Isaiah Week Three: The Lie of Self-Sufficiency

As I was thinking about the next blog post, I couldn’t get away from Isaiah 2:22. It says, “Stop regarding man in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he?” However, I knew that couldn’t be the whole post. Still, it kept rolling around my head as I thought through the second chapter of Isaiah. Why shouldn’t we regard man? Earlier in the chapter, Isaiah records, “You have rejected your people, the house of Jacob, because they are full of things from the east and fortune-tellers like the Philistines….Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots. Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hand” (Is. 2:6-8).

Think about that devolution of a society. First, they make ungodly alliances and allow those who do not believe in God to influence them and their outlook on the future. Next, they can provide for all their own needs so there is no urgency for them to trust God. Third, they can protect themselves. They have all the soldiers and military might needed. Finally, they completely turn to other gods. They bow down to the works of their own hands. They end in false worship but notice just as terribly, they end in self-sufficiency.

I don’t think I need to point out the obvious correlations between Isaiah’s day and modern America (or many other nations). We have invented a world in which God is perceived as superfluous. Why do we need him when we have the works of our own hands? And yet we don’t have to look very hard to see the unstable foundations and anxious spirits. In our moments of honesty and when we’re not distracted by the constant noise around us, we have to admit that we understand our insufficiency. We understand the fallibility of our efforts. A few verses later Isaiah issues this warning, “And the haughtiness of man shall be humbled, and the lofty pride of men shall be brought low, and the LORD alone will be exalted in that day. And the idols shall utterly pass away” (Is. 2:17).

Isaiah had already clarified that the idols were the work of man’s hands. Verse seventeen isn’t just saying all other idols will be destroyed. It is also highlighting the very important fact that in the end, all self-sufficiency will be exposed as useless. They will be destroyed in the face of the only eternal, self-existent, self-sufficient, holy One. It is no light choice that Isaiah says the LORD (Jehovah) alone will be exalted. In contrast to the paltry efforts of human initiative, the One who is fully sufficient will remain.

If in the end, the only One who will endure is Christ and the “splendor of his majesty” then it makes perfect sense that Isaiah ends the chapter with the charge to “stop regarding man.” There is nothing more transient than breath. It depends on a life-source, it can be stopped so suddenly, it can be hindered. When someone’s life ends, so does their breath. Beyond that though, in Genesis we find that God “Breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). We are only living creatures because the very author of life gave us breath to begin with.

On a practical level, what does this mean? How do we “stop regarding man?” Some possibilities include, that we no longer exalt what man, a fallible, transient, uncertain, created being thinks as more important than truth found in Scripture. We stop looking for validation from everyone else, especially the lost who do not know Christ. We stop looking for intrinsic worth and purpose in only those things below the sun (or without the Son). I’m not saying that this is easy. After all, no one wants to be disliked, ridiculed, or excluded. We spend a not insignificant portion of our lives trying to make friends and find our proverbial people. We were made for relationship. However, when we ignore that this ultimately means we were made for God and instead try to find satisfaction in temporal friendships, we miss the stable and eternal foundation upon which we could build our lives.

If you’re rushing around trying to make everyone happy and looking to conform...stop. Don’t settle for man who has breath – instead, seek the One who gave us his breath in the beginning. The work of our hands will fail. Our self-sufficiency has a terminal date. He will be the only One exalted and the only One who remains. Stop. Seek his face, and find rest for your soul.