Who Hath Required This at Your Hand Is a Question God Asks First

He looked once, about nine years ago, and did not find it.

He remembers the afternoon. He had a concordance and about two hours and a genuine, uncomplicated intention to nail down the verse so he could stop wondering. He was not looking for a loophole. He fully expected to find it and to feel better.

He did not find it. He found something adjacent, which he read four times, and which does not say what he had been told it says. It says something in the same neighborhood, about a different matter, in a passage aimed at a different question.

So he closed the book and went and did something else, and he has kept the rule every day since, and he has not looked again.

That is not stupidity. That is a man who understood, correctly, that finding out would cost him more than not finding out, and who made a rational decision to leave a stone unturned.

And the strange thing is that the question he was afraid to ask is a question God asks first, out loud, of an entire nation.

God asks where it came from

Here it is, in the King James Version:

When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? (Isaiah 1:12)

Who hath required this at your hand?

Stop and notice who is asking. This is God, asking a people who had been doing this for generations, where they got it.

And He asks about something that is not obviously wrong. Appearing before Him. Treading His courts. That is not a pagan practice. It is the ordinary machinery of the religion He Himself instituted, and He asks who required it, in that manner, at their hand.

Which means the question is not forbidden. A man who wonders where a practice came from is not in rebellion, and he is not being clever, and he is not the first one to raise it. God raised it, in writing, in the opening chapter of the longest prophet in the Bible.

You are not out of line for asking and you were never in rebellion for wondering. Isaiah 1:12 has God Himself asking who required a practice, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a burst of nerve who lets a man ask a question he has been avoiding for nine years.

The Bible is not shy about this in general

This is not a one-off, and there are two other lines worth having because they cut in both directions.

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it. (Deuteronomy 12:32)

Not add thereto, nor diminish from it. Both errors are named in one verse and they are named as the same kind of error. Adding is not the safe mistake. It is a mistake.

And Proverbs, with the reason:

Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar. (Proverbs 30:6)

Thou be found a liar. That is strong, and it is aimed at the act of attributing to God something He did not say.

That is worth sitting with, because a man in this position has usually assumed the risk runs one way. He assumes that keeping something unnecessary is cautious and letting something go is dangerous, so he keeps everything and calls it safety.

The text does not treat it that way. It puts adding and subtracting on the same shelf.

You have a text that names both errors and you were never told that adding was the safe direction. Deuteronomy 12:32 forbids adding and diminishing in one sentence and Proverbs 30:6 gives the reason, and it is His Spirit rather than a scholar who makes that a thing a man can weigh honestly about his own practice.

What He asks for in the same chapter

Isaiah 1 does not stop at the question. It says what He wants, and the list is startlingly concrete.

Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-17)

Relieve the oppressed. Judge the fatherless. Plead for the widow.

Not one of those is a rule about a substance or a schedule. Every one of them involves another human being, and every one of them is unmeasurable from the outside, which is exactly why a structure that runs on visibility drifts away from them.

That does not tell a man what to do about the specific rule on his own list. Nobody can do that sorting for him, and this article is not going to. What it does is hand him the other end of the scale, so he can see what the weight is being measured against.

You have the heavy end named plainly and you were never left guessing what He was after. Isaiah 1:17 names relieving the oppressed and pleading for the widow as the thing, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a list like that something that reorders a man rather than something he agrees with.

And then, four verses later

Here is the part that makes it possible to ask the question at all, and it is the reason Isaiah 1 is in this category rather than in a harder one.

After the question, after the charge, after a chapter of language about a people whose practices had come loose from anything:

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

Come now, and let us reason together.

That is an invitation to a conversation, extended by the one asking the hard question, to the people He is asking it of. Not a summons. A conversation, and He is the one proposing it.

Which is precisely the thing a man who closed his concordance nine years ago does not believe is available. He believes the question is a trapdoor. The chapter says the question opens onto a conversation, and gives the terms of it up front, and the terms are scarlet to snow.

You are invited into the conversation and you were never going to be trapped by the question. Isaiah 1:18 says come now, and let us reason together six verses after the hard question, spoken by the same voice, and it is His Spirit who makes an ancient invitation something a man can accept on an ordinary afternoon.