Former Ignorance - Future Knowledge (Part 1)

Pastor Bill Farrow

Isaiah 28:11-13

¹¹For with stammering lips and another tongue He will speak to this people,  ¹²To whom He said, “This is the rest with which You may cause the weary to rest,” And, “This is the refreshing”; Yet they would not hear.  ¹³But the word of the Lord was to them, “Precept upon precept, precept upon precept, Line upon line, line upon line, Here a little, there a little,” That they might go and fall backward, and be broken And snared and caught.

Isaiah 28:11

For - This verse is to be understood as a response to what the complaining and dissatisfied people had said, as expressed in the previous verse. God says that he will teach them, but it should be by another tongue - a foreign language in a distant land. Since they refused to hearken to the messages which he sent to them, and which they regarded as adapted only to children, he would teach them in a manner that should be “much more” humiliating; he would make use of the barbarous language of foreigners to bring them to the true knowledge of God.

With stammering lips and another tongue will He speak to this people - The word which is used here is derived from a verb which means to speak unintelligibly: especially to speak in a foreign language, or to stammer; and then to mock, deride, laugh at, scorn (compare Isa. 33:19; Prov. 1:26; 17:5; Ps. 2:4; 59:9; Job 22:19). Here it means in a foreign or barbarous tongue; and the sense is, that the lessons which God wished to teach would be conveyed to them through the language of foreigners - the Chaldeans. They should be removed to a distant land, and there, in hearing a strange speech, in living long among foreigners, they should learn the lesson which they refused to do when addressed by the prophets in their own land.

How severely God would reckon with them for this. He would deprive them of the privilege of plain preaching, and speak to them with stammering lips and another tongue, v. 11. Those that will not understand what is plain and level to their capacity, but despise it as mean and trifling, are justly amused with that which is above them. Or God will send foreign armies among them, whose language they understand not, to lay their country waste. Those that will not hear the comfortable voice of God’s word shall be made to hear the dreadful voice of his rod. Or these words may be taken as denoting God’s gracious condescension to their capacity in his dealing with them; he lisped to them in their own language, as nurses do to their children, with stammering lips, to humor them; he changed his voice, tried first one way and then another; the apostle quotes it as a favor (1 Co. 14:21), applying it to the gift of tongues, and complaining that yet for all this they would not hear.

Since the drunkards would not listen to God’s prophet, He responded to them by predicting their subservience to Assyrian taskmasters, who would give them instructions in a foreign language. The NT divulges an additional meaning of this verse that anticipates God’s use of the miraculous gift of tongues as a credential of His NT messengers.  The problem with Israel was the same in Jesus time as it was in Isaiah’s, in fact, that problem beset Israel for their entire history - they did not wish to listen to their God and, instead, pursued their religions in their own fashion and according to their own righteousness.  As in Isaiah’s day, God had to use other means to speak to them because they were not listening to the means that He originally desired to use.  Ultimately, this was manifest in the coming of Christ and the ordination of Christianity and dissolution of formal Judaism as a means of approaching God.  As He used the “stammering lips and other tongues of the Assyrians and the Babylonians to speak to the Israel of Isaiah’s day, so also would he use the stammering lips and other tongues of Gentiles as they were enabled miraculously to speak in whatever language was needful to communicate the Gospel.  The ultimate promises that at the time of the end, they will finally listen and come to Him.