Playground basketball courts have been a platform for humiliation for me. I was not blessed with the height, speed, or really any of the abilities needed to be competitive in basketball. I was so bad at basketball that I’ve had my opponent look me in the eye as he held the ball, tell me he was going to fake left, cross over to his right, and finally drive to the basket for a layup. My opponent was so confident I couldn’t stop him that he would call his own play. And you know what, he was right. Even with having that knowledge of what was going to happen, I still couldn’t stop the play he had just called.
God calls his plays. Isaiah 48:3 has the language of calling a play as God says, “The former things I declared of old; they went out from my mouth; and I announced them; then suddenly I did them, and they came to pass.” God declares what He is going to do, and then He does it. The specific play that God calls in Isaiah 48 is about Israel’s future return to the land.
In the last few chapters leading up to Isaiah 48, the prophet Isaiah offers hope. Specifically, Isaiah is offering hope by declaring that God will raise a new leader of Persia (Isaiah 44:28), who will defeat Babylon (Isaiah 45:1-8), and release Israel from captivity (Isaiah 44:28). That play is far more than simply calling that you are going to sink a step-back three-pointer. The play God is declaring is how He is going to direct the geopolitical movements of the greatest nations of that day.
Isaiah 48 is not an isolated occurrence of God calling His play. God routinely tells humanity what He is going to do before He does it. In the Garden of Eden, He starts calling His play when He tells Adam and Eve how He is going to defeat Satan and provide redemption. On a starry night in Canaan, God called His play to Abraham. In Samaria, God called His play regarding the weather when He spoke through the prophet Elijah that it wouldn’t rain until He said so.
On the playground, calling your play is usually done because it is one of the ultimate ways to humiliate your opponent. At least that is how I felt as I watched helplessly as I was scored on. Isaiah 48, though, gives us a different reason why God would call His play. God told Israel of deliverance because he knew that Israel was stubborn in their idolatry (Isaiah 48:4). Isaiah 48:5 says, “I declared them to you from of old, before they came to pass I announced them to you, lest you should say, ‘My idol did them, my carved image and my metal image commanded them.’”
Verse 5 provides a sad potential picture. God knew that if He didn’t call His play, the Israelites would give credit for the blessing that God gave to their idols instead of God. God knew there was a good chance they would turn on the news, find out that Babylon was overthrown by Cyrus, see the notice to return to their homeland, and instead of falling down in joyful praise to God, they would turn to their homemade idols and praise those fake gods for what God had accomplished. They would rob God of His glory.
We are often no different than the Israelites; we just cut out the middleman of the idol and give ourselves the credit for God’s blessings. God calls His play of providing for our needs, and yet we look at the abundance of what we have, and our first thoughts are about how we worked so hard to get it. God calls His play as He promises that all the twists and turns in the life of those who love him will end up at the destination of good, and yet we often pat ourselves on the back for good in our lives. Jesus calls His play that He will grow his church, and yet as a pastor, when the church I serve has the smallest sign of growth in any way, the temptation is to place some of that credit on myself, even though I know it is clearly Jesus’ work. He called His play.
In every aspect of the gospel in my life, God called His play long before creation even happened. God called a play that included foreknowledge, predestination, justification, glorification, and every work of the gospel that happens in between those words. He declared before I existed exactly the work that the gospel would do in my life to save me, transform me, and bring me to my eternal glorious home. But even with all this verbalized by God, the temptation is present to take a portion of the credit for myself—to look at spiritual growth and think, “Look what I have done.”
I don’t need a chubby idol that I carved out in my wood shop; I have me. But the result is the same—I rob God of the praise and glory that he deserves as I ignore that God already called His play.
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