We often sing the lovely gospel song, “In the Garden.” Jesus walks with me, he talks with me, he tells me I am his own.” You know the rest. Gardens, especially this time of year, are lovely places. Well, maybe full of weeds. I have a little garden with some tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, squash, etc. But I’ve been in some of your gardens and they are beautiful. You are proud of your gardens – you put lots of time and effort into them and you enjoy your time there. In this beautiful passage of scripture, Isaiah is proclaiming that trusting in God results in a spiritual garden pathway – a highway that is so filled with beautiful flowers that it is like a garden – down which pilgrims travel on their way home. If I had to put the basic message of Isaiah in this passage into one sentence it would be this: If we as a nation will really trust God as a people willingly and faithfully, God will restore us, bless us, renew us, transform us, redeem use like streams in the desert. Let’s fill this out a little more.

Time for a very short history lesson. Like the prophets Amos and Hosea, Isaiah of Jerusalem was a prophet who had something to say about the political arrangements of his time. He prophesied not to the Northern Kingdoms (Samaria or Ephraim) but to the Southern Kingdom of Judah. After a period of relative peace between Israel (the Northern Kingdom) and Judah, international tensions rose after Tiglath-Pileser III become king of the Assyrian Empire in 745 BC and began his campaign to conquer Egypt and all the lands in between (which included Judah). The kings of Israel and Syria tried to force Ahaz, king of Judah into an anti-Assyrian alliance. When he refused to join (he knew it was suicidal and he was right!), these two countries actually attacked Judah to force him into this alliance. Ahaz actually turned to Assyria for help in fending off Israel and Syria – but in the process became a vassal of Assyria.

Later, (the period to which this text probably speaks) Hezekiah tried to break free of Assyria. Being a vassal state devastated a country; “You give us virtually everything you own and produce, and we won’t invade you and kill you.” Assyria was the first terrorist state – meaning they intentionally terrorized other nations into submission. After the death of the powerful Sargon II, Assyria entered into an internal power-struggle which encouraged Hezekiah to take the opportunity to throw off the Assyrian yoke. He established alliances with Egypt and Babylon. The new Assyrian king, Sennacherib, retaliated and conquered the cities surrounding Jerusalem in 701 BC. Hezekiah was able to avert the conquest of Jerusalem itself only by paying a high tribute and after God intervened.

It was into this political situation that Isaiah addressed his message – and while it was a deeply spiritual message, it had deep political overtones. Isaiah had a spiritually energized political agenda and plan he wanted to promote. Our passage, chapter 35, along with chapter 34, end the first major section (of three) of the book. In other words, chapters 34 and 35 reach a climactic conclusion of the first major triad of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah from this point can be summarized as addressing some basic questions. The first section (chs. 7-12) pose the question: “Is God Sovereign of the Nations? Can God really be trusted to deliver Judah from Assyria? Or is God just one more of the gods waiting to be gobbled up by a bigger god? Can God be trusted? The next section (chs. 13-33) have sought to answer that question: God is indeed LORD of the other nations and a sovereign actor on the world stage. God’s counsel over that of merely human leaders is asserted. Isaiah’s political message to Judea was essentially this: the best policy is to have absolutely no foreign alliances but to ally ourselves with Yahweh alone.

These last two chapters close the section by showing two clear courses of action. In chapter 34, you can go the way of the nations of the world and trust in yourself and your self-made deities you can control, and you will turn the beauty of your country into a wasteland like the country of Edom. Isaiah 34 is something of the exact opposite to Isaiah 35: By not trusting God, you turn the garden into a desert. But (chapter 35), by trusting God completely, by walking down his holy way, the desert will blossom into a garden of lush pleasure. That is the overview. Let’s look at ch. 35 more carefully.

Vs. 1 – The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad. These words mark a sudden break from the gloominess of chapter 34. Edom, the nation that exemplified trust in foreign alliances and their gods, has become a gloomy wilderness of unclean animals. Places where people lived, nice cities, are now only inhabited by jackals and other unclean animals. But now, in 35:1, there is a complete shift in tone. The wilderness itself is going to sing with gladness. The wilderness will blossom with crocus flowers; it will rejoice with joy and singing.

Suddenly the wilderness is a place of rejoicing and blooming flowers. This reflects the fact that in the desert regions of S. Israel, sudden rainstorms can turn a dry place into a blooming field almost overnight. Flowers have a tendency to sprout up and bloom very quickly when the right seasonal rains come. But in the text itself, what brings about this difference? Isaiah keeps us in suspense for a few verses until he gives a partial answer in vv. 2 and 4.

v. 4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.”

So what is causing the desert to burst into flowers? The answer is simple – God. He is the author of all this joy bursting out all over! God has been wanting to pour out this blessed joy and redemption but has been hindered by this refusal to trust in him alone. We humans think we can produce joy on our own. But we never can. Joy is always the by-product of the presence of God in the world. We can, through a lack of trust, hold God at arms-length. When we do, the end is desolation; we turn the garden-highway of our lives into a desert. But God is always after the restoration of joy.

v. 2 they shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God. Here we see Isaiah proclaiming that God wants us to see this glory. Glory is a major element in this chapter and in the book as a whole. I think of Isaiah’s temple vision in chapter 6. There, Isaiah saw the glory of the Lord in the temple with angels shouting out, Holy, Holy Holy is the LORD of Hosts! The whole earth is full of his glory. Thru this experience, Isaiah is purified to be a prophet. Now, it isn’t Isaiah alone in the temple who encounters God’s glory, it is everyone who walks down this garden highway. Isaiah is wanting to say something like this: God wants to share his glory with his creation, but any attempt by the creation to produce their own glory will end in disaster.

