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The Bible’s questions, answered—part 11: Answers to questions in Isaiah

The bad book

The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions from the book of Isaiah.

Isaiah’s questions

Isaiah asks: Why hold mere humans in esteem? Answer: As opposed to God? At least humans exist. And most of them are a lot nicer than him.

He asks: When someone tells you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Answer: Yes, they should not.

And he asks: Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? Answer: The living don’t know everything.

Isaiah asks: Does the ax raise itself above the person who swings it, or the saw boast against the one who uses it? Answer: No, those things are not autonomous, unlike what you’re comparing them to.

Isaiah asks: Who can thwart God’s purpose? His hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back? And God asks: When I act, who can reverse it? Answer: Adam, Ahab, Satan, divorcees, Christians who eat forbidden food, and humans in general.

Isaiah asks the people of Tyre: Is this your city of revelry, the old, old city, whose feet have taken her to settle in far-off lands? Answer: No, I’m pretty sure cities don’t have feet.

Isaiah asks: Has the Lord struck Israel as he struck down those who struck her? Has she been killed as those were killed who killed her? Answer: Yes, constantly.

Isaiah asks: Who can fathom the Spirit of the Lord, or instruct the Lord as his counselor? Whom did the Lord consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? Who was it that taught him knowledge, or showed him the path of understanding?

Answer: Job and God’s prophets know what God thinks. God reveals his thoughts to mankind. Paul knows the whole will of God. The Corinthians must know it too, because God has given them all knowledge, so they “have the mind of Christ“. God has made the mystery of his will known to Paul and/or the Ephesians.

As for instructing God, according to Elihu, guardian angels instruct God to spare people. Moses counseled God and convinced him not to kill all the other Israelites. And a Gentile woman convinced Jesus that he was wrong to shun people like her, after which he started having his disciples preach to all nations instead of just to the Jews.

Isaiah asks: With whom, then, will you compare God? Answer: Hitler.

And he asks: To what image will you liken him? Answer: This one.

Isaiah asks someone: Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded? Implied answer: Isaiah sounds like he’s trying to say the answer is yes. Real answer: I’m pretty sure Isaiah isn’t talking to God here, so the answer is no.

Isaiah asks: He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested?

Christian answer: This is a prediction that Jesus would be crucified and no one would care. Alternative biblical answer: I have no idea who Isaiah is really talking about, but let’s pretend he’s talking about Jesus. In that case, Pilate supposedly protested his own verdict. Which doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what the Bible says.

Isaiah asks: Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson? Who is this, robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength? Answer: I think it’s supposed to be God?

He asks: Where is he who brought them through the sea, with the shepherd of his flock? Where is he who set his Holy Spirit among them, who sent his glorious arm of power to be at Moses’ right hand, who divided the waters before them, to gain for himself everlasting renown, who led them through the depths? Answer: Well, he’s definitely not in a temple. He can’t be found anywhere on earth. And he can’t be in the heavens. Maybe he’s in the underworld?

Isaiah asks God: Why do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you? Answer: God must be crazy.

Isaiah asks: How then can we be saved? Answer: You can be saved if God randomly decides to turn a blind eye to what you did wrong.

Isaiah asks God: After all this, will you hold yourself back? Will you keep silent and punish us beyond measure? Answer: You haven’t seen the last of the Jews’ hardships, if that’s what you mean.

Isaiah’s questions for the Jews

Isaiah asks the people of Judah: Why should you be beaten anymore? Answer: Who’s beating them? God? Well, God never does anything without explaining his intentions to his prophets, and you’re a prophet. So if even you don’t know why he’s doing it, then I guess God must be beating people for no reason.

And he asks them: Why do you persist in rebellion? Answer: Probably because following God’s laws is unreasonably hard to do. Even Jesus thinks so.

When King Ahaz, misinterpreting the scriptures like a lot of religious people do, claims that God doesn’t want him to “put him to the test” by asking him to do something, despite the fact that God’s prophet has just told him to ask God for a miraculous sign, Isaiah asks Ahaz: Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? Answer: I don’t know if he will (again), but he just did. He’s putting God’s patience to the test by refusing to “put the Lord to the test”.

