“He will wave his hand over the River with his mighty wind; He will split it into seven streams and allow people to cross it in sandals. Thus there will be a highway for the remnant of his people that remains from Assyria, as there was for Israel when he came up from the land of Egypt.” (Isaiah 11:15b-16, Quinn-Miscall p.99)
Isaiah’s references turn from Genesis to Exodus in the last few verses of Chapter 11, and he returns to metaphors of water. Now the Assyrian flood predicted in Chapter 8 has come and gone. The Tigris and Euphrates have flooded the land of Judah up to the neck before God turned them back. But the Northern Kingdom was swept away in that flood.
Isaiah says in 11:15-16 that God will reverse this disaster. Instead of the rivers rising up, they will dry out. God’s people will return walking on dry land. This highway is “for the remnant” “from Assyria.” Isaiah mentions other highways in other parts of his book – it’s practically a road map. In 19:23 a highway runs “from Egypt to Assyria.” And in 40:3 Isaiah starts a new section of his book with the description of “a highway for our God” in the desert.
Through the end of the book from Isaiah 40, the prophet builds heavily on the theme of the Exodus. God will lead his people down a road, out from slavery to the Empire, and this road may wander and stall, but it ultimately leads home. God is an engineer, removing the obstacles of nature from His children’s path: “Thus says the Lord, who makes a road through the sea and a path in powerful waters, who leads out chariot and horse with an army of powerful warriors.” (43:16-17 Quinn-Miscall p.73)
I never realized just how many Nativity stories translocate God’s people, usually with long journeys on highways. Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, of course, but before that Mary traveled to her pregnant cousin Elizabeth, and after, Joseph and Mary fled Herod’s wrath to Egypt. The Wise Men traveled west, possibly on the same roads Isaiah envisaged the remnant returning from the eastern empire of Assyria. And when the Holy Family traveled home to Nazareth, they traveled on Isaiah’s roads according to Hosea’s words, as “out of Egypt have I called my son.” (Hosea 11:1) God moves His people around the world for His purposes.
In the book titled for the original journey, Exodus, God tells us why He is doing this, and the reason is another of Isaiah’s themes: “knowledge.” God says at least four times in Exodus that he is liberating His people so that they, and their oppressors, may know that He is God:
- In Exodus 6:7, “that children of Israel may know … that I am in the Lord your God, who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians”;
- In 7:5 and 14:4, “that the Egyptians may know that I am the Lord”; and
- My favorite in 9:14, “that Pharoah may know there is none like me in all the Earth.”
YHWH is not just revealing Himself to His people, but to the most powerful person on the planet, because He is much more than a tribal god. Isaiah sees this when he reads Exodus, and it’s part of the reason why he’s so insistent that God offers this knowledge to the cosmos.
In Isaiah 63:12 God repeats this theme from Exodus, that He saves so the world may know Him through His specific and eternal name: “Who made his glorious arm march at Moses’s right hand? Who split the waters before them to make for himself an everlasting name?” (Quinn-Miscall, p. 100)
And God promises He will be with you on the Exodus road: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.” (Isaiah 43:2) God is with us fully in his Son, Immanuel, “God-With-Us.” He has moved along many paths in the past – just look at all the miles Mary and baby Jesus traveled both before and after His birth! He is walking with us now, and he waits in the future where the path ends.
Paul writes in his letters that God has performed this new Exodus through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. When Paul mentions water, slavery, or kingdoms, he’s often referring to Exodus at some level. For example, Paul refers to a highway between two kingdoms when he says that God has “delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of his love” (Colossians 1:13 ASV)
The verb “translated,” or even “transposed,” hides a connection back to Isaiah 11 in the original Greek. The Greek word is “methistémi” which is made from the prefix “meta-“ meaning with, beyond, and/or after, and the verb “histemi” meaning stand. In the Greek text of Isaiah 11:10, the “root shall rise up” when also uses a version of the verb “histemi.”
Paul says God performs a “meta-standing” on us, and Isaiah in the Greek says God performs an “up-standing” on the root of Jesse. It’s the same basic movement. Paul’s Greek word says we are raised up to stand with Jesus, transposed up from the kingdom of death to stand in the kingdom of life. This goes all the way back to Isaiah 7:9, where God says “stand firm.” He is able to make you stand, and to change your standing from one kingdom to another. The process of change is like a road.
The road Jesus walked is described in the Gospels, and it can be a hard road. You have to take up your cross and follow Him uphill. As you walk this road, you’ll end up caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Cry out and wait for the Spirit to make a way. This is God’s road every step of the way. You walk in God’s strength to work out God’s salvation, and at the end of the road, there is a song – in Exodus, in Luke, and in Isaiah, too.
(Image: https://www.boredpanda.com/disappearing-road-passage-du-gois-france/ )