v. 3 Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. Drooping hands here is an expression of helplessness brought on by fear – almost like “I threw up my hands in despair.” Confronted with the mighty nations who use power so terrifyingly like Assyria, what can one do but throw up their hands in despair? No, the prophet booms! Trusting in God will bring magnificent rewards..

v. 4 Here is your God! is a powerful statement throughout scripture. When you feel God is too far away to reach, the answer of Isaiah and other prophets is, “God is reaching out to you now!” God has been coming to us across the millennia: through revelation in scripture, by his acts of providence, by the coming of Christ, by the powerful presence of the Spirit in the world and especially in the church. Again, I’m reminded of Isaiah’s vision of the LORD in the temple that transformed him. This speaks of a spiritual encounter God wants us to have that brings us into such an awareness of divine presence that we feel everything false in us is seared away.

v. 5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. These figures do not stress freedom from oppression (slaves set free) but freedom from personal ailments. Blindness and deafness in scripture often are used in a spiritual sense – being spiritually blind and deaf. Both probably have meaning here – God has an inner abundance that will take any situation you are in and give you spiritual eyes and ears to hear and know the blessedness of your condition.

These verses use the image of the redeemed marching up to Zion – the location of the Jerusalem temple. v. 8 A highway shall be there and it shall be called the Holy Way, the unclean shall not travel on it. Isaiah foresees a time when all persons will be able to experience such spiritual cleansing that they will be able to come into God’s very presence with joy and thanksgiving. This is not an inclusive verse – the unclean shall not travel on this road. This is the Holy Way that limits access – only those who have been cleansed and redeemed are able to travel on this pathway. The way is holy because only those who have been cleansed will walk there.

They are protected while there – No lion shall be there (v. 9). This is a highway of sheer delight and joy – they shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. This is the apex of Isaiah’s vision: a day when the people of God can be set free from their own sins and the sins of others, when they can come home to their God and be fully restored to his image, when a lifelong struggle to avoid grief and pain will be ended in their being overwhelmed by gladness and joy. This is the hope of biblical faith and a foretaste of what is to come. If God is God at all, then we may believe all his promises.[1]

In Matthew 11, when John the Baptist wondered from prison if Jesus was really the promised one of Israel, Jesus responded using Isaiah 35 as a backdrop to understand his ministry. Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me. This is an allusion to Isaiah 35:5-6. Jesus understood the miracles in his healing ministry – deaf made to hear, blind to see – as an indication that the promise of Isaiah 35 was coming to fruition.

This fits the general pattern of the way the NT interprets the old. Jesus didn’t simply look to the OT as a grab-bag of promises from which to proclaim himself Messiah. Jesus was not simply envisaging himself doing a few scattered and random acts which correspond to various detached prophetic sayings; he was thinking of the entire storyline at last coming to fruition in his ministry. He came preaching the Kingdom of God had arrived in his ministry. He has not come to abolish the law but fulfill it – that is, to bring the law to its pinnacle or final purpose. He, as the word-made-flesh, embodies in his ministry, teaching, life, death and resurrection, all the goals and purposes to which the prophets pointed and hoped. He in himself was the ‘true Israel’ formed by scripture, bringing the Kingdom to birth. Jesus came, in the words of Isaiah 35, to open us for us a new highway of holiness whereby we can return to Zion.[2]

So where are the streams in the desert? How are the eyes of the blind opened today? If Jesus is the culmination of all these beautiful things, where do we stand now? How can it be that Church can seem to mundane, so boring, so utterly human? Why aren’t we wowed into worship every Sunday by amazing displays of God’s presence? This passage is all power-and-glory and what we encounter is often liturgy and lethargy. Why such a disconnect?

I think of this passage as a window into understanding the potential of real, gut-wrenching, trend-setting, long-lasting, putting-your-life-on-the-line trust in God. God wants to do the big things in our lives personally and in our church. No matter what kinds of personal tragedy, disaster, discouragement, desertion you have felt and experienced, God is into restoration. What holds us back? It finally comes down to trust. This for Isaiah was no vague thing but highly specific: we need to trust in God rather than our alliances with foreign nations. Trust in God for us ought to be also highly specific.

We find God if we seek him wholeheartedly. This is the promise – streams in the desert, blossoms blooming in the oddest places, blindness replaced with sight. God is always wanting to blossom in your life and in our community. God is behind every corner, in every nook-and-cranny, behind every bush, just saying, “Trust me and I’ll renew you in ways you cannot imagine.” But this demands humility, repentance, turning from old habits, etc.

It is as if we live on the one side of a curtain. On our side we see life of status-quos, mundane affairs, casseroles and coffee-cakes, ups-and-downs, cause-and-effect. We see discouragements, disease, disagreements, and down-turns. But on the other side of this curtain is the world of divine potential; a world of faith-made blessing, of spiritual transformation, of life-affirming grace, of springs in the desert, of the deaf hearing and the blind seeing. The prophet is saying to us, “God’s world of spiritual prosperity lays in wait for the taking. By faith, raise up and feast on God’s treasures.”

My question for you today is quite simply. Where is our trust? What are we trusting in God for to such a degree that if God doesn’t come through, we’re sunk? It is in that kind of highly specific trust, that kind of risk-taking faith that we find the reality of this text coming through; streams in the desert and highways of holiness. I want you to think about this question this week. Were am I trusting in God? In what way am I stepping out in faith in response to my trust in God? Where am I depending on God in risk-taking ways? Is my faith a vague trust in God or a risk-taking kind of trust? Isaiah is asking us to take the big risks of faith in the face of life’s greatest terrors and challenges. Let’s pray.

[1] John Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah Chapters 1-39 (NICOT) 623-26.

[2] N.T. Wright, The Last Word, p. 42-44.