Isaiah asks: Why do you complain, Jacob? Why do you say, Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God”? Answer: Because they don’t see him doing anything for them.

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The Story of the Circum-Schism—
Paul Hijacks Christianity

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Ignorant outsider declares himself the authority on Christianity

When a man named Paul (also known as Saul) saw that Stephen had been killed, he approved. With the high priest’s permission, Paul started beating, imprisoning, and killing all the Christians he could find.

But then, while Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus, Jesus blinded him with a flash of light from heaven, and then sent a Christian from Damascus to un-blind him. Paul had a change of heart, but he just couldn’t make himself stop sinning.

Paul spent several days with the Christians in Damascus, during which he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from them. Then he suddenly started proclaiming that Jesus was the son of God, which confused everyone.

The Jews in Damascus wanted to kill Paul now that he was promoting Christianity. But he escaped back to Jerusalem, and tried to join the Christians there. At first they didn’t believe that their enemy was really a Christian now, but someone convinced them.

But then the Jews there tried to kill him too. So Paul went away and started preaching his own foolish message of Christianity to the world. People thought he was insane. Paul preached only to foreigners, who weren’t familiar with Jesus and so had no preconceived ideas of what he was actually like. Paul and his companions suggested that they might harm people who didn’t do what he thought God wanted. And the terrified foreigners complied.

Three years later, Paul went to Jerusalem briefly and met the Christians there for the first time, again. The apostle Peter (also known as Simon or Cephas) also started preaching Christianity to Gentiles, which the other Christians of Judea thought was wrong. They thought only Jews could be Christians. But Peter said he had had a dream that God told him to eat animals that were forbidden by God’s law. Therefore, it must be okay for Gentiles to be Christians.

Paul briefly questions the reliability of his knowledge about Jesus

Over a decade later, Paul heard that Christians from Judea were teaching Gentiles that they couldn’t be saved unless they were circumcised. Paul, having never actually met Jesus nor learned the original church’s doctrine, had been teaching something quite different. He had taught his followers that Jesus had made all those useless old Jewish laws obsolete. Especially circumcision.

So Paul decided to go to Jerusalem again, to talk with the apostles and make sure he was getting the message right. He found that, contrary to what he thought the spirit of Jesus had revealed to him, the original Christian church believed that all Christians had to follow all the Jewish laws, including circumcision. Peter, who tended to say foolish things, discussed the matter with Paul, who he thought was awfully hard to understand. They seemed to come to an agreement, but that didn’t last long.

The apostles sent Paul out with a letter telling the Gentile Christians that they only had to follow a few Jewish laws. But Paul really didn’t think even Jews needed to follow even those laws. He sometimes pretended to think people were still under the law though, in order to be more convincing to people who thought that way.

The original Christians attempt to debunk Paul’s misinformation

Then Jesus’s brother James convinced Peter and the rest of the Jewish Christian church and even Paul’s companion Barnabas that Gentile Christians did indeed have to live like Jews. Paul opposed them and called them hypocrites.

The Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem sent out their own missionaries to the foreign churches Paul had founded, teaching them their version of Christianity, which Paul disagreed with. They taught Paul’s followers that they had to obey the Jewish laws, including circumcision. They pointed out that they were Jesus’s own chosen apostles, and Paul was not. Some members of Paul’s churches started turning away from Paul and his comrade Apollos, and started following Peter.

So Paul started writing his followers defensive letters, proclaiming himself to be an apostle. He insulted and demonized the “other” apostles, insisting that they weren’t any better than him, and he didn’t need their opinions.

Paul’s insistence on lawlessness gets him arrested

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Paul Hijacks Christianity →
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The Story of John the Baptist—
Too Many Herods!

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John the Baptist, a relative of Jesus, was in the wilderness of Judea, baptizing and insulting people. People thought he was demon-possessed. He made people get in the river, even though it’s possible to be baptized without getting wet at all.

