I Read That Chapter As A Promise About Me

Her Bible falls open at it, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Isaiah 58, and there is a coffee ring on the page, and there are three different colors of underlining on it from three different decades of her life. She has read that chapter in a hospital corridor. She has read it in a car outside a house she was about to have a very hard conversation in. She read it the week her husband's contract ended and she read it the night before her daughter's operation.

And what she has always underlined, in all three colors, is the second half.

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning. Underlined twice. Thy righteousness shall go before thee. Underlined. Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer. That one has a star beside it in blue ink from about 2009.

And she was reading it again this month, the way she does, and her eye went up rather than down for once, and she saw the word she has been standing on for thirty years without ever once looking at it.

Then.

Then. Which is a word that hangs on something. And she looked at what it hangs on, and it is not her, and it never was, and she sat back in the chair.

If your Bible falls open at a page you have only ever read the bottom half of, come and sit down. Not one promise is coming off that page today.

The word then, and what it is attached to

Here is the verse she has underlined twice.

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy rereward.Isaiah 58:8

Beautiful. All of it true. None of it being taken away in this article.

Now read what comes immediately before it, because the word then is a hinge and it has to be attached to something.

The two verses before are the ones about loosing the bands of wickedness, undoing heavy burdens, letting the oppressed go free, breaking every yoke. Dealing your bread to the hungry. Bringing the poor who are cast out to your house. Covering somebody. Not hiding yourself from your own family.

That is what the then is hanging on. Every single promise in the second half of that chapter is attached to a first half that is entirely about somebody other than the reader.

And notice what the whole chapter is. It is God answering people who are complaining that they have fasted and He has not noticed. That is the setup. They come with a grievance about their own religious effort, and He answers by pointing at their neighbors.

You have been reading the second half of a sentence for thirty years, and the first half was there the whole time. Isaiah 58:8 is where that sits, hinged on a word that points backward at verses six and seven, and the same Spirit who kept the whole chapter together is the one who lets a woman see it without feeling foolish about the underlining.

Nothing on this page connects going without food to anybody's health

I am going to stop the teaching completely and deal with one clause in that verse, plainly, because a page about fasting that quoted it and moved on would be careless in a way that could hurt somebody.

Thy health shall spring forth speedily. You will hear that verse used to suggest that going without food produces healing. This site will never say that. Not once, not as a hint, not in an aside.

Fasting is not a treatment. It is not a route to recovery, it is not a thing that helps an illness, and if you are unwell or waiting on a result, you stay with your doctor and you do exactly what they tell you. A person who delayed treatment because of something written on a Christian page has been harmed by that page, and I would rather never publish another word than be part of that.

Read the chapter itself and you will see it agrees with me. The promises hang on burdens being lifted off other people, not on anybody's empty plate, and the whole point of God's answer is that He was never interested in the going without in the first place.

You are not being handed a mechanism, and you were never once offered one anywhere in that chapter. That is Romans 14:17, not my caution, and His Spirit is named in that same verse as what the kingdom actually consists of, in a sentence that says plainly it is not about eating and drinking.

Some people must not go without food at all. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are not sure, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule. And telling a doctor, a husband, a parent or whoever cooks is always right and is never a failure of privacy.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.

The promises are not smaller, they are just addressed differently

Now let me give her back what she thinks she is losing, because she is not losing it.

The light still breaks forth. That is still in the chapter, in God's own handwriting, and it did not become conditional in a mean way when she noticed the hinge. What changed is only the direction she is facing when it happens.

She has spent thirty years reading that chapter as a woman standing still, waiting for a list of things to arrive. What it actually describes is a woman on the move, and the light breaking on somebody who is already walking toward a neighbor, which is a completely different picture and a considerably better one.

And I would say this too: the hospital corridor readings were not wrong. God met her in that corridor. He is not so pedantic that He withholds comfort from a frightened woman because her exegesis was incomplete, and anybody who suggests otherwise has never been frightened in a corridor.

You have not been misled by God, and you were being comforted correctly in every one of those rooms. He promised it, in the psalm about a God who is near to the broken hearted (Psalm 34:18), and His Spirit has never once required accurate reading as the condition of comfort.