Toward a Fruitful Future

In contrast to the paralysis that a blocked future inflicts upon people (see Kyle Shepherd’s companion article in this issue of Arise and Build), we find strong scriptural support for a future that pulls us purposely forward toward the blessings God has promised His people in the world. Once we grasp the kind of future that God has placed before us, we become motivated to work toward that future in confidence, with diligence, according to the riches of God’s grace.

It is instructive to note that many counterfeit futures have been put forward by humanists of various stripes, each with its strident cheerleaders goading on their followers who all share one thing in common: a commitment to rebel against the rule of Christ and arrive at their goal on their own power. Two such visions of progress toward a “known” future are worth pointing out. Marxist communists have their own vision of an allegedly inevitable future that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves—and you—to attain. The largest book I ever encountered at a Christian bookstore (that wasn’t a Bible) was Dr. Francis Nigel Lee’s massive Communist Eschatology, which documents the nature of the Marxist conception of the future and the part Marxists play in realizing it. The power of a strong vision for the future is a profound one, driving this ideology aggressively across the world’s continents and capturing the minds of humanists in its stampede through history.

Another secular vision of the future is put forward by the poets of evolutionism: you are part of a train of events, and by imputing to each of us the status of a steppingstone to a brighter future, these poets bid us to see ourselves as a small part of a massive story reaching back to the birth of the world. Loren Eiseley’s books exemplify this approach of placing man in a context designed to simultaneously humble him and exalt him. Note particularly his popular book, The Immense Journey, and The Unexpected Universe (among others). Eiseley and others use all the tools of language to make the trek through so-called deep time a noble one, even if chance is conceded to be governing the process. The importance of capturing hearts and getting man to embrace these humanistic futures (a worker’s paradise or biological perfection, the latter now associated with merging man and machine) is driven by the motivational force in these visions of unregenerate man.

Eternity Placed in Man’s Heart

Why should man be receptive to this kind of vision-casting practiced by humanists? He responds to these siren calls because he is God’s creature, and God has embedded in man a sense of eternal things, which is part of the image of God in man. This internal motif creates problems for man, as Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 alerts us, and he can choose either to cling to God’s purposes and Christ’s Kingship, or strike out on his own and assert man’s conceits and autonomy to try to satisfy (or sublimate) his hunger for eternal things.

I have seen the travail which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He maketh everything beautiful in his time, eternity also he hath set in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. (Eccl. 3:10-11, trans. Hengstenberg)

Humanistic man, in effect, attempts to seize the reins from God and take control of the future, as he refuses to accept what Scripture here asserts. He wants to either control the future himself, or comfort himself with the fiction that if he cannot control it, no God is there to control it either. Man won’t wait for God: man will force things to be beautiful on man’s schedule without reference to God. This revolutionary act on his part ensures ugliness, not beauty, on a global scale given man’s forsaking of the Lord of life. His attempts to create heaven on his own terms instead create hell on earth.

Not only are men unable to see “the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end,” they cannot see how “He maketh everything beautiful in his time” either. Man’s sense of the eternal tells him that these beautiful things are there, but they are irrevocably concealed from those who walk by sight. As Dr. Rushdoony pointed out, it is faith that has the truer, more accurate vision. But humanistic man demands a future he can see, putting his faith in Marxist determinism or evolutionary progress—and always putting determination in the created order and denying it to the Creator and King.

But God’s setting eternity in man’s heart is a divine gift. “It is man’s highest privilege to discern something eternal behind the transitory objects of the present world.”1 This fact drives us to consider the future that is hurtling toward us that comes from God’s hand. When we look upon our children and grandchildren, we are seeing living roots extending into the future, allowing us to discern His purpose for His people across the generations. The resulting confidence should lead us to fruitful labor toward that future (John 15:8) rather than paralysis or humanistic detours into futility. Humanists promote a godless ideology and walk by sight, such that “the ‘gift’ of ‘eternity’ is a terrible burden from this angle.”2

Isaiah’s Vision of Future Fruitfulness

Isaiah 32:1-8 has been discussed in Arise & Build before,3 as it describes in detail what our future holds.4 The next six verses deal with intervening judgments until verse 15 transitions us forward in time to the vast repercussions arising from the pouring out of the Spirit of God on the world. Kilpatrick summarizes these verses this way: “It is a vision of the fruitful earth in quiet beauty, and of a righteous people rejoicing in the security and peace of those who do the will of God.”5 So understood, we’ll walk through verses 15 through 18 in sequence to catch the prophet’s vision.

