What Do You Put In Your Cupboard

 Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.  Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.  Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. (Isaiah 1:16-17)

          God’s call to Israel through Isaiah. It doesn’t promise salvation, but it is God’s solution for that country going through difficult times. It speaks to the people, as individuals. The nation cannot be the “yourselves” that He is speaking to since He was speaking to one nation at the time. He’s speaking to individual people. The first step to solving their problems was for them to cleanse themselves of their sins. A few verses earlier, He said He would make them whiter than snow. There seem to be two sides to this equation, God’s side that makes them whiter than snow, and the individual’s side of washing and making themselves clean.

          If you moved into a place with broken cabinets and weren’t a carpenter, you would have someone remove them and put in new cabinets. That’s God’s part. After that, would you put rusty cans, leaky packages, or rotten food in those cupboards? No, you make sure that bad food doesn’t go in the cupboards. That’s our part – removing the garbage.

          What we want to stock that cupboard with, instead, are good, healthy foods that will make us strong, resilient, and healthy. We need a big can of “Doing What is Right,” a jumbo size jar of “Justice,” Several supersized boxes of “Defend the Oppressed,” and gallons of “Cause of the Fatherless” and “Plead the Case of the Widow.”

          What makes this a little tougher is that the oppressed, the widows, and the orphans may not be the same oppressed, widows, and orphans of two thousand years ago. Back then, conquered people, widows, and orphans had no means of support, nowhere to turn for justice. Those groups still exist, but there are other groups that also need our support.

          So who are the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. I believe it fits the same pattern as the “neighbor” from the story of the Good Samaritan. The widow, the orphan, and the oppressed are anyone you trip over who needs help, whether or not they deserve that help.

Let me give an example: I lived all of my life with my father – more years than my mother did. Had my mother survived him, she would have gotten money from the Social Security Administration as his widow. That income isn’t available to me. So, I can sympathize with those homosexuals who live together for years but haven’t been permitted survivor’s benefits. I believe homosexuality to be 100% wrong, but it seems to me that there is justice in granting survivor’s benefits to one long-term companion of another sort – if conditions are met.

Another example, perhaps even better and harder. Is there someone you don’t like? Plead their case against you to yourself.