If you saw the President's State of the Union Address, you saw a biblical principle in action. I didn't see it because I was engaged in something that was having eternal consequences--I was teaching the Gospel of Mark in a GBS class. And, truth be told, I'd forgotten the oration was going to be on TV. But I read about the event and did so with interest because it illustrated a principle Isaiah announced to and about Israel.
Since context is king, we need to put the principle into its context. The prophet is telling Israel of its disobedience and about how God is going to discipline their nation. God does discipline cities and nations like Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and even Israel herself.
There are various ways God may choose to discipline a nation. One of the ways He disciplined Israel is a little-mentioned one, but Isaiah wrote about it.
But first, what did you see and what was it I heard about at the State of the Union Address? From what I read and you saw, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, making sure a TV camera was pointed her way, sliced and diced the President's written speech for all the world to see. (Some say that action is against the law, the law forbidding damaging, taking, or shredding official documents. That's another aspect of the event.)
At its minimum, it was an act of disrespect. But biblically speaking it was more than that; it was an example of one way God is signaling that a nation is in the divine woodshed of discipline. How so? Because it was an act of immaturity, a childish display, not suitable for adults and not proper for the dignity of the occasion.
But it's not only the immaturity of the Speaker of the House. Diana West wrote a book whose title tells us what's happening in our culture. She called it, "The Death of the Grown-Up." We see examples of the death of the grown-up in living color all around us: television programing is puerile, movies are adolescent (e. g. superheroes), and periodicals with a surfeit of articles, pictures, and quotes from and about vacuous celebrities, as in "People Magazine."
We read about immaturity when our newspapers report brawls by parents at children's soccer, baseball, and football games. Then we turn the page and read about adults beating each other, shooting each other, and killing each other over a parking spot. We listen to immaturity when we hear the celebrities we worship ranting, raving, using language about a candidate, a Supreme Court judge, or an elected official, words which would embarrass a longshoreman at a heated union meeting.
Immaturity is all around us. We see puerile college students who disagree with a speaker, getting a group together and shouting at him, beating a drum while he's trying to speak, chanting obscenities at him, ringing bells, pulling fire alarms, blockading buildings, and heckling him until he can't be heard and has to have police protection to enter and leave the campus. Or we see and hear people who don't get their way who want to show everybody that they're upset, so they get up, storm out of the meeting, finding doors to slam along the way, accomplishing their childish purpose--to make themselves and their anger the center of attention.
What does Isaiah have to do with all this and with the Speaker of the House and what occurred after the State of the Union Address? Listen to what the prophet announced to Israel as one of the disciplinary actions God had for Israel:
"And I will make mere lads their princes, and capricious children will rule over them."
That wasn't a prophecy about America, but we can learn from it because it shows us a principle regarding how God may choose to discipline a nation: their leaders will be as immature as children.
You saw and I read about that principle in action.
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