Audio Transcript
We were just in Isaiah 56:4–5 on Monday, looking at a promise given that applies to couples who are sorrowfully facing infertility. Now, just a couple of chapters later in our reading plan, we read Isaiah 58 this week as well. So, it’s a good time to tackle this challenging question from an anonymous man.
“Hello, Tony and Pastor John. Thank you both for the podcast! It’s been such a blessing to my life and countless others. My question is about Isaiah 58:2–3, where the people are described as seeking God daily and delighting to draw near to him. On the surface, this sounds very much in line with the idea of Christian Hedonism — finding our greatest joy in God. But despite their religious activities, God rejects them for being self-centered, saying they ‘seek [their] own pleasure’ (Isaiah 58:3).
“So, how do we reconcile this apparent contradiction? How can these people delight in God and yet still be forsaken for selfishness? It seems like the issue here is that their seeking God was self-serving, but I’m curious about how we as Christians can delight in God without falling into this trap. How does a Christian Hedonist live out this dynamic, balancing the joy of delighting in God without becoming self-centered? Thank you for your thoughts!”
It seems to me that most apparent contradictions in the Bible are intended by God to protect us from careless uses of some precious truth. When we make an exciting discovery in the Bible, we are very prone to carry that discovery in a direction that it was never intended to go, and then we bump into a statement in the Bible that seems to contradict the discovery itself. But after looking carefully at the context, we realize that the apparently contradictory statement wasn’t intended to nullify the discovery that we had made, which is true, but to protect us from misusing it. So, that’s the principle that I think lies behind texts like this one in Isaiah 58 (and many others).
Hidden Lusts
Isaiah 58:1–3 says,
Declare to my people their transgression,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet they seek me daily
and delight to know my ways,
as if [That’s crucial: “as if”] they were a nation that did righteousness
and did not forsake the judgment of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments;
they delight to draw near to God.
“Why have we fasted, and you see it not?
Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?”
And here’s God’s answer. “Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers.” So, what’s the situation here? It says they delight to draw near to God, they delight to know his ways as if they did righteousness, and they seek pleasure while oppressing their workers. What should we make of this? It’s very strange.
“The human heart is so deceptive that it can cloak God-dishonoring attitudes with an outward show of enjoying God.”
What we should make of it is that they are hypocrites. They’re not delighting in God’s ways, because God’s ways are not to oppress his workers. So, what are they doing? They are enjoying worship services. The worship songs and the atmosphere and the fellowship are fun, pleasurable, just like TV is fun. When the worship songs say, “I delight in God,” they sing, “I delight in God.” But Isaiah 58:3 makes it plain they don’t, because it says, “You seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers” — which means you are not finding pleasure in mercy and justice, which are God’s ways. Your so-called delight in God is not overflowing in treating your employees with love and justice. You are seeking your private pleasures at the expense of your workers. You are seeking your private pleasures on Sunday morning in worship services. You are seeking your private pleasures in the way you treat your employees. That’s the way Isaiah 58 opens.
Godly Delights
Now, here’s the way the chapter ends. It comes back around to the same issue. It goes like this:
If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath,
from doing your pleasure on my holy day,
and call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth. (Isaiah 58:13–14)
Very strange. God promises, “If you will stop turning my Sabbath into a day of your own, private, self-indulgent pleasures, and instead count the Sabbath a delight as I designed it, then you will delight in the Lord.” So, all this apparent indictment of delight in Isaiah 58 is not an indictment of true enjoyment of God and his ways. Rather, it’s an indictment of personal self-indulgence that does not truly delight in God for who he is, nor does it delight in doing good to others. Delight is not the problem here. Pleasure is not the problem. The problem is that they were not really delighting in God or his ways.
So, the apparent contradiction to Christian Hedonism is that Christian Hedonism says, “Delight yourself in the Lord” (Psalm 37:4), delight in being merciful (Hosea 6:6–8), show compassion with cheerfulness (Romans 12:8), and find your joy in the joy of others (Acts 20:35) — not by oppressing them. And then, along comes an apparent contradiction: Sinners delight in the Lord; sinners seek their own pleasure. But then we discover by looking carefully at the context that the function of that apparent contradiction is to warn us that the human heart is so deceptive that it can even cloak private, self-indulgent, people-oppressing, God-dishonoring attitudes with an outward show of enjoying God in worship and making much of his ways.
Mature Love
There are very similar warning texts in the New Testament that sound like contradictions also. For example, Romans 15:1–2: “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” Or 1 Corinthians 10:33: “I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved.” Or 1 Corinthians 10:24: “Let no one seek his own but that of his neighbor” (author’s translation). It doesn’t say what you’re seeking; just don’t seek your own. It’s exactly the same as 1 Corinthians 13:5, which says, “Love seeks not its own” (author’s translation).
Now, a careless reading of each of those texts would say, “Well, I guess it’s wrong to seek my own happiness — instead, I should seek the good of others.” That’s what you would think: “Well, you can’t do both. It must be the one or the other.” Now, that would be a careless reading, not only because we are commanded so many times in the Bible to seek our own joy in God, but also because it totally ignores that a person might find his own happiness in doing good to others. You don’t choose between the two: “Do I seek my own happiness, or do I seek the good of others?” What if you found your own happiness in doing good to others? This is exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
Now, what all those texts are warning against is seeking our own private good, limited to ourselves, indifferent to whether anybody else is included in it or not. Christian Hedonism says, “What makes the pursuit of my pleasure an act of love is that I’m willing to suffer in order to include as many people in it as I can. I want them to taste and experience the very joy that I am pursuing in suffering for them to bring them with me.”
So, thank God for apparent contradictions in the Bible that wake us up to how easily we can miss precious truth and misuse precious truth.
