Fear is spreading through Jerusalem like a fever, everyone catching it from everyone else, until "conspiracy" is the word on every tongue. Into that atmosphere God speaks to Isaiah with a strong hand upon him and warns him 11"not to walk in the way of this people." Panic is contagious, and Isaiah is told not to catch it.
12"Do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread." The remedy is fear redirected: the LORD of hosts is to be honored as holy: 13"Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread." The goal is a heart with one thing left to fear, God himself, and that one fear has a way of shrinking the rest.
Then comes a sentence in which God does something almost unsettling. He will become 14"a sanctuary and a stone of offense and a rock of stumbling." The same God, met by two different people, becomes two different things. For one he is a sanctuary, a refuge nothing outside can touch. For the other he is a stone lying in the road, tripping feet that never watched for it. What changes between the two encounters is only the posture of the one walking toward him.
Isaiah does not force his message on a people determined to refuse it. 16"Bind up the testimony; seal the teaching among my disciples." He entrusts the word to a small, faithful circle, trusting that a sealed message can be opened later by someone ready to receive it. He says 17"I will wait for the LORD," though the LORD is hiding his face from Jacob's house. Waiting is its own act of faith, choosing to trust a God who currently seems absent.
Then comes the alternative the crowd is reaching for. They say to consult the mediums and necromancers, and Isaiah answers with a question: 19"Should not a people inquire of their God?" Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
20"To the teaching and to the testimony!" The revelation already given still stands. Every other source of guidance that ignores God's word ends in the same place, darkness deepening the longer it is pursued, until people who once feared a conspiracy are cursing their king and their God and looking to heaven and earth and finding only 22"distress and darkness."
Centuries later Paul and Peter both reach for this image of a stone (Romans 9:33; 1 Peter 2:8) and apply it to Christ. The same person met by two hearts becomes exactly what Isaiah described, a sanctuary for everyone who trusts him and an unavoidable stumbling block for everyone who does not. No one who meets him walks away unaffected. The question this passage leaves is which of the two you have made him.
Ask what fear you have caught from the people around you this month, and whether it is bigger than the fear of the LORD.
Prayer
Father, we have let the fears spreading around us become our own, and forgotten that only one fear was meant to steady us. Be our sanctuary. Where we have been tempted to seek guidance anywhere but your word, bring us back to the teaching and the testimony. Let us wait for you, even when your face feels hidden, and hope in you until the dawn we cannot yet see. In Jesus' name, amen.