God’s Word for You

Isaiah 3:1-3 Staff and stay

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, December 14, 2024

3:1 See! The Lord, the LORD of Armies, is about to remove every staff and stay from Jerusalem and Judah: all the supplies of bread, and all the supplies of water, 2 the hero and the warrior, the judge and the prophet, the one who reads omens and the elder, 3 the commander of fifty and the respected leader, the adviser, the idol-maker, and the spell-caster.

This chapter takes a step back from judgment day to the judgment coming to Judah and Jerusalem in the more immediate future in Isaiah’s time. It will be something like the end of the world, but there will be a remnant, and repentance will be possible. Here the society of Judah collapses in various ways:

a) Legitimate and illegitimate leaders will be removed (3:1-3)
b) The wrong people will become leaders (3:4-5)
c) Some chosen as leaders will object (3:6-7)
d) Judah will be judged on account of her deeds (3:8-11)
e) But the wicked deeds will continue (3:12)
f) The Lord comes to judge (3:13-15)
g) The Lord judges the wicked women (3:16-26)
    i. For their arrogance (3:16-17)
    ii. By removing their finery (3:18-23)
    iii. By removing their beauty and their men (3:24-26)

To begin with, Isaiah foresees the end of leadership in the city and in the nation. He uses the phrase “staff and stay” (its only appearance in the Bible). In Hebrew, this is both the masculine and feminine forms of the same word (staff, support). It seems to be an idiom for “every form of support.” The English phrase is curious and worth looking at. A staff is obviously a walking stick of any kind. But what is a “stay”? In more recent centuries, “stays” are the whalebone or wooden bindings sewn into women’s dresses to tighten the tummy—a fashion that thankfully did not last very long.

The older English meaning that goes back to the time of the King James Version and earlier is nautical. In a sailing ship, a stay is a rope or chain that supports a mast so that it does not move or “spring” (wiggle back and forth) with the rise and fall of the ship, the movement of the winds, and so on. It is an important part, perhaps the most important part, of the ship’s rigging. Stays are still used today in sailing ships and in other vessels with anything such as a funnel or the slender masts used for radio and other equipment. Surely Solomon’s navy and later Israelite ships had to use some form of stays, no matter what they were called (2 Chronicles 8:17; 1 Kings 9:26). The doubled use of “support” here is not the same as the “rod and staff” pairing in Psalm 23:4.

God is the one who established governments and positions of leadership. Therefore he can remove as well as establish. First, the food and water will come to an end. Then, soldiers and their officers such as the “hero” (or Mighty Man), the warrior, and the commander of fifty. Other leaders are mentioned (judge, prophet, elder, leader, and advisor), and interspersed with them in the list are illegitimate leaders who are, of course, also interspersed throughout actual society: the reader of omens, the idol-maker, and the spell-caster (or sorcerer).

The “reader of omens” or soothsayer is a fortune teller. Jeremiah also condemns them: “They are prophesying a false vision to you, a worthless divination—something from their own imagination” (Jeremiah 14:14). It might be argued that the word does not necessarily have a negative connotation here. Luther says, “these are learned men.”

In verse 3, the “idol maker” could simply be a skilled craftsman (Luther, “architects”), but the word has the specific idea of a man who overlays metal plating, such as gold plating, on a carved image. This is the work known as peening that gives the rounded ball-peen hammer its name.

Should “spell-caster” at the end of verse 3 also be taken in some excellent and acceptable way? Remember that these are all leaders or counselors that are being removed by God, whether legitimate or not. But in a positive, godly sense, this person could be a political secretary or advisor, someone who can “read the room” or a situation and understand its dangers and opportunities. But since the Hebrew term lachash means “to whisper, to charm a snake, to make magical amulets for women,” a more negative and even sinister meaning seems appropriate. Witchcraft and superstition run contrary to the will of God.

Superstition, especially astrology, is a pitfall to many Christian. Once they become acquainted with such things, they either abandon them as foolishness or else there is a little hook that gets set, and the superstition will follow them around for the rest of their lives. They are often blind to it, finding a way to balance it with their faith in Jesus, by seeing the stars, perhaps, as signs given to mankind to help us in our lives? The problem with that line of thinking is that the Lord never once says that in his word, but he does tell us the reason that he made the sun, moon and stars: “God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to divide the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light to the earth.’ And it was so” (Genesis 1:14-15). And as for those who look to those created things for advice or to give omens, they are grouped with idolatry in God’s eyes: “Those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations, and to all the starry hosts” (2 Kings 23:5).

What of those people who struggle with such things? We should teach them—me, as a pastor, and you, as a mother, father, brother, sister, or friend—and then each of us needs to be reminded of the many sins in our lives that we are blind to, as well. Preserve us from these failings, O Lord Jesus! But we take comfort that, “being offered to God through baptism, we are received into God’s grace” (Augsburg Confession IX:2). For Jesus Christ loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood (Revelation 1:5). Trust in his forgiveness, speak the truth in love, and look to the plank in your own eye.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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