10/02/2025
Restoring God Before Rebuilding Ruins
What are your criteria for choosing leaders? When we elect or appoint leaders, we usually have
many expectations—after all, they will guide us. But what if we chose them based on something
as shallow as their clothing? That doesn’t make sense, does it? Yet Isaiah 3:6 paints just such a
picture: “Someone will seize a relative, a member of the clan, saying, ‘You have a cloak; you
shall be our leader, and this heap of ruins shall be under your rule.’” Why would something like
this ever happen?
Isaiah 3 opens with a grim description of Jerusalem and Judah. The prophet declares that
God will take away their warriors, soldiers, judges, prophets, diviners, elders, and dignitaries—in
other words, the entire governing class of society. And this prophecy comes true in the near
future during the Babylonian captivity. With the top tier of leadership removed, the people are
left with no choice but to place their hope in the young and inexperienced, appointing them as
rulers.
This brings us to verse 6, where someone seizes a relative who merely has a cloak,
perhaps suggesting that he looks respectable or gives the appearance of leadership. Yet in the
next verse (v. 7), that same person refuses, knowing that accepting would mean taking
responsibility for rebuilding a nation and its capital, Jerusalem, which lie in ruins. His refusal
points to a deeper truth: what God has taken away cannot simply be restored by human hands.
What Judah truly needs is not the rebuilding of its political or social structures first, but the
restoration of its relationship with God.
Reverend Dr. Seung Ho Bang