“For the LORD will rise up as at Mount Perazim, He will be stirred up as in the valley of Gibeon, to do His task, His unusual task, and to work His work, His extraordinary work” (Isaiah 28:21).

That is, literally, His “task is strange,” His “work is alien.”  

I learned along time ago, from the late Bible teacher Derek Prince no less, that judgment to God is “strange,” is “alien.”  That is to say, it is not His nature to judge; by nature He is merciful, kind, and compassionate.  But Judge He is, judge He must, and judge He does.  

I have always been intrigued by what follows the verse above, as if a completely separate portion of Scripture; today, however, I find it to be completely joined to God’s judgments. Here is the passage, starting in verse 23 and ending at verse 29:

“Give ear and hear my voice,

Listen and hear my words.

Does the farmer plow continually to plant seed?

Does he continually turn and harrow the ground?

Does he not level its surface

And sow dill and scatter cummin

And plant wheat in rows,

Barley in its place and rye within its area?

For his God instructs and teaches him properly.

For dill is not threshed with a threshing sledge,

Nor is the cartwheel driven over cummin;

But dill is beaten out with a rod, and cummin with a club.

Grain for bread is crushed,

Indeed, he does not continue to thresh it forever.

Because the wheel of his cart and his horses eventually damage it,

He does not thresh it longer.

This also comes from the LORD of hosts,

Who has made His counsel wonderful and His wisdom great.”

There is so much to be had from these verses.  Years ago–I can recall it vividly, I took it as practical wisdom for marketing and managing my company’s projects.  I reasoned that if God instructs the farmer, He can teach me how to run a painting business.  However, although it stands by itself as a wonderful illustration about how God involves Himself in the work of men, I find that in context it is a fleshing out of the words found beforehand.  It describes how God works through His judgments.  You can see, if you look at it this way, God’s wisdom and wonderful counsel.  You can also see His love at work through painful discipline.  Think of the father, about to spank his child, saying, “This is going to hurt me more than it will you.”  

I was greatly helped by reading the commentators, all of whom seemed to agree.  I first turned to Matthew Henry who, I think, is less ‘theological’ than the rest; his writings seem more like meditations than they do word studies or scholarly dissertations.  Yet they are filled with insight.  Here is what he writes,

“The Lord, who has given men this wisdom, is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in his working. As the occasion requires, He threatens, corrects, spares, shows mercy, or executes vengeance. Afflictions are God’s threshing instruments, to loosen us from the world, to part between us and our chaff, and to prepare us for use. God will proportion them to our strength; they shall be no heavier than there is need. When His end is answered, the trials and sufferings of His people shall cease; His wheat shall be gathered into the garner, but the chaff shall be burned with unquenchable fire.”

You see, what God does He has to do even though He doesn’t want to do it.  But He has an end in mind; He is after producing something in His people.  Suffering has its place; it is “after you have suffered for awhile…..” (1 Peter 5:10).  

Expostiors’ explains it this way,

“God’s purposes require him to act differently at different seasons, perhaps sparing Jerusalem in 701 B.C. and destroying it in 586 B.C.  Once again, the variety of God’s ways with people is being underlined.  Plowing, sowing, threshing, and grinding are all means to this end. So God has his purposes in history, and through a sequence of events he brings them to pass. God’s power and wisdom, united in his nature, bring forth a pattern of events in the story of the human race. The agricultural processes here suggest pain, implying that it is possible to find oneself on the wrong side of God’s purposes in history and so to experience his judgment.”

A. R. Faussett writes, 

“God adapts His measures to the varying exigencies of the several cases: now mercy, now judgments; now punishing sooner, now later (an answer to the scoff that His judgments, being put off so long, would never come at all); His object being not to destroy His people any more than the farmer’s object in threshing is to destroy his crop; this vindicates God’s ‘strange work’ in punishing His people.”

So are the will and ways of God; He does what He needs to do in order to bring about His designs for men and nations.  We on the receiving end should take heed and trust in the goodness of God, as while He leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, He prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies.  His goodness and lovingkindness always chases after us.  That is the nature of God and the reason for His judgments.  

I have said it over and over–I shall say it again:  God’s judgments are redemptive.  I reason that absent God’s dealings with men, they would not in the goodness of their hearts turn to Him.  Keep in mind that there is “none good, no, not one.”  We are a fallen race, a condemned one.  But for the grace of God, no person would come out of this reconciled to God.  If it weren’t for the consequences of sin, which send men reeling, they would not ponder God. The whole human race is under judgment–save those who have believed in the Son of God (see John 3).  

And, if it weren’t for difficulty and trouble, who among we who have believed would grow?  This is a different matter, though it is related.  

I think some reading (if ever anyone reads what I spend hours writing) would wonder why I seem to focus so much on the negative, on judgment.   Do I?  Am I not speaking of God’s goodness, His love, His tender mercies?  Again, read Hebrews 12 and Revelation 3.  He treats people according to their need.  Whatever we require to return us to God and for Him to produce the sons and daughters He desires, He does for us.  This is no less than the love of God in action.