Jesus (now grown up) came to the river where John was baptizing. John thought Jesus should be the one baptizing him, because he thought Jesus was greater than him. But Jesus wasn’t actually any greater than John, so Jesus had John baptize him instead.

Then John was put in prison for claiming that it was against the law for King Herod‘s son Herod to marry his niece Herodias after she divorced his brother Herod Philip. Herod and his wife Herodias both wanted to kill John, but Herod was hesitant to kill someone who was thought of as a prophet.

On Herod’s birthday, Herodias got her sexy daughter to help her convince Herod to have John beheaded immediately. Herod was very distressed at the thought of having to kill the man he wanted to kill. But he did it anyway, because he had promised to give his hot stepdaughter/niece whatever she asked for.

(Herodias’s daughter married Herod’s other brother who was also named Herod Philip. And later, she married the son of one of Herodias’s two brothers who were named Herod. Herodias’s other brother, Herod Agrippa, later persecuted the disciples of Jesus, and then an angel killed him for failing to point out that he wasn’t a god. Herod Agrippa’s son was… Herod Agrippa, who met the “apostle” Paul.)

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Too Many Herods! →
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The Story of the Birth of Jesus—
The Massacre of the Innocents

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Over a hundred years after the time of Esther, Judea (the home of the Jews) was taken over by the Greeks when Alexander the Great arrived. And three hundred years after that, the Roman Empire took it over.

A carpenter named Joseph, who was descended from the kings of Judah, was engaged to a woman named Mary. Then God impregnated her, which nearly caused them to break up. But God insisted that Joseph should marry Mary anyway, so he did. But he didn’t have sex with her until after she gave birth to God’s baby, which they named Jesus.

While Mary was pregnant, Joseph decided to go to Bethlehem to take part in the governor Quirinius’s census of Judea. Even though Joseph didn’t live in Judea, and even though the census wouldn’t happen till several years later. And Jesus was born there.

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The Massacre of the Innocents →
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The Story of Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel—
Daniel in the Lions' Den

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Fake fortune tellers exposed

After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon captured Jehoiakim (the third-to-last king of Judah), the four smartest aristocratic young men in Judah were brought to Babylon to be Nebuchadnezzar’s advisers. Their names were Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel, but king Nebuchadnezzar renamed them Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Belteshazzar. (Apparently one of those new names wasn’t so catchy.)

Nebuchadnezzar had a troubling dream about a big statue being smashed by a rock, which then became a huge mountain. He decided to see if his magicians could tell him what it meant. To make sure they were really capable of interpreting it, instead of telling them what he had dreamed about, he demanded that they tell him first. The magicians said that was impossible; only a god could do that. Since they couldn’t read his mind, the king decided to have all the wise men in Babylon killed for being frauds.

But the king’s wise adviser Daniel said that wouldn’t be necessary, because his God could help him do what the king demanded. Daniel described the dream and said it was a prediction about the kingdoms that would come after Nebuchadnezzar’s. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Daniel and his friends to high positions.

Daniel obeys the king

After he had a dream about a huge statue, Nebuchadnezzar decided to make a huge statue. He decreed that everyone had to worship the statue or die. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship it, so the king had them tied up and thrown into a furnace. Daniel didn’t get thrown into the furnace, so apparently he was willing to worship the king’s idol.

God sent an angel to protect Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and they came out of the furnace unharmed. The king was very impressed, and he promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to high positions.

God continues to communicate badly

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Daniel in the Lions’ Den →
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The Story of the Exile of Israel and Judah—
The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms

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Where the Samaritans came from, according to the Jews

Jotham’s son Ahaz was an evil king of Judah, so God sent the kings of Israel and Aram to fight against him and defeat him after God had promised they wouldn’t defeat him.1 After God predicted Assyria would destroy Judah, Ahaz got the king of Assyria to instead help him attack Israel, by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God.

Hoshea, the next king of Israel, was an evil traitor. When the king of Assyria found that out, he took Hoshea prisoner and conquered his country, putting an end to the kingdom of Israel. The people of Israel were exiled to Assyria, becoming the Ten Lost Tribes. The king of Assyria sent foreign pagans to settle in the former land of Israel, becoming Samaritans.

