The Way God Speaks

7.16.2011

Isaiah 28:11 11 Very well then, with foreign lips and strange tongues God will speak to this people… NIV

Jesus Christ said, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.” (John 6:63 NIV) He also said, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” (John 3:6) When Jesus said these things He shed light on the fact that there is a spiritual realm that the natural man has no access to: what is of the spirit is not what is of the flesh. In other words, we need to be in the spirit in order to understand the things of the Spirit.

What God was saying to Judah through Isaiah the prophet was that since they wouldn’t listen to their own prophets and priests, He would speak to them through the strange tongues of a foreign people. God is not limited to including just His people in the conversation.

We might possibly take this in two ways. We might take it that God was going to speak to His people through the words and actions their conquering enemies – or through discipline. Or we might take it that God was going to speak to His people through other peoples who’d believed in Him when His own didn’t. God’s plans and purposes usually don’t wait around very long for us to make up our minds. It’s not that God’s impatient; it’s that His purposes don’t seem to tolerate apathy. It’s one thing for us to need time to be convinced; it’s quite another for us to vacillate once we’ve been given the truth. God seemed to be fed up with trying to convince His people of His own goodness and presence when they’d chosen to largely ignore Him.

God seems to have taken a different tack with us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit representing the Person of Jesus Christ. But the watchword is this: beware of apathy – it’ll get you nowhere with God. Hebrews 13.8 states, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” If the Second Person of the Trinity is the same, then it goes that the Other Two are as well: never-changing! The fruit of apathy today is the same as it was then: bitter.

God will get His message across to us and He will use many means, including others, to do it – we just have to be open to recognize that and to be about the business of listening to Him daily through His word and the counsel and fellowship of other believers. Sometimes people will say strange or foreign things to us we don’t (or can’t) understand. When that happens, we need to go to God and ask for translation that we may learn and grow in His grace.