chicken feet and walled gardens

I had a good time eating my first chicken feet with the crew from the U recently, and I’m super proud that after bugging them for weeks to pick a book of the Bible to study over the homeworkless summer, everyone at the table had great stuff to say about what they were reading. I’m taking my own advice and working my way through Isaiah. I’m not going to blog a study on Isaiah; I’ve got too much left to figure out yet for that, but I will be posting some of my favorite thoughts and questions as I go. Here’s my first.

The garden/vineyard metaphor of Chapter 5 is a great example of the Hebrew understanding of what God was doing through Israel in the world. If you read Genesis really really fast, it begins like this: God made the world good, we messed it up, we messed it up again, we messed it up again, then He picked this dude named Abram to form a new people to be His solution for the whole world. When Isaiah writes of Israel as a walled garden/vineyard it’s an allusion to the first walled garden, with Israel as God’s solution to the fall, bearing out God’s original intent in and for a fallen world. God is working in His people to restore what was lost. The promise of Messiah in Chapter 9 fulfills this. When Israel is restored, God will usher in an ever-expanding kingdom of peace that extends to the entire world. Without a wall, the garden blossoms across the world. This is a consistent hope, seen in many other prophecies and promises, like Deuteronomy 30 and Joel 2, where the promise of restoration is not a return to the garden, but a new way of following God that brings us nearer and radiates outwards: not the garden, but the fulfillment of the purpose of the garden/Israel in the world.