How Hezekiah used the gift of success

Ahaz’s son Hezekiah was the most righteous king Judah ever had. So God made him successful at everything. Hezekiah successfully convinced God to let his people break God’s law by celebrating the Passover in any way they wanted.

He successfully rebelled against the king of Assyria, so God told the king of Assyria to destroy Judah. But righteous Hezekiah kept the king of Assyria from conquering Judah by giving him all the gold and silver from the temple of God (which his father had already given to the king of Assyria). After Hezekiah successfully convinced the king of Assyria not to conquer Judah, the king of Assyria continued to try to conquer Judah, as God had commanded him, until God got him killed.

Hezekiah got sick, and God sent a prophet to tell him that he would never recover. But Hezekiah successfully convinced the never-changing God to change his mind, and so he recovered anyway.

Men from Babylon came to visit Hezekiah, and he showed them all the treasure and stuff he owned. The prophet told Hezekiah that now that the Babylonians knew about all that treasure, they were going to steal it all some day. And they would kidnap and castrate some of Hezekiah’s descendants. Righteous Hezekiah said he didn’t mind that, since he wouldn’t be around when it happened.

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The End of the Independent Hebrew Kingdoms →
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The Story of the Good Kings of Judah—
No Rest for the Righteous

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After Queen Athaliah was murdered, she was replaced by the seven-year-old king Joash. He reigned for 40 years, doing what was right. Joash had two wives, and he wouldn’t worship God or listen to his prophets. God got Joash severely wounded in battle, and then his own officials murdered him.

Joash was succeeded by his son Amaziah, who killed his father’s murderers. He reigned for 29 years, doing what was right. Just like his father, Amaziah wouldn’t worship God or listen to his prophets. So God got the king of Israel to attack Judah, and then Amaziah got murdered, too.

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No Rest for the Righteous →
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The Story of Jonah and the Fish—
It was This Big!

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God told a prophet named Jonah to go to the Assyrian city of Nineveh and announce that it would be destroyed soon. But Jonah knew God well enough to know that he wouldn’t actually do what he said he would do. Jonah didn’t think it would be right to deliver a false prophecy, so he ran away from God and hid on a ship that was going somewhere else.2

But God sent a storm, which nearly wrecked the ship. The sailors found out that Jonah had angered his God and brought a storm on their ship. So Jonah suggested they throw him overboard, to divert God’s wrath away from the ship. But the sailors didn’t want to kill him. They tried to sail back and return him to land, so he could resume his mission.

But God liked Jonah’s idea better, so he made the storm worse and prevented them from getting back to land. So the sailors reluctantly threw Jonah overboard, and the storm stopped. God sent a huge fish, which swallowed Jonah and then threw him up on land three days later.

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It was This Big! →
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The Story of Elisha and the Mean Boys—
God Rescues His Servant From Persecution

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The life of Elijah the prophet ended when God took him up to heaven in a whirlwind. He was succeeded by his servant Elisha, who gained the ability to do miracles like Elijah had done. As Elisha was walking along, a bunch of boys saw him and started making fun of him because he was bald. This bothered Elisha, so he stopped to put a curse on them. Then God sent two bears out of the woods to maul the mean little boys, so the bald prophet could continue on his way without anyone reminding him that he was bald.

The end.

The moral of the story

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God Rescues His Servant From Persecution →
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The Story of the Two Prophets—
An Expensive Meal

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During the reign of Jeroboam, God sent a prophet to deliver a message to the king. After ignoring the prophecy, the king invited the prophet to his home for a meal. But the prophet refused Jeroboam’s offer, because God had told him not to eat or drink until he got back to his own home.

On the way home, the prophet met an old prophet. The old prophet also invited him to have a meal, and the younger prophet explained again that he had to wait till he got home to eat. But the old prophet lied and told him that God wanted him to eat and drink with him. So the younger prophet went to the old prophet’s house and ate and drank. Then the old prophet declared that the younger prophet had disobeyed God and would be punished. The younger prophet tried to go home, but God sent a lion after him, and it killed him.

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An Expensive Meal →
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