“For though your people, O Israel, be as the sand of the sea, a remnant of them will return; the destruction decreed shall overflow with righteousness.” (Isaiah 10:22, Hebrew text)
“Even if the number of Israel’s sons are like the sand by the sea, only a remnant shall be saved; for the Lord will bring judgment on the earth, complete and decisive.” (Romans 9:27b-28, New Testament for Everyone)
There’s been four children so far in Isaiah 6-12, with one more to come in Chapter 11. There’s one we passed that I didn’t mention at the time, because he’s probably not a child anymore, but his name resonates with a key image in Isaiah 10 and 11.
In Isaiah 7:3, at God’s first message to Ahaz, God tells Isaiah to take his first son with him. That son’s name is Shear Yashub, ū·šə·’ār yā·šūḇ, which means “Remnant-will-Return.” From the first meeting with Ahaz, Isaiah’s son’s presence speaks from silence that there will come a harrowing, then hope. Bad news, and good news. A remnant, but they will return.
Isaiah repeats his son’s name, “remnant,” again and again near the end of his judgment on Assyria. The noun is repeated five times in 10:19-22 and two more times in chapter 11 (also occurring twice there as the verb “will remain”). The noun occurs only about two dozen times in the whole Hebrew Bible, and seven of them are on these few pages. Verse 21 says it twice: “The remnant will return, the remnant of Jacob, to the Mighty God.” Another child’s name speaks here: “Mighty God” is the third name of the child in Isaiah 9:6. The remnant promised by Isaiah’s first son will return to the Third Child of this prophecy, who is born “unto us.”
The next verse, Isaiah 10:22 (above), is quoted by Paul in Romans 9:27-28. Paul says in the present tense, “Isaiah calls out” this verse. If Isaiah was still speaking 700 years later to the Romans, he is also still speaking today to us. Isaiah and Paul together say a remnant will be saved by learning to lean on YHWH. God, the Mighty One, who will work decisively, ending his spoken sentence with a full stop.
Both Paul and Isaiah emphasize the severity of the cutbacks and the small size of the remnant. But they also both insist that God will make it grow again. In Romans 9:29 Paul quotes Isaiah 1:9, again using the Greek text, saying that this remnant is also a seed, that will someday grow. In Isaiah 11, a shoot will sprout from the stump of Jesse.
The seed is tiny, and is found among a small, shattered group. Paul’s letters were written to small churches dispersed in an Empire, and he tells these people meeting in their houses that “you are how God chooses to work.”
Paul also points out to them that this is nothing new. In Isaiah, God made his ways and glory known through remnants and children. We are remnants. We walk a straight and narrow path, we must enter the Kingdom of God as a child, and we are told to stand firm but not arrogantly, not on our own but on God.
My community of God’s people, Bethany Community Church, has endured times of darkness and loss. I’m struggling with the feeling right now that we, especially our younger members, are a remnant after the “exile” that was COVID. As I struggle, I’m remembering two experiences of the dark that our church has lived through, both involving pastors named Scott, weirdly enough. Neither of these stories has a happy ending, not yet. Both are examples of trusting that God is at work even in incomprehensible loss, when all that’s left is a remnant.
The more recent of the two examples was when fire took our sister church’s home before they could even move in. On the night of December 8, 2021, a fire broke out at the former Family Fun Center in Edmonds, WA. The mini-amusement park had closed down during the COVID pandemic, but it was being converted into a church building by the Bethany Community Church North congregation. A group of volunteers had put months of work into tearing out the old arcade and building in the structures needed for worship. Pastor Scott Sund described this fire in a sermon:
“We had been a mobile church at that point for maybe 12 years and we had rented, not owned, this building with a three-year lease. It still had putt putt golf outside — how great will this be? — and a play area for kids and a huge area to worship God. It was going to make so much sense and then the fire burned the building, it was deemed utterly worthless … as the staff and volunteers from the church gathered that December 8 morning of 2021 and stood in a circle, it was broken glass all around us, and we cried and we prayed and we sang the Doxology and our hearts were broken. God, why do things burn? Why do things break?” (At 1:04 in Bethany Green Lake service on December 10, 2023, Facebook)
As I write this, Bethany North is still a mobile church, still wandering as a remnant. Pastor Scott and the congregation watched their work dissolve into nothing, and we still don’t know why the fire even started. But they continue to seek God’s will for a church home.
In 2007, our church had suffered an earlier hard loss. Associate Pastor Scott Becker, who had mentored me for many years, lost his life as pancreatic cancer consumed his body. He was 46, younger than I am now. I can’t even wrap my head around that simple fact that for the rest of my life, he will stay 46 in my memory, until I go to meet him, as I have passed him in years.
This Pastor Scott taught me Romans, blowing me away each week with how much he unfolded from a text I thought I knew. I remember several things Scott showed us as we met in a house like the original Roman church:
- Romans 9-11, including Paul’s citation of Isaiah 10:22, is not incidental but central to Paul’s and God’s purposes. So I cite Scott as the one who opened these scriptures to me.
- The sheer beauty of the end Romans 11, when Paul practically bursts into song: “How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!” (11:33)
- The key role of Romans 15:7 as the endpoint of Paul’s argument, which I had previously completely overlooked: “receive one another, as Christ also received you.” (Berean LB)
In 2003, Pastor Scott had heard a call to earn a Ph.D. and moved to California to do so. He never finished it. As he studied, he wrote a blog about his health struggles called Aufhebung, which is still live at https://aufhebung1.blogspot.com/. I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what “aufhebung” meant, but thankfully Scott explained in a December 11, 2006 post, and it means something like a fire:
“It can signify an act of lifting something up, removing it, moving it forward, destroying it, transforming it. This ambiguity makes it a handy word … sooner than I wish, I myself will be abolished and lifted up. I don’t even know what this means—I don’t think anyone on one side of an Aufhebung can see what lies on the other. … This is perhaps the consummation of every truthful and liberating turn I’ve been granted throughout my life up to this point.”
Earthly consummation happened in 2007, when Scott’s body was consumed, far too soon, as his own rebellious cells turned against him. In 2021, the nighttime fire consumed Bethany North’s church building, far too soon, before it could even open its doors for Christmas services. The Assyrian fire consumed the Kingdom of Israel in 721BC, and the Babylonian fire consumed the Kingdom of Judah in 587BC.
Isaiah warns Israel that desire will, like a fire, eat everything up. Other countries “shall devour Israel with open mouth” (10:12) and the misled people are “swallowed up.” (10:16) Wickedness will “devour” like a brush fire (10:18), and the Israelites’ “hunger” will set brother against brother, so the tribes will consume each other (9:20-21). As Paul warns the Galatians, “if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another!” (Galatians 5:15 NKJV)
But later, Isaiah uses the same word as in 9:16, when he predicts something else will be “swallowed up.” Isaiah 25:7-8 reads, “On this mountain he will swallow up the shroud that is over all the peoples, the woven covering that is over all the nations; he will swallow up death permanently. The sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from every face, and remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. Indeed, the LORD has announced it!” (NET Bible)
I sit here with cutbacks, silences, and absences — little “aufhebungs” — all around. The two tragedies of the two Pastors Scott are only two of many in the life of my church. We poured out like water, and burned up to ash.
In the middle of the storm, when you can’t understand, will you simply endure? And then when it’s something your body can’t endure, like pancreatic cancer, to trust beyond even that? To believe that a remnant of yourself, your soul, will endure beyond your ability to hold it together, kept safe by your Everlasting Father?
In a world of consumption and desire, Isaiah said that fires will burn. Later, Isaiah turned to a remnant of a nation – whose country had, in fact, been burned! – and he said, “when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” (42:3 NRSV)
If God’s words are true, then the things that can burn, even flesh and blood, are not really “you.” The corruptible will put on incorruptibility and the Great Consumer will be himself consumed. Through Isaiah and Paul, God spoke of both this incomprehensible fire and this incomprehensible hope together. How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out, indeed.
