, such as what was on television last night, or our favourite football team’s prowess in yesterday’s match? Through Isaiah, God was very critical of the way the Israelites were behaving. He wrote, “When you come to worship me, who asked you to parade through my courts with all your ceremony? Stop bringing me your meaningless gifts; the incense of your offerings disgusts me! As for your celebrations of the new moon and the Sabbath and your special days for fasting— they are all sinful and false. I want no more of your pious meetings” (Isaiah 1:12-13). James too wrote on this theme, and we read, “But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it” (James 1:22-25).

The people in Judea probably thought that if they continued to go through the motions in their religion, then they would be alright. Isaiah wrote, “Year after year you celebrate your feasts” but God added another word “Yet”. We pilgrims have to beware of this word, because it confirms that any assumptions we might like to make about our faith could be followed by a “yet”. Those two verses at the end of Psalm 139 must be on the lips of every pilgrim frequently: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life”. We must remember that God loves us, and because of that, He won’t leave us in a life of complacency or sin without discipline. 

But in all the negatives of our verses today, there is hope. Our faith in God is alive and well, I’m sure, and He is quick to respond to a repentant heart. He loves us as a father loves His children and will go to extraordinary lengths to nurture us and educate us in His ways. 

Dear Father God. Thank You for Your love and care. We know it is easy to go through spiritual motions and delude ourselves about their reality. We pray David’s prayer, that You would search our hearts and keep us close to You, this day and for all time. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Falling Away

Posted on by Adrian Clark

“So, dear brothers and sisters, work hard to prove that you really are among those God has called and chosen. Do these things, and you will never fall away. Then God will give you a grand entrance into the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
2 Peter 1:10-11 NLT

So we must start in asking what these “things” are, that Peter is recommending. Again we go back to earlier in the chapter where we are told that God has “given us everything we need for living a godly life”. This will happen as we get to know God more and respond positively and proactively to His promises. But Peter includes a warning, that if we fail to do what he advises, then we are in danger of falling away. In other words, if we stop pursuing God, then we will become side-tracked into doing other things.

I know of several believers who became casualties of the Covid lockdowns here in the UK. Churches stopped holding Sunday in-person meetings and went on-line using video conferencing facilities such as Zoom. This was too big an ask for some people and they stopped participating in a techno-church. But, worse, when the churches I have in mind restarted their Sunday services, these people remained at home. Of course, a Christian doesn’t have to attend a church, but it helps if they do. Hebrews 10:25, “And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near“. Without meeting with other Christians we will miss out on mutual encouragement and much more. A lone Christian becomes an easy target for the devil. Those enticing whispers, that sound so right, saying things like it doesn’t matter if you don’t attend a church service. After all, God will still love you, the devil says. 

I have met people in the past who neglect to read the Bible, because, they say, they don’t understand what it says. In Peter’s day, the people lacked a Bible such as we have, relying instead on Jewish Scriptures, someone to expound them, and the teaching of the Apostles and others who knew Jesus. It was only much later that the Canon of Scripture was put together in the form that we have. But Peter’s encouragement to the believers in the Five Provinces in Asia Minor also applies today. In 2 Peter 1:5a he wrote, “In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. … “. 2 Peter 1:10a, “So, dear brothers and sisters, work hard to prove … “. Understanding what the Bible says and applying it to our lives will take personal effort. It will do us no good to place a Bible under our pillows at night, and hope the truths and promises contained therein will somehow leap into our minds.

The New Testament contains several warnings about “falling away” from the faith. Revelation 2:4-5, “But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first! Look how far you have fallen! Turn back to me and do the works you did at first. If you don’t repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches“. This warning, in a vision through the Apostle John, came directly from Jesus and was intended for the Ephesian believers. In 1 Timothy 4:1a, Paul wrote, “Now the Holy Spirit tells us clearly that in the last times some will turn away from the true faith … “. And then we have the ominous warning in Hebrews 6:4-6, “For it is impossible to bring back to repentance those who were once enlightened—those who have experienced the good things of heaven and shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the power of the age to come— and who then turn away from God. It is impossible to bring such people back to repentance; by rejecting the Son of God, they themselves are nailing him to the cross once again and holding him up to public shame“. 

In Genesis 11 we find the story of Terah, Abraham’s father. Just a few verses but Terah heard God’s call to move to Canaan, but he never arrived there because he settled in a place called Haran, about half way to his destination, and he eventually died there. Perhaps in this brief episode we can read a warning about failing to reach the goal towards which God has called us. There is no half way house in God’s Kingdom. We pilgrim believers must be diligent and make every effort to stay faithful to God. If we find ourselves slipping away from the faith, then we must get on our knees once again and pray for forgiveness and the strength to stay on track.

Heavenly Father. Please help us to stay the course, and remain faithful to You. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Lost Sheep

Posted on by Adrian Clark

“I have wandered away like a lost sheep;
    come and find me,
    for I have not forgotten your commands.”
Psalm 119:176 NLT

Psalm 119 ends with a strange verse. How can the Psalmist find himself in this position, describing himself as a “lost sheep”, after such a cornucopia of expressions of the greatness of God and His wonderful works and laws, and His relationship with the writer, who had been clever enough to devise a Psalm of sections, each of eight verses and each beginning with a letter in the Hebrew alphabet? What happened to him?

Sheep are animals with a predisposition to get lost. They wander off, steadily grazing their way into places where they shouldn’t be. And then they can’t find their way back to the rest of the flock or a safe place. A lost sheep is very vulnerable, at the mercy of predators and prone to get caught up by its wool in thickets or trapped somewhere by a difficult terrain. In spiritual terms, we can be like “lost sheep”. We wander off the track marked out for our pilgrimage through life, and before we know it we are in a place of great danger, in a place of temptation and sin.

Jesus was very aware of the challenges facing us, God’s “sheep”. In Matthew 18:12-13 we read, “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them wanders away, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost? And if he finds it, I tell you the truth, he will rejoice over it more than over the ninety-nine that didn’t wander away!“. There are two significant pieces of information here that are worth considering. Firstly, Jesus Himself searches for His lost sheep. He calls, He looks, He goes to extraordinary lengths to find us when we stray. Secondly, finding us is not guaranteed – we also can go to extraordinary lengths to avoid being found by Jesus. We can ignore His calls. We can hide away from His gaze. I have known good men and women who have wilfully deserted their Christian faith, no longer counted in Jesus’ flock.

A sheep gets lost when it abandons its familiar territory. When it thinks the grass elsewhere is greener and more palatable. And so it is with us. We can leave the familiar territory of God’s Word and be attracted to something new. Then we can become “lost”, and the frightening thing is that we might not even know it. I think the Psalmist ended this Psalm, with a warning. Don’t abandon God and get lost. Always keep home in sight by checking things out with His word. Always be aware of dangerous terrain, where sheep should never go.