The Divine Diagnosis of Dead Religion
Introduction: The Antithesis of Worship
We live in an age that despises sharp distinctions. Our culture, and sadly, much of the church, wants to blur every line that God has drawn. They want a world of gray, a world of compromise, a world where the church and the world can be good friends, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya. But the Bible knows nothing of this. The Bible presents a great and glorious antithesis, a sharp, unbridgeable chasm between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world, between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of men, between light and darkness. And nowhere is this antithesis more critical than in the matter of worship.
Worship is the central activity of man. You are always worshiping something. The question is not whether you will worship, but what you will worship, and how. And in our text today, the Lord Himself pulls back the curtain on a people who had perfected the outward performance of worship while their hearts were a thousand miles away. They had the liturgy down. They had the vocabulary. They could say all the right things. But it was a sham. It was a performance. It was religious theater, and God was having none of it.
This passage is a divine diagnosis of a spiritual disease, a disease that is just as rampant in the modern evangelical church as it was in ancient Jerusalem. It is the disease of formalism, of externalism, of going through the motions. It is the hypocrisy of honoring God with your lips while your heart is busy serving other masters. And God's response to this is not a gentle chiding. It is a promise of a "marvelous" and "wondrous" work, which turns out to be a devastating judgment upon the intellectual pride and pretended wisdom of men.
This is a severe word, a necessary word. It forces us to ask the hard questions. Is our worship genuine? Is our fear of God something we have truly learned from Him, or is it a second hand tradition, a set of rules taught by men? Is the wisdom we esteem the wisdom of God, or is it the hollow, self-serving cleverness of this age? Let us attend to God's Word, and allow it to perform its necessary surgery.
The Text
Then the Lord said,
"Because this people draw near with their mouth
And honor Me with their lips,
But they remove their hearts far from Me,
And their fear of Me is in the command of men learned by rote,
Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous;
And the wisdom of their wise men will perish,
And the discernment of their discerning men will be hidden.”
(Isaiah 29:13-14 LSB)
The Hollow Core (v. 13)
The Lord begins with His indictment. He puts His finger directly on the central problem, which is a profound disconnect between outward appearance and inward reality.
"Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor Me with their lips, but they remove their hearts far from Me, and their fear of Me is in the command of men learned by rote," (Isaiah 29:13)
Notice the first part of the charge. "This people draw near with their mouth and honor Me with their lips." This is not a description of pagans in some far-off land. This is God's covenant people. They are in the temple. They are offering the sacrifices. They are singing the psalms. From all outward appearances, they are a worshiping people. They have the right vocabulary. They know the script. Their mouths are full of the language of Zion.
And this is the very nature of hypocrisy. Jesus quotes this very verse when He confronts the Pharisees, the masters of external religion (Matt. 15:8-9). Hypocrisy is not failing to live up to God's standard. We all do that. That is called being a sinner. Hypocrisy is pretending that you do live up to the standard. It is constructing a public persona of righteousness to mask a private reality of corruption. It is the gap, not between your ideals and your performance, but between your profession and your heart.
God continues, "but they remove their hearts far from Me." The heart, in Scripture, is the seat of the will, the affections, the intellect. It is the command center of your entire being. And God is saying that while their mouths were in Jerusalem, their hearts were in Babylon. Their lips sang praises to Yahweh, but their hearts lusted after idols, after money, after power, after the approval of men. True worship is a matter of the heart. It is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Anything less is just noise.
The diagnosis gets even more specific: "And their fear of Me is in the command of men learned by rote." This is crucial. Their religion was not born of a real, terrifying, glorious encounter with the living God. It was a tradition handed down. It was a human system. They feared God, not because they had any sense of His holiness, but because it was what they were taught to do. It was a "command of men learned by rote." It was memorized, not internalized. It was cultural Christianity. It was a checklist of religious duties. This is the essence of dead orthodoxy. You can have a perfectly Reformed confession, a flawless liturgy, and a heart that is cold as a stone. If your fear of God is simply a habit you picked up from your parents or your pastor, and not a soul-shattering reality that governs your life, then you are right here in Isaiah's crosshairs.
