Isaiah 48

In this chapter of Isaiah, God rails against the Israelites who have either been slow to respond or have not responded at all to His personal revelation in their lives: “I foretold the former things long ago, my mouth announced them and I made them known; then suddenly I acted, and they came to pass. For I knew how stubborn you were; your neck muscles were iron, your forehead was bronze. Therefore I told you these things long ago; before they happened I announced them to you so that you could not say, ‘My images brought them about; my wooden image and metal god ordained them.’ You have heard these things; look at them all. Will you not admit them?” (vs 3-6)

It seems God was right about the Israelites—that they were so stubborn in their thinking and hardened in their hearts that they would find every conceivable way possible of attributing God’s work to their own idols. (Hmmm, that doesn’t sound so different from what many of us still do today—myself included!)

God was having a difficult time “breaking through” to them, but He had a plan: “From now on I will tell you of new things, of hidden things unknown to you. They are created now, and not long ago; you have not heard of them before today. So you cannot say, ‘Yes, I knew of them.’” (vs 6-7)

God declares that He will make a progressive revelation of Himself. It will be progressive in two ways—first, it will be new information, things which have previously been hidden and unknown; second, it will be harder to “reject” than previous revelations.

This is precisely why I have written that, with God, it is not possible to be deceived. I tell my atheist friends not to worry about whether God exists, because if He does exist, and if He is as the Bible portrays Him, they will not be “in the dark” for long. He will make it more than clear to them that He’s alive and well! And I tell my Christian friends not to worry about whether they are holding to false doctrine, because if they are, they will not be “in the dark” for long. God will make it more than clear to them where they’re going wrong. He did it time and time again for the Israelites, and He still does it today!

If there is any “danger” in God’s progressive revelation, it is that danger seen in the life of Pharaoh. When we deny truth—that is to say, when we deny something that we know to be true—it damages us. Imagine what it takes to knowingly live a lie! And, just like with Pharaoh, when we have rejected something we know is true, God comes to us again with a further revelation of who He is. If we are, then, re-convicted of that truth we’ve been trying to deny, yet redouble our efforts to deny it again and still “live the lie,” we do even more damage to ourselves!

Thus, while God’s revelation is progressive, so is the impact of our response to Him. If we continually reject His progressive revelation, we are putting ourselves at greater and greater risk of that thing called “blaspheming the Holy Spirit” (which means to harden the ears of our hearts, or deaden our conscience). On the other hand, as we continually receive His progressive revelation, we are opening ourselves more and more to the beauty and wonder of a personal relationship with our wonderful God.

Hopefully, we will choose the latter and not the former, for with God, the revelation is always progressive!