For thus the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, has said,
“In repentance and rest you will be saved,
In quietness and trust is your strength.”
But you were not willing (Isaiah 30:15).

God told the Israelites that they would receive salvation and strength by simply repenting and trusting in Him, not by planning and striving but by quietly resting in His providence. But they refused. They preferred to trust in their horses. They perferred to trust in their alliance with Egypt. What Israel failed to understand was that to trust in themselves was to reject the Lord, to trust in Egypt was to rebel against Him. 

Friends, oftentimes our immediate response to hardship is to take matters into our own hands. Instead of evaluating our hearts, we evaluate our situation. Instead of humbling ourselves in repentance, we try to become more resourceful. Rather than prayer to God, we seek other avenues for help. 

Yet, Israel had this promise from the LORD:

Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you,
And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
How blessed are all those who long for Him (Isaiah 30:18).

God desired to be gracious to Israel. He was eager to show them compassion. He wanted to bless them if they would only turn to Him rather than their own ingenuity and the assistance of foreign nations. 

Friends, the Lord is for us even more now than in the past. He gave us His own, most precious, one and only Son! How will He not also give us all things with Him. This is what Paul proclaims:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? (Romans 8:31-32).

Let us, therefore, rest in the Lord. Let us simply live by faith in Christ and obedience to His Word. Let us stop striving to make things work out just the way we want them to work out. Let us acknowledge that God is sovereign over every circumstance, even over every outcome. And let us worship Him in every circumstance.

See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who relies on it will never be striken with panic (Isaiah 28:16).

God's "tested stone" is contrasted with the lies upon which the leaders of Israel were basing their hope (cf. Isaiah 28:18). Rather than embracing God's provision and following God's commands, these leaders tried to forge their own security on the basis of man-made traditions and ritual. They even made a "covenant with death" to escape the scourge of death (cf. Isaiah 28:15), but God declared that this covenant would not hold and that they would be swept away in judgment (cf. Isaiah 28:18).

Now, we understand this "tested stone" to be Jesus (cf. 1 Peter 2:4-7), the "living Stone", through whom we are "being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God" (1 Peter 2:5). There is a definite contrast between what is man-made and what is spiritual, what is tradition and what is God's Word, what is merely ritual and what is true obedience.

It is in lining up with God's truth and God's provision in Christ that we find a sure foundation and freedom from everything that would make us afraid and panic. 

In the very next chapter Isaiah elaborates on his contrast of what is man-made versus what is spiritual, between human rules and God's truth:

The LORD says: "These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught" (Isaiah 29:13).

Jesus brought this indictment against the religious rulers when they criticized his disciples for failing to follow "the tradition of the elders" (Mark 7:5). Jesus' cited Isaiah 29 and gave this application: 

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions... You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!...Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down  (Mark 7:8-13).

The religious leaders of Jesus' day added hundreds of rules on top of the Law of God. While these may originally have been written to help people obey the Law of God, in many cases these rules became an unbearable burden on them and, over time, became equal to or even greater than the commands of God. 

Friends, we must be careful not to fall into this trap ourselves. It is sufficient to preach the Word of God and exhort believers to follow the Law of Christ. We must not be found to be adding to the Word of God our traditions, rituals and rules that compete with the incontestable and singular authority of God's Word. We must also resist the temptation to resurrect the Old Covenant Mosaic Law as though these regulations are still binding on believers today.

Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:16-17).

The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless... For if there had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another... By calling the covenant "new," he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear (Hebrews 7:18; 8:7,13).

When we understand this, then we can understand why it is wrong for us to insist that people tithe when they carry personal debt or when they need this money to support their parents or family. The tithe is an Old Covenant regulation and never commanded of Christians.

It is wrong to scold people for missing Sunday "church," as if Sunday was a kind of Christian Sabbath, which is never commanded of believers. The exhortation to meet regularly is based on a mistaken understanding of the language of Hebrews 10:25, where the expression "assembling of ourselves" has nothing to do with church meetings and everything to do with the gathering of believers in the rapture of the Church (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:1).

It is wrong to try to command Christians to follow the Old Covenant dietary laws or regulations regarding clothes or the management of slaves, etc. Remember, we are no longer under the Law but under grace (cf. Romans 6:14):

But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code (Romans 7:6).

Friends, instead of trying to reinstate the Law, let us encourage one another to study God's Word and rightly interpret this Word of truth (cf. 2 Timothy 2:15). Then every believer will know the Word of God for themselves and be personally accountable to God for correctly understanding and applying its truths to their lives.

Certain Bible passages may be confusing because it is unclear who is speaking. For example, we read in Isaiah 28:9-10,

"To whom would He teach knowledge,
And to whom would He interpret the message?
Those just weaned from milk?
Those just taken from the breast?
For He says,
'Order on order, order on order,
Line on line, line on line,
A little here, a little there.'"

Who's speaking here? Is it God, Isaiah or someone else? I believe the speakers are the drunken priests and prophets just described in Isaiah 28:7. I like the way the New Living Translation renders this passage:

“Who does the LORD think we are?” they ask.
“Why does he speak to us like this?
Are we little children,
just recently weaned?
He tells us everything over and over—
one line at a time,
one line at a time,
a little here,
and a little there!”

The religious leaders of Israel complain that God is treating and speaking to them like children, and they refuse to pay any attention to what the prophet tells them. In fact, the Hebrew literally reads Sav lasav, sav lasav, Kav lakav, kav lakav, Ze’ er sham, ze’ er sham, a series of Hebrew monosyllables that imitate the babblings of a child, thus, mocking the prophet's teaching.

Indeed, He will speak to this people
Through stammering lips and a foreign tongue (Isaiah 28:11).

Isaiah writes that since the people will not listen to God but simply mock His teaching, calling it childish babbling, God will, then, speak to them in the very way they are mocking Him, "through stammering lips and a foreign tongue." Of course these stammering lips and foreign tongue would come in the form of the Assyrian invaders that would be sent to judge the people of Israel. 

He who said to them, “Here is rest, give rest to the weary,”
And, “Here is repose,” but they would not listen.

Consequently, God's words were not childish babblings. It just sounded like it to the leaders of Israel because they were intoxicated by their own pride, their own ideas, and their own indulgence. God clearly told them to trust in Him and to promote justice, even to wait for His provision, but they refused to listen. Since they would not trust in the Lord and since they chose to mock His Word rather than carefully listen to and obey it, Isaiah writes,

So the word of the Lord to them will be,
“Sav lasav, sav lasav,
Kav lakav, kav lakav
Ze’ er sham, ze’ er sham” (Isaiah 28:13).

God will speak to them in the very manner in which they are mocking Him. Thus, they will not perceive, nor understand, nor turn from the error of their ways. Rather than finding rest and refreshing, they will encounter just the opposite:

That they may go and stumble backward, be broken, snared and taken captive (Isaiah28:13).

Since the people refused to listen to what God had to say, God would then speak to them in a manner they would not understand. Since they refused to heed God's clear word of mercy, they would be blindsided by God's word of judgment. If you recall, this is in keeping with Isaiah's original prophetic commission:

He [God] said, “Go and tell this people:

So now God will have to speak to his people through foreign oppressors who speak a strange language! (Isaiah 28:11 NLT)

Did you know that this verse in Isaiah is cited by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians? It is cited in the context of his discussion on the gift of speaking in tongues. Why is this significant? To understand Paul's use of this text in Corinthians, one must understand it in the context of Isaiah. In Isaiah it speaks of God's judgment, whether by the Assyrians or the Babylonians, who are foreign nations speaking a foreign tongue. Because God's people, and especially the leaders, have rejected God's message, He will speak to them again, but in a language they will not understand, by a foreign nation that will kill and destroy them and take the rest into exile. Now, consider how Paul uses this text in his argument in 1 Corinthians 14:

Dear brothers and sisters, don’t be childish in your understanding of these things. Be innocent as babies when it comes to evil, but be mature in understanding matters of this kind. It is written in the Scriptures: “I will speak to my own people through strange languages and through the lips of foreigners. But even then, they will not listen to me,” says the LORD. So you see that speaking in tongues is a sign, not for believers, but for unbelievers. Prophecy, however, is for the benefit of believers, not unbelievers. (1 Corinthians 14:20-22 NLT)

First, Paul rebukes the Corinthians for their ignorance and childishness with respect to tongues. He wants them to understand the reason why the gift of tongues was given in the first place. It was given as a witness against unbelieving Jews, even as a sign of judgment by the hands of foreign-speaking Gentiles. It was not, therefore, particularly when uninterpreted, meant for believers but for unbelievers, even unbelieving Jews. Therefore, it is not a gift that they should glory in and practice, especially in the congregation of believers. And I believe that this witness against Jewish unbelief was fulfilled in the first century; therefore, the gift ceased of itself. Therefore, what is practiced today is not the biblical gift but something else, and has been more the cause of false spirituality, division and a wrongful focus in the church. 

And so the Lord says,“These people say they are mine.They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And their worship of me is nothing but man-made rules learned by rote. (Isaiah 29:13 NLT)

Friends, please understand this. When the Bible condemns lip-service, it is not condemning the following of biblical rules. It is condemning a kind of hypocrisy, where what is said contradicts what is done. In other words, people may sing praises to God with their lips but then do acts of injustice toward their fellow brothers and sisters. This is what is condemned. What is condemned is not the letter of the Law versus the spirit of the Law but following man-made laws over God's laws. This needs to be clarified because some people preach and teach that God wants your heart-felt obedience over mere ritualistic obedience. This is not what the Bible teaches. Passages like Isaiah 29:13 is not about how you feel about your obedience, but true obedience over false obedience (i.e. disobedience). Jesus describes this very thing in a parable:

“But what do you think about this? A man with two sons told the older boy, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ The son answered, ‘No, I won’t go,’ but later he changed his mind and went anyway. Then the father told the other son, ‘You go,’ and he said, ‘Yes, sir, I will.’ But he didn’t go. “Which of the two obeyed his father?” They replied, “The first.” Then Jesus explained his meaning: “I tell you the truth, corrupt tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the Kingdom of God before you do. For John the Baptist came and showed you the right way to live, but you didn’t believe him, while tax collectors and prostitutes did. And even when you saw this happening, you refused to believe him and repent of your sins. (Matthew 21:28-32 NLT)

Therefore, let us clearly understand that God desires real obedience, not merely lip service. Don't just say you will obey Him. Do it! While it would be good if you do it in a heart-felt way, that is not the primary issue. In fact, if you obey God when you don't feel like it, that may be an even greater deed than if you obey Him when you feel like it.