The Marvelous Judgment (v. 14)
Because of this profound hypocrisy, God promises to act. But the way He describes His action is shot through with a terrifying divine irony.
"Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; and the wisdom of their wise men will perish, and the discernment of their discerning men will be hidden." (Isaiah 29:14)
When we hear of God doing a "marvelous work," we tend to think of the Exodus, or the parting of the Red Sea, or the resurrection. We think of salvation. But here, this marvelous work is a work of judgment. It is a wonder of destruction. God is going to do something so shocking, so unexpected, that it will leave everyone speechless. He is going to pull the rug out from under their entire system.
And what is the nature of this judgment? "The wisdom of their wise men will perish, and the discernment of their discerning men will be hidden." Their punishment would fit their crime perfectly. Since they had replaced the true fear of God with the man-made wisdom of rote learning, God would simply expose that human wisdom for the utter bankruptcy that it is. The men everyone looked to for advice, the policy experts, the religious leaders, the cultural commentators, would suddenly be revealed as fools. Their plans would fail. Their predictions would be wrong. Their counsel would turn to nonsense.
This is a foundational principle in Scripture. "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will set aside" (1 Cor. 1:19). The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. And when a people, even a covenant people, begin to trust in their own cleverness, their own strategies, their own political savvy, their own educational systems, their own theological formulations, rather than in the living God, He has a way of marvelously demonstrating how foolish they have been all along. He simply lets them reap the consequences of their own pretended wisdom. He lets them fall into the pit they have dug.
The secular mind, and the religious mind that apes it, believes it can manage reality without reference to God. It believes in its own expertise. But God will hide discernment from them. They will look at a situation and be utterly unable to see what is actually going on. They will call evil good and good evil. They will promote policies that lead to ruin and call it progress. They will be blind guides, leading the blind into a ditch. And God calls this a marvelous work. It is a wonder that reveals His own sovereignty and the absolute folly of trusting in man.
The Gospel Cure
This passage is a severe warning, but it is not without hope. The diagnosis is grim, but it points us to the only possible cure. The problem is a heart far from God, and a religion of human tradition. The solution, therefore, must be a new heart, and a religion that comes from God Himself.
The disease described here is the natural state of every fallen human heart. We are all born hypocrites. We are all born with hearts that are distant from God, preferring our own wisdom to His. We instinctively try to build religious systems based on our own performance, our own traditions, our own efforts. We are all, by nature, Pharisees.
The only cure for this condition is the marvelous work of the gospel. It is the ultimate "wondrously marvelous" act of God, but this time, it is a wonder of salvation. At the cross of Jesus Christ, God destroyed the wisdom of the wise in the most profound way imaginable. The cross is foolishness to the world (1 Cor. 1:18). It makes no sense to the worldly wise that God would save the world through weakness, through shame, through the execution of His own Son. This is not a strategy that any human committee would devise.
And in the new birth, God performs the necessary heart surgery. He takes out the heart of stone and gives us a heart of flesh (Ezek. 36:26). He puts His Spirit within us, and causes us to walk in His statutes. He gives us a true fear of God, not one learned by rote, but one born of a genuine, saving encounter with His holiness and His grace. He replaces our lip-service with heart-worship.
Therefore, the application for us is simple, but profound. We must relentlessly examine our own hearts. Is our worship genuine? Is our religion a living relationship with the risen Christ, or is it a set of cultural habits? Do we tremble at His word, or have we domesticated it? And when we find, as we all will, the remnants of this disease of hypocrisy in our hearts, we must not try to fix it with more religious performance. We must flee to the cross. We must confess our hypocrisy and plead for the grace that alone can make our worship true. We must ask God to perform His marvelous work in us, to demolish our prideful wisdom and replace it with the glorious foolishness of the gospel.