15a. Until the Spirit be poured upon us from on high. Skinner points out that “Spirit” is “used absolutely and denotes the Divine principle of life, and especially the power by which the will of God is made to prevail in human society.”6 Oswalt’s explanation is equally valuable:

If God’s people were ever to share His character, an outcome devoutly to be hoped for, then it would have to come about through an infusion of God’s Spirit into human beings. This development relates fundamentally to a crisis of Lordship. God cannot fill where He does not rule. Thus, it is no accident that this statement occurs in this context of divine kingship. So long as human beings usurp ultimate rule of their lives, there is impotence, unrighteousness, and dependence upon the very forces which would destroy us.7

15b. And the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest. Oswalt explains that “what was formerly useless for crops will become fertile, while what was fertile will become a veritable jungle. When the creative energy of God is let loose the results are always astonishing.”8 A tremendous transformation in the natural world is asserted and is then immediately tied to moral transformation in the next verse.

16. Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. Skinner points out that judgment and righteousness then become “the foundations of social order.”9 These two terms, judgment (justice) and righteousness, are pulled from the first verse of this prophetic chapter (Isa. 32:1) and are now provided with a stupendous geographic range in which to operate. Ridderbos points out how extraordinary the reach of justice is:

The importance of justice prevailing in the grassland is that shepherds come here to pasture their flocks. In this dispensation, that justice is often violated because stockmen take possession of each other’s wells or pastures (cf. Gen. 13:6-7; 26:20ff.). The distance from the settled areas encouraged the tendency to allow might to prevail over right. The fact that all this will change is not only because of the righteous government that will then be established (11:4ff; 32:1-2) but also because of the spiritual renewal the Spirit will have brought about in people. On the earth that is full of the knowledge of the Lord, no man, indeed no animal, will cause another any harm (11:6-9).10

In short, we have justice extending where we traditionally have least expected to find it.

Kilpatrick further unpacks the priorities that Isaiah is putting forward here in an easily understood form:

God and His righteousness come first. That message, men have consistently ignored. They have refused to believe that religion is related to economics, despite the fact that the history of human enterprise, the story of competitive private business, the unavailing quest for peace, all testify to the impossibility of creating a just and enduring order of life while greed, pride, selfishness, and such distortions of the spirit prevail in the relations of men.

It is here that the supreme relevance of the Christian gospel to the problems of humanity is to be seen; for good character is not a natural endowment of man, but something attained, not by human device, but by the recreative power of God’s Spirit. The modern humanistic philosophy, with which so much psychology and social science are infected, dismisses this claim of faith, or at most concedes to it a merely subordinate influence.

There is not a single problem now vexing society on which the Word of God has not light to throw; but the first duty of those who will speak for God is to confront the world with His declared purpose and revealed will. This world can never know peace till life is organized on the principles laid down by God for His children. It is to be remembered that Jesus Christ came not merely to proclaim a new life, but to produce it.11

17. And the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever. This verse alerts us that we are not merely to be passive in relation to securing peace but rather laboring for justice and righteousness so that peace can be the resulting product. Ridderbos therefore defines this entire passage of Isaiah as teaching “Peace Through Justice (32:15-20).”12 Kilpatrick again provides a strong exposition of this verse of the prophecy:

The lesson for us is inescapable. If we are to know peace we have to show a new concern for righteousness, a new understanding of the spiritual conditions of peace. No one can claim that in all modern man’s unavailing labors for peace there has been a first concern for righteousness. We have not aimed high enough; we have set our sights on a balance of power, on compromise between competing ambitions, on mutual pacts, and on all the manipulations of human resources which might prevent war. Limiting our conceptions of peace to a state of armed preparedness, we have hoped that fear would restrain strife. In no sense is that truly a quest for peace, [it is just] a precarious cease-fire. A true peace cannot be arranged at the council table.13

There is a glorious future ahead that has already been set in motion by the omnipotent Lord. Isaiah fills out the details and delineates the outworkings involved in the securing of that glorious future not only through the Lord’s work, and the Spirit’s work, but also His work through us as His ambassadors, as the Spirit-filled men of Exodus 30:1-11.14

18. And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure dwellings, and in quiet resting places. Note the actual journey that landed us here at this destination, beginning just before verse 15, when the destruction and barrenness decreed was asserted in verse 14 to be forever. But verse 15 immediately flips this forever on its head as it opens with “Until the Spirit be poured out on us from on high.” This is a radical shift in direction, as Lange points out: “Thus, the word ‘until’ that begins verse 15 is both a restriction of the preceding hyperbolical ‘forever’ and a bold bridge from the present into the remote future.”15 There is a shift from a false and baseless security to a true and legitimate one, because the Spirit from on high “will be emptied out on us, completely poured out” as Lange renders the Hebrew.16 God sets the means in motion by sending His Spirit into the world to convict it of righteousness.

The sequence of this prophecy is summarized by Kelley: “The outpouring of the Spirit will result in the increased fertility of the earth, and in the establishment of justice and righteousness throughout the world. The widespread practice of righteousness will in turn produce peace and tranquility forevermore.”17 Delitzsch asserts that the transition from 32:9-14 to verses 15-18 depicts “the destruction of the false rest to be followed by the realization of the true,”18 whereby the false peace cobbled together while defying God’s law becomes the worthless chaff that it is.

A People Not Yet Born

We are to cling to the precious promises God has provided to His people, most notably that our labor is not in vain in the Lord, and that our works shall follow us. Whatsoever we do to “establish the law” (Rom. 3:31) brings peace closer to realization, for the King who rules in righteousness (Isa. 32:1) is also the Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:6-7). The future is the domain where the increase of Christ’s government and of peace dwell. God’s people are to be future oriented, because the future is God’s and not man’s, and His grip on it serves as our refuge and strength.

Consequently, we are to adopt a steppingstone theology: a willingness to be part of the chain of events that ushers in the blessings of Isaiah 32:15-18, for the sake of our children and children’s children. Abraham was informed that kings would come forth from him, which doubtless reinforced his looking forward in time to glorious victories he could only faintly imagine. So must we walk in the spirit of the closing verses of Psalm 22, where the generational theme is all but engraved with the point of a diamond, with all eyes upon the future that Christ holds in His hands: “Posterity shall serve Him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; They shall come and proclaim His righteousness to a people yet unborn, that He has done it.” (ESV)

And how far will His dominion extend geographically in the future on His people’s behalf? To the utmost limits, for Isa. 33:17 literally refers to His realm as “a land of distances.” There is then no such thing as a blocked future, or a constricted domain, for the adopted sons and daughters of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. You can see down the corridor of time quite well with the eye of faith, and thus can work accordingly with all joy and diligence so that you might hear those coveted words, “well done, good and faithful servant.”

1. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, A Commentary on Ecclesiastes (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998 reprint), p. 107.

2. Craig G. Bartholomew, Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), p. 167.

3. https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/is-the-kingdom-present-2

4. https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-scope-of-healing

5. D. D. D. Kilpatrick in The Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1956), vol. 5, p. 345.

6. John Skinner, The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Chapters 1-39 (Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 1896), p. 245.

7. John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), pp. 587-588.

8. Ibid., p. 588.

9. Skinner, p. 245.

10. Jan Ridderbos, Isaiah (Grand Rapids, MI: Regency Reference Library, 1985), pp. 266-267.

11. Kilpatrick, pp. 345-347.

12. Ridderbos, p. 264.

13. Kilpatrick, p. 347.

14. https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-spirit-filled-men

15. John Peter Lange, Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Isaiah (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, n.d.), p. 343.

16. Ibid.

17. Page H. Kelley in The Broadman Bible Commentary (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1971), vol. 5, p. 283.

18. Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, n.d.), vol. 7, sec. 2, p. 53.