Leftovers 01: Isaiah 8

Welcome to Leftovers - a place to put all the stuff I didn’t get to in the sermon, but I still thought was cool - and maybe you’d wanna know about as well.

We are marching through the ancient prophecy of Isaiah looking for every place where the prophet mentions the coming Promised One. What would He be like? What would He do? What should we look for and expect?

But, along the way, we may wind up skipping some pretty great stuff… cool moments in Isaiah’s prophecy that aren’t exactly about Jesus, but are still exciting, encouraging, enriching, etc.

In today’s leftovers, we are going to talk Hebrew poetry. Follow me down the nerd rabbit hole as we explore inverted symmetry! (Don’t let the big words trip you up. Just hang in there… all will be explained, hopefully.)

First, let’s talk about poetry… specifically, songwriting. When I was a kid growing up in the 80’s and watching music videos on MTV and VH1, I loved all the most popular songs of the moment. I loved Huey Lewis, the Bangles, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and on and on. One of my favorite music videos was Paul Simon’s hit “You Can Call Me Al”.

To my seven-year-old mind, this was the perfect pop song. It was catchy, it had a great hook and Chevy Chase was hilarious in the video pretending to play the saxophone. Years later, when I began attempting songwriting myself, I realized this song was actually an extremely complex and vulnerable masterpiece of poetry.

In the song, Paul Simon gives us the painful, confusing and inescapable reality of middle age - your body changing, the funkiness in your personality galvanizing (maybe against your will) and your general life experiences shrinking down around you until you break out and find some avenues into a different life.. and he does this with one little repeating theme… ready for it?

“A man walks down the street…”

That’s it. That little line. He is going to create and paint so much coolness off of that little motif.

Verse 1: “A man walks down the street, he says, “Why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?”

WHOA. Wasn’t that awesome?! He uses two different meanings of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ without changing lines and without breaking a sweat. His character’s physical midsection is getting soft to the touch, but life - his issues and struggles feel difficult, so he uses the word ‘hard’. Brilliant.

Verse 2: “A man walks down the street, he says, “Why am I so short of attention? Got a short little span of attention, and whoa my nights are so long…”

Again! Two meanings of ‘short’ and ‘long’ in one line!!

But then our aging and frustrated hero books a flight to go on some foreign trip - an international adventure to expand his experience!

Verse 3: “A man walks down the street, it’s a street in a strange world, maybe it’s the third world, maybe it’s his first time around…”

DO YOU SEE what I’m saying?! Two different meanings of ‘Third’ and ‘first’ all packed into one line. Wow.

Poets are amazing. They take time. Even in smash hit pop songs featuring Chevy Chase. They figure out all the cool things words can do and how they can impact us when we take time to pay attention.

Okay… so, the Biblical authors were no different. These folks were poetic geniuses. Yes, they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, but don’t let that amazing spiritual fact take away from their artistic brilliance! They were incredible poets.

Hebrew poets loved repeated words. What’s more, they loved repeated themes. For them, talking about one concept in two different ways with similar but different words was just like rhyming sounds.. think of it as rhyming concepts. Hebrew poets wanted you to spend your whole life reading and then re-reading the Scriptures so that you got more and more goodness out of the experience every time you approached it.

These poets (like Isaiah) used a form of repetition called “inverted symmetry” to build depth and gravity into their poetry. Isaiah 8 contains an amazing example of this. Let’s check it out.

The poet wants to communicate several things that are happening because of the unfaithfulness of God’s people - their refusal to trust Him and wait for His help. So he builds a 5 point message… then repeats the same 5 point message in reverse order. (That’s inverted symmetry) Think of it like a flag that has five colors… red, orange, yellow, green and blue… blue is at the center… then we repeat blue, then green, then yellow, orange and lastly red once more. It’s a pattern that repeats in reverse order to emphasize, underline and highlight what’s important. Think of it like a mirror image sitting next to the original image.

Here’s how it works in Isaiah 8:

Verse 9 mirrors verses 21 and 22 - and they deal with government and societal collapse.

Verse 10 mirrors verses 19 and 20 - and they deal with bad advice sought and followed.

Verse 11 mirrors verses 16-18 - and they deal with people separated for the Lord’s word and work.

Verse 12 mirrors verse 15 - and they deal with what people fear and what their fate is.

Verse 13 mirrors verse 15 - and they deal with Who people should fear.

Verse 14 is the center - The Stone that causes stumbling (Jesus)

So, the verses collapse onto themselves like origami - a highly organized system explaining what happens to those who do and don’t trust the Lord… and the thought opens like a blooming flower right in front of your eyes and then closes again. The whole beautiful image is hinged on verse 14 where we actually find Jesus… the Stone - the inescapable reality that every heart must face and deal with. Wow!

At the center of every single person’s reality is a Person. He is the central reality. He is the unavoidable One. If you won’t deal with Him, trust Him, wait on Him, it will lead to placing hope, trust and fear in all the wrong places until finally the entire society collapses. This is exactly what Isaiah was watching happen all around him and he was able to paint it with these complex, intricate and symmetrical colors.

Why put all that poetical work in? Simply, He wants to grab someone’s attention… YOUR attention! He wants to wake up your mind and heart as you read. He wants to make you realize this isn’t just a simple pop song with a quirky music video… this is a brilliant exposition of the deep central matter of the human experience. We need the Cornerstone to come into our lives, trip us up and get us on a different track with Him so that we look at the rest of the world, their mistakes and fate and then decide to trust Him and let Him lead us and guide us instead of trying to find our own way.